Authors: Neal Ascherson
It was October when they were arrested, already disagreeably cold, and they remained in the dungeon for most of the ensuing winter. They got through the weeks and months by drinking mugs of hot tea, arguing about what sort of Poland they intended to restore, singing to the distant sounds of the monastery organ at Mass, and listening to Adam Mickiewicz while he read his own poems. They lived, in other words, through the essential experience of every generation of young Poles from that day to this.
Mickiewicz, who was to become the 'national poet', even the lay patron saint of his country, was then twenty-four: about a year older than Pushkin. He was already a famous young man. With his
collection
Ballads and Romances,
he had introduced Romanticism into Polish literature: 'Faith and feeling more reveal to me/Then the sage's lens or eye . . . ' In an occupied, demoralised nation whose hope of new life seemed to be a matter of visionary faith rather than of reason, the book had instantly sold out. He had written the long poem
Grazyna,
and in Vilnius he had composed two acts of
Dziady
(Forefathers' Eve). This was the beginning of an extraordinary poetic drama about love, magical religion and political sacrifice which is unlike anything else in European literature and which was never to be completed. The writer Ksawery Pruszyriski has compared it to a cathedral of which 'an aisle, a chapel, a presbytery, part of the choir' were raised but never united under a single roof.
It is not easy to come close to the young Mickiewicz. He became too important to Poland. Even his friends from the Filomats wrote about him with an undifferentiated awe, as if he were a Romantic icon: a one-dimensional figure of passionate emotions and immaculate patriotism, a profile with wind-blown locks and burning eyes brooding among crags and eagles. Only much later in life, in the long years of his exile in Paris, does a human being emerge from contemporary descriptions. This middle-aged Mickiewicz, thickset and with bushy grey hair, was solemn in speech, endlessly patient with friends and strangers, short-tempered with his own family. Disappointments and a difficult marriage had marked him. His last great work, the narrative poem
Pan Tadeusz,
had been finished in
1834,
and for the last twenty years of his life he wrote little of lasting value. Instead he gave his energies to organising the vain struggle for Polish independence, travelling up and down Europe to summon up support for the cause and to raise armies from Polish communities in exile. In Paris he fell victim to the religious charlatan Towianski, who for many years exploited the poet's fame to bolster his worthless mystical sect and drove a wedge between Mickiewicz and the political leadership of the Polish emigration.
It is hard, too, to comprehend the nature of his Polishness. Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania, in the town of Nowogrodek which is now in Belarus (Byelorussia). He opened
Pan Tadeusz,
the most beloved work in the Polish language, with the words: 'Lithuania, my fatherland . . . ' The national poet of Poland, sent into exile at the age of twenty-four, never visited the country we now know as Poland at all, apart from a brief foray into Prussian
occupied Poland near Poznan during the insurrection of 1830-1. He never saw either Warsaw or Krak6w, the two capital cities of historic Poland. It is as if Shakespeare had never visited England. A little more accurately, it is as if Shakespeare had been an Anglo-Irishman brought up in Dublin, driven to take refuge in Paris before he could find his way to London.
These ironies did not seem ironic to Adam Mickiewicz. They derived from the nature of the archaic, pre-ethnic Polish imperium which had collapsed just before he was born. The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been united into a royal 'commonwealth' in the Middle Ages. And this 'Lithuania' was not the small Baltic-speaking nation of today, but a huge, decentralised sprawl of territories reaching southwards almost to the Black Sea - and at times touching its coast. Its peoples included not only Baits in the far north, but Slav-speaking nationalities who were later named Byelorussians and Ukrainians. Among the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy were Cossacks, Nogay Tatars and
—
in the towns and villages - the main Jewish population of the world at that time.
As generations passed, the dominant culture of the Grand Duchy became Polish. Below the level of the gentry, the lower orders
- including peasantries which had often been reduced to serfdom -preserved their own languages and their own rich folk cultures. But by the time that Adam Mickiewicz went to university, Vilnius was a Polish- and Yiddish-speaking metropolis, while almost the entire landowning class - the princely families, the squirearchy, the 'bonnet lairds' of the petty aristocracy - considered themselves to be 'Lithuanian Poles'.
This was a tenacious identity. It produced many of Poland's best writers in the century-and-a-half after Mickiewicz, and the contemporary poet Czesfaw Milosz, raised in Vilnius, can still describe himself as a 'Lithuanian of Polish speech'. It gave Poland a series of national leaders and patriotic conspirators, like Jozef Piisudski who led the nation to its regained independence in 191
8.
Especially after the Partitions, its political tradition was fiercely anti-Russian, and its Catholic faith — in a countryside where the peasant majority was often Orthodox or Uniate - was embattled and mystical.
In the Literary Museum at Odessa, in a cabinet which once belonged to a Polish family in the 1820s, there is a miniature portrait of a woman. She is blonde, blue-eyed, conventionally pretty, with flowers in her hair and a low-cut 'peasant' dress. The women who sit on chairs keeping an eye on the visitors say that this is a picture of (Carolina Sobanska, the lover of Mickiewicz.
If it is a portrait, it is not a likeness. She was anything but a little shepherdess. Another Pole who fell for her in Odessa wrote much later, after he had decided to loathe her: 'She was about 40 [a slander: in fact she was about 30], coarse-featured, but what physical appeal, what a voice, what a manner!' Other, more believable portraits, some of which vanished during the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, showed bronze-coloured hair, dark eyes full of amusement, a slightly snub nose with big nostrils. The younger, more cheerful part of 'good society' in Odessa adored Sobanska, and crowded to her receptions and tea-parties. Older and more respectable people, including the Vorontsovs, detested her. This was partly because she was promiscuous even by Romantic standards. But for some of the Polish families in Odessa, there was another reason. They thought her a traitor.
Karolina Rozalia z Rzewuskich Hieronimowa Sobanska, to give her full married name, was not just an aristocrat. She came from the Rzewuski family, one of the oldest and most influential clans in Poland. Her own branch of the family was firmly located in what we would now call Ukraine; her father had been a member of parliament in independent Poland and then, after the Third Partition, a Russian senator and Marshal of the Nobility in the province of Kiev. Karolina, one of a clutch of brilliantly clever and attractive sisters and brothers, was educated in Vienna. Her sister Ewa was to marry Balzac in 1850, after besieging him by letter for many years. Her brother Henryk Rzewuski, in Odessa a good-natured chatterbox with vaguely revolutionary ideas about the fate of Poland, later became ultra-conservative and even pro-Russian in his views and took to writing historical novels. (One,
The Recollections of Seweryn Soplica Esquire,
is still worth reading as an ironic portrait of the eastern Polish nobility.)
But Karolina lived with the chief of the Russian secret police. She had been married, almost a schoolgirl, to Hieronym Sobanski, a rich landowner who had set up an export business at Odessa for wheat from his own estates up-country. Then, in 1819, she met a much more interesting man.
Colonel-General Jan Witt was in his forties when (Carolina became his mistress. His mother was a famously beautiful Greek woman who had been 'acquired' in Istanbul as a possible mistress for Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. His father was a Dutchman who managed to abduct her on the way to Warsaw. Jan Witt himself was small, shrewd, with Greek good looks; even those who hated his profession found it hard to dislike a man who was such good company. That popularity was the centre of his operation. By acquiring Karolina, and by making their house a place to which any restless young person or visitor would gravitate in search of a party and perhaps a woman, he became irresistible. It was before the age of microphones. It was still an age in which a fine fellow was a fine fellow, and his politics came second. So it came about that when the conspirators of Odessa felt like a good time - an intellectual argument, a drink, a dance - they would go round to the house of the tsar's chief of police.
Witt's assignment in Odessa was what we would now call counterintelligence. He had to build up and maintain a net of informers, and to gather intelligence about conspiracies. As far as he knew in 1825, there were two lines of enquiry to be followed up in Odessa. One was the jumble of Polish secret organisations, some more imaginary than real, which were planning an insurrection and the restoration of Poland's independence. The other was the evidence, already solid, of a Russian conspiracy against Tsar Alexander I, a plot among intellectuals and young officers to overthrow the régime and instal liberal and constitutional government. Witt knew the names of some of these conspirators, now remembered as the 'Decembrists'. He suspected - and he was on the right track for much of 1825 — that they would initiate their revolution by assassinating the tsar.
Vorontsov, perhaps having learned something from his attempt to be fatherly with Pushkin, passed Adam Mickiewicz and his two companions to the care of Witt. Mickiewicz and Jezowski were lodged in the Lycée Richelieu, on the first floor of the long, two-storey school building which still stands in Deribasovskaya; they were supposed to teach, but in practice were never invited to enter a classroom. Instead, they set about amusing themselves.
This is an uncomfortable period for the poet's more pious biographers. The saintly patriot is held to have let himself down. Mickiewicz, though not a virgin, had led a fairly repressed life until then. He had fallen chastely and deeply in love with the young daughter of a landowner near Nowogrddek. When he had been posted to Kaunas (Kowno) as a teacher after his graduation, he had become involved in an earthier way with Madame Kowalska, the local pharmacist's wife. But in Odessa, where northern conventions counted for little and most people lived for the moment, he let himself go. In poems and letters, he wrote about 'Danaids', the girls who took him to bed just to score a poet or to see how much money he had, and he described himself - a bit self-consciously - as a 'pasha' with a harem. But among the Danaids, there were four Polish women in Odessa who mattered more. One was a young married woman known only through a group of erotic poems as 'D.D.', with whom Mickiewicz for a time thought he might be in love. The second was Eugenia Szemiotowa, a married women with a family, whose small house was used for meetings of Polish exiles. Eugenia had nothing to do with Odessa social life, and her importance for Mickiewicz seems to have been her unwavering Catholic patriotism. Another close friend, steady and supportive, was Joanna Zaleska who, with her husband, kept the poet fed and comforted when playing the pasha grew too much for him. The fourth woman was Karolina Sobanska.
A great many letters which might have answered questions about how the poet and the policeman's mistress came together have been burned - many by Mickiewicz's son after his father's death. This lack leaves behind two mysteries. The first is what they felt for one another. The second mystery is how much they really knew about one another's secret activities, for, with both of them, there was a great deal to be known.
This was not a grand love. It began, evidently, with physical attraction and mutual curiosity, and quite possibly with a suggestion from Jan Witt. He used Karolina, before and after Adam Mickiewicz, to find out what men were up to, and if that meant going to bed with them, he accepted it. But the affair between Sobanska and Mickiewicz led to something which in the circumstances was unlikely: they became friends. Mickiewicz found in this grand and wicked young lady somebody he could talk to without making allowances; his nickname for her was 'Donna Giovanna', the bold adventuress who was more Byron's Don Juan than Mozart's. She, in turn, was touched by his awful provincial manners, which seemed to put her in her place as just one more
Vilnius student comrade. When she was an old lady, the thing she remembered best about Adam was how boorish he became when he was fully launched into a speech in her drawing-room. He would stick out his empty tea-cup at Witt, as if he were a passing lackey; and when they first met and she enquired what he would like to drink, he really did talk to her as if she were a waitress:
(
I want coffee, but it's got to be with double cream and a thick head on it!'