Mickiewicz’s „site” of shelter

Abstract

The figure of shelter sites – fundamental for Mickiewicz’s imagination – scrolls throughout all poet’s output and takes different shapes – from the traditional houses as buildings , real habitats up to unconventional houses such as the methaphoric “house of my spirit” from Rozmowa wieczorna or the house – nest set in the leaf (leaves) mentioned in the Lozanna piece titled Uciec z duszą. In Mickiewicz’s life there are the special “moments” of Lithuania’s eidos recognition that generate its oneiric lyric phantasms. There belong: the situation of exile and emigration, the perspective of distance or the feelings of longing and loss constitute in the poet’s imagination the pattern, the ideal of multilevel universe creating Konrad Wallenrod and Pan Tadeusz, permeated with the pictures of lost Eden. In both works the shelter sites, that arise from the affirming memory, are called explicitly Lithuania and embrace every cirle of the homestead – from home and its environment, through Homeland to the heavenly home of God Father – Paradise. In both these works there is the full picture of center – lost in Konrad Wallenrod and regained in Pan Tadeusz. Lithuania is the sacred place, the ideal existence, godly and heavenly, emerging from the past.The symbolic figure of Paradise represented by the nature of Lithuania is set here in two different dimensions of the world – the youthful Wallenrod, which is tragical, and eidetic Pan Tadeusz. The sketch presented above is an attempt to explain the Mickiewicz’s shelter sites – the image of Lithuania – Paradise that leads to Soplicowo.