Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, published in Paris in 1834, can be seen as an expression of a romantic culture of remembrance which emerged in Poland and Lithuania in the aftermath of a traumatic political event, the January Uprising of 1830–1831. This article discusses the poet's transformation of the devices and generic model of heroic epic for the double purpose of expressing a notion of historical time which holds out an open future for both the individual and the national community, and of promoting the acceptance of a complicated past through the resolution of its conflicts. Both in Poland and in Lithuania, Pan Tadeusz was regarded as a monumental tribute to the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a major influence on the modern national literatures in Lithuanian, Belarusian and Yiddish, sprouting on the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The ten years Stanisław Pigoń spent in Wilno (1921-1931) was a very important phase of his life. Wilno not only attracted a great deal of his research but also became the focus of a lasting emotional attachment, a sentiment which he reaffirmed in a memoir published shortly before his death in 1968. Although a lot is already known about Pigoń’s Wilno decade, there are some episodes that are worth a closer examination. One of them is a debate about Konrad’s cell which he triggered off just before leaving Wilno. The controversy concerns a cell in the former Basylian Monastery where Adam Mickiewicz was imprisoned in 1823 and where Konrad, the main character of his Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) undergoes a spiritual transformation, the climax of the poetic drama. Pigoń contributions to this interminable debate exhibit a fine balance of scholarly precision and passionate conviction. This article not only looks at the origin and the early phases of the Konrad’s cell controversy in their contemporary background but also tries to show Pigoń’s involvement in the life of the university and the cultural and literary life of Wilno.

This article attempts to formulate a new interpretation of the mysterious messianic character marked "Forty and Four" from the Vision of Priest Piotr in Adam Mickiewicz's poetic drama Dziady ( Forefathers' Eve), Part III. After a review of earlier readings of this crux and its symbolism, the author of the article presents his own proposal, which contextualizes the enigmatic number in three historical frameworks. The first of them is ancient history, and, more specifically, 'Forty four' is seen as a reference to the Ides of March in 44 B.C., the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of conspirators led by Brutus. The other two relevant contexts are the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, and the high tides of modern history culminating in tyrannicide. In effect, the 'Forty four' passage is seen as an affirmation or even a sacralization of tyrannicide, symbolized by not only by inexplicit references to Brutus and the Israelite heroine Judith. It is a theme which reverberates not only in Dziady but also throughout Adam Mickiewicz's work.

The article attempts to outline Adam Mickiewicz’s concept of subjectivity. He introduces it in his visionary poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) where a radically ambivalent situation is presented through the duality of the main character Gustaw/Konrad. The article describes this duality in terms of Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between cogito exalté and cogito brisé. In Dziady Mickiewicz dramatizes the transition from exaltation to dejection, the condition of cogito brisé (living with a wound). His romantic subject cannot throw away his past, but because he is acutely aware of his failings and his inadequacy he is able to free himself from delusions of grandeur and self-centered pride. The condition of uncertainty, inadequacy and chronic insatiability is like a gaping wound or a lack which may lead the ‘I’ to open up and seek the Other. It is a vision of man who knows he is deeply flawed but capable of pursuing a noble desire; vulnerable and fallible, beset by ‘endless error’ and yet able to act and get his act together; self-centered and yet, because of the relational nature of the human identity, capable of redirecting his emancipatory energy to Others. It can be summed up the concept of homo capax (homme capable) which, as this article argues, provides the key to Mickiewicz’s anthropology.

This is a comparative analysis of the key ideas regarding nation-building in the writ-ings of Adam Mickiewicz and Patrick Pearse, who have gone down to history as icons of the Polish and Irish national revival. In the case of Mickiewicz the article focuses on Dziady – Część III (Forefathers’ Eve – Part III), Konrad Wallenrod, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (Books of the Polish Nation and Poland’s Pilgrimage); the Irish materials include Pearce’s dramas The King and The Singer as well as Theobald Wolfe Tone’s ‘Speech from the Dock’. A trope common to all of them is the concept of ‘a beauti-ful, awesome voice’ / ‘a traitorous song’: literature as a mighty force that can create a community dedicated to the national cause. A comparison of passages that articulate the messianic idea indicates that, though understood by either writer in his own way, they both envision it as a catalyst turning nation-building literature into an apotheosis of martyrdom and death – a process which could be described as axiological metabolism. The article also examines the paradoxes of the projections of the myth of national unity in the work of both writers, especially in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Pearse’s short story ‘In My Garden’.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.