Groza wojny w balladowej odsłonie powstania na Litwie w 1831 roku – Nocleg Adama Mickiewicza

Abstract

Themes revealing the horror of war rarely appeared in poetry related to the November Uprising. The authors of insurrectionary works usually sought to high-light the positive aspects of the battle, relegating to the sidelines drastic images and experiences of difficult, ambiguous emotions released in confrontation with the real battlefield (including fear, disgust, and hatred), in contact with death peeled from romantic decorations. Adam Mickiewicz’s ballad The Night, set in Lithuania during the 1831 uprising, breaks from the standards of Romantic aesthetics, according to which a lofty image of the struggle against the invader was built. Mickiewicz touched on such topics in the work as the death of civilians, acts of revenge, torture, and negative emotions. The Night was censored during its first publication precisely because of the brutality of its depiction of scenes of partisan fighting in Lithuania. However, literary scholars have concluded that the ballad’s troubles with publication in the 19th century were due to Mickiewicz’s subordination of religious values to national ones. The interpretation of the work, which focuses on bringing out and describing the manifestations of war horror appearing in the text, reveals the dark side of the insurgent struggle, which rarely became the subject of November poetry.