On the Ritualistic Character of Adam Mickiewicz’s "Dziady" Once Again" Review of: Grażyna Charytoniuk-Michiej, "The Rite of “Dziady” in the Documents and Works of Mickiewicz’s Series", Warszawa 2011 Cover Image

O obrzędowym charakterze cyklu „Dziadów” Adama Mickiewicza raz jeszcze. Rec.: Grażyna Charytoniuk-Michiej, „Obrzęd dziadów w dokumentach i cyklu Mickiewicza”, Warszawa 2011
On the Ritualistic Character of Adam Mickiewicz’s "Dziady" Once Again" Review of: Grażyna Charytoniuk-Michiej, "The Rite of “Dziady” in the Documents and Works of Mickiewicz’s Series", Warszawa 2011

Author(s): Małgorzata Burzka-Janik
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Towarzystwo Literackie im. Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: Dziady – a pagan festival in honour of ancestral spirits; rite; Romanticism; cultural/social anthropology

Summary/Abstract: The publication presented in the review is an interesting and much-needed research proposal, which combines the discourse of a philologist, an ethnographer, and a cultural anthropologist. This approach is innovative in the literary studies research on this Polish master dramatist; it constitutes a valuable source not only for literary commentators of Mickiewicz’s series but also for Belorussian folklore scholars, or for those investigating the merging of Polish and Belorussian culture. It makes us realize that, among others, by means of his drama, the poet introduced the Belorussian rite of dziady – a pagan festival in honour of ancestral spirits – into Polish culture. The rite is, for the Belorussians, not only a literary picture but still a cultivated, common, and obvious phenomenon. Similarly, the book unravels a fragment of a common cultural sphere; the renewed and repeated dziady rite helps to explain the poet’s masterpiece, though it unravels only one piece of it and fails to place it in wider historical, or, even more importantly, biographical contexts.

  • Issue Year: LXVIII/2013
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 573-579
  • Page Count: 7
  • Language: Polish