CHAPTER 8

A Melopoetic Struggle between East

and West: Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom

Jan Czarnecki

INTRODUCTION
When the national bard of Ukraine Taras Shevchenko published his epic
poem Haidamaki in 1841, no one would have expected that a band
named after its protagonists, the eighteenth century anti-Polish rebels,
would one day release an entire album based exclusively on Polish verse.
Mickiewicz—Stasiuk—Haydamaky, a project realised with the Polish
writer Andrzej Stasiuk in 2018, lets the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz
(1798–1855) resound in a clash of rhythmically recited Polish with sung
Ukrainian. I shall reflect upon this remarkable conjunction of refined
poetry with folk rock through the following series of oppositions, which I
think it suggests: East and West (intended as geographically inconsistent
imagological labels), popular and ‘highbrow’ and, finally, music and poetry.
The album combines the sophisticated poetic form of the Mickiewiczian
sonnet with the powerful sound of alternative rock, encompassing folk

J. Czarnecki ( )
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: jan.czarnecki@uni-koeln.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 155

Switzerland AG 2021
T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_8
156 J. CZARNECKI

instruments as well as folk scales and rhythms. This is the ‘Highbrow’ and
Popular axis. Original texts are recited by the writer while Ukrainian trans-
lations are sung by the band. Stasiuk’s Polish scandito is at times rapping,
at times rhapsodic and in general: highly blasé, in which it contrasts emi-
nently with the refrains sung by Oleksandr Iarmiola and Roman Dubonos.
This is the poetry and music axis. The East and West axis, evident in the
very contraposition of West Slavic (Polish) and East Slavic (Ukrainian)
words, is potentiated by the union of the latter with music. The whole
concept of the album suggests a melopoetic journey—or perhaps a ‘wild
steppe rush’—between East and West. Its textual core consists of six of the
eighteen Crimean Sonnets (1826), the celebrated cycle inspired by
Mickiewicz’s 1825 ‘oriental’ travels to the Akerman Steppe and Crimea
(Akkerman Steppe, The Storm, The Harem Tombs, Baidary, The Pilgrim
and The Road by Chufut-Caleh Chasm). The sources of the remaining four
songs are of no lesser importance for the present account (Ordon’s
Redoubt, The Living Dead, Alpuhara and [Pytasz, za co Bóg]).
If the album’s self-presentation as a journey between East and West
relies explicitly on the Crimean Sonnets’ inspiration, it is within the epic
poem Konrad Wallenrod that the complex and antagonistic presentation
of the three axes of oppositions can be found. The Moorish ballad
Alpuhara, analysed here in greater detail, constitutes Wallenrod’s epic
apex and, arguably, also the album’s acme. In its original context of the
Canto IV, it is a song within a song which symbolically encloses the whole
poem’s message as an allegory for Konrad’s fate. Konrad Wallenrod, along
with Mickiewicz’s other tale in verse Grażyna, displays a high degree of
musicoliterary self-consciousness: The text presents itself as music, namely
as epic music, the music of the East, the music of the People. Understanding
this mechanism foregrounds the whole interpretation of the album
to follow.

MICKIEWICZ’S POPULARITY IN MUSIC

What is Popular? One of the main challenges of the present volume lies
within the imminent polysemy of the term ‘popular’, with regard to words
and to music. In order to avoid vagueness or equivocation, I distinguish
three meanings of the term, all of which are united by its common Latin
root ‘popularis’, deriving from ‘populus’ (OED 2020).
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 157

popular1—of popular origin, typical of the oral tradition of the people. In

the English tradition, this sphere of culture is referred to as ‘folk’ or
‘traditional’; however, in the Romance languages, it is commonly
dubbed populaire (French) or popolare (Italian). The German and Polish
languages both follow this etymology, albeit by substituting the radix
populus with its translated counterpart, as in Volk (German) or lud
(Polish) and Volksmusik or muzyka ludowa, respectively. This also
impacts the French and English translations of Mickiewicz from the
mid-nineteenth century: ‘O chant populaire!’ / ‘O popular song’
(Mickiewicz 1851, 67).
popular2—stylistically and sociologically belonging to ‘popculture’, as
opposed to ‘high culture’ or—with regard to music—as opposed to ‘art
music’ or ‘classical music’. If rigorously applied to music according to
the English usus (cf. Middleton and Manuel 2001), popular2 must be
seen as distinct from folk (popular1) as it is from art music. The band
Haydamaky can be categorised as such, while their musical identity is
grounded in a constant, if somewhat superficial, evocation of the folk
idiom (i.e. popular1).
popular3—well known and beloved (among the public).

Mickiewicz’s poetry engages with the popular1, the folk, not only by
praising its value and force but also by sacralising and demonising it, and
elaborates it in a highly refined artistic form which masquerades as folk-
song and requires a musical response from the reader. This poetry remains
extremely popular3 among musicians and Haydamaky’s contribution is a
recent addition to a long list of musical settings. This list encompasses
various genres from classical to popular2. Lieder, cantatas and operas based
on Mickiewicz’s poetry have been written by composers such as Maria
Szymanowska, Karol Lipinੜski, Fryderyk Chopin, Stanisáaw Moniuszko,
Mikhail Glinka, Cesar Cui, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov to quote just a few of the most eminent (see Wszelaczynੜski
1890; Moore Coleman 1955; Michaáowski 1986; Suáek 2016).
Mickiewicz’s extreme popularity among the ordinary readership along
with the intrinsic songfulness of his poems has led them to be featured in
many popular songbooks, containing numerous tunes and simple choral
settings of his lyrics and of certain dramatic fragments.
Popular music settings of Mickiewicz are nothing new, ranging from
the setting of Niepewność (‘Uncertainty’, Grechuta 1970), through
Czesáaw Niemen’s interpretation of the sonnet Dobranoc (‘Goodnight’,
158 J. CZARNECKI

Kurylewicz et al. 1971), to most recent settings of fragments of the ballad

Romantycznos ੜcੜ in the song Astrolog and fragments from Grażyna and
Dziady in Lao Che (2002), fragments of Dziady: jazzy Noc smutna w
wieଆzieniu (Kleszcz and Krzak 2016) and electronic 40i4 (Rod 2018), not
to mention various rap/hip-hop settings (e.g. Oda do máodos ੜci by Popek
or Wielka improwizacja by Peja). Settings of the former type (Grechuta,
Niemen, Kleszcz) emphasise the poetry’s expressiveness by the use of pop-
ular musical means. Lao Che and Rod, on the other hand, transform it by
including rap stylistics to highlight an ambiguous battle with the educa-
tional system: by ‘rapping’ Mickiewicz, they attempt to reclaim him for
the ‘unofficial’ culture and against the perceived oppression of the main-
streamed school system, which, in turn, mythologises the poet as the great
Romantic bard of Poland.1 If such an appropriation of Mickiewicz’s
canonical poetry for the sphere of popular culture was not the main inten-
tion of the project by Stasiuk and Haydamaky, it certainly produces similar
side effects.2

POPULAR SONG IN MICKIEWICZ

O wiesੜci gminna! ty arko przymierza

Mickiewicz’s ballad Romantycznos ੜcੜ, written in 1821 and published the

following year in Vilnius in the volume of Ballady i romanse, which
presented itself as a ‘collection of ballads and popular songs’ (Mickiewicz
1822, IX) praises the people’s sensibility and faith as contraposed to scien-
tific rationality impersonated by the figure of the Old Man (Mickiewicz
1925, 159; 1998a, 57). The people’s voice, conserved in the popular
tunes of guslars, waydelotas and kobzars, is consequently sacralised, as in

1
Whether this subversive strategy is effective remains doubtful. Users’ comments on the
band’s YouTube videos testify that teachers now make it their pupil’s homework to watch
these exact videos. See Eldo’s Stepy akermanੜskie which stages the whole rapped version of the
opening Crimean sonnet as the pupil’s school recitation. Ironically, the teacher who is exam-
ining her pupils says ‘Adam Mickiewicz wielkim poeta ଆ byá’ (‘Adam Mickiewicz—oh, what a
great poet he was!’, my translation) which is a travesty of the famous scene in Ferdydurke
where the teacher refers to the ‘second’ Romantic bard, Juliusz Sáowacki.
2
In a live recording of a concert performance in Dukla (3 May 2019) of the Alpuhara
ballad, Stasiuk brags that ‘Sometimes Polish teachers write to me to say that they play this
song during classes dedicated to Mickiewicz’, (my translation, https://youtu.be/DFb-
ahEfHVg; accessed 21 September 2020). All remarks to musical qualities refer exclusively to
the album version of the songs, which suffered a lot in live recordings.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 159

Konrad Wallenrod’s apostrophes: ‘O popular tradition! thou ark of cove-

nant between old and young times! […] O sacred ark! not to be destroyed
by time […]. O popular song!’ (Mickiewicz 1851, 67–69). It is explicitly
the ‘popular song’—‘wies ੜcੜ / pies ੜnੜ gminna’ (Mickiewicz 1998c = KW, IV,
177–183)—which assumes the role of the sacred Ark of the Covenant,
carrying the nation’s as well as the individual’s identity—as it is evident in
W’s tragic case. Mickiewicz shares his reverence for the Volk with Western
Romantics: his paratexts—that is, the titles, subtitles, notes, pre- and post-
faces—suggest an oral and popular source for the presented poetry and
thus remind of Walter Scott’s practices of this kind, following the example
of Allan Ramsay’s and Thomas Percy’s collections, together with the
greatly admired Macphersonian mystification of Ossian’s songs.
By letting Polish and Lithuanian vagabond bards act as Homeric aoids,
he follows Johann Gottfried Herder’s conviction that ‘The greatest singer
of the Greeks, Homer, is at the same time the greatest folk poet’ (Herder
and Bohlman 2017, 51).3 The popular origin of a song guarantees truth-
fulness, but also offers an ideal for the (art) poet—and this specifically on
the musical plane. Wincenty Pol, a fellow Romantic poet, wrote in his
1829 O z rੜ ódáach narodowej poezji (‘On the sources of national poetry’, my
translation):

An event or a phrase which makes it to the folksong is true and essential,

because if it weren’t such, it wouldn’t have survived on the people’s lips.
The folksong is therefore an infallible mirror of truth. […] Each song,
before it becomes fettered in speech, must beforehand resound in the soul
with all its mute music. The origin of poetry is thus musical.4

This idealisation of popular song has further consequences for the poetics:
the Romantic measure of achievement is to create a text that could easily
‘descend’ upon people and live on their lips as popular song (Janion 1979,
16–17; Zgorzelski 1988, 44). This criterion of poetic success is inscribed
into the inner structure of the Romantic work in various ways and includes

3
‘Der größte Sänger der Griechen, Homerus, ist zugleich der größte Volksdichter’
(Herder 1990, 3:320, qtd. in Billings 2011, 106; see also Krzyżanowski 1961, 320–349).
4
‘Zdarzenie lub zdanie, które jest do piesੜni gminnej przyjeଆte, jest prawdziwe i istotne, bo
gdyby nie byáo takim, nie utrzymaáoby sieଆ w ustach ludu. Ona jest przeto nieomylnym
zwierciadáem prawdy […]. Każda piesੜnੜ nim sieଆ w mowie zwia ଆże, musi najprzód niema ଆ swoja ଆ
muzyka ଆ ozwacੜ sieଆ w duszy. Pocza ଆtek poezji jest w ten sposób muzykalny’ (qtd. in Zgorzelski
1988, 44–45, my translation).
160 J. CZARNECKI

its presentation as belonging to the oral tradition, which grants the written
text of the poem only a minor role of a quasi-ethnographic source. This
deprecation of the text’s sovereignty in favour of the oral (and musical)
tradition of the folksong is traceable most eminently in Mickiewicz’s epic
poems Grażyna5 and Konrad Wallenrod. Their musicoliterary nature, dis-
cursively established through numerous historical references to Homeric
and (partially fictional) Slavo-Lettonic pagan traditions of sung epic
poetry, is put in evidence by the mise en abyme scenes containing diegetic
music. Through these musical scenes, I shall argue, Konrad Wallenrod
construes the political ‘East’-‘West’ polarity, articulated in linguistic and
religious contrasts, in terms of a singing contest.

KONRAD WALLENROD: A SINGING CONTEST BETWEEN

EAST AND WEST
This tale in verse was written during Mickiewicz’s Russian exile
(1825–1827) and was therefore published in St. Petersburg in 1828
(Chwin in Mickiewicz 1998c, III). The poet had previously been forced
to leave his native land after being sentenced in the political process of the
Philomaths and Philarets by the Russian imperial administration (see
Rymkiewicz et al. 2001, 26–27, 466–467). The text in six cantos is pre-
ceded by a historising Foreword in prose (complete with the author’s
notes) and an Introduction in verse, which locates the historical time-
frame of the action in the late Middle Ages during the military expansion
of the Teutonic Order State. This historical mask evoking literary tradi-
tions of Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and Lord Byron—and hiding the
poem’s political actuality, evident to the public of that time—apparently
outsmarted Russian censorship, which enabled the book to be printed in
the first place (Zantuan 1964, 242; 1969, 153). The famous report of
Senator Novosiltsev to the Tsarevich on 10 April 1828 concerning the
poem’s political and moral implications that threatened the Empire came
post factum (Novosiltsev 1891, 250–255).
The story is presented in a most convoluted and fragmentary way.6 In
order to understand the musicoliterary significance of the ballad Alpuhara

5
See esp. Mickiewicz 1998b, 50, lines 99–102, transl. Mickiewicz 1940, 37–38.
6
For more information, see Ziolkowski (2018, 139–145). It is noteworthy, that Ziolkowski
uses the title of the much later Lithuanian translation (1891) instead of the original and that
he consequently misspells the name of Almanzor.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 161

for the whole—and, later on, within the Album—we need to trace several
plot threads, which culminate in it. For one hundred years, the Teutonic
Order (mostly referred to as the Germans) has been continuously invading
the ‘Northern Heathens’, the Old Prussians, Letts and Lithuanians,
meeting any resistance with bloodshed under the sign of the Cross.
Konrad, the eponymous hero of the tale, becomes Grand Master of the
Order. He is presented as a mysterious stranger, who has fought with the
Moors in the mountains of Castile and with the Ottomans during cru-
sades, earning knightly fame in the Western world. The consecutive can-
tos, especially the tale sung by the Lithuanian bard (wajdelota) at the
Banquet in Canto IV, unveil the true biography of the protagonist gradu-
ally: he was born in Lithuania and kidnapped by the knights, raised by the
Grand Master Winrych, but remained under the influence of the old
Lithuanian bard disguised as the monk Halban, who preserved his
Lithuanian identity by singing him old epic songs.

‘Knights who are free’, he would tell me, ‘freely may choose their own
weapons,
Openly meet in fair combat — but thou art a slave, and the single
Weapon of bondsmen is treason. But wait, thou wilt learn from the Germans
War-craft and conduct of battle. First let them think they can trust thee,
Then we will talk of our vengeance’.7 (Mickiewicz 1925, 42, empha-
ses added)

This was Halban’s terrible envoy, which would eventually become flesh
in Konrad’s fate. When at war with the Lithuanians, Walter and the old
bard abandon the German troops and tell their story to the Lithuanian
prince Kiejstut, whose daughter Aldona Walter eventually marries. Due to
his vengeance remaining incomplete, he must abandon her to change his
identity once more and, years after, come back to Marienburg as Konrad
Wallenrod. Aldona becomes an eremite and lives walled up in a

7
‘Wolnym rycerzom–powiadaá–wolno wybieracੜ oreଆzė / I na polu otwartym bicੜ sieଆ
równymi siáami; / Tysੜ niewolnik, jedyna bronੜ niewolników–podsteଆpy. / Zostanੜ jeszcze i
przejmij sztuki wojenne od Niemców, / Staraj sieଆ zyskacੜ ich ufnosੜcੜ, dalej obaczym, co
pocza ଆcੜ’ (KW, IV, 341–345). This verse, in its original diction ‘thou art a slave, and the single
/ Weapon of slaves is deception’ has been erased by the tsarist censor of the first edition. All
editions print the censured version until 1860, when Januszkiewicz and Klaczko restore the
missing verse, but in a slightly distorted version: ‘Tysੜ niewolnik: jedyna bronੜ niewolników
jest zdrada’ (Mickiewicz 1860, II:140). The English translation follows this distorted version
(‘treason’ in lieu of ‘deception’), ignoring Bruchnalski’s 1922 edition which restituted the
original (see Mickiewicz 1998b, 289–293).
162 J. CZARNECKI

Marienburg’s castle tower. Konrad as the Grand Master of the German

Order falters and remains indecisive.
The ultimate battle of identities takes place during the Banquet in
Canto IV and takes the form of a singing contest during the patronal feast.
After having rejected Western courtly love- and knightly praise-songs sung
by the Italian and Occitan troubadours, the Grand Master calls for a dif-
ferent song. A duel ensues against all that is noble, orderly and Western:
the Wajdelota steps forth with his Prussian lute and sings two lengthy epic
songs. Wallenrod answers to the Wajdelota’s implicit call to act for the sake
of the oppressed homeland with a ‘bizarre ballad’ (‘dziwaczna ballada’,
KW, IV, 756; epithet lost in translation: Mickiewicz 1925, 78)—entitled
Alpuhara. The ballad’s protagonist, the fictitious Moorish king Almanzor,
approaches the victorious Spaniards and feigns homage and friendship,
while actually infecting them with the plague trough a traitorous kiss. This
terrible Oriental story of bloody treason prefigures Konrad’s own decision
to lead his knights to war with Lithuania, bringing them absolute defeat
and himself: condemnation and inevitable suicide.
On this (Western and knightly) ground of a singing contest, the East
wins with the West: first through the rejection of its courtly minstrelsy
(with Konrad as Judge) and second, by Konrad’s defeat in the duel with
the Wajdelota.8 Having lost to the force of the Wajdelota’s songs, Konrad
takes sides with the oppressed and decides his fate. His defeat has itself two
more layers—musically speaking it is first expressed in the form of an ori-
ental ballad9—which, astonishingly, is accompanied by a tune from the
‘local East’, namely, from the childhood’s Lithuania: ‘That note, that
childish note, which used to peal / Through the belovèd valley blessèd
hours, / When I would carol to it day by day!’ (Mickiewicz 1925, 56; KW,
IV, 633–635). This tune is not only Eastern by location but also pastoral,
idyllic, that is: popular. When Konrad demands this ‘pagan’ (Lithuanian)
accompaniment to the ‘pagan’ (Moorish) ballad, pagan gods are
invoked—‘Return, old bard! For by [all gods], / Germanic, Prussian’
(transl. modified, KW, IV, 636–637)—adding a further religious stratum
of contraposition. The reader sides with the ‘pagan party’, even though
they are depicted as less civilised, treasonous, and prone to act in drunken

8
The old bard is disguised Halban, but monk Halban is in fact a disguised wajdelota, so
his disguise unveils his true identity by obscuring the false one.
9
‘[When I fought] In the mountains of Castile / The Moors their ballads taught me’
(Mickiewicz 1925, 56; KW, IV, 631–632).
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 163

furies. The relationship between words and music is that of Master and
Slave: ‘[He struck the lute] / And follow[ed], though with an uncertain
chord, / [Konrad’s wild tones], / As a bewildered slave his angry lord’
(my translation),10 which brings to mind Monteverdi’s principle l’oratione
sia padrona dell’armonia e non serva, but the slave is triumphant: the
apparently subjugated Lithuanian melody wins over Konrad’s heart, at the
price of his dreams to flee with Aldona and abandon his impious patriotic
duty, namely: treason.
Musically speaking the text prescribes here a very singular performance:
(1) a Moorish ballad (2) with a Lithuanian idyllic (i.e. popular) accompa-
niment (3) and featuring a vocal line containing ‘wild tones’. The whole
must have sounded very awkward, even to the old bard’s ears, if he fol-
lowed his master in such a confused way. This stylistic incongruence is
clearly prescribed by the text. Konrad’s ballad is ‘bizarre’ because it mixes
musical styles in a very disturbing way. Going forward, I will trace the ways
of these musical instructions down to Haydamaky’s version of the ballad.
Konrad Wallenrod, often considered a (fatal) prelude to the November
Uprising of 1830–1831, is arguably a metapoetic deliberation which has
at its core the poetry’s political perlocutionary force.11 In other words:
itself being an incentive to act politically, it contains a powerful staging of
this very mechanism and at the same time denounces its fatal conse-
quences. Wallenrod, if finally conquered by the Wajdelota’s songs before
he starts singing himself, produces a bitterly fervent philippic against this
melopoetic metier and its dreadful influence on the audience:

I know you wajdelotas: every strain

Howls and forebodes mischance, like dogs by night;
In songs of blood and fire is your delight,
Leaving to us the glory and the pain.
About the cradled child your traitorous song
Twines like a reptile, cruelly to inflame
His soul with poison […]
I know thee, thou old traitor! Thou hast won! (Mickiewicz 1925, 56, empha-
sis added)

10
The original reads ‘Uderzyá lutnieଆ i gáosem niepewnym / Szedá za dzikimi tonami
Konrada, / Jako niewolnik za swym panem gniewnym’ (KW IV, 637–640).
11
I owe this application of the terminology used in speech act theory to the classical
Mickiewiczian tension between Word and Deed (cf. Witkowska 1983) to Uffelmann (2012,
293–295).
164 J. CZARNECKI

The poem’s traitor accuses both song (poetry) and the singer (poet) of
treason. Eventually, he sings the ballad of treason before acting as the trai-
tor himself. By exclaiming ‘[t]hou hast won!’ he pronounces the verdict of
the singing contest. In identifying the polarity of East and West, I partially
follow Dirk Uffelmann’s interpretation of the poem in terms of a postco-
lonial critique (2012). In fact, both categories remain implicit because the
explicit antagonism lies between the pagan Lithuanians, Old Prussians and
Letts, on the one side, and the Germans on the other. The only explicit
mention of the East is to be found in the author’s note: ‘In the East,
before the appearance of the plague, a phantom is said to show itself, with
the wings of a bat, and with its fingers pointing to those fated to die’
(Mickiewicz 1841, 159). This is how Mickiewicz explains the context of
the old bard’s first ‘unintelligible Lithuanian song’. The constant opposi-
tion between East and West is thus articulated in terms of a linguistically
driven mutual (non)understanding:

[…] I love to hear

The unintelligible, mournful strain,
Even as I love the breakers’ echoing,
Or gentle patter of the early rain:
They lull to pleasant slumber.—Minstrel, sing! (Mickiewicz 1925, 34 [KW,
IV, 146–150])

In contrast to the Teutonic audience gathered at the great hall of the

Marienburg Castle, the readers hold the privilege of understanding. For
them, the Lithuanian song appears as comprehensible Polish. If the con-
traposition of German and Lithuanian is explicitly thematised through the
relation of (non)understanding, other Western languages are implicit: the
hymn to the Holy Spirit (KW, II, 7–28) must have been sung in Latin, just
as the courtly minstrels must have sung their songs in Romance languages.
The Germans do not understand Lithuanian, and Aldona does not under-
stand German.12 Walter, Halban and Kiejstut are presented as bilingual, as
is, in terms of understanding, the implied reader. This is why she has no
choice but to take sides with the East and its conspiracy against the West.
The present discussion permits us now to exhibit the initial three axes
of contraposed notions within an extended table of oppositions:

12
Uffelmann emphasises that the Germans are presented as dumb (2012, 275, 279, 292).
The present discussion permits to reframe his observations.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 165

West East
‘Highbrow’ (knightly / courtly) Popular (peasant)
Master Slave
Catholic Pagan / Muslim
German / Latin / Romance Lithuanian / Old Prussian / Lettish
Sober Ecstatic (wild / drunk)
Intelligible <==> Unintelligible
Words <==> Music

Polish—as the medium of poetry

The protagonist exists on both planes: he belongs to the left column as

Konrad Wallenrod, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who every
time when he succumbs to his weakness and drinks wine sings in an incom-
prehensible language (Lithuanian) and thus inevitably slips into the right
column. Whether in Homeric banquets or Mickiewicz’s improvisations,
wine brings inspiration to sing but here also reclaims his Eastern identity:
in vino veritas.13 The list points towards the supremacy of the left column
over the right and exposes the blatant stereotypes at hand (consider the
combination of: peasant, pagan, slave, wild and drunk). Yet, while the
Germans understand nothing of the Lithuanian songs, the reader feels
part of the conspiracy against them, because—by the miracle of poetry—
she does understand every single word.

WHERE IS EAST? GEOPOETICS OF THE CRIMEAN SONNETS

By placing an epigraph from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West-östlicher
Divan in his Crimean Sonnets, Mickiewicz seems to subscribe to the
Western project of a Romantic fascination with the Orient.14 He puts him-
self in the position of the Western poet who admires the wonderful trea-
sures of the mysterious, strange, dangerous, dreamy and astonishingly
beautiful East. But this East is not as far as Persia: it is Crimea and its
Muslim Tatar heritage. Thus, the Polish language of this poetry situates
itself on the West, arm in arm with Goethe’s German. However, this
‘Western’ poet still lives in Russian exile and the Orient in question is one
of ruins of the subjugated Khanate.
The Pilgrim, nostalgic of Lithuania, is guided by the Mirza in his travel
among the dangers and wonders of the peninsula. Several sonnets consist

13
See J. Czeczot’s account Adamowe (àucki 1924, 52).
14
‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen / Muss in Dichters Lande gehen’ (cf. Goethe 1819, 241).
166 J. CZARNECKI

of a dialogue between the two (V, IX, XV), leaving the whole space of the
thirteenth sonnet to the Mirza’s prayer-like apostrophes to Mt. Chatyr-
Dag. The high degree of autonomy given to the ‘Eastern voice’ of the
noble and learned Tatar guide permits the East to speak for itself, to
express its attitude towards the West, all with the use of an orientalising
vocabulary, as in Mogiáy haremu (‘The Harem Tombs’, track 5):

Mirza do Pielgrzyma
Tu z winnicy miáosੜci niedojrzaáe grona
Wzieଆto na stóá Allaha; tu pereáki Wschodu,
Z morza uciech i szczeଆscੜ ia, porwaáa za máodu
Truna, koncha wiecznosੜci, do mrocznego áona.

Skryáa je niepamieଆci i czasu zasáona,

Nad niemi turban zimny báyszczy sੜród ogrodu,
Jak bunੜczuk wojska cieniów, i ledwie u spodu
Zostaáy dáonia ଆ giaura wyryte imiona.

O wy, róże edenੜskie! u czystosੜci stoku

Odkwitneଆáy dni wasze pod wstydu lisੜciami,
Na wieki zatajone niewiernemu oku.

Teraz grób wasz spojrzenie cudzoziemca plami,

Pozwalam mu,—darujesz, o wielki Proroku!
On jeden z cudzoziemców poglaଆdaá ze ázami. (Mickiewicz 1998a, 243,
emphases added)

Murza to Pilgrim
Here passion’s vinyard garnered unripe grapes
For Allah’s board; too soon eternity
Ravished these orient pearls from seas of bliss
And coffined them inside his sunless shell.

Time’s veil, oblivion’s drape envelops them.

A turban’d headstone gleams inside the yard,
Reared like the martial staff [tug] of wraiths; below
Decay the names the giaour’s hand engraved.

Eden’s roses! Shame’s leafage sheltered you;

Beside a taintless pool your days declined,
Forever hidden from the heathen’s [infidel’s] glare.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 167

Today a stranger’s eyelid stains your tomb;

I give him leave: Great Prophet, grant this once,
Here stands an infidel [stranger] who gazed with tears.15 (Mickiewicz
1998d, 423, emphases added)

There is a cultural and religious distance which is construed through the

stylistically charged expressions, which I emphasised in the line above.
‘Eden’s roses’, though, recall a common Biblical root of both religions.
The Pilgrim is here presented as an ‘infidel’ whose visit to the ruined
tombs of the Khan’s wives, in the eyes of the pious Muslim, borders on
sacrilege. Yet, the Pilgrim is referred to as ‘the only one among the strang-
ers who gazed with tears’ (my verbatim translation of the last line). It is
thus all about this gaze, foreign, impious, inappropriate, invasive and yet
admitted. By shedding tears, the Pilgrim secretly takes sides with the con-
quered and gains their confidence. This all happens within a cycle which
was received with enthusiasm in Moscow and understood as a confirma-
tion of the Empire’s triumph over the Tatar Khanate. For it is here turned
into a picturesque ruin with its Muslim inhabitants safely enclosed within
the rigors of the sonnet form (cf. Koropeckyj 2001, 670).16

LITERARY FOLK ROCK
Haydamaky, the group’s name, bears historical allusions to literary and
Ukrainian patriotic contexts that are admittedly anti-Polish. For Taras
Shevchenko’s eponymous work glorifies the haidamaki, the Ukrainian
peasants and Cossacks who fought for their freedom by leading a bloody
rebellion, Koliyivshchyna, against their feudal Polish lords (and Jews and
Catholic clergy) in 1768.17 The kobzar—the waydelota’s Ukrainian

15
Terms in square brackets indicate my verbatim translation.
16
Izabela Kalinowska (2001) advocates the cycle’s character of a non-violent, open, inti-
mate dialogue with the foreign Muslim culture. The cycle is not necessarily guilty of oriental-
ism in the Saidian sense, because it was conceived in the form of a genuine, respectful
dialogue with another civilisation. This is how Wiesáaw Rzonੜca (2018, 176) interprets the
fact that the sonnet Widok gór ze stepów Kozáowa—in its Persian adaptation by Dzafar Topczi-
Baszy—appeared in the 1826 St. Petersburg edition.
17
This would be the viewpoint from a ‘Ukrainian perspective’. The historical allusion is
problematic on the grounds of Polish collective memory. It is nevertheless consciously
168 J. CZARNECKI

counterpart—is both Shevchenko’s and Haydamaky’s model figure of a

national bard who sings epic songs to the accompaniment of a chordo-
phone: kobza or bandura.18 Haydamaky’s engagement with contemporary
and Romantic literature—their 2005 album was named after Yurii
Andrukhovych’s novel Perverzion—must be read together with their
engagement with folk instruments and scales: both allude to the same
tradition of an organic union of literature and music, albeit within a post-
modern fusion of styles. The popular genre ‘kozak-rock’ embraces a mix-
ture of traditional elements with rock, reggae, ska, dub, punk, jazz
improvisation and other styles. It can be contrasted with the revival of the
kobzar movement in Ukraine as well as historically informed performance
formations such as Taras Kompanichenko’s Chorea kozacka or Sarmatica,
who use authentic instruments and erudite musicological source study.
However very different in purely musical terms—the guest presence of
Chorea’s Berezhnyuk in the discussed album notwithstanding—they sub-
scribe to the same pro-European geopolitical vision of Ukraine as a co-heir
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the religiously tolerant, multi-
ethnic and multilingual democracy of the szlachta, seen sometimes even as
a prefiguration of the European Union.19 In geopolitical terms, Poland is
understood to lie on Ukraine’s way to the West. Through the common
cultural heritage of the Commonwealth, Ukraine can build an identity
that is orientated towards the West and that can function as an alternative
to the post-Soviet or pan-Slavic image of Ukraine as necessarily remaining
within the sphere of influence of Moscow.
The difficult historical relationship between the Poles and the Ukrainians
was particularly bloody during the Second World War and in its first fol-
lowing years. A lot of effort to promote Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation
and reworking of deeply entrenched negative stereotypes was afforded by
both sides, resulting in numerous Polish-Ukrainian cultural projects. This

deployed in Haydamaky’s music and has an actualised sociopolitical meaning, as evident in

the song Babilon System, sung in Ukrainian and Polish with the band Voo Voo. The song
praises the ‘world music and world Koliyivshchyna’ as ‘warriors of light’ against the ‘bloody
Babilon, drunk with petroleum’ from ‘that pipe’ (Haydamaky and Voo Voo 2009, my
translation).
18
References to this are also made in the titles of Shevchenko’s volume of poetry (ּ‫ږ‬ȹͳã‫ݠ‬Ȼ,
1840) and Haydamaky’s album (Kobzar, 2008).
19
Cf. John Paul II’s aphorism ‘From the Union of Lublin to the European Union’ added
spontaneously to his speech at St. Peter’s Square on 19 May 2003. The slogan, regardless of
its historical accuracy, became extremely influential.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 169

kind of dialogue through popular music is rightly perceived as the primary

interpretive context of the album (see Regiewicz 2018, 113; Rott 2018,
125). Nevertheless, Oleksandr Iarmiola, the band’s leader, sees their take
on Mickiewicz as more than just another initiative of this noble kind. He
explains: ‘On the “sound steppe” nobody was chasing us, we were free,
and so we rushed from East to West, from Lithuania to the Black Sea’ (my
translation).20 This vision of a homely space between Lithuania (i.e. the
Baltic Sea) and the Black Sea alludes to the failed geopolitical project of
the Commonwealth of Three Nations. The 1658 Treaty of Hadiach envis-
aged establishing the Grand Duchy of Ruthenia on the lands under
Cossack control and admitting it to equal rights with Lithuania and the
Crown to the Commonwealth. The failure of this ambitious union caused
conflicts between the Cossacks and the Crown which contributed to the
Commonwealth’s decline and inevitably led to the Russian domination
over both parties from the late eighteenth through most of the twentieth
century. This shared past of imperial oppression makes it possible for ‘hay-
damakas’ to sing Mickiewicz, who lamented over the ruins of the Russian-
annexed Crimean Khanate and died in Istanbul.21
If we recall the Hymn to the Holy Spirit solemnly sung by the German
knights on the day of Konrad’s election—in the context of the violent
Christianisation of eastern pagans—we can perhaps understand better
Shevchenko’s lines from his 1858 poem ֌ߎनã‫‘( ؛‬To Poles’): ‘ǖ ֣ɟ̗Ѫցͳ
ɟ֣ã֫˺Ѫ٘‫ ؛ږ֣٘ͳߎ ؛‬/ ּ‫٘ݠ‬फ़٘࠘Ȼ: ’Te Deum! Allelujah!’ (‘And the priest
cries out in an insane language: ’Te Deum! Allelujah!’, Shevchenko 1876,
2:210, my translation). The foreignness of Catholicism imposed over East
Orthodox Christianity of the Ruthenian Palatinates of the Commonwealth
is made evident on the level of alphabet of the quoted chants: these are the
only Latin characters in the poem.22 Seen from the perspective of a nation
which was shaping itself against a cultural and political domination of the
Polish ruling class, Shevchenko’s patriotism necessarily entails anti-Western
overtones. And yet, his poetry blames the egoism of the magnates and the
clergy, ultimately appealing for a reconciliation of the people. In the last

20
‘Na stepie dzੜwieଆków nikt nas nie sੜcigaá, bylisੜmy wolni, wieଆc gnalisੜmy od Wschodu do
Zachodu, od Litwy do Morza Czarnego’ (Stasiuk and Haydamaky 2018, s. l.).
21
Where he went to support the Ottoman Cossack Unit created by Michaá Czajkowski
(Sadyk Pasha).
22
When it comes to the Hallelujah, the Latin alphabet becomes the only differentiating
factor, because the Hebrew acclamation is present in the Eastern Liturgy no less than in
the Roman.
170 J. CZARNECKI

two lines, Shevchenko persuades the Polish addressee: ‘Give your hand to
the Cossack […] let us renew our still paradise’ (my translation).23
Stasiuk asserts the band Haydamaky to be the ‘musical heirs of the
Cossacks’ who are more entitled than anyone else to ‘bring out all the
steppy, Eastern and Oriental elements of this poetry’ (Stasiuk and
Haydamaky 2018, n.p., my translation). Here, Stasiuk frames them as
legitimate partners of this dialogue regarding the cultural and geopolitical
identity of Ukraine. As such they are entitled to recognise themselves in
the oriental idiom of Mickiewicz with all its territorial extension, including
the Tatar Crimea as well as the Ukrainian steppe. In their self-styled orien-
talism, Haydamaky repeat Mickiewicz’s gesture with respect to his native
Poland-Lithuania, but—in contrast to Konrad Wallenrod’s geopoetics—
with no need for symbolic inversion. By Stasiuk acting as Mickiewicz’s
medium Poland is presented as this East’s non-violent ‘own’ West—a West
to which this East belongs. Stasiuk’s ostentatiously unprofessional style of
performance24—as an object of exegesis and not of evaluation—thus
becomes meaningful: it showcases him as a tangible specimen of a Polish
writer, who represents the wordiness of literature in contrast to its
musicality.
That these subtle equations need to be read in the contemporary con-
text of the ongoing aggression of Putin’s Russia against Ukraine is rein-
forced by two further melopoetic statements of the album, made in the
spirit of the immense perlocutionary force of popular song. First, in the
heavy metal setting of Reduta Ordona, fragments are rearranged to
emphasise the powerful anti-war (and anti-imperialist) irony of the poem’s
original rhetorical questions: ‘Where is this king, who sends these crowds
to slaughter? / Does he share their courage, does he expose his own
breast?’ (my translation).25 Here, music becomes illustrative of a series of
machine gun shots which create an overall expressiveness of senseless
destruction in the face of which courageous defence becomes a necessity.
Second, the country-style setting of the poem [Pytasz, za co Bóg] plays on
the ‘Western’ as a parody even more striking than the jazzy version of the
sonnet Baidary. That the last word—in linguistic, musical and contextual

23
‘ҙ‫ږ‬ցãٚ ֫˺ ‫ͳږ֣ ॄ֣ॄݠ‬ã֣‫ږ‬ɁҢ, […] ɂ‫ږͳږ‬ȹѪ‫ږ‬Ɂ٘‫ ؛‬ѪãѸ ࠘٘न٘ٚ ‫ݠ‬ãٚ!’ (Shevchenko 1876, 2:210).
24
Not only in musical terms (intonation, rhythm), but in terms of poor diction and even
distortion of Mickiewicz’s text.
25
‘Gdzież jest król, co na rzezie táumy te wyprawia? / Czy dzieli ich odwageଆ, czy piersੜ sam
nadstawia?’ (Mickiewicz 1998a, 343).
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 171

terms—is given to the West must be understood as a condensed point of

arrival of the album’s to-and-fro between its contraposed idioms and
directions. We hear the Polish original only, but Haydamaky are no longer
orientalising themselves in this absence of the Ukrainian (as they did in
their setting of Alpuhara, see below). Instead, they play Country. As if to
say: ‘we are at home not only in Mickiewicz’s steppe and Crimea but in his
Lausanne, Dresden, Paris… and beyond!’26 In terms of the poem’s textual
meaning, which praises deeds and silence over words which bring fame—
Haydamaky seem to define once more their own musical activity as auxil-
iary to action.
The table of contrapositions resulting from the previous analyses of
Konrad Wallenrod and the Crimean Sonnets can be expanded in the light
of Haydamaky’s music to include the following oppositions:

Polish Ukrainian
Words: Recitation Music: Vocal and instrumental
‘Highbrow’ (poetry) Popular (song), orientalism, ‘wild’
West East

Medium: Western Popular music in fusion with Eastern Folk

This extended opposition will now allow for an analysis of the problem
proposed at the outset, namely the astonishing stylistic dissonance within
Alpuhara, which unites the ‘wild tones’ of a Moorish ballad of war, pesti-
lence and bloody treason with the innocent idyll of an idealised Lithuanian
childhood. This unique aesthetic effect is not addressed in numerous
musical settings of the ballad, which in most cases emphasise its belligerent
character.27 Haydamaky ignore this contrast, too, but only with regard to

26
The authors of the album use the online popular edition of Mickiewicz’s works and
assume that [Pytasz, za co Bóg] is one of the so-called Lausanne lyrics, written in Lausanne
1839–1840. However, this is not accurate, as the poem is dated approx. 1833–1836 by the
editors (Mickiewicz 1998a, 406). Still, it was written in the West, so if what they meant by
closing the album with it was an ‘Eastern travel with a Western happy end’ they achieved
their goal, regardless of this inaccuracy.
27
I identified fourteen settings, ranging from Maria Szymanowska’s song (1828), through
various other settings including an opera aria in Wá. Żelenੜski’s Konrad Wallenrod (1885) as
well as cantatas and simple tunes contained in popular songbooks of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Another rock setting is featured in Wozੜniak (2003) and seems to illus-
trate the Waydelota’s lute by alluding to its ‘uncertain chords’ in the guitar intro. However,
no trace of the idyllic childhood tune can be found.
172 J. CZARNECKI

one of its constitutive elements: the ‘childish’, mild character, prescribed

by the drunken Teutonic Master. If this element is lost, the Eastern and
the popular idioms have found their (transformed) counterparts here: the
former through the ‘oriental’ musical gestures and instrumentation—
including ney and sopilkas as well as typical rhythms and scales—and the
latter in the very fact that it is a folk rock music setting. Here, Konrad’s
‘wild tones’ become ‘tribal’ war cries that answer a Ukrainian folk fife’s
‘war signal’. The combination of the repeated ‘Hara-hara Alpuhara! Hara-
hara, hara-hara!’ motive with the ‘tribal’ cry constitute the chorus of
Haydamaky’s version. This is most revealing, given the structural position
these elements occupy here, as Ukrainian-sung choruses tend to become a
strategy of turning poems into songs on this album. This setting, however,
together with the album’s concluding song are the only tracks where not
a single word of Ukrainian is to be heard.28 The ‘tribal wildness’ of the
Moors, who are orientalised here to the extreme, takes the place of the
Ukrainian language entirely, making their identification structurally evi-
dent. A final line of identification is drawn by purely musical means: the
main motive of Alpuhara is first played by a trumpet, then repeated over
and over again with guitars, bass and drums. It hence not only becomes
the whole’s ostinato but also recalls the ‘music of the steppe’-motive from
the first track, the Akerman Steppe, by sharing the same rhythmic pattern.
In the Akerman Steppe setting, the musico-literary structure seems to fol-
low Goethe’s assertion of an intrinsic bond between Land and Dichtung,
quoted by Mickiewicz in the epigraph. First appears the steppe soundscape
(Land) followed by the poem’s recited words (Dichtung). Out of these
music is born: at first instrumental, developed from the rhythmic motive
of the ‘oriental’ steppe, then melo-recited and finally vigorously sung in
Ukrainian. In other words, music (the East) takes its melodies from the
words of poetry alone (the West) and these words originate from the wild
soundscape (the East once more).

CONCLUSION
The fictitious Ukrainian poet Stanislav ‘Stakh’ Perfetsky, the protagonist
of Andruchovych’s novel Perverzion, travels from Ukraine through Poland
and Austria to Venice in a humorous post-modern pastiche of Thomas

28
The chorus on track 6, the ballad The Living Dead, is sung by Iarmiola in Polish albeit
bearing a heavy Ukrainian accent.
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 173

Mann’s Death in Venice. His Ukrainian journey towards the West through
Poland seems to be a congenial prose pendant of the musico-literary jour-
ney which we were tracing on the album. It ‘is a dogged, unceasing, and
unerring push to the West […] not a single step to the East!’ (Andrukhovych
2005, 13). In Kraków, having read a ‘hermeticized lecture’ at the
Jagiellonian University, Perfetsky ‘bacchanalized the neighborhoods of
the Market Square […] calling this risky contrivance A Tartar in the City:
Scenes from the History of Cracow’ which was followed by a ‘reading at
night of the most controversial excerpts of Shevchenko’s long poem
Haidamaky before the monument of Mickiewicz’ (Andrukhovych 2005,
13). These few phrases mirror eloquently several crucial points of our
discourse.
As shown, the popular song is associated with the Homeric tradition,
which brings epic music to Mickiewicz’s poetry. The word-notated music
of the song is the only armour the politically oppressed have against the
colonising power. This sound-picture plays on a conflict between the
oppressed, pagan and uncivilised ‘popular’ (East) and the oppressive, col-
onising, civilised and courtly (West). Words (contrasted in terms of lan-
guage) and music (contrasted in terms of style and genre) are on both
sides of the barricade and—united in song—are the weapon in the war of
identities. This war’s decisive battle takes shape as a singing contest. On
this knightly Western ground, the East wins with the West by using the
musical form of Konrad’s oriental ballad and by combining it with a popu-
lar tune from the ‘local East’. This astonishing union constitutes a disturb-
ingly dissonant musical disposition which is consequently disregarded by
the text’s interpreters but partially fulfilled in Haydamaky’s setting. The
song’s perlocutionary force is first praised in the Wajdelota’s songs and
then realised in Konrad’s action, both poetic (his ‘strange ballad’) and
political (his high treason). The union of mythos (plot) sung within the
narrative with the narrative’s own plot is a means of musicalisation: it
serves—on the level of genre identification—to present the whole poem
within the tradition of the epic song, as a song which needs musical reali-
sation. This identification, once established, has the reverse validity: by
singing his ballad Wallenrod quite literally sings his own fate—albeit in an
oriental guise. The performative power of song—that is, that by singing it
one decides one’s own fate—thus relies on this very mechanism of
identification.
Alpuhara brings all these Mickiewiczian symbolic tensions and mecha-
nisms of substitution at the heart of the album. Haydamaky have been
174 J. CZARNECKI

playing on literary strings from the very beginning of their existence: in

Polish, the group’s very name connotates crime, violence and injustice,
while in Ukrainian—through a literary tradition—it is associated with the
patriotic struggle against foreign oppression. Through their subsequent
projects with various Polish artists, they seek to recontextualise it, building
a new opening in the two nations’ historically difficult relations. At the
same time, Haydamaky present themselves as a pop-cultural continuation
of the guslars, whose songs are sacralised and politicised in Mickiewicz’s
texts. In their hands, the wajdelota’s Old Prussian lute and the kobzar’s
bandura become an electric guitar.
In the Crimean Sonnets, solidarity with the oppressed Orient is shown
and repaid with trust (cf. Mogiáy haremu). In Konrad Wallenrod, the
reader is won for the Eastern case and understands its ‘unintelligible’ lan-
guage no less than her mother tongue. That East is a disguise for one’s
own invaded political community. The language of imperial stereotypes
which construes old Lithuania as the East with respect to the Teutonic
State is thus used as a subversive weapon. The historical mask permits this
operation and also to deploy its symbolic power, actual geographical direc-
tions being reverse (Poland-Russia). Thus, historicism permits not only to
outsmart Russian imperial censorship but, much more significantly, to
present the Polish case in lights similar to that known from Byron’s orien-
tal tales. Such a self-orientalisation in disguise permits the twenty-first-
century reader of Mickiewicz to overcome the specifically Polish reluctance
to use postcolonial critique with respect to Poland, seen as a menace to
Polish (Europocentric) self-identification with the West (cf. Skórczewski
2007, 151–152).
We have traced bi-medialism and bilingualism, differently realised in
both sources. In Konrad Wallenrod, the ‘Homeric union’ of music and
epic poetry is rendered in mere words; in the album: Polish recited words
are contrasted with Ukrainian music: instrumental and vocal. Antagonistic
bilingualism present in Konrad Wallenrod, rendered in the poem’s Polish,
is augmented by the disjunction of the media ostensive in the album’s
Polish scandito constantly contraposed with sung Ukrainian.
The musical interpretation develops and re-enacts the three polarities
discussed within Mickiewicz’s Romantic melopoesis, re-setting Poland in
the position of the West and placing Ukraine (in lieu or as a continuation
of Mickiewicz’s Lithuania) as Poland’s own, inner East. Thus, Ukraine
identifies itself as a ‘European’, ‘Western’ East, rather than as a satellite of
the post-Soviet Empire. Orientalising musical gestures, particularly drastic
 8 A MELOPOETIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: MICKIEWICZ… 175

in the ballad Alpuhara, where they underline its ‘wild’ aspects, can be read
in two ways: as an extreme case of self-orientalisation or as a less innocent
gesture, as if to say: ‘with all our orientalism, to which we proudly admit,
and which we skilfully integrate with the Western popular music idiom, we
are still not as wild as that’. After all, finding one’s East is a way to feel
more West. The latter sentiment seems to be mercilessly true of the Polish
glimpse eastwards encoded in Stasiuk’s unprofessional (and thus: totemic)
recitations: Poland, feeling the postcolonial complex of being the West’s
East and Russia’s ex-annexed territory, and not willing to accept either,
orientalises East Slavic countries, to reaffirm its hurt sense of its own
mythologised Westernness. This inevitably happens, even if, as in this case,
it is done in a fully appreciative way. ‘Instead of being a part of the Eastern
Leviathan’, Poland seems to say impersonated by its Writer, ‘be my East.
Trust me, because I am your West. Come through me to the West’s West’.29

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