Symbolizing (the Real) Mickiewicz
Symbolizing (the Real) Mickiewicz

Summary/Abstract: There are two biographies of Adam Mickiewicz. The essence of the first, the one most familiar to generations of the poet’s readers, was captured most saliently by Tomasz Lisiewicz in his 1894 painting Apotheosis of the Wieszcz. There is nothing remarkable in the concept itself: the figure of an author surrounded by various products of his literary imagination. What is remarkable is Lisiewicz’s rendering of the author. Mickiewicz is depicted lying on his deathbed, his face modeled on August Préault’s 1867 funerary medallion of the poet’s head that Préault had in turn modeled, ostensibly, on the plaster cast of Mickiewicz’s face taken a few hours after his death in 1855. I say ostensibly, because the French sculptor reworked the features of a prematurely aged fifty-six-year-old’s death mask to resemble those of a much younger—one might say eternally young—Mickiewicz. [...]

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