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Konrad Wallenrod
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Overview
- Full title
- Konrad Wallenrod. Powieść historyczna z dziejów litewskich i pruskich (Konrad Wallenrod: A Historical Tale from Lithuanian and Prussian History)
- Author
- Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), born near Nowogródek in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania; sent into the interior of Russia after the Philomath trial of 1823–24
- Written and published
- Written in Russia, chiefly in Moscow, in about 1825–27; published in St Petersburg in 1828, after passing the Russian censorship
- Form
- An introduction and six cantos of narrative verse, with a hymn, songs, a ballad and a framed tale set into them; Mickiewicz added a preface and historical notes
- Setting
- Marienburg (Malbork), capital of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, and, in the inset tale, Kowno and the Lithuanian lands along the Niemen
- Time of action
- The late fourteenth century, compressing events from the battle of Rudau (1370) to the brief rule of Grand Master Konrad von Wallenrode (1391–93)
- Epigraph
- Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 18: there are two ways of fighting, by law and by force, and a ruler must know how to be both fox and lion
- Genre
- Romantic verse tale on the Byronic model, presented as a historical poem and read from the first as a political parable
- Translation quoted
- Maude Ashurst Biggs, blank verse with rhymed songs (London, 1882); the edition held here omits the prefaces, the epigraph and the notes
- Famous for
- The Song of the Wajdelote, the ballad of Alpujara, the hero who betrays from within, and the political idea of 'wallenrodism'
Context
Mickiewicz wrote Konrad Wallenrod as a political exile. In 1823 the Russian authorities in Wilno uncovered the student societies of the Philomaths and Philarets, to which he belonged, and after a long investigation directed by Senator Nikolai Novosiltsev he and several friends were sentenced to be sent into the interior of Russia. He spent 1824–29 in St Petersburg, Odessa, the Crimea and Moscow, where he was welcomed in literary society, came to know Pushkin, and had met Kondraty Ryleev and Aleksandr Bestuzhev, soon to be leaders of the Decembrist revolt of December 1825. The poem was written chiefly in Moscow, in the years when the Decembrists were tried and punished, and it is shaped by the experience of a subject who must speak and act under watchful eyes (Koropeckyj 2008) (Weintraub 1954).
The subject comes from the long war between the Teutonic Order and pagan Lithuania. The Order, founded in the Holy Land, had by the late thirteenth century conquered the Baltic Prussians and built a state ruled from Marienburg; for more than a century its campaigns into Lithuania drew knights from all over Christian Europe. Lithuania under princes such as Kiejstut (Kęstutis) and his son Witold (Vytautas) resisted, raided in return and played the Order against its rivals, until the union with Poland and the official conversion of 1386–87 changed the balance (Christiansen 1997) (Urban 2003) (Rowell 1994). The real Konrad von Wallenrode ruled as Grand Master from 1391 to 1393 and was remembered by some chroniclers as harsh and unlucky; Mickiewicz turned him into a Lithuanian in disguise.
The poem was printed in St Petersburg in 1828. Mickiewicz framed it as history, with a prose preface and learned notes on Lithuanian antiquities, and set at its head an epigraph from chapter 18 of Machiavelli's The Prince, on the two ways of fighting, one by law and proper to men, the other by force and proper to beasts, and on the ruler's need to be both fox and lion (Machiavelli 1998). The historical framing helped the poem through the censorship. Readers in Poland and Lithuania nevertheless took it at once as a parable of their own situation under Russia, and there are stories that Novosiltsev saw its meaning only after it had been passed; such anecdotes belong to the poem's legend and should be treated with caution (Koropeckyj 2008) (Welsh 1966).
Formally the poem is a Romantic verse tale in the manner made famous by Byron's The Giaour, The Corsair and Lara: a mysterious, melancholy hero, a hidden past revealed in fragments, abrupt transitions, and lyric songs set into the narrative. Mickiewicz joins this to historical colour in the manner of Scott and to the figure of the bard who preserves a nation's memory, so that the central disclosure of the plot is made in a song within the poem (Weintraub 1954) (Krzyżanowski 1978) (Lednicki 1956). Biggs's translation, quoted here, renders the narrative in English blank verse and the songs in rhyme (Mickiewicz 1882); a modern version is that of Irene Suboczewski (Mickiewicz 1989).
The poem's afterlife was political as much as literary. The young officers and cadets who began the November Uprising in Warsaw in 1830 belonged to a generation that knew it well, and the word 'wallenrodism' (wallenrodyzm) came to name a strategy of feigned loyalty and betrayal from within, admired by some as patriotic heroism and condemned by others as a corruption of honour. The story also passed into music, notably in Amilcare Ponchielli's opera I Lituani (1874), and Joseph Conrad's Polish name Konrad is usually connected with Mickiewicz's heroes (Davies 2005) (Janion 1978) (Najder 2007).
Plot overview
In the late fourteenth century the Niemen divides pagan Lithuania from the lands of the Teutonic Order. At Marienburg the knights elect a new Grand Master. Their favourite is Konrad Wallenrod, a stranger who has won fame fighting the Moors in Spain and the Turks at sea, and who is admired for his austerity, though he is gloomy, sometimes drinks alone and sings in a foreign tongue. His only friend is an old monk, Halban. During the election the knights overhear a walled-up recluse in a tower by the lake cry out that Konrad will be Master in order to destroy them; Halban persuades them to treat this as a prophecy in Konrad's favour, and he is chosen.
As Master, Konrad disappoints the Order's hopes of war. He imposes penances and discipline, delays the campaign against Lithuania, and spends his nights at the recluse's tower, where it emerges that she is the woman he loves and that he is pursuing some terrible design. At the Patron's feast, with the Lithuanian prince Witold present as the Order's ally, an old Lithuanian bard (the Wajdelote) sings of Lithuania's sufferings and tells the story of Walter Alf: a Lithuanian boy captured by the Germans and raised by the Grand Master Winrych, who escaped to Lithuania, married Aldona, daughter of Prince Kiejstut, and then, convinced that Lithuania could not win in open war, left her and went back to the Germans with the old bard to destroy the Order from within. Aldona entered a convent.
Konrad, drunk and shaken, answers with the ballad of Alpujara, in which a defeated Moor feigns surrender and infects his Spanish victors with the plague by his embrace. War follows: Witold deserts the Order, the Pope proclaims a crusade, and Konrad leads a great army into Lithuania, where by delay and neglect he allows it to be destroyed by hunger, winter and Witold's attacks. He returns to Marienburg with a remnant.
A secret tribunal of the Order, told that the Master is not the real Wallenrod and has spoken Lithuanian at the tower, condemns him. Konrad goes to the tower and begs Aldona to come away with him to Lithuania; she refuses, fearing that he would no longer recognise her, and asks only that he visit her more often. Warned by the tribunal's cry of 'Woe', Konrad arranges a signal with her, a lamp in his window, and takes poison as the judges break in. He boasts of the ruin he has caused, compares himself with Samson, and dies, throwing down the lamp. A cry from the tower tells that Aldona has died too. Halban survives to carry the story to Lithuania in song.
Canto by canto
Canto 0: The Niemen
Introduction (Polish: Wstęp)
Summary
A century after the Order first waged its crusade against the heathen north, the Prussians have been crushed or driven out, and the Teutonic Knights press on towards Lithuania. The Niemen now marks the frontier. On one bank stand the Lithuanian sanctuaries and sacred woods and the young warriors in lynx-skin caps; on the other the German knight sits armoured on his horse, loading his gun and telling his rosary, beneath a great cross that seems to stretch its arms over Lithuania.
The river that once joined brother peoples has become a threshold that no one crosses except at the cost of freedom or life. Only nature still ignores the border: the hop vine climbs across to the Prussian poplar, and the nightingales on both banks still converse in Lithuanian. The narrator foresees armies and the axe on the river's shores, and promises that two lovers, divided by the hatred of nations, will be united again in the bard's song.
Analysis
The introduction sets the poem's governing opposition in a single landscape. The cross on the hill is drawn as an image of conquest rather than faith, and the knight who counts his beads while loading his weapon gives in one line the poem's charge of religious hypocrisy against the Order. The vine and the nightingales, which cross the frontier freely, suggest that the division of peoples is unnatural, and they prepare the love story, which is also a story of a border crossed (Weintraub 1954).
The last lines announce the double subject, a national war and a private love, and a song that will bring them together. The Wajdelote, a Lithuanian bard, is named before he appears, and the promise that the lovers will be united in his song points to the poem's frame, in which history survives as poetry (Koropeckyj 2008). The geography also served the allegory. After the partitions the Niemen had marked the frontier between Prussian and Russian rule, and Napoleon's army crossed it at Kowno in 1812, so that the prophecy of hosts rushing over its fords would have stirred recent memories in the first readers (Welsh 1966) (Davies 2005).
In mail and helmet armed, the German sits Upon his charger motionless; while fixed His eyes upon the entrenchments of the foe, He loads his arquebuse and counts his beads.
The Teutonic Knight as the poem sees him: piety and violence in one gesture. The arquebus is an anachronism for the fourteenth century, but it sharpens the image.
The nightingales from Kowno’s groves of oak Still with their brethren of Zapuszczan mount, Converse, as once, in Lithuanian speech.
Nature ignores the frontier. The shared language anticipates the theme of speech and nationality that runs through the poem.
It severs all things. But the hearts of lovers Shall in the Wajdelote’s song unite once more.
The close of the introduction announces both the love story and the role of the bard's song in preserving it.
Canto 1: The Election
Canto I (Polish: Obiór)
Summary
The bells of Marienburg ring as the commanders (Komturs) of the Order gather in chapter to elect a Grand Master. Opinion favours Konrad Wallenrod, a knight unknown in Prussia but famous abroad for his deeds against the Moors in Castile and the Turks at sea, and admired for poverty, humility and contempt for the world. He has no courtly graces and seems indifferent to praise and to women; though young, he is already grey and worn.
His character has strange depths. Certain words, 'Fatherland', 'Duty', 'Beloved', the crusades and Lithuania, cloud his rare moments of gaiety. Alone, he drinks, and then he sings melancholy songs in a foreign language, songs that touch every feeling except mirth and hope. When he breaks into wild threats, his friend and confessor Halban, an old monk, calms him with a look, as a keeper masters a lion with his eye.
Analysis
The canto presents Konrad from outside, through what the knights say of him, and so begins the poem's method of concealment and gradual disclosure. The reader is given clues the knights cannot interpret: the foreign songs, the words that wound him, the night drinking. Each points to a hidden identity, and the knights' praise of his austerity becomes heavily ironic once the plot is known (Weintraub 1954).
The simile of the lion and its keeper fixes the relation between Konrad and Halban. Konrad is the force, Halban the controlling will, and the image already suggests that the hero is not wholly free in his own design. The emphasis on song matters too: the hero's true self survives only in music, in a language his hearers cannot understand, a figure for national identity under foreign rule (Koropeckyj 2008) (Walicki 1982).
These words: Fatherland, Duty, Beloved,—the mention of Crusades, And Litwa, all the mirth of Wallenrod Instantly poisoned.
The words that betray Konrad's secret, in effect a list of the poem's themes.
All strings he strikes in turn, one string except— Except the string of mirth;—the hearer shares All feelings with him,—one excepted—hope!
Konrad's private songs: the absence of hope defines him from the start.
With talisman of an undying soul Unreasoning strength in bonds he doth control.
The lion-keeper simile closes the canto with a rhymed couplet and fixes Halban's power over Konrad.
Canto 2: The Recluse's Prophecy
Canto II
Summary
The chapter sings a hymn to the Holy Spirit asking for a sign of the worthiest candidate. In the pause before the next session the Archkomtur takes Halban and the leading knights for a walk at dawn, and they come to a tower by the lake where, ten years before, an unknown woman asked to be walled up as a recluse. No one sees her; only her hymns are heard at night, and a glimpse of her white hand is sometimes noticed at the grate.
The knights hear her voice cry out that Konrad will be Master so that he may destroy them, and that the Crusaders would know him even if he came back from the grave. A gleam like a helmet vanishes in the distance. Halban at once declares the words a prophecy in Konrad's favour, and the knights agree to elect him. Left alone, Halban sings of the Wilija, the river that runs into the Niemen and is lost in it, as a Lithuanian girl is lost to the foreign youth she loves.
Analysis
The canto turns on misreading. The recluse's words reveal the plot exactly, but Halban persuades the knights to hear them as a blessing, and their pious expectation of a sign makes them easy to deceive. The irony works against the Order's own religious language, set out in the solemn hymn that opens the canto (Weintraub 1954).
Halban's song of the Wilija is among the most admired lyrics in the poem. The river that abandons her valley for the Niemen and perishes with him in the sea is an image of Aldona, who has left her homeland for love; the final line, with the girl weeping in a prison tower, applies the image to the recluse and so tells the attentive reader who she is. Like the Wajdelote's later song, it hides the truth in a form that only Lithuanians, or readers, can decipher (Welsh 1966) (Miłosz 1983).
“Thou art Konrad! Heaven! Fate is now fulfilled! Thou shalt be Master, that thou mayest destroy them!
The recluse's cry, which the knights take for prophecy. The secret of the plot is spoken in the second canto and not understood.
Wilija, thou parent of streams in our land, Heaven-blue is thy visage and golden thy sand;
The opening of Halban's song. The Wilija (Neris) joins the Niemen at Kowno, the setting of Aldona's story.
And in her loved Niemen the Wilija is lost, In the dark prison-tower weeps the maiden undone.
The close of the song joins the river image to the recluse in the tower.
Canto 3: Konrad and the Recluse
Canto III
Summary
Konrad receives the sword and cross of the Grand Master with a fierce, ambiguous look. The knights expect war, but a whole year passes in peace. Konrad declares that the Order has broken its rule, enforces penance and harsh discipline, and does nothing while Lithuanian raiders burn villages near Marienburg. The moment seems ideal for war, since Lithuania is torn by internal conflict and Witold, displaced by Jagiełło, has come to seek the Order's help; but Konrad delays.
At night he goes to the recluse's tower. She sings of the happy life she once had as a prince's daughter in Lithuania and of the youth who taught her of the Christian God and a greater world; Konrad answers bitterly. In the dialogue that follows she tells how she followed him to Marienburg and walled herself up only to be near him, and he speaks of the vengeance for which he renounced happiness. He confesses that he delays the war to spend more evenings with her, and leaves at dawn like an infernal spirit fleeing the matin bell.
Analysis
The canto shows the cost of the plan before the plan is fully revealed. Konrad's policy of reform, penance and peace looks like piety and is in fact a means of weakening the Order; but the dialogue at the tower shows that his delays also come from love. The tension between the nation's cause and private feeling, which the plot resolves only in death, is here at its sharpest (Weintraub 1954) (Janion 1978).
The recluse's song is a compressed autobiography. The line about three daughters, which Konrad repeats in anguish, and the image of the cross from which thunder flies, sum up how Christianity entered her life as both promise and destruction. Konrad's language of greatness, and his picture of himself as a man who weeps only in order to kill, belong to the Byronic hero; but the poem lets Aldona answer him and question what such greatness is worth (Koropeckyj 2008). The final simile, in which the hero vanishes like a spirit of hell at the morning bell, shows the narrator's refusal to idealise him.
Aye! let us weep, but let our proud foes tremble! For Konrad wept, but ’twas to murder them!
Konrad turns grief into vengeance: the hero's programme in its most brutal form.
Two of us only on this mighty earth, Upon the seas of sand two drops of dew.
Aldona's image of the lovers' isolation, set against the epic scale of the nations' war.
’Tis morning! and he let his visor down, And in his cloak’s wide folds concealed his face.
Konrad resumes his mask at dawn. Lowering the visor is the gesture of his whole double life.
Canto 4: The Festival
Canto IV (Polish: Uczta)
Summary
On the Patron's day Konrad holds a feast for the knights, with Witold and his Lithuanian captains as guests. Bored by an Italian singer's flattery and a troubadour's love songs, he calls for a harsh song fit for monks who kill. An old man in Prussian or Lithuanian dress, his face veiled, offers to sing. He shames the Lithuanians who serve the Germans, which moves Witold to tears, and sings the Song of the Wajdelote: a vision of the plague-maiden and of the Order as a worse plague, and a hymn to native song as an ark that preserves a people's memory.
He then tells the Wajdelote's Tale. A Lithuanian boy, captured in a German raid and raised by the Grand Master Winrych under the name Walter Alf, kept his Lithuanian soul with the help of a captive bard, who taught him that a slave's only weapon is treachery. Walter fled to Lithuania, served Prince Kiejstut and married his daughter Aldona. When defeat showed that Lithuania could not win in the field, he left her, with the bard, to wage war on the Order by a 'dreadful way'; Aldona took refuge in a convent tower. Konrad, wildly drunk, seizes the lute and sings the ballad of Alpujara, in which the Moor Almanzor feigns surrender and kills his victors with the plague by his embrace; then he falls asleep amid general bewilderment.
Analysis
The longest canto is the centre of the poem, and it is built as a series of frames: the narrator tells of a feast at which a bard tells a story that is the hero's own, and the hero replies with a ballad that is also his own story in disguise. The plot is revealed openly, but in a form the Germans cannot understand, while Witold and the reader can. Song is both the keeper of national memory and a coded political weapon (Weintraub 1954) (Koropeckyj 2008).
The Song of the Wajdelote, with its address to native song as the ark of the covenant between generations, became a classic statement of the Romantic idea that a nation without a state survives in its poetry (Walicki 1982) (Miłosz 1983). The tale gives the poem's moral argument in the old bard's words: free knights may choose their weapons, slaves have only treachery. The ballad of Alpujara is the most compressed image of the strategy, in which the embrace of surrender carries death. Konrad's outburst against the bard's 'traitorous song', which poisons the infant with love of glory and country, shows that the hero himself experiences national poetry as a fate laid upon him (Janion 1978).
Let the last Wajdelote of Litwa sing Litwa’s last song!”
The old bard presents himself as the last of his kind, a recurring figure in Romantic poetry of national loss.
O native song! between the elder day, Ark of the Covenant, and younger times,
The famous apostrophe to national song as the ark that joins past and present.
Thou art a slave; the only Weapon that slaves may use is treachery.
The bard's counsel to young Walter: the principle later called 'wallenrodism' in its starkest form.
“For my kiss breathed venom in ye, And the plague shall lay you low;
Almanzor's revelation in the ballad of Alpujara. Feigned submission becomes the means of vengeance, as in Konrad's own plan.
Canto 5: War
Canto V (Polish: Wojna)
Summary
Konrad can no longer restrain the demand for war. Witold, abandoning his alliance after the banquet, leads his men away, enters the Order's castles with forged orders from the Master and destroys their garrisons. The Pope proclaims a crusade, and knights flood in from all Europe. The army marches into Lithuania, its progress marked by burning on the horizon; then the news stops. In winter the people of Marienburg see Konrad and a few commanders struggle back through the snow, followed by a broken, starving rabble, with frozen corpses standing by the road.
The narrator explains the disaster: Konrad, once famous for prudence, besieged Wilno sluggishly, ignored Witold's snares, let hunger waste the army, held secret parleys and at last was the first to flee the field. Yet he returns with a strange, almost satanic joy in his eyes. Meanwhile, in a dungeon beneath Malbork, the Order's secret tribunal of twelve masked judges hears an accuser declare that the Master is not the real Wallenrod but the count's squire, suspected of his death, who has spoken Lithuanian at the tower. The judges silently consult the law and pronounce the single word 'Woe!'
Analysis
The canto shows the plan succeeding, in a deliberately rapid and distanced narration. The great crusade is reported from the walls of Marienburg, first by the absence of news and then by the image of the returning army, so that the catastrophe is seen through the eyes of the Order's own people. The scene of the frozen dead would have recalled to many first readers the retreat of Napoleon's army from Moscow in 1812 (Weintraub 1954) (Davies 2005).
The tribunal scene, with its masks, its law-book turned with dagger points and its silent sentence, owes more to Gothic fiction and to the legend of secret courts than to anything known of the Order's institutions. It also mirrors Konrad's own method: the judges act in secret and by stealth, as he has done. The poem thus suggests that the Order and the strategy used against it share the same moral darkness, a point later critics of 'wallenrodism' took up (Janion 1978) (Miłosz 1983).
Thou see’st a fiery blaze; the vault of heaven O’er-deluged with a stream of bloody flame; Behold the annals of invading war.
The crusade seen from Marienburg: the burning horizon is its only chronicle.
But with raised hands the corpses standing point Straight to the town, like pillars on the way.
The frozen dead of the returning army, one of the poem's most powerful images.
That man who calls him Konrad Wallenrod, He is not Wallenrod.
The accuser before the secret tribunal. The mask is at last named as a mask.
Canto 6: The Parting
Canto VI (Polish: Pożegnanie)
Summary
At a stormy winter dawn Konrad comes to the tower and calls to Aldona that his vows are fulfilled: the Order has been struck to the heart, and he wants no more vengeance. He describes his visit to their old valley in Lithuania, where the dry willow twigs he once planted have grown into trees, and begs her to come away with him. She refuses. She swore never to leave the tower except for the grave, and she fears that he would not know in her the Aldona he remembers; she asks only that he come more often, and that Lithuanian children be brought to sing near the tower.
Wandering by the lake, Konrad hears the tribunal's 'Woe' and understands. He arranges a signal with Aldona: a black cloth on his balcony by day and a lamp at his window by night. That evening the judges break into his turret. He takes poison, and Halban, offered the rest of the cup, chooses to live and spread the story in song. Konrad tramples his Master's badge, claims the ruin of the Order as his work, compares himself to Samson, and dies, throwing down the lamp. A cry from the tower marks Aldona's death. The narrator closes by leaving the end of her song to heaven and to the reader.
Analysis
The final canto turns from political triumph to private loss. Konrad's declaration that Germans too are men, and his wish to forget nations in Aldona's arms, suggest that the avenger has outlived his vengeance; Aldona's refusal shows that the sacrifice cannot be undone. Her image of the moth in amber, keeping its form for ever, makes her a figure of memory: she would rather keep the past whole than meet him changed (Welsh 1966) (Janion 1978).
The death scene is staged as a public act. Konrad's last speech is a boast, and the comparison with Samson, who pulled down the temple on himself and his enemies, presents his suicide as heroic self-sacrifice. Halban's decision to survive, so that the deed may be sung and an avenger may arise, gives the poem a political future beyond the hero's death (Koropeckyj 2008). The closing lines, which break off like a snapped string and hand the song over to heaven and the reader, return to poetry as the medium in which the story lives on (Weintraub 1954).
I will no more of it—I am a man! I spent my youth in foul hypocrisy, In bloody, murders.
Konrad's confession at the tower. The comma in 'bloody, murders' is Biggs's text.
So the fair moth, within the amber drowned, Retains its primal form eternally.
Aldona's reason for refusing to leave: she would rather be remembered than seen.
Aye! they shall sing them, and in future days Some venger shall arise from out our bones.”
Halban chooses to survive in order to carry the song to Lithuania. The line echoes Dido's curse in the Aeneid (4.625), 'exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor'.
As Samson, by once shaking of the column, To o’er throw the temple, dying in its ruin.”
Konrad's last image of himself. Biggs's text prints 'o’er throw' as two words.
Characters
Lithuanian in disguise
- Konrad Wallenrod (Walter Alf)
- The hero, a Lithuanian carried off as a child in a German raid, raised by the Grand Master Winrych as Walter Alf, and later known by the name of a dead German count. Brave, austere, melancholy and given to solitary drinking, he rises to Grand Master in order to lead the Order to ruin. He is a Byronic figure whose inner life appears only in fragments, songs and outbursts; his sacrifice of love and honour to the nation's cause makes him the original of 'wallenrodism'.
Lithuanians
- Aldona
- Daughter of Prince Kiejstut, who fell in love with Walter when he taught her about the Christian world, and married him. When he left to carry out his plan, she followed him and walled herself up as a recluse in a tower near Marienburg, to live near him. She is the poem's voice of private love and memory, and her refusal to come out at the end shows that some sacrifices cannot be reversed.
- Halban (the Wajdelote)
- An old Lithuanian bard (wajdelota), long a captive of the Germans, who nursed Walter's patriotism and taught him that a slave's weapon is treachery. He follows him into the Order as a monk and his confessor, and keeps his resolve alive with a look or a word; at the feast he appears, it is implied, as the veiled old singer. At the end he chooses to live so that the deed will be sung, an embodiment of the poet as the nation's memory.
- Kiejstut (Kęstutis)
- The historical Lithuanian prince (d. 1382), here a warrior who has always fought the Germans and does not think about the future. He welcomes Walter, makes him his son-in-law, and is shaken by Walter's warning that Lithuania cannot win in open war.
- Witold (Vytautas)
- Kiejstut's son, historically the future Grand Duke of Lithuania. In the poem he has sought the Order's help against Jagiełło and sits at the feast as its ally; the bard's words about traitors move him to tears, and he then turns against the Order and, in secret contact with Konrad, destroys its army.
Teutonic Order
- Winrych (Winrich von Kniprode)
- The Grand Master (historically 1351–82) who raised Walter as his own son. He appears only in the Wajdelote's tale, where the boy's secret damage to his palace is an early sign of hidden hatred.
- The Archkomtur and the chapter
- The leaders of the Order who elect Konrad. Pious, warlike and easily deceived, they read the recluse's words as a prophecy and later grumble at the Master's delays.
- The secret tribunal
- Twelve masked judges who meet under Malbork to punish the crimes of the powerful. They condemn Konrad with the single word 'Woe' and come to execute the sentence.
Inset ballad
- Almanzor
- The Moorish leader in Konrad's ballad of Alpujara, who feigns surrender to the Spaniards and infects them with the plague by his embrace, a mirror of Konrad's own strategy.
Themes
Patriotism and treason
The poem's central question is whether deceit and betrayal can be justified in the cause of a conquered nation. Konrad betrays the Order he has sworn to serve, and the poem gives the reason in the old bard's words: the free may fight in the open, but a slave's only weapon is treachery. The Machiavelli epigraph on the fox and the lion frames the story as a study of political means.
Yet the poem does not simply praise the strategy. Konrad pays with his love, his happiness and his moral integrity; he calls his life 'foul hypocrisy', and the narrator likens him to a spirit of hell. Readers have argued ever since about whether the poem endorses or warns against what came to be called 'wallenrodism' (Janion 1978) (Miłosz 1983).
Love and the nation
The love of Walter and Aldona is sacrificed to Lithuania, and the poem makes the sacrifice the heart of its tragedy. In the Wajdelote's tale even the sweetest words, family and love, yield to the word 'country'. Aldona's choice to wall herself up near him makes her a partner in the sacrifice, but her voice also questions the greatness for which they suffer.
The poem ends with her death rather than with the fall of the Order, and its last lines are about her fate. Private loss is not a sideline to the political plot but its measure (Welsh 1966) (Weintraub 1954).
Song and national memory
Poetry is the medium through which the nation survives. The Wajdelote's apostrophe to native song as an ark that no stroke can break makes the bard the guardian of a people's identity when its political existence is threatened.
Song is also an instrument of action. The bard's songs keep Konrad's vengeance alive, the plot is revealed in a song the Germans cannot understand, and Halban survives to turn the deed into a song that will raise future avengers. Konrad himself feels this as a poison that has destroyed the possibility of a private life (Walicki 1982) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Mask and identity
Konrad lives under several names: a German name given by his captors, the borrowed name of a dead count, and a Lithuanian self beneath both. The poem dwells on visors, cloaks, veils and masks, and on the gap between appearance and the self beneath it. The capture of the child, renamed and raised by his enemies, makes identity something that has to be remembered and defended against assimilation.
The theme had obvious resonance for subjects of the Russian Empire, but it also raises a general question: how long can a man live behind a mask before it becomes his face (Koropeckyj 2008) (Janion 1978)?
Holy war and its hypocrisy
The Teutonic Order presents its wars as crusades, and the poem gives its hymns and prayers. Konrad's own phrase for the knights, men who sanctify and murder, and the knight who loads his gun while saying his prayers, point to the hypocrisy of violence in the name of religion.
The poem's view of the Order is partisan, and it compresses and simplifies the history of the Baltic crusades, which modern historians describe in more complex terms (Christiansen 1997) (Urban 2003).
Motifs
Songs within the poem
The hymn, the song from the tower, Halban's song of the Wilija, the Song of the Wajdelote and the ballad of Alpujara: the narrative is constantly interrupted by songs, which carry its secrets and its emotional climaxes.
Night and dawn
The lovers meet only at night and part at dawn, when Konrad lowers his visor. Daylight brings back the public mask; darkness is the time of truth.
Wine
Konrad drinks alone and at the feast, and only in drink does he show his feelings. His last cup is poison.
Fire and burning
Burning villages, the fires of war on the horizon, the hidden fire that hollows the oak and the final lamp link vengeance with destruction.
'Woe'
The tribunal's single word, echoed three times by the walls and later by the shadow on the snow, works as a refrain of doom in the last cantos.
Symbols
The tower
Aldona's tower is both a living grave and the place of the lovers' only meetings. It stands for fidelity, imprisonment and the private life that the nation's cause has walled up.
The white mantle and black cross
The dress of the Teutonic Knights. In the Song of the Wajdelote the plumed helmet and the mantle with the black cross become a plague worse than the pestilence.
The Niemen and the Wilija
The frontier river and its tributary. The Niemen divides peoples once joined; the Wilija lost in it is an image of Aldona lost in her love.
The sand and the meadow
The old bard shows Walter the sea-sand burying a coastal meadow: the drifting sand is the Order, the buried herbs the conquered peoples.
The falcon
The caged falcon who knows his homeland as soon as he rises into the sky is Walter returning to Lithuania.
The oak burned from within
The hunters' fire that hollows an oak of Białowieża is the image of vengeance consuming Walter's capacity for love.
The moth in amber
Aldona's image for memory: the beloved kept unchanged in the heart, at the price of never being seen again.
The lamp
The agreed signal between the lovers, which Konrad throws down as he dies. Its last ring of light is the sign of death to Aldona.
Critical debates
Hero or traitor: the problem of 'wallenrodism'
For many nineteenth-century readers Konrad was a model of patriotic self-sacrifice, the man who gives up even his honour for his people. For others his method of deception and betrayal was a moral poison that could corrupt political life. The word 'wallenrodism' has kept both meanings in Polish political language (Janion 1978) (Davies 2005).
Critics such as Weintraub and Miłosz stress that the poem itself is ambivalent: it presents Konrad's deed as necessary and terrible, and shows its cost in drink, despair and the loss of love. The question is whether the poem endorses the strategy, warns against it, or deliberately leaves the matter open (Weintraub 1954) (Miłosz 1983).
Historical poem or political allegory?
Mickiewicz presented the poem as a historical tale drawn from the chronicles of the Order, with a learned preface and notes. Readers in Poland and Lithuania read it at once as an allegory of their own position under Russia, and the poet's situation, an exile writing in Moscow after the Decembrist revolt, made that reading natural (Koropeckyj 2008) (Kleiner 1948).
Some scholars warn against reducing the poem to a coded political message: it is also a Romantic tragedy of love and identity, and its medieval world has its own coherence. The question is how far the historical surface is a disguise, a device for the censor, or a genuine interest in the Lithuanian past (Welsh 1966) (Weintraub 1954).
The Byronic model
The poem's hero, structure and tone owe much to Byron's oriental tales, which were very popular in Poland and Russia in the 1820s. Critics have debated how far Mickiewicz imitates Byron and how far he transforms him. The Byronic hero is usually a rebel against society; Konrad rebels on behalf of a community, and his isolation is a means rather than an end (Weintraub 1954) (Lednicki 1956) (Kridl 1951).
This national turn given to the Byronic tale has been seen as one of Mickiewicz's main contributions to the genre, and as a link between Konrad Wallenrod and the Konrad of Forefathers' Eve, Part III (Krzyżanowski 1978) (Koropeckyj 2008).
The bard and the hero
Halban, the Wajdelote, is the force behind Konrad's plan, and some readers see him as the poem's real protagonist: the poet who shapes the hero's will, masters him like a lion, and survives to make his story a song. On this reading the poem is about the power of poetry to create political action (Koropeckyj 2008) (Walicki 1982).
Others stress the darker side of the relation. Konrad accuses the bard's song of poisoning the infant's soul with the desire for praise and love of country, and the poem can be read as a critique of a national poetry that sends young men to self-destruction (Janion 1978) (Miłosz 1983).
The poem and the November Uprising
The insurrection of November 1830 began with a conspiracy of cadets and young officers in Warsaw, a generation steeped in Romantic poetry. It became a commonplace that Konrad Wallenrod had helped to inspire them, and the poem's reputation as a revolutionary text dates from this time (Davies 2005) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Historians are more cautious about direct influence, since the uprising had many political causes. Mickiewicz himself took no part in the fighting, which weighed on him for years. The connection is better described as part of the poem's legend and reception than as a proven cause (Welsh 1966) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Aldona: voice or emblem?
Aldona can be read as an emblem of the sacrifice the nation demands, a figure whose love and suffering exist to measure the hero's greatness. But she also speaks in her own right, questions Konrad's greatness, refuses his plea to leave the tower, and has the poem's last moment (Welsh 1966).
Recent readers have asked how the poem stages a woman's choice within a male plot of war and vengeance, and whether her walled-up existence criticises or idealises feminine sacrifice (Janion 1978) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Lithuanian or Polish?
The poem is set in Lithuania and its hero is Lithuanian, but it was written in Polish for Polish readers, and the Lithuania it celebrates is in part the Lithuania of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lithuanian readers have also claimed the poet, as Adomas Mickevičius, and the work has a place in both national traditions (Snyder 2003) (Davies 2005).
Historians of medieval Lithuania describe a powerful pagan state that fought and bargained with its Christian neighbours; Mickiewicz's version, drawn from chronicles and antiquarian lore, is a Romantic reconstruction of that past (Rowell 1994) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Key passages
And mankind?—War has severed human kind! The ancient love of nations has departed Into oblivion.
The introduction moves from the landscape of the Niemen to a lament for the broken bond between peoples. The frontier is not natural but the work of war, and the love story will show what it costs.
Where is his soul?—In the land of memories!
Konrad's solitary songs reveal that his inner life lies in the past. The line makes him an exile within his own life and anticipates the theme of memory as the place where the nation survives.
Greatness, and greatness yet again, mine angel! Greatness for which we groan in misery!
Konrad's answer to Aldona's account of her sacrifice. The repeated word expresses both pride in the great design and the bitterness of its cost; the poem leaves open whether such greatness is worth it.
Of us, who sanctify and murder men, Let song of murderous tone proclaim the saintship,
Konrad's request for a new song at the feast. The phrase sums up the poem's view of the Order and its holy war, and it is spoken, with bitter irony, by the Master himself.
Thou ark! no stroke can break thee or subdue, While thine own people hold thee not debased.
The bard's apostrophe to native song as the ark of the nation. Song outlives the destruction of states, but only as long as the people themselves value it. The passage became central to the Romantic idea of poetry as national memory.
Thou art a slave; the only Weapon that slaves may use is treachery.
The bard's advice to young Walter, and the clearest statement of the moral logic of 'wallenrodism': in an unequal struggle the defeated cannot fight by the rules of honour. The whole tragedy follows from accepting it.
Sweet were the names of family, of friendship, And sweeter yet than all the name of love, Which no word equals here on earth, but—country.
The scale of values that will destroy the lovers. Love is the sweetest word but one, and the dash before 'country' marks the point where the private gives way to the national.
Great hearts, Aldona, are like hives too large; Honey can fill them not, and they become The lizard’s nest.
Walter's apology to Aldona before he leaves. The homely image explains why domestic happiness cannot satisfy him, and suggests that a heart too large for ordinary life lies open to dark passions.
Enough of vengeance. Germans, too, are men!
After the destruction of the Order's army Konrad renounces vengeance. The line shows the humanity that survives beneath the mask and complicates any reading of the poem as simple hatred of the Germans.
Thus lute strings, shuddering from a heavy stroke, Vibrate and burst; in their confusèd sounds They seem to voice the first notes of a song,
The poem ends with an image of broken music after Aldona's death cry. The story stops but does not finish, and the song is handed on to heaven and the reader.
Questions for study
How does the introduction's picture of the Niemen prepare the themes of the poem?
Think about the frontier, the vine and the nightingales, and the promise of the bard's song.
Why does Mickiewicz reveal the hero's past through the Wajdelote's tale rather than by direct narration?
Consider who understands the song at the feast, and the role of song in preserving memory.
What does the Machiavelli epigraph on the fox and the lion add to a reading of the poem?
Think of the two ways of fighting, by law and by force, and of which methods Konrad chooses.
Is Konrad a hero, a traitor, or both? Support your answer from the text.
Look at the bard's argument about slaves and treachery, and at Konrad's judgement of himself in Canto VI.
What is the function of the ballad of Alpujara within Canto IV?
Compare Almanzor's strategy with Konrad's, and ask why Konrad sings it at that moment.
Does Aldona's role challenge or confirm the poem's celebration of sacrifice for the nation?
Look at her dialogue with Konrad in Canto III and her refusal in Canto VI.
What is the relationship between Halban and Konrad? Who is in control?
Recall the lion-keeper simile, the songs, and Halban's choice at the end.
How does the poem portray the Teutonic Order, and how fair is that portrayal?
Consider the hymns, the feast, the secret tribunal, and what historians say about the Baltic crusades.
Why might the poem have passed the Russian censorship, and why was it nevertheless read as a political text?
Think of the historical framing, the notes, and the situation of readers in 1828.
What does the poem suggest about the power and the danger of national poetry?
Compare the Song of the Wajdelote with Konrad's outburst against the bard's 'traitorous song'.
Further reading
- Christiansen, Eric. The Northern Crusades. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1997.
- Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Janion, Maria, and Maria Żmigrodzka. Romantyzm i historia. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978.
- Kleiner, Juliusz. Mickiewicz. 2 vols. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1948.
- Koropeckyj, Roman. Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
- Kridl, Manfred, ed. Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Poland: A Symposium. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.
- Krzyżanowski, Julian. A History of Polish Literature. Warsaw: PWN–Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978.
- Lednicki, Wacław, ed. Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature: A Symposium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956.
- Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. Translated by Irene Suboczewski. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Konrad Wallenrod: An Historical Poem. Translated by Maude Ashurst Biggs. London: Trübner, 1882.
- Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
- Najder, Zdzisław. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Translated by Halina Najder. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007.
- Rowell, S. C. Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
- Urban, William. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill Books, 2003.
- Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
- Weintraub, Wiktor. The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. The Hague: Mouton, 1954.
- Welsh, David. Adam Mickiewicz. New York: Twayne, 1966.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.