A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West: Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom (original) (raw)

Words, Music, and The Popular, 2021

Abstract

The 2018 album Mickiewicz – Stasiuk – Haydamaky by the Ukrainian folk-rock band Haydamaky is a setting of ten poems by Adam Mickiewicz. The album combines recitations in Polish by the writer Andrzej Stasiuk with parts sung in Ukrainian. This chapter offers a reading of the album in light of its literary sources in Polish and Ukrainian Romanticism and of its historical context, showing a melopoetic tradition of folksong’s political force to which both Mickiewicz and Haydamaky subscribe. Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod, the source of the oriental ballad Alpuhara (track 4), builds an axis of conflict, articulated in terms of linguistic, religious and poetic genre contrasts between the German, knightly, “Highbrow”, Catholic “West” and the oppressed, conquered, Lithuanian, Pagan “East”, whose priest and folk singer, the wajdelota, is presented as heir to Homer’s lyre. The Crimean Sonnets (tracks 1-3, 5, 7, 8) provide an additional layer to the East/West axis in terms of an ambiguous orientalism, eloquently re-appropriated by the Ukrainian rock band. It is my contention that Mickiewicz’s politically charged melopoesis is here recast as popular music to make a statement on Ukraine’s precarious position between East and West.

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