Pour un mythe romantique polonais : le héros solitaire ou la lutte solidaire?
On a Polish Romantic Myth: Solitary Hero or Solidary Struggle?

Summary/Abstract: Since the dissolution in 1795 of the Polish state, and for more than two centuries, the interaction between history and literary works has deepened and created a series of great national myths. The most important and persistent one seems to be the myth of the hero willing to withstand by himself the dismemberment of Poland (resisting, in particular, the tyranny of the Russian tsar, the usurper of the royal Polish crown), in a solitary struggle which he wages on behalf of the entire Nation. Konrad, the young protagonist of the drama The Forefathers (1822-32) by Adam Mickiewicz, emerges from this mythology and represents its major figure; the main terms of my paper – struggle, victory and defeat, solitary vs. solidary – strictly refer to this theme. The sacrifice, martyrdom, failure, even the death of the hero are not the intended outcome of this struggle, since they offer a new reason to live to the members of the community, to the nation-people without a State. The imaginary system thus crystallized relies on the antinomy between the individual and the collectivity, between loneliness and fellowship. The individual, even if excessively glorified, loses so as the collectivity should win. This is the reason why the existence of the characters involved in the conflict is divided into two separate parts. We may recognize here a specifically Romantic dichotomy, duality and clash. Loneliness, intrinsic to the protagonist’s destiny, draws the individual into a despoiling of himself in the name of the other, more precisely in the name of the others. This is a fundamental question which also concerned Goetz, Manfred, Cromwell, Lorenzaccio or other Romantic heroes fighting against isolation and imprisonment, both literally and figuratively. In Mickiewicz’s writings the game between I and you, between I and we, can be read in terms of a positive and optimistic programme (Ode to Youth), but there are also some texts in which the extreme loneliness of the self is woven into a theme by far more dramatic: that of revolt reaching the point of blasphemy, sacrilege and the crime of regicide-parricide (The Forefathers). A double fall, of the individual and of the country, is represented here. The hero, superbly lonely and, at the same time, jointly bound to his fellows, falls but rises again, yields but stands up against what oppresses him, falls yet again, and so on… From this point of view, Poland seems to share a similar fate: allowing its collapse, but revolting against it, Poland does not surrender but loses its best children as well as its boundaries, only to rebuild them again, in solidarity. History turns into myth, and myth into history…

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