QVL - other times, other students

[Peter Petto]

(quasi Vineland)

I'm reading _Black Sea_ by Neal Ascherman, and came across a passage about
student unrest that resonated with PR3. I thought that others might enjoy
reading it:

All three had been involved in a plot, or more correctly in a secret society,
devoted to the restoration of Polish independence. The Filarets (‘lovers of
virtue’) had arisen in the early 1820s among students at the Wilno (Vilnius)
University, some twenty-five years after the final suppression of Poland by the
Third Partition. Before the Filarets, there had been a much smaller grouping
called the Filomats (‘lovers of learning’), to which all three exiles had
belonged: something between a Masonic lodge and a debating club in which
romantic students discussed Byron, sex (they invented an ‘Erometer’ for
measuring passion) and the liberation of Poland. But too many people heard
about them and wanted to join.

The Filarets started as an overflow organisation from the Filomats. Soon,
however, they became much larger and bolder, not to say reckless. Prominent
Polish conspirators, sought by the tsarist police, came to Vilnius and talked
insurrection. So did a few young Russian friends of liberty, who later became
members of the ‘Decembrist’ conspiracy. Russian informers kept note of words
and names. But the explosion, when it took place in 1823, was expected by
nobody, touched off by a stroke of pure Polishness.

It started in a classroom at the Vilnius Lycée. One lesson was over, but the
next teacher had not turned up. A boy called Plater, in the fourth form, sidled
to the blackboard and wrote Vivat Konstancja in chalk. He had some girl in
mind.
But another boy in the form, a serious-minded youth called Czechowicz, rubbed
out the end of the second word and wrote Konstytucja  Long Live the
Constitution.

Every boy in the room knew what that meant. It meant the patriotic Constitution
of the Third of May, 1791, the charter of Polish national enlightenment and
liberty which had been erased by the tyrannous partitioning powers. Somebody
else drew an exclamation mark. Then yet another schoolboy got hold of the chalk
and added: ‘Ah, what a sweet memory!’ Hubbub broke out in the classroom and
spread down the corridors.

It was too late to contain the outbreak. The school authorities arrested three
of the boys and were then arrested themselves by the Russians. All over the
pink, yellow and white walls of baroque Vilnius, graffiti unreeled themselves:
‘Long Live the Constitution! Death to Tyrants!’ Senator Novosiltsev, who had
been sent to Vilnius to investigage rumours of sedition in the university, was
roused from a drunken coma and signed an order licensing the police to act on
the Filaret files. Within a few days, most of the leading Filarets and
Filomats, including Adam Mickiewicz and his companions, were locked up in a
dungeon in the cellars of the Basilian Monastery.

It was October when they were arrested, already disagreeably cold, and they
remained in the dungeon for most of the ensuing winter. They got through the
weeks and months by drinking mugs of hot tea, arguing about what sort of Poland
they intended to restore, singing to the distant sounds of the monastery organ
at Mass, and listening to Adam Mickiewicz while he read his own poems. They
lived, in other words, through the essential experience of every generation of
young Poles from that day to this.

Mickiewicz, who was to become the 'national poet’, even the lay patron saint of
his country, was then twenty-four: about a year older than Pushkin. He was
already a famous young man. With his collection Ballads and Romances, he had
introduced Romanticism into Polish literature: ‘Faith and feeling more reveal
to me/Then the sage’s lens or eye . . . ‘ In an occupied, demoralised nation
whose hope of new life seemed to be a matter of visionary faith rather than of
reason, the book had instantly sold out. He had written the long poem Grazyna,
and in Vilnius he had composed two acts of Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve). This was
the beginning of an extraordinary poetic drama about love, magical religion and
political sacrifice which is unlike anything else in European literature and
which was never to be completed. The writer Ksawery Pruszynski has compared it
to a cathedral of which ‘an aisle, a chapel, a presbytery, part of the choir’
were raised but never united under a single roof.

(pp. 145-147)
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