Mulatka. Powiesc Wierszem
Lwowie: 1833. [2],v,30pp. Modern quarter cloth and marbled boards, manuscript label. Bookplate on front pastedown, contemporary ownership inscriptions and later ink stamp on title page. A few pencil notations in text; lightly soiled. About very good. Item #6418
First edition of this early and rare work of narrative verse set during the Haitian Revolution, centering on a tragic interracial love story shaped by war, exile, and Polish sacrifice. Mulatka is among the earliest Polish literary engagements with Saint Domingue and the second known Polish imaginative treatment of the Haitian expedition, following Polak w St. Domingo (1818/1819). Its author, Stanis aw Jaszowski (1803–1842), was a Galician poet, translator, and critic active in the formative years of Polish Romanticism. Educated in Lwów, he emerged as an early promoter of new literary currents in Galicia, publishing widely in contemporary journals and translating authors such as Byron, Chateaubriand, and Moore.
In his detailed introduction, Jaszowski frames Mulatka as a commemorative poem devoted to the 1802 French expedition to Saint Domingue and the participation of Polish troops. Jaszowski first offers a concise historical outline of the island, addressing colonization, slavery, the Haitian Revolution and its leaders, and the abolition of slavery in 1794, before recounting the failure of the French expedition and the catastrophic fate of the Polish Legion. The poem itself unfolds as a tragic interracial love story set amid the fighting in Saint Domingue. A wounded Polish soldier, Artur, is captured after a retreat and rescued by Adyna, a mulatto woman described as the daughter of Dessalines, whose rebel leadership is portrayed as grounded in violence and vengeance. As she leads Artur to safety, an intense bond develops between them, but Artur remains emotionally tied to Poland and to a woman awaiting him there. When he rejoins his comrades, the lovers part. After the French withdrawal, Adyna attempts to follow him by sea but perishes in a storm; Artur later encounters her body among the wreckage. The poem sets this personal tragedy against the wider violence of the revolution, reflecting on war, exile, and loyalty to homeland.
Although geographically distant, Saint Domingue occupied a charged place in the Polish historical imagination of the early 19th century. After the final Partitions of Poland in 1795, Polish soldiers served in Napoleonic armies as political exiles, fighting abroad in the hope that loyalty to France might contribute to the restoration of their own state. The expedition to Saint Domingue in 1802 became part of this broader experience of displacement and deferred national hope. Historically, the Polish presence on the island was both substantial and catastrophic: over 5,000 Polish troops participated in the excursion, of whom around 4,000 died. In Polish Romantic culture before 1848, such episodes were increasingly read as symbolic histories of martyrdom, exile, and unfulfilled loyalty. Haiti, with its revolutionary violence, abolition of slavery, and catastrophic losses, became a powerful emblem of Polish sacrifice without reward, and a lens through which writers like Jaszowski reflected on national loss and the moral costs of freedom on a global stage. Mulatka remains little known within the broader literary historiography of the Haitian Revolution. Unlike Polak w St. Domingo, it is absent from major Anglophone studies and survives only in a small number of institutional copies, all held in Poland.
Price: $6,500.00