‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:

The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.