Familiar stranger: the problematic position of Adam Mickiewicz in the Lithuanian literary canon between 1883 and 1905

This article explores the principal arguments exposed in the Lithuanian press of national revival and in early literary historiogrphy attempting to establish or reject the position of Adam Mickiewicz in the national canon. The commemmoration of the centenary of Adam MIckiewicz, the most famous (at that time) Lithuanian poet, celebrated during the last decade of the nineteenth century spurred the attempts to recount more clearly the boundaries of Lithuanian national literature. In his works of fiction and articles from the period of exile, Mickiewicz announced the ideas of a rebirth of the Polish nation and acquired a special status in Polish culture: he became the nation's prophet. This cult of the Polish poet-prophet was unacceptable to the members of Lithuanian nationalism since it contradicted their endeavour to gain the status of an independent Lithuanian nation with all the legal rights. The essentila premise for setting an alternative version of Lithuanian reception of Mickiewicz in opposition to the Polish one was the exclusion of his early poems that poetise the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ("Konrad Wallenrod", Grażyna) from the main corpus of his works. It was the excerpts from these particular poems that the translators of his texts into Lithuanian of the period of the national movement used to choose. Therefore, the poet's Lithuanian reception that did not contradict the aims of the national movement was determined mainly by three factors: ideological selection of Mickiewicz's translatable texts into Lithuanian; articles in the periodical press that emphasised the poet's Lithuanian origins and Lithuanian topics of his works; the concept of bilingual Lithuanian literature opposite to the ethnolinguistic notion of national literature. In this article, this reception is generally called the "Lithuanian Mickiewicz"