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RESEARCH PRODUCT

O obrzędowym charakterze cyklu "Dziadów" Adama Mickiewicza raz jeszcze

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The publication presented in the review is an interesting and much-needed research proposal, which combines the discourse of a philologist, an ethnographer, and a cultural anthropologist. This approach is innovative in the literary studies research on this Polish master dramatist; it constitutes a valuable source not only for literary commentators of Mickiewicz’s series but also for Belorussian folklore scholars, or for those investigating the merging of Polish and Belorussian culture. It makes us realize that, among others, by means of his drama, the poet introduced the Belorussian rite of dziady – a pagan festival in honour of ancestral spirits – into Polish culture. The rite is, for the Belorussians, not only a literary picture but still a cultivated, common, and obvious phenomenon. Similarly, the book unravels a fragment of a common cultural sphere; the renewed and repeated dziady rite helps to explain the poet’s masterpiece, though it unravels only one piece of it and fails to place it in wider historical, or, even more importantly, biographical contexts