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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:
And from the trumpets to the heavens sped That march of triumph: ‘Poland is not yet dead!’
The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.
Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.
‘Truth is great and shall prevail’: an old Hussite motto which was adopted by Masaryk and rendered into Czech as Pravda Vilezi.
1 President Vaclav Havel, Speech to Polish Sjem and Senate, January 21, 1990. New York Review of Books vol xxxvii no.5, p. 18.
2 Williams, George Hunston. The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of his thought and action. (New York, 1981) p. 314Google Scholar.
3 Havel, Vaclav. Living in Truth (London, 1990) p. 115Google Scholar.
4 Living in Truth p. 54.
5 Living in Truth p. 114.
6 President Vaclav Havel, Inaugural Address, The Spectator 27 January 1990, p. 12.
7 ibid., p. 11.
8 John Paul II, Address to Latin American Bishops, John Paul II in Mexico (London, 1979) p. 74Google Scholar.
9 Havel, Inaugural Address, p. 12.
10 John Paul II, Address to European Parliament, 11 October 1988. Briefing vol. 18, no. 22, p. 471.
11 ibid., p. 473.
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