SOURCE: Dudli, Monika A. “Pan Tadeusz and the Epic Tradition” and “Some Conclusions.” In Pushkin, Mickiewicz and The Overcoming of romanticism, pp. 33-55. Stanford, CA: Stanford Honors Essays in Humanities, 1976.

In the following essay, Dudli examines the unique aspects of Pan Tadeusz, comparing it with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Where Pushkin's choice of genre, the novel in verse, synthesized a number of eighteenth-century and contemporary strains, and yet unmistakably anticipated the forms and themes of the nineteenth century, Pan Tadeusz is a work of culmination and reminiscence, in form as much as in content. It is difficult to classify decisively as a novel in verse, a heroic or mock-heroic epic, or even a fairytale, but one thing is clear: it is not a forerunner of the nineteenth-century novel, in spite of its incorporation of some of the techniques of realism. Mickiewicz composed his masterpiece at the same time that...