SOURCE: “Intimations of Intimacy: Adam Mickiewicz's ‘On the Grecian Room,’” Slavic and Eastern European Journal, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 216-30.

In the following essay, Shallcross assesses Mickiewicz's poem “On the Grecian Room in Princess Zeneida Volkonskaia's House in Moscow,” and contends that Mickiewicz portrays a sense of loss and disappointment regarding the way nineteenth-century culture viewed history. Shallcross further discusses the way in which the poem “de-domesticizes” the home.

I. Flirtation and Fragments

Conquer and describe. 

Napoleon

Of his entire oeuvre, a single poem—although one not commonly anthologized, nor adequately interpreted—best represents Mickiewicz's concept of domesticity. The poem, entitled “Na pokoj grecki w domu księżnej Zeneidy Wołkońskiej w Moskwie” (“On the Grecian Room in Princess Zeneida Volkonskaia's House in Moscow”),¹ offers a description of the actual interior of his friend's residence. I intend to place the poet's evocation of Volkonskaia's home-museum and his...