Forefathers' Eve by Adam Mickiewicz

Author:Adam Mickiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
Published: 2016-11-02T11:57:29+00:00

FOREFATHERS’ EVE, PART III

This Poem

is dedicated to

Jan Sobolewski

Cyprian Daszkiewicz

Feliks Kółakowski

of blessed memory

fellow students • prisoners • and exiles

persecuted • for their love • of their fatherland

who died • longing • for their homeland

in archangelsk • in moscow • in saint petersburg

martyrs

of the national cause

the author

For half a century now, Poland has been the scene of such ceaseless, unflagging, inexorable cruelty at the hands of the tyrants who oppress Her, and such illimitable devotion and endurance on the part of Her suffering peoples, as the world has not seen since the days of the persecuted Christians. It seems as if these kings possessed a Herod-like presentiment of the manifestation of a new light appearing upon the earth, and of their own imminent downfall, while the people believe ever more strongly in their renewal and resurrection.

The history of martyred Poland embraces many generations and a countless number of sacrifices; bloody scenes unfold daily in all corners of our homeland, as well as on foreign soil. The Poem with which we present the Reader today constitutes a few small sketches from this huge canvas; a few events from the persecutions instigated by Caesar Alexander.

Round about the year 1822, the politics of Caesar Alexander, the enemy of all liberty, began to manifest themselves more clearly, ground themselves more firmly, and take a more determined direction. In those days a universal persecution was visited upon all the tribes of Poland, an oppression that became ever more violent and bloody. At that time the infamous Senator Novosiltsov stepped onto the stage. He was the first to understand the instinctive and beastly hatred of the Russian government towards Poles as something salvific, as eminently good politics, and thus he took it as the basis of all his actions, and set as his goal the destruction of Polish nationhood. In those days the whole area between the Prosna and the Dniepr, and from Galicja to the Baltic Sea, was locked away and governed like one huge prison. The entire administration of those lands was wound up like a huge machine for the torture of Poles, the wheels of which were set in motion by Tsarevich Constantine and Senator Novosiltsov.

The systematic Novosiltsov set himself to the torture of children and adolescents, so that the hopes of all future generations should be snuffed in their very cradle. He set up his central hangman’s headquarters in Wilno, the academic capital of the Lithuanian-Belarussian provinces. At that time there existed certain literary organisations among the university students, which aimed at the maintenance of the Polish tongue and of Polish nationhood, rights such as were guaranteed to the Poles both by the Congress of Vienna and by Imperial privilege. Now, these organisations, aware of the ever more intense suspicion they aroused among the government officers, dissolved themselves before any edict should enjoin them to do so. But Novosiltsov, even though he arrived in Wilno a full year after the voluntary dissolution of these clubs, hurried before the Imperial presence and pretended to have found them still in existence.

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