SOURCE: Slawek, Tadeusz and Donald Wesling. “The Exiled Voice in Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.” Acta Litteraria XXXI, nos. 1-4 (1989) 311-40.

In the following essay, Slawek and Wesling maintain that Mickiewicz celebrates a mythic, ideal tradition of Poland in Pan Tadeusz.

Pan Tadeusz, written in Paris (1832-34), emerges from a political and cultural situation wound through with paradoxes. It is a long epic poem in twelve books dealing with various aspects of the social life of the landed gentry, in Lithuania, closing with the arrival of the Polish legions in the service of Napoleon and their departure for the ill-starred Moscow adventure of 1812. Although the beginning of the plot can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1811, it is important to realize that as a national epic its initial stimulus goes back to the life of a culture, and can hardly be confined to the temporal scheme...