28 NAROD
Active conspiracy was for the few, however. Much more typical for Poles
who shared the same convictions, if not the same courage, was the mental habit
of withdrawing from the public world altogether. In the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, especially in Russian Poland, public life was so overborne by the inter-
minable brutalities and humiliations of censorship, police surveillance, arrests,
imprisonments, and exiles, that many Poles simply refused to participate.
Instead, they withdrew into the 'poetico-political dream world' of literature.
There, they could read of triumphs and satisfactions which were denied them
elsewhere. Their cultivation of the inner spiritual life, where aesthetic and moral
values hold sway over all manifestations of reality, marks one of the abiding
characteristics of Polish culture. In this sense, all the great writers were pro-
foundly political; and politics was saturated in literature. Mickiewicz, in
Konrad "Wallenrod (1828) and Dziady (Forefathers' Eve, 1832) explored the
theme of vengeance; Krasinski, in Nie-Boska komedia (The Undivine Comedy,
1835) and Irydion (1836), preached the gospel of submission and of private spir-
itual mastery; Slowacki, in the play Kordian (1834), in the prose-poem Anhelli
(1838), in the epic Beniowski (1841), and in the symbolic Krol-Duch (King-
Spirit, 1847), explored political, historical, and historiosophic subjects and
made some notable forays into the realm of satire. Perhaps more than any of his
great contemporaries, he agonized in the present in order to inspire the happier
generations of the future:
Oh Poland, Poland, sacred and godly,
Sometime perhaps in calm and serenity
You may turn the gaze of your re-awakened eyes
Onto our graves, where we rot, and the worm pries:
Where, like sleepy swans in the Spring, our ashes
Lie wrapped in thought beneath the willows.
Oh Poland mine! Remember us
When we can feel no longer; remember
How we framed and fashioned your cause
Both as a prayer of sorrow and as a flash of thunder.
Then, it will suffice that you ponder awhile
Beside our sepulchres, and, in the deathly quiet,
Accursed, as it were, by God, and vile,
That you, oh Holy One, should not forget.^27The conscious link between Romantic literature and insurrectionary politics
was forged at an early date by Maurycy Mochnacki (1804-34) whose activities
as a militant critic in the one field were expressly designed to redeem his failures
in the other. As a youth of 17, he had been expelled from Warsaw University for
striking a policeman who ordered him to extinguish his pipe, and two years later
(1823) was arrested for belonging to a secret society. In the Carmelite Prison, his
resistance was broken. He was induced to write an open letter condemning the
irresponsibility of Polish youth, and was released. Later, under pressure from
his parents, he spent several months working for the Tsarist censorship. The rest