Adam Mickiewicz is the greatest poet in Poland. Nobody raises a objection to the
fact that his Ballads and romances, published in 1822 year, was the beginning of
Polish Romanticism. Adam Mickiewicz wrote many poems, ballads, sonnets, poetic
novels, dramas and epics, but among them the drama Dziady and the epic Pan
Tadeusz are his most important works.
The main reason he could write those masterpieces was that he properly adapted
folk elements to his literary works and through it he could get near to the heart of
Poles. Adam Mickiewicz not only imitated the external form or style of oral
literature, but also accepted it's outlook on the world and moral norms of human
behavior. His Dziady could be a real Polish national drama, because he took a
religious ceremony among peasants as it's main motif.
The beginning of the study about old Slav culture and oral literature in Poland
was in the middle of Enlightenment, and it reached to the zenith in the period of
Romanticism. Among Polish folklorist, Zorian Dołęga Chodakowski was the first man
who personally traveled rural communities collecting folk songs in the field. Taking
that as a momentum many scholars left their room and began to go to rural
districts in order to collect the works of oral literature and to publish them later.
The writers also, like Adam Mickiewicz, began to write literary works using the
folk elements.
Nobody praised so highly the values and beauties of peasant's moral norms like
Chodakowski in his work "About old Slav culture before Christianity". But he even
took a very radical attitude to them that he treated old Slav culture not simply as a
history, but as a kind of myth. For him a myth is a symbolic representation of
historic event, and a variant of poem that very often includes in itself similar
contents. In a word, myth is a another record of history. His such thoughts on old
Slav culture had a very strong influence on the young generation. For them his
work was a kind of poem that has great artistic values.
Therefore in this paper we will examine in details Chodakowski's conception and
viewpoint about old Slav culture in his work, because it was the decisive factor of
the Romantic enthusiasm for folklore in Poland. After that, look into carefully the
folk elements in the Adam Mickiewicz's drama Dziady - part II, it's main motif is a
traditional religious ceremony for the dead. And finally, the mutual relation between
the folk elements and Christian elements in the drama.
Through this work we can know the importance of folklore, the meaning of folk
elements to the official literature and the way of using them in the official literature
by the writers in Polish Romanticism.