The choice of work for this year’s nationwide readathon seemed to be obvious as 2022 has been designated the Year of Polish Romanticism.
The publication of Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances two centuries ago is regarded as the beginning of the Romantic period in Polish literature, and its manifesto.
The work consists of 14 poems which contain, as one literary scholar put it, “folk motifs treated with great mastery, linking the fantastic, the romantic and the ‘bizarre’ with a realistic and colourful view of people and their everyday affairs, expressed with remarkable restraint and with a very apt choice of words, in melodious rhythmic stanzas of great precision.”
The scholar added: “Drawn from Mickiewicz’s native lands and from old Polish traditional motifs, the ballads also indicate borrowings of more contemporary literary ideas from western Europe, notably a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a free translation of Schiller’s Handschuh (The Gauntlet).”
‘The essence of Polishness’
In a letter inviting Poles to take part in the National Reading Day, President Duda described Romanticism as “the essence of Polishness and the foundation of the nation’s present-day identity.”
Launched in 2012, the National Reading campaign involves public readings of outstanding works of Polish literature. The event is organised by local governments, cultural institutions, schools, and libraries with an aim of popularising the wealth of Polish literary tradition and promoting book reading.
Works selected for previous editions of the National Reading Day included Mickiewicz’s epic poem Master Thaddeus, The Trilogy and Quo vadis by the Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus’s novel The Doll, and Stanisław Wyspiański’s play The Wedding.
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