Anhelli by Juliusz S?owacki tells of a mystic journey undertaken by the eponymous hero and his guide, a shaman, around Siberia, to which many Poles were deported after their failed revolt in 1830. It’s an unintentionally hilarious classic of nineteenth century Polish romantic literature. At one point Anhelli and the shaman meet people carrying coffins from a Siberian prison. Anhelli entreats the shaman to work a miracle and wake one of the dead, whom he recognises. (The footnotes in my edition identify the man as Wincenty Niemojowski, brother of Bonawentura.) The shaman replies: “I shall raise him and you will kill him again. Verily, and I shall raise him twice and he shall receive death from you twice.” (I did say it was mystic.) The shaman resurrects the man, who doesn’t get to say anything before Anhelli unintentionally kills him by repeating lies spread by the Russians about the deceased after his death — of which, of course, he had been unaware.

The shaman resurrects Niemojowski again, first saying to Anhelli: “and you beware not to cause him death again.” Anhelli says to the resurrected man:

Forgive me, for I knew not that I was speaking calumny and slander. I saw you in the National Council with your brother and I saw your two heads always together with a whiteness like unto that of two doves that fly down together for millet […] Oh unhappy brothers! One of you seeks eternal repose in a Syberian cemetery and the other lies under the roses and cypresses by the banks of the Seine. Unfortunate doves – separated and dead.

The unfortunate dove cries out “My brother!” and dies again. The shaman says to Anhelli — and here I will paraphrase lightly, rather than translate: What did you want to go and tell him his brother was dead for?

The title of this piece comes from Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke: “Dlaczego S?owacki wzbudza w nas zachwyt i mi?o??? (…) Dlatego, panowie, ?e S?owacki wielkim poet? by?!” (“Why does S?owacki kindle in us admiration and love? (…) Because, gentlemen, S?owacki was a great poet!”)