SOURCE: "Polish Romanticism before 1830," in A Survey of Polish Literature and Culture, translated by Olga Scherer-Virski, Mouton & Co., 1956, pp. 213-40. [In the following excerpt, Kridl comments on the career, works, style, and overall contribution of Mickiewicz to Polish Romanticism.]

As a movement, romanticism affected not only literature but also certain other domains of intellectual and cultural life. . . . In different countries and among many writers of the same epoch and of the same general literary direction, the movement revealed a variety of facets. If we take such representative romantic poets and writers as Byron and Shelley in England, Novalis, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, and Kleist in Germany, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, and Vigny in France, Manzoni in Italy, Mickiewicz and Słowacki in Poland, Lermontov in Russia, and so on, we notice that each of them represents a distinct creative individuality, a distinct creative style, although the problems they...