Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/99

Rh on such an occasion, recited a little harmless poem about a mother and her child, which was not on the programme, was fined no less than a hundred rubles.

This winter I had occasion to study the censor very closely. In return for the kindness which had been shown to me the year before in Warsaw, I had promised to return, and to speak on the Polish literature of this century, which is treated almost exclusively as philology by the critics of the country.

The task was extremely difficult for many reasons. There was in the first place the intrinsic difficulty of telling the Polish people something new about a literature which they knew better than I. Then there were the external difficulties. At the University of Warsaw it is absolutely forbidden to speak of the history or literature of Poland after the year 1500. Not even in Russian, not even in the Russian spirit must the subject be dealt with. And in addition to this, the good literature of the whole of this century is patriotic in the extreme, thoroughly hostile to the Russian rule, and forbidden on that account. How should I manage to discuss Mickiewicz's Dziady, in which political prison life in Wilna is described, or Slowacki's Kordjanj which treats of an attempt to assassinate the Tzar Nicholas, or Krasinski's whole works, not to speak of the lyrics of war and rebellion; how, on the other hand, could I omit to speak of all these?

First and foremost it was necessary to get permission to speak at all on this subject. There was only one thing to depend on—the dislike of the persons in authority to be regarded as barbarians by Europe.

In the middle of January 1 sought permission from Count Tolstoi, the head of the police, to deliver lectures for a charitable object. The answer came in the middle of February. I was permitted to lecture three times in Russian February (the 1st of which answers to our 13th). I then drove immediately to the President of the Censors and presented my request, basing it on the invitation which had been given me the year before in Warsaw: "Come again and speak about our own literature."—The President: