Then began
an atrocious tragedy.
an atrocious tragedy.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
" Krasinski freely owns that the faults
of execution in Iridion are many2. The play is in fact
of excessive length. It is at times overladen with ir-
relevant details and side scenes that distract the
attention from the broad lines of a magnificent idea. But
these are mere blemishes. Iridion remains one of the
splendid monuments of Polish literature and thought:
an enduring witness to that high spiritual vision by
which the Polish nation has risen above the powers of
evil set loose against her by an oppression which has
striven in vain to destroy her soul. Its author fearlessly
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 6, 1837. 2 Ibid.
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? 168 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
laid down a principle for his people at the moment when
it was most bitter to hear, hardest to realize. While
their country was rent and ravaged by a persecution
that knew no mercy, the Anonymous Poet against the
cry of his own heart entreated his fellow-Poles to rise,
not to revenge or retaliation, but to the more rugged
road of love. Krasinski's own language on what he
calls the "dream of his youth, the wail of an unheard-
of Titanic grief," is its best justification1. Let, says he
to Gaszynski, let the critic to whom these words were
addressed, let whoever reads Iridion be free to judge it
as they will. One thing alone they must acknowledge:
its truth.
And to prove its truth the author might call upon the shades
of the dead and the tears of the living. He might ask many
a one: "Didst thou not feel thus, didst thou not dream thus? "
And many a one would answer: "It is so. " Not only many a
one, but a whole nation2.
1 Ibid. 2 Ibid.
\
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? CHAPTER VIII
THE DEVIATION: A SUMMER NIGHT
AND THE TEMPTATION
(1836-1838)
After Krasinski had written Iridion, he swerved aside
in the development of his master thought. In the years
that followed his great drama he could speak to his
nation with no certain voice, because he himself was
wandering in doubt and darkness, intensified by the
influences of pantheism and German philosophies.
"As to pantheism," he wrote to Gaszynski, "I doubt
if you will succeed in finding any consolation in it. . .
Pantheism is a reasoned out despair. Pantheism has
poisoned much of my faith1. "
With its theory of the absorption of the individual
pantheism could not fail to be a horrible nightmare to
Krasinski, under which his clear perceptions were
staggered. For if the unit must lose its individuality,
what hope was there for a nation that in the eyes of the
world was being slowly done to death, but whose
resurrection was the belief to which every Polish heart
has always clung?
His soul, he told Reeve, was:
equally disgusted with the idea of nothingness, of the want
of individuality after death, and, on the other side, with the
idea of an activity without pause, an eternal metempsychosis
of misery and pains. . . I cannot get out of this fatal dilemma.
My brain will dash itself out one day against it2.
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 12, 1836.
2 Correspondence. Krasinski to Reeve. Florence, March 6, 1836.
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? 170 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"He is," he writes to Gaszynski, as usual speaking
of himself in the third person where his literary pro-
ductions were concerned, in reply to his friend's urging
him to write upon certain patriotic themes, "at that
time of life when everything is dried up and wearied
out by doubt. May God grant him to emerge from
those depths with a new and manly faith1. "
He re-read the gospels--this confidence is to his
father--and: "they brought me no comfort, no hope. "
Some power, he said, had left him: "and that power
was faith2. "
Krasinski was now tasting the whole bitterness
which passion had brought upon himself and Joanna
Bobrowa. The love on her side had always been greater
than on his. As, inevitably under the circumstances,
his love died down and infinite compassion took its
place, he felt himself the more bound to Mme Bobrowa
by the fact that it was affection for him that had caused
her misery: and against the entreaties, remonstrances
or commands as the case might be, of his friends,
Danielewicz, with whom he lived, Reeve, and above all
his father, he refused to break with her. It accorded
with the inherent nobility of Krasinski's nature that,
bitterly as he rued the personal sufferings that the whole
affair had caused him, his chief thought throughout was
for the woman, and the keenest edge of his anguish the
knowledge that her happiness was wrecked. Tortured
by this reflection, by his conscience, by her reproaches,
chiefly carried on by correspondence, for they met
seldom during these years, engaged in a perpetual
conflict with his father on the subject, his nerves were
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 6, 1837.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Deviation 171
strained to the breaking-point and his eyesight again
began to fail. Such was the inner life of the poet, little
guessed at in the cosmopolitan salons of Rome and
Vienna where he appeared as a youth of peculiarly
courteous manner, with an exceptional brilliance and wit
in his talk--which characteristics remained always his.
Whatever his own troubles Krasinski never put
aside the concerns of his friends. The younger of the
two daughters who had been taken from Sottan died in
1836, when a child of eight years old. To the doubly
bereaved father Krasinski wrote:
Your little girl is happier than all of us. She only dreamed
she was on earth, and after one night she woke, back in heaven.
There is nothing more pure, more blessed than a child's death.
In later years to die amidst the temptations of life and its
difficulties is a different matter. Certain it is that, dying, she
did not regret the unknown world. Perhaps the thought of
her far off father came to her as through a dark mist, and then
the mist broke, and clearly with an angel's eyes she beheld
her earthly father and, having clasped her little hands in his,
gave herself to her heavenly Father. And when they bring you
flowers in spring, think that you have one fresh in heaven whose
fragrance is prayer and song for you. Do not weep over her
early grave, but rather say: manibus date lilia plenisx.
Krasinski had already been leaving no stone un-
turned to obtain the Russian government's restoration
of Sottan's surviving daughter. Through the influence
of Wincenty Krasinski he at last succeeded: and in the
midst of his mental tortures, hampered by semi-blind-
ness, he, with that touch of womanly tenderness which was
so marked in his character, arranged every particular of
the girl's long journey, thinking out every little detail
for her comfort till she could reach her father.
In the spring of 1836, while he was in Rome,
1 Letters to Sottan. Vienna, Nov. 12, 1836.
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? 172 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Krasinski had met another young Polish poet whose
place in the national literature stands by his own, above
his own as regards form. J uliuszStowacki had left Poland
during the troubles of 1830. He wandered about Europe
and the East, eating his heart out in the loneliness
from which a premature death delivered him. There
is both in his life and in his early work a strong strain
of the fashionable Byronism: yet beneath this ran the
undercurrent of that deep love for his country under the
influence of which he enriched his nation with magnifi-
cent patriotic song. In the opening days of Krasinski's
friendship with Stowacki, whom he fondly calls Julek,
he saw clearly his defects--his restless egotism, his
petty jealousies, the want of spiritual perception which
characterized the youthful production of the future
mystic and which, observes Pr Kallenbach, the Anony-
mous Poet was at that moment in no condition himself
to strengthen in another. But he likewise saw, and was
among the first of his countrymen to call public attention
to it, the promise of Slowacki's brilliant art which he
whole-heartedly admired. The two youths, both con-
sumed by poetic genius and patriotic fire, were wont to
walk together in the garden of the Villa Mills on the
Palatine, and hold moonlight conversations among the
roses and ruins in that romantic spot.
At this period of Krasinski's life inspiration left him.
In his tension of mind and soul he could write but little,
and nothing that was worthy of the creator of Iridion.
His fragment of a drama on Wanda, the heroine of
Polish legend, lies in the limbo of the unfinished.
To the two prose-poems A Summer Night and The
Temptation we will return. There remains the little
collection of prayers which he composed for Joanna
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? The Deviation
173
Bobrowa and which was published forty years after the
poet's death, in 1899.
At heart a deeply religious woman, Mme Bobrowa's
most persistent accuser had been her conscience. Lost
and unhappy himself, Krasinski realized that religion
could be her only comfort, and so wrote out these prayers.
They are more poetical exercises than pious outpour-
ings, though their form is prose. Placed as they are on
the lips of a miserable woman, their accents are of grief
and desolation. There is something in them that
invariably falls short of the true language of spirituality.
It is obvious that the writer stood on no certain ground
himself, albeit it must be taken into consideration that
Krasinski is speaking in the person of another, and had
he been speaking in his own might have expressed
himself differently1. Be that as it may, passages border
on the blasphemous. Others are inspired by pantheism.
And yet moments occur where, given one degree further,
and the poet would be pouring out his soul with the
devotion and the fire of a Christian mystic.
For Thou art the first, the only, the highest love: for all
the love of hearts on earth are only rivulets, flowing from the
sea of Thy brightness: for Thou wilt save me when my days
are numbered, and Thou wilt comfort my distressed soul. . . For
Thou wilt not forsake the work of Thy Hands, Thy daughter
who here weeps and wails to Thee {Litany).
As an illustration of the development of Krasinski's
thought, the prayers are not without importance. They
put forth the theory of vicarious suffering which was to
be the corner-stone of his prophecies for Poland. On
the other hand their note of despair has no place in
Krasinski's subsequent scheme.
In one direction these years saw a new departure of
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 174 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
great significance in the history of the Anonymous Poet.
It was now that he began to write verse.
He sent his poems, for the most part written to or
about Mme Bobrowa, in letters to either Sottan or
Gaszynski, as experiments, with no intention of ever
publishing them: and only after his death did they see
the light. Krasinski thought poorly of them. In one
he complains that the Creator had denied him the power
of expression, and that he felt in his heart heavenly
accords which were shattered before they could reach
his lips. {God has refused me. June, 1836. ) Far inferior
to the love lyrics he was to write later to another, these
early poems express sorrow and remorse, not love.
Krasinski was eating Dead sea apples. He realized with
an anguish of regret that the powers of his mind, the
brilliant gifts of his youth, had been squandered in
a love which was from the outset doomed to ruin.
"My heart is broken" is the burden of a poem he
sent to Gaszynski, of which we quote some extracts
because, to comprehend the fulness of Krasinski's
spiritual uprising, we must first go down with him into
the abyss of his despair.
All that I loved is far away as God, or fadeth as a cloud.
What has the spark of genius wrought for me? It only
glimmered in the deep places of my soul. Had I not loved
a mortal beauty or laid my lips upon an earthly brow, I might
have lit a flame upon the vale of earth with that spark which
fell to me from eternity. Too late to-day! The soul is even
as the body. Once it is marred, and the marred part thou
tearest not away with all thy strength from the whole members,
the evil overrunneth all and multiplies. Happy the body, it
alone can die.
Ever between two waves the spirit rocks. Her thought in
heaven dwells, her heart sinks ever lower into hell. Immortal
war she wages with herself, she may not die, and at each
moment dies in double woe. All is unbearable; for guilt and
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? The Deviation
175
sentence in each spark of life commingle. Ah! life seems but
a mockery only. Unbroken sleep, peace of the grave, are false,
even as happiness is falsehood. Even as the world is great, it
is the fallen field. Even as the world is great, it is the rock of
shipwreck. With endless toil, with everlasting pain, so all is
wrought, so all is ended. {My heart is broken. November, 1837. )
These lines are the only acknowledgment we have
from Krasinski's pen of his own genius. Not long after
he had written it he tells Reeve, in the last letter but
one that ever passed between them, that his position
with his father and Mme Bobrowa had become in-
tolerable. He met the latter in Kissingen during the
summer. Their interviews took place in a cemetery, as
the only place safe from observation where they stood
among the tombs, rain beating on them unheeded.
"In one word," says Krasinski to Reeve, "she was a woman
who had reached the last stage of exaltation, who had thrown
off the conventions of the world, considering with a calm eye
that society would soon reject her and seeing in this world no
one except him who ought never to have brought her to so
terrible an extremity. Then there came into his head a thought
of despair and love. He resolved to sacrifice himself for her.
He wrote to his father that he wished to drive her to divorce
her husband, and he would marry his beloved.
Then began
an atrocious tragedy. The father no longer answered him, he
would only write to his friend [Danielewicz]. He threatened
his son with his curse. He accused him of driving him into his
grave, and declared that this marriage should never take place
without entering into war with him, without being separated
from him for ever, and neither ever seeing each other again.
What could the son do against such terrible threats? 1"
Krasinski was gradually brought to the point of
acknowledging that he must break for ever with Mme
Bobrowa. He refused to do it in the drastic manner
enjoined by his father. He would only consent to take
the step in some natural, inevitable way that would
spare her feelings.
1 Correspondance. Letter to Reeve. Vienna, Dec. 29, 1837.
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? 176 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I loved that woman," he wrote to the General. "That
woman has been good to me. I will maintain in regard to her
all the forms of friendship, all the precautions of affection:
but I will not wound either her pride or her heart1. "
The time allowed to Krasinski by the Russian pass-
ports had now expired, and in the summer of 1838 he
was obliged to return to Poland. What that return meant
to him he had already told Sottan two years earlier.
If we return coram in patriam, I confess it will be for me
a plunge into complete darkness, a descent to hell. . . On that
frontier where our ancestors once drew with happy emotions
their native air into their lungs, where they knelt to thank God
for having granted them to return from distant wanderings,
to-day we, when we stand there, must say farewell to the
feelings and persons dearest to us. To-day a foreign land is
our home. Our own has become worse than foreign, worse than
far away, because it is a prison. In that land of ours, except
for my father, I have no friend, scarcely anyone known to me2.
His friends were all in exile.
"My Konstanty,mayGod guard you,"he wrote to Gaszynski
on the day when he began the journey which he always believed
would end in Siberia. "Remember you are in a foreign country
among foreigners, and it is your most sacred duty to main-
tain the purity of the Polish name. In the nightmare of which
life is woven remember always that you have a friend who, far
off or near, will always remain the same to you3. "
On his way through Germany to Poland Krasinski
met for the last time as her lover Joanna Bobrowa. He
wrote to Sottan:
Oh, Adam, unhappy is he who with the naivety of a child,
dreaming of noble deeds, did violence to another's rights, tore
a wife from her husband, a mother from her children. I did
this, thinking in my madness that there were poetry and spring
on that road. Now, now I am deeply abased before myself, and
she before the world4.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Letters to Sotfan. Kissingen, July 10, 1836.
3 Letters to Gaszynski. Vienna, May 14, 1838.
4 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? The Deviation
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Perhaps the most tragic feature of Krasinski's re-
lations with, his father is the deep mutual love that
survived the father's utter want of comprehension of his
son. Together with the expression of an unusually close
affection that we find in those letters from Zygmunt to
his father to which we have access in Dr Kallenbach's
pages, there is again and again the evidence of the son's
wounded feeling: his guarded defence of himself against
the General's reproach for not returning to the home
that the father's own conduct had rendered intolerable
to his son: his protests against his father's false con-
ception of his character. During the years of Zygmunt's
attachment to Mme Bobrowa Wincenty Krasinski had
occasionally crossed the frontier to spend a few weeks
with his son. These meetings had brought small joy to
either. They were passed in a battle between the father
whose one desire was to see his heir make a brilliant
marriage, and the son who loathed the thought of mar-
riage in itself, and who compassionated Mme Bobrowa
too much to consent to place the barrier of marriage
with another woman between himself and her.
"You cannot imagine," wrote he to Sottan after he
had joined his father in Poland in the summer of 1838,
"what my daily life at home is: how I feel that I am
killing my father and that I am being killed in my
turn1.
The summer which the two spent together at
Opinog6ra was one painful struggle between the father
and son. At last the father wrung from Zygmunt his
promise to see and write to Mme Bobrowa no more.
Wincenty Krasinski went to her in person and brought
back her written farewell to the man to whose memory
1 Letters to Soltan. Danzig, Aug. 12, 1838.
G.
12
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? 178 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
she remained faithful all her life. Tortured by the
thought of her grief, Krasinski in repeated letters begged
the friend who had originally made him acquainted with
the lady to watch over her, and to help her in any and
every way he could. From this closed chapter of his
life he carried a bitter searing of soul. At this time he
was corresponding constantly with the young Pole for
whom he wrote The Temptation, and who afterwards
became his brother-in-law by marrying into the Branicki
family: Adam Potocki. Krasinski was now only twenty-
six: but these letters warning a boy of sixteen who had
not yet bartered innocence for passion to shun the same
road that the poet had himself trodden, to strengthen
and beautify his character while it was still as clay for
the moulding, throw strong light on the tragic swiftness
with which Krasinski had laid down his youth:--and
as strong a light on the nobility, the undestroyable
idealism that were the possessions from which Krasinski
never parted. His experience had led him to that mile-
stone where he saw the only beauty of life in stern moral
obligation, life's greatest danger in the indulgence of
dreams beyond the sphere of action. Innocence is the
beautiful gift of Adam's age, but:
You at this moment are not yet standing in the vestibule,
you are still rocked on wings. But remember, so that you shall
not despair when those wings fall from you, that you must end
the journey on foot which you began so lightly, so charmingly,
so sweetly--I repeat on foot--and on their knees even must
each approach the sanctuary of life where the sacrifice is
celebrated, where for the eternal instruction of mankind God
clothed in our very flesh suffers and dies on a cross. This is
the difference between innocence and virtue. Virtue knows all,
understands all, has experienced all, has passed even through
hell, and has risen on the third day. In virtue there is the same
purity as in innocence, and, besides, the knowledge of all, of
good and evil. Your future is that virtue. So know this before
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? The Deviation
179
the time, so that virtue shall not reveal itself to you in
intolerable burdens1.
To save this boy on the brink of a precipice
Krasinski told him what he would tell no one else.
None can adequately picture to himself how fearfully my
soul has been ruined by love, how I deprived myself of the
powers inexorably necessary for life, if we call labour, strength
and virtue life. For your instruction, for your good, I will tell
the frank truth which I should confess to no other. I became
stupefied, I became degraded, as the result of exaltations and
continual emotions of the soul. You would have the right to
be angry with a man who could not understand you and who
himself had never suffered as you are now suffering. My heart
is perhaps torn more deeply than yours, my soul yearning with
a greater despair, but I have behind me the series of the years
of my past youth, I know what seeds existed within me ready
to be developed, to give out their later fruit, and I can perfectly
appreciate why perhaps nothing will come forth from me any
more--I know what has killed me, and when it was that I killed
myself with all my flaming heart in that suicide2.
In November Krasinski left Poland and travelled
with his father through Italy. His faith in Poland
wavered together with his religious faith, both of which
were always inseparable in Krasinski's heart. He was
at the cross roads, perturbed, restless, unhappy, swept
from his spiritual bearings, still seeking endlessly where-
soever he discerned a glimmer of light. When he
mentions his nation in his correspondence it is generally
in a widely different key from that of his early letters to
Reeve, his later letters to his Polish friends. There is
a tone of profound discouragement. No hint is given of
the calling of a chosen country that remains to succeed-
ing generations as the trumpet call of the Anonymous
Poet to his people. At moments he could see nothing
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Adam Potocki. Opinog6ra, Oct.
5, 1838. Biblioteka Warszawska, May, 1905 (Polish).
2 Ibid. Warsaw, Oct. 20, 1838.
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? 180 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
but the faults of his nation: utter blankness and desola-
tion for her future. Death in these days seemed to him
the only outlet for the Pole from miserable existence.
"Who cannot struggle against the stream," he once said,
"and who will not degrade himself with the slime of its turbid
waters ought to leave the scene. To live in order to eat and
drink of shame, to grow fat on shame. . . is not worth while1. "
The moral stress that sapped at the roots of his life
reacted upon the artistic worth of Krasinski's work, no
less than upon the evolution of his national theory.
A Summer Night and The Temptation, both written in
1837, but published a few years later, fall far short of
Iridion or The Undivine Comedy. Indeed A Summer
Night seems a distinct return to the immaturity, we
might even say the tediousness, of Agay Han. It
appears at first reading a not very intelligible Byronic
sketch in poetic prose of a girl, forced by her father to
marry a prince of an alien race. Her lover watches the
ceremony in the church; makes his way into the newly
wedded wife's apartment and, with all the accompani-
ments of a romanticism, banal to the present day reader,
but affected by the contemporaries of Krasinski's youth,
he slays his beloved and himself, while the aged father
dies for grief at having sacrificed his daughter's happi-
ness.
This is the literal aspect of A Summer Night: but
there is something deeper behind it. In whatever
straits of pain Krasinski was immersed, his thoughts
and fears could not leave his nation. The vagueness
and confusion of the style of A Summer Night, the
scenic effects that bewilder the reader and go far to blot
out the main point, are in part attributable to the in-
1 Letters to Saltan. Prague, Aug. 5, 1836.
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? The Deviation
181
fluence of Jean Paul: but still more are they Krasinski's
shield of defence by which he protected both his father
and himself from discovery. With the increasing severity
of the Russian censors, Krasinski was driven to redouble
his precautions. Sottan was bidden to look for the
manuscript of Iridion among Krasinski's papers in
Rome and to destroy it: and so no autograph of the
play exists. Gaszynski, if he mentions Iridion in his
letters to Krasinski, must write merely a capital I. To
his father, probably warned by the latter to do so, the
poet wrote, denying the absurd rumour that he was the
author of Iridion \ A Summer Night is the history of
the marriage of a Polish girl, a lady of the Radziwift
family and a cousin of Krasinski's own, with a Russian
prince. When a boy of sixteen in 1828 Krasinski had
been present at this wedding: and even before the
events of 1830 had placed a great chasm between the
Pole and Russian, such an alliance, entailing, moreover,
the passing into Russian hands of the heiress's immense
estates, was one that every patriotic Pole would regard
with abhorrence. Under the squandering of decorative
devices, we had almost said upholstery, the hand of
the author of A Summer Nightvizjs, trembling, not only
with indignation against the ambitious parents who
compelled their daughters to such a lot, but with pro-
found compassion for the victims.
"She": "The Father," or "The Old Man": "The
Bridegroom," or "The Youth": "He," meaning the
lover: are the designations of the chief movers in the
drama. They are shades, not men and women of
flesh and blood; symbols who, as often is the case with
Krasinski, represent ideas.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 182 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I saw her," the prose-poem begins abruptly, "when they
led her in. She walked in terror in white robes with a wreath
on her head. "
Reading between the lines, and grasping those few
clues that penetrate through the mystery in which Kra-
sinski purposely shrouded them, there appears little doubt
that his thoughts were painfully reverting to another,
if not wholly dissimilar, story than that of a Polish girl,
sacrificed to her father's self-seeking: to the tragedy of
his own life.
"I grew beneath the shadow of his hand," cries the lover.
"It was he who first taught my lips the name of my country,
he who first made me know the desire for war. "
What other language is this than that of Krasinski's
reminiscences of his childhood with his father? When
the bride justifies to her lover the marriage she had
made, we might be reading one of those confidences to
Henry Reeve during the terrible struggle that Krasinski
underwent in the year of the Rising.
"Ah, my father came and entreated and implored. Thou
knowest how he can command with a harsh voice: but for
me he summoned not his orders from the bosom of a judge.
He veiled the thunder of his curse with tears, and sighed and
complained of his only child that she would thrust him down
into his grave. "
The autobiographical allusions, or rather hints, in
Krasinski's writings are too valuable to pass over in
silence. Another personal thread that runs through this
allegory refers to his separation from Joanna Bobrowa,
typified by the marriage which divides the lover from the
bride of the Russian prince. Twice does Krasinski, as
Dr Kleiner notices, emphatically repeat: "What the
priest shall bind, man will not unloose1. " There are
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Deviation
183
other expressions that are clearly explainable by this
unfortunate love affair. And a touch purely personal,
and yet impregnated with the patriotism that is never
far to seek in what Krasinski wrote, is to be found in
the lover. The youth is a soldier, leading his followers
to some great battle--which is of course, in the hidden
language that Krasinski was forced to use, war for
Poland. With the warlike tradition of his house in his
veins, Krasinski had a craving for the battlefield from
which his physical weakness alone was enough to de-
bar him; the heroes of his works are always soldiers.
In addition, his regret at not having fought for his
country when she rose in 1830 was an ever living one.
"He fought at Ostrotenka1": are the words by which
he would have Stowacki understand the depths of his
grief when he saw his dearest friend Danielewicz die2.
Further, it is worthy of notice that Krasinski places
the lover, as he gives his farewell charge to his men
before he himself seeks the bride in the castle, among
those "three gentle slopes" which had been the poet's
country home.
of execution in Iridion are many2. The play is in fact
of excessive length. It is at times overladen with ir-
relevant details and side scenes that distract the
attention from the broad lines of a magnificent idea. But
these are mere blemishes. Iridion remains one of the
splendid monuments of Polish literature and thought:
an enduring witness to that high spiritual vision by
which the Polish nation has risen above the powers of
evil set loose against her by an oppression which has
striven in vain to destroy her soul. Its author fearlessly
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 6, 1837. 2 Ibid.
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? 168 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
laid down a principle for his people at the moment when
it was most bitter to hear, hardest to realize. While
their country was rent and ravaged by a persecution
that knew no mercy, the Anonymous Poet against the
cry of his own heart entreated his fellow-Poles to rise,
not to revenge or retaliation, but to the more rugged
road of love. Krasinski's own language on what he
calls the "dream of his youth, the wail of an unheard-
of Titanic grief," is its best justification1. Let, says he
to Gaszynski, let the critic to whom these words were
addressed, let whoever reads Iridion be free to judge it
as they will. One thing alone they must acknowledge:
its truth.
And to prove its truth the author might call upon the shades
of the dead and the tears of the living. He might ask many
a one: "Didst thou not feel thus, didst thou not dream thus? "
And many a one would answer: "It is so. " Not only many a
one, but a whole nation2.
1 Ibid. 2 Ibid.
\
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? CHAPTER VIII
THE DEVIATION: A SUMMER NIGHT
AND THE TEMPTATION
(1836-1838)
After Krasinski had written Iridion, he swerved aside
in the development of his master thought. In the years
that followed his great drama he could speak to his
nation with no certain voice, because he himself was
wandering in doubt and darkness, intensified by the
influences of pantheism and German philosophies.
"As to pantheism," he wrote to Gaszynski, "I doubt
if you will succeed in finding any consolation in it. . .
Pantheism is a reasoned out despair. Pantheism has
poisoned much of my faith1. "
With its theory of the absorption of the individual
pantheism could not fail to be a horrible nightmare to
Krasinski, under which his clear perceptions were
staggered. For if the unit must lose its individuality,
what hope was there for a nation that in the eyes of the
world was being slowly done to death, but whose
resurrection was the belief to which every Polish heart
has always clung?
His soul, he told Reeve, was:
equally disgusted with the idea of nothingness, of the want
of individuality after death, and, on the other side, with the
idea of an activity without pause, an eternal metempsychosis
of misery and pains. . . I cannot get out of this fatal dilemma.
My brain will dash itself out one day against it2.
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 12, 1836.
2 Correspondence. Krasinski to Reeve. Florence, March 6, 1836.
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? 170 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"He is," he writes to Gaszynski, as usual speaking
of himself in the third person where his literary pro-
ductions were concerned, in reply to his friend's urging
him to write upon certain patriotic themes, "at that
time of life when everything is dried up and wearied
out by doubt. May God grant him to emerge from
those depths with a new and manly faith1. "
He re-read the gospels--this confidence is to his
father--and: "they brought me no comfort, no hope. "
Some power, he said, had left him: "and that power
was faith2. "
Krasinski was now tasting the whole bitterness
which passion had brought upon himself and Joanna
Bobrowa. The love on her side had always been greater
than on his. As, inevitably under the circumstances,
his love died down and infinite compassion took its
place, he felt himself the more bound to Mme Bobrowa
by the fact that it was affection for him that had caused
her misery: and against the entreaties, remonstrances
or commands as the case might be, of his friends,
Danielewicz, with whom he lived, Reeve, and above all
his father, he refused to break with her. It accorded
with the inherent nobility of Krasinski's nature that,
bitterly as he rued the personal sufferings that the whole
affair had caused him, his chief thought throughout was
for the woman, and the keenest edge of his anguish the
knowledge that her happiness was wrecked. Tortured
by this reflection, by his conscience, by her reproaches,
chiefly carried on by correspondence, for they met
seldom during these years, engaged in a perpetual
conflict with his father on the subject, his nerves were
1 Letters to Gaszynski. Kissingen, June 6, 1837.
2 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Deviation 171
strained to the breaking-point and his eyesight again
began to fail. Such was the inner life of the poet, little
guessed at in the cosmopolitan salons of Rome and
Vienna where he appeared as a youth of peculiarly
courteous manner, with an exceptional brilliance and wit
in his talk--which characteristics remained always his.
Whatever his own troubles Krasinski never put
aside the concerns of his friends. The younger of the
two daughters who had been taken from Sottan died in
1836, when a child of eight years old. To the doubly
bereaved father Krasinski wrote:
Your little girl is happier than all of us. She only dreamed
she was on earth, and after one night she woke, back in heaven.
There is nothing more pure, more blessed than a child's death.
In later years to die amidst the temptations of life and its
difficulties is a different matter. Certain it is that, dying, she
did not regret the unknown world. Perhaps the thought of
her far off father came to her as through a dark mist, and then
the mist broke, and clearly with an angel's eyes she beheld
her earthly father and, having clasped her little hands in his,
gave herself to her heavenly Father. And when they bring you
flowers in spring, think that you have one fresh in heaven whose
fragrance is prayer and song for you. Do not weep over her
early grave, but rather say: manibus date lilia plenisx.
Krasinski had already been leaving no stone un-
turned to obtain the Russian government's restoration
of Sottan's surviving daughter. Through the influence
of Wincenty Krasinski he at last succeeded: and in the
midst of his mental tortures, hampered by semi-blind-
ness, he, with that touch of womanly tenderness which was
so marked in his character, arranged every particular of
the girl's long journey, thinking out every little detail
for her comfort till she could reach her father.
In the spring of 1836, while he was in Rome,
1 Letters to Sottan. Vienna, Nov. 12, 1836.
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? 172 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Krasinski had met another young Polish poet whose
place in the national literature stands by his own, above
his own as regards form. J uliuszStowacki had left Poland
during the troubles of 1830. He wandered about Europe
and the East, eating his heart out in the loneliness
from which a premature death delivered him. There
is both in his life and in his early work a strong strain
of the fashionable Byronism: yet beneath this ran the
undercurrent of that deep love for his country under the
influence of which he enriched his nation with magnifi-
cent patriotic song. In the opening days of Krasinski's
friendship with Stowacki, whom he fondly calls Julek,
he saw clearly his defects--his restless egotism, his
petty jealousies, the want of spiritual perception which
characterized the youthful production of the future
mystic and which, observes Pr Kallenbach, the Anony-
mous Poet was at that moment in no condition himself
to strengthen in another. But he likewise saw, and was
among the first of his countrymen to call public attention
to it, the promise of Slowacki's brilliant art which he
whole-heartedly admired. The two youths, both con-
sumed by poetic genius and patriotic fire, were wont to
walk together in the garden of the Villa Mills on the
Palatine, and hold moonlight conversations among the
roses and ruins in that romantic spot.
At this period of Krasinski's life inspiration left him.
In his tension of mind and soul he could write but little,
and nothing that was worthy of the creator of Iridion.
His fragment of a drama on Wanda, the heroine of
Polish legend, lies in the limbo of the unfinished.
To the two prose-poems A Summer Night and The
Temptation we will return. There remains the little
collection of prayers which he composed for Joanna
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? The Deviation
173
Bobrowa and which was published forty years after the
poet's death, in 1899.
At heart a deeply religious woman, Mme Bobrowa's
most persistent accuser had been her conscience. Lost
and unhappy himself, Krasinski realized that religion
could be her only comfort, and so wrote out these prayers.
They are more poetical exercises than pious outpour-
ings, though their form is prose. Placed as they are on
the lips of a miserable woman, their accents are of grief
and desolation. There is something in them that
invariably falls short of the true language of spirituality.
It is obvious that the writer stood on no certain ground
himself, albeit it must be taken into consideration that
Krasinski is speaking in the person of another, and had
he been speaking in his own might have expressed
himself differently1. Be that as it may, passages border
on the blasphemous. Others are inspired by pantheism.
And yet moments occur where, given one degree further,
and the poet would be pouring out his soul with the
devotion and the fire of a Christian mystic.
For Thou art the first, the only, the highest love: for all
the love of hearts on earth are only rivulets, flowing from the
sea of Thy brightness: for Thou wilt save me when my days
are numbered, and Thou wilt comfort my distressed soul. . . For
Thou wilt not forsake the work of Thy Hands, Thy daughter
who here weeps and wails to Thee {Litany).
As an illustration of the development of Krasinski's
thought, the prayers are not without importance. They
put forth the theory of vicarious suffering which was to
be the corner-stone of his prophecies for Poland. On
the other hand their note of despair has no place in
Krasinski's subsequent scheme.
In one direction these years saw a new departure of
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 174 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
great significance in the history of the Anonymous Poet.
It was now that he began to write verse.
He sent his poems, for the most part written to or
about Mme Bobrowa, in letters to either Sottan or
Gaszynski, as experiments, with no intention of ever
publishing them: and only after his death did they see
the light. Krasinski thought poorly of them. In one
he complains that the Creator had denied him the power
of expression, and that he felt in his heart heavenly
accords which were shattered before they could reach
his lips. {God has refused me. June, 1836. ) Far inferior
to the love lyrics he was to write later to another, these
early poems express sorrow and remorse, not love.
Krasinski was eating Dead sea apples. He realized with
an anguish of regret that the powers of his mind, the
brilliant gifts of his youth, had been squandered in
a love which was from the outset doomed to ruin.
"My heart is broken" is the burden of a poem he
sent to Gaszynski, of which we quote some extracts
because, to comprehend the fulness of Krasinski's
spiritual uprising, we must first go down with him into
the abyss of his despair.
All that I loved is far away as God, or fadeth as a cloud.
What has the spark of genius wrought for me? It only
glimmered in the deep places of my soul. Had I not loved
a mortal beauty or laid my lips upon an earthly brow, I might
have lit a flame upon the vale of earth with that spark which
fell to me from eternity. Too late to-day! The soul is even
as the body. Once it is marred, and the marred part thou
tearest not away with all thy strength from the whole members,
the evil overrunneth all and multiplies. Happy the body, it
alone can die.
Ever between two waves the spirit rocks. Her thought in
heaven dwells, her heart sinks ever lower into hell. Immortal
war she wages with herself, she may not die, and at each
moment dies in double woe. All is unbearable; for guilt and
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? The Deviation
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sentence in each spark of life commingle. Ah! life seems but
a mockery only. Unbroken sleep, peace of the grave, are false,
even as happiness is falsehood. Even as the world is great, it
is the fallen field. Even as the world is great, it is the rock of
shipwreck. With endless toil, with everlasting pain, so all is
wrought, so all is ended. {My heart is broken. November, 1837. )
These lines are the only acknowledgment we have
from Krasinski's pen of his own genius. Not long after
he had written it he tells Reeve, in the last letter but
one that ever passed between them, that his position
with his father and Mme Bobrowa had become in-
tolerable. He met the latter in Kissingen during the
summer. Their interviews took place in a cemetery, as
the only place safe from observation where they stood
among the tombs, rain beating on them unheeded.
"In one word," says Krasinski to Reeve, "she was a woman
who had reached the last stage of exaltation, who had thrown
off the conventions of the world, considering with a calm eye
that society would soon reject her and seeing in this world no
one except him who ought never to have brought her to so
terrible an extremity. Then there came into his head a thought
of despair and love. He resolved to sacrifice himself for her.
He wrote to his father that he wished to drive her to divorce
her husband, and he would marry his beloved.
Then began
an atrocious tragedy. The father no longer answered him, he
would only write to his friend [Danielewicz]. He threatened
his son with his curse. He accused him of driving him into his
grave, and declared that this marriage should never take place
without entering into war with him, without being separated
from him for ever, and neither ever seeing each other again.
What could the son do against such terrible threats? 1"
Krasinski was gradually brought to the point of
acknowledging that he must break for ever with Mme
Bobrowa. He refused to do it in the drastic manner
enjoined by his father. He would only consent to take
the step in some natural, inevitable way that would
spare her feelings.
1 Correspondance. Letter to Reeve. Vienna, Dec. 29, 1837.
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? 176 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I loved that woman," he wrote to the General. "That
woman has been good to me. I will maintain in regard to her
all the forms of friendship, all the precautions of affection:
but I will not wound either her pride or her heart1. "
The time allowed to Krasinski by the Russian pass-
ports had now expired, and in the summer of 1838 he
was obliged to return to Poland. What that return meant
to him he had already told Sottan two years earlier.
If we return coram in patriam, I confess it will be for me
a plunge into complete darkness, a descent to hell. . . On that
frontier where our ancestors once drew with happy emotions
their native air into their lungs, where they knelt to thank God
for having granted them to return from distant wanderings,
to-day we, when we stand there, must say farewell to the
feelings and persons dearest to us. To-day a foreign land is
our home. Our own has become worse than foreign, worse than
far away, because it is a prison. In that land of ours, except
for my father, I have no friend, scarcely anyone known to me2.
His friends were all in exile.
"My Konstanty,mayGod guard you,"he wrote to Gaszynski
on the day when he began the journey which he always believed
would end in Siberia. "Remember you are in a foreign country
among foreigners, and it is your most sacred duty to main-
tain the purity of the Polish name. In the nightmare of which
life is woven remember always that you have a friend who, far
off or near, will always remain the same to you3. "
On his way through Germany to Poland Krasinski
met for the last time as her lover Joanna Bobrowa. He
wrote to Sottan:
Oh, Adam, unhappy is he who with the naivety of a child,
dreaming of noble deeds, did violence to another's rights, tore
a wife from her husband, a mother from her children. I did
this, thinking in my madness that there were poetry and spring
on that road. Now, now I am deeply abased before myself, and
she before the world4.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Letters to Sotfan. Kissingen, July 10, 1836.
3 Letters to Gaszynski. Vienna, May 14, 1838.
4 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski. J. Kallenbach, op. cit.
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? The Deviation
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Perhaps the most tragic feature of Krasinski's re-
lations with, his father is the deep mutual love that
survived the father's utter want of comprehension of his
son. Together with the expression of an unusually close
affection that we find in those letters from Zygmunt to
his father to which we have access in Dr Kallenbach's
pages, there is again and again the evidence of the son's
wounded feeling: his guarded defence of himself against
the General's reproach for not returning to the home
that the father's own conduct had rendered intolerable
to his son: his protests against his father's false con-
ception of his character. During the years of Zygmunt's
attachment to Mme Bobrowa Wincenty Krasinski had
occasionally crossed the frontier to spend a few weeks
with his son. These meetings had brought small joy to
either. They were passed in a battle between the father
whose one desire was to see his heir make a brilliant
marriage, and the son who loathed the thought of mar-
riage in itself, and who compassionated Mme Bobrowa
too much to consent to place the barrier of marriage
with another woman between himself and her.
"You cannot imagine," wrote he to Sottan after he
had joined his father in Poland in the summer of 1838,
"what my daily life at home is: how I feel that I am
killing my father and that I am being killed in my
turn1.
The summer which the two spent together at
Opinog6ra was one painful struggle between the father
and son. At last the father wrung from Zygmunt his
promise to see and write to Mme Bobrowa no more.
Wincenty Krasinski went to her in person and brought
back her written farewell to the man to whose memory
1 Letters to Soltan. Danzig, Aug. 12, 1838.
G.
12
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? 178 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
she remained faithful all her life. Tortured by the
thought of her grief, Krasinski in repeated letters begged
the friend who had originally made him acquainted with
the lady to watch over her, and to help her in any and
every way he could. From this closed chapter of his
life he carried a bitter searing of soul. At this time he
was corresponding constantly with the young Pole for
whom he wrote The Temptation, and who afterwards
became his brother-in-law by marrying into the Branicki
family: Adam Potocki. Krasinski was now only twenty-
six: but these letters warning a boy of sixteen who had
not yet bartered innocence for passion to shun the same
road that the poet had himself trodden, to strengthen
and beautify his character while it was still as clay for
the moulding, throw strong light on the tragic swiftness
with which Krasinski had laid down his youth:--and
as strong a light on the nobility, the undestroyable
idealism that were the possessions from which Krasinski
never parted. His experience had led him to that mile-
stone where he saw the only beauty of life in stern moral
obligation, life's greatest danger in the indulgence of
dreams beyond the sphere of action. Innocence is the
beautiful gift of Adam's age, but:
You at this moment are not yet standing in the vestibule,
you are still rocked on wings. But remember, so that you shall
not despair when those wings fall from you, that you must end
the journey on foot which you began so lightly, so charmingly,
so sweetly--I repeat on foot--and on their knees even must
each approach the sanctuary of life where the sacrifice is
celebrated, where for the eternal instruction of mankind God
clothed in our very flesh suffers and dies on a cross. This is
the difference between innocence and virtue. Virtue knows all,
understands all, has experienced all, has passed even through
hell, and has risen on the third day. In virtue there is the same
purity as in innocence, and, besides, the knowledge of all, of
good and evil. Your future is that virtue. So know this before
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? The Deviation
179
the time, so that virtue shall not reveal itself to you in
intolerable burdens1.
To save this boy on the brink of a precipice
Krasinski told him what he would tell no one else.
None can adequately picture to himself how fearfully my
soul has been ruined by love, how I deprived myself of the
powers inexorably necessary for life, if we call labour, strength
and virtue life. For your instruction, for your good, I will tell
the frank truth which I should confess to no other. I became
stupefied, I became degraded, as the result of exaltations and
continual emotions of the soul. You would have the right to
be angry with a man who could not understand you and who
himself had never suffered as you are now suffering. My heart
is perhaps torn more deeply than yours, my soul yearning with
a greater despair, but I have behind me the series of the years
of my past youth, I know what seeds existed within me ready
to be developed, to give out their later fruit, and I can perfectly
appreciate why perhaps nothing will come forth from me any
more--I know what has killed me, and when it was that I killed
myself with all my flaming heart in that suicide2.
In November Krasinski left Poland and travelled
with his father through Italy. His faith in Poland
wavered together with his religious faith, both of which
were always inseparable in Krasinski's heart. He was
at the cross roads, perturbed, restless, unhappy, swept
from his spiritual bearings, still seeking endlessly where-
soever he discerned a glimmer of light. When he
mentions his nation in his correspondence it is generally
in a widely different key from that of his early letters to
Reeve, his later letters to his Polish friends. There is
a tone of profound discouragement. No hint is given of
the calling of a chosen country that remains to succeed-
ing generations as the trumpet call of the Anonymous
Poet to his people. At moments he could see nothing
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Adam Potocki. Opinog6ra, Oct.
5, 1838. Biblioteka Warszawska, May, 1905 (Polish).
2 Ibid. Warsaw, Oct. 20, 1838.
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? 180 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
but the faults of his nation: utter blankness and desola-
tion for her future. Death in these days seemed to him
the only outlet for the Pole from miserable existence.
"Who cannot struggle against the stream," he once said,
"and who will not degrade himself with the slime of its turbid
waters ought to leave the scene. To live in order to eat and
drink of shame, to grow fat on shame. . . is not worth while1. "
The moral stress that sapped at the roots of his life
reacted upon the artistic worth of Krasinski's work, no
less than upon the evolution of his national theory.
A Summer Night and The Temptation, both written in
1837, but published a few years later, fall far short of
Iridion or The Undivine Comedy. Indeed A Summer
Night seems a distinct return to the immaturity, we
might even say the tediousness, of Agay Han. It
appears at first reading a not very intelligible Byronic
sketch in poetic prose of a girl, forced by her father to
marry a prince of an alien race. Her lover watches the
ceremony in the church; makes his way into the newly
wedded wife's apartment and, with all the accompani-
ments of a romanticism, banal to the present day reader,
but affected by the contemporaries of Krasinski's youth,
he slays his beloved and himself, while the aged father
dies for grief at having sacrificed his daughter's happi-
ness.
This is the literal aspect of A Summer Night: but
there is something deeper behind it. In whatever
straits of pain Krasinski was immersed, his thoughts
and fears could not leave his nation. The vagueness
and confusion of the style of A Summer Night, the
scenic effects that bewilder the reader and go far to blot
out the main point, are in part attributable to the in-
1 Letters to Saltan. Prague, Aug. 5, 1836.
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? The Deviation
181
fluence of Jean Paul: but still more are they Krasinski's
shield of defence by which he protected both his father
and himself from discovery. With the increasing severity
of the Russian censors, Krasinski was driven to redouble
his precautions. Sottan was bidden to look for the
manuscript of Iridion among Krasinski's papers in
Rome and to destroy it: and so no autograph of the
play exists. Gaszynski, if he mentions Iridion in his
letters to Krasinski, must write merely a capital I. To
his father, probably warned by the latter to do so, the
poet wrote, denying the absurd rumour that he was the
author of Iridion \ A Summer Night is the history of
the marriage of a Polish girl, a lady of the Radziwift
family and a cousin of Krasinski's own, with a Russian
prince. When a boy of sixteen in 1828 Krasinski had
been present at this wedding: and even before the
events of 1830 had placed a great chasm between the
Pole and Russian, such an alliance, entailing, moreover,
the passing into Russian hands of the heiress's immense
estates, was one that every patriotic Pole would regard
with abhorrence. Under the squandering of decorative
devices, we had almost said upholstery, the hand of
the author of A Summer Nightvizjs, trembling, not only
with indignation against the ambitious parents who
compelled their daughters to such a lot, but with pro-
found compassion for the victims.
"She": "The Father," or "The Old Man": "The
Bridegroom," or "The Youth": "He," meaning the
lover: are the designations of the chief movers in the
drama. They are shades, not men and women of
flesh and blood; symbols who, as often is the case with
Krasinski, represent ideas.
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 182 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I saw her," the prose-poem begins abruptly, "when they
led her in. She walked in terror in white robes with a wreath
on her head. "
Reading between the lines, and grasping those few
clues that penetrate through the mystery in which Kra-
sinski purposely shrouded them, there appears little doubt
that his thoughts were painfully reverting to another,
if not wholly dissimilar, story than that of a Polish girl,
sacrificed to her father's self-seeking: to the tragedy of
his own life.
"I grew beneath the shadow of his hand," cries the lover.
"It was he who first taught my lips the name of my country,
he who first made me know the desire for war. "
What other language is this than that of Krasinski's
reminiscences of his childhood with his father? When
the bride justifies to her lover the marriage she had
made, we might be reading one of those confidences to
Henry Reeve during the terrible struggle that Krasinski
underwent in the year of the Rising.
"Ah, my father came and entreated and implored. Thou
knowest how he can command with a harsh voice: but for
me he summoned not his orders from the bosom of a judge.
He veiled the thunder of his curse with tears, and sighed and
complained of his only child that she would thrust him down
into his grave. "
The autobiographical allusions, or rather hints, in
Krasinski's writings are too valuable to pass over in
silence. Another personal thread that runs through this
allegory refers to his separation from Joanna Bobrowa,
typified by the marriage which divides the lover from the
bride of the Russian prince. Twice does Krasinski, as
Dr Kleiner notices, emphatically repeat: "What the
priest shall bind, man will not unloose1. " There are
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski.
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/wu. 89102083045 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? The Deviation
183
other expressions that are clearly explainable by this
unfortunate love affair. And a touch purely personal,
and yet impregnated with the patriotism that is never
far to seek in what Krasinski wrote, is to be found in
the lover. The youth is a soldier, leading his followers
to some great battle--which is of course, in the hidden
language that Krasinski was forced to use, war for
Poland. With the warlike tradition of his house in his
veins, Krasinski had a craving for the battlefield from
which his physical weakness alone was enough to de-
bar him; the heroes of his works are always soldiers.
In addition, his regret at not having fought for his
country when she rose in 1830 was an ever living one.
"He fought at Ostrotenka1": are the words by which
he would have Stowacki understand the depths of his
grief when he saw his dearest friend Danielewicz die2.
Further, it is worthy of notice that Krasinski places
the lover, as he gives his farewell charge to his men
before he himself seeks the bride in the castle, among
those "three gentle slopes" which had been the poet's
country home.
