Dziady (poem)

Dziady (Polish pronunciation: [ˈdʑadɨ], Forefathers' Eve) is a poetic drama by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. It is considered one of the great works of European Romanticism. To George Sand and Georg Brandes, Dziady was a supreme realization of Romantic drama theory, to be ranked with such works as Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred.

The drama's title refers to Dziady, an ancient Slavic and Lithuanian feast commemorating the dead (the "forefathers"). The drama comprises four parts, the first of which was never finished. Parts I, II and IV were influenced by Gothic fiction and Byron's poetry. Part III joins historiosophical and individual visions of pain and annexation, especially under the 18th-century partitions of Poland. Part III was written ten years after the others and differs greatly from them. The first to have been composed is "Dziady, Part II," dedicated chiefly to the Dziady Slavic feast of commemoration of the dead which laid the foundations of the poem and is celebrated in what is now Belarus.

A ban on the performance of the play was an aspect of the 1968 Polish political crisis.

The drama's four parts are described below in the order of their composition.

Part II

In this part, Mickiewicz expressed a philosophy of life, based mainly on folk morality and on his own thoughts about love and death. In the drama, Lithuanian peasants are summoning ghosts to ensure them the access to heaven. First ones, ghosts of two children, cannot get there, because they had never suffered. Then appears a phantom of a cruel squire. He is persecuted by birds — they are obliged not to let him eat, because as a living person, he did not act like a human being. The next ghost is a phantom of Zosia, a young, beautiful shepherdess. Her fault is that she had never returned anybody's love, and love is needed to the act of salvation.

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