Adam Mickiewicz

My correspondence with Adam Mickiewicz began in an unusual way. I was living in Moscow again, the city appearing to me each morning as if from behind the curtain of a dream: the tower blocks wrapped in mist, the marbled stone of the ministry building, the smokestacks peering above the bridge in the distance. I loved the city, every inch of it. I was working as a translator and in my spare time writing a series of stories about a lonesome girl living in Russia, one of which, by the mercy of a small literary journal back in the States, had recently been published. It was a terrible story. In it, a girl wanders around a snow-covered Saint Petersburg with nothing to do aside from feed her landlady’s cat, whom she names Cat, and pine for her ex-girlfriend, Juliet. Periodically she climbs onto a rooftop, where she looks over the city and feels spectacularly sorry for herself. The more I reread it, the more my embarrassment grew, the more certain I became that the magazine had accepted it by accident, or out of sheer desperation, that perhaps not a single soul aside from myself had submitted. And so I was quite surprised, one Monday morning in October, to open The New Yorker and discover a story by Adam Mickiewicz so similar to my own that I began to wonder if the great writer had read my story and plagiarized it.

Though I had read only one of Mickiewicz’s novels, I had long felt a certain affinity with him. Both of us were from Philadelphia, both of us had Polish roots, though it was a stretch to call myself Polish — my grandparents, Polish Jews who’d escaped Warsaw in 1941, despised Poland and considered their Polish heritage as nothing more than an unhappy coincidence. His father, on the other hand, was a Pole through and through. Janusz Mickiewicz had fled Communist Poland in 1953 and settled in Philadelphia, where he fell in love with a speech-language pathologist named Brenda. The two married and had a son, whom his father insisted on naming Adam after the great nineteenth-century Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, a patriot dedicated to the dream of an independent Poland. A fervent nationalist, Janusz felt it his duty to take advantage of his last name and grant his son the name of this Polish national hero, a name that was more or less fine for a boy growing up in Philadelphia, where nobody knew who Adam Mickiewicz was, but which rendered him completely and utterly absurd in Poland. It was, Mickiewicz later explained in interviews, as if somebody with the last name Shakespeare had thought it amusing to name his son William, or if a certain John Hemingway had called his son Ernest. This was the burden his father had bestowed upon him.