The Lithuania of its subtitle, and of its invocation—“Lithuania! My homeland! You are health alone. / Your worth can only ever be known by one / Who’s lost you”—refers to the land of Mickiewicz’s childhood, one of the two historical entities constituting the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that some forty years earlier had been partitioned out of existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The remainder of the subtitle enumerates the key elements of the poem: the climactic event around which the plot is organized as well as the sentiment informing it; the milieu as well as purported time in which it takes place; its length (9721 lines, to be exact); and even, perhaps, a suggestion regarding its genre. Just as significant, though, is the name of its author, Poland’s national poet (1798–1855), whose symbolic autobiography conditions how the poem ought, in part, to be read.

Set in a Polish-Lithuanian backwater of what in 1811 was the Russian Empire, Pan Tadeusz tells the tale of two feuding families, the Soplicas and the Horeszkos, and the budding love between the scion of the former, the eponymous Tadeusz, and Zosia, an orphaned descendant of the latter, who is being raised at the Soplicas’ by a distant relative with her own amorous designs on the young man. The ostensible bone of contention between the two families is a half-ruined castle on the Soplicas’ estate to which the Romantically inclined Count, a distaff Horeszko, decides to lay claim, thanks to the goading of the castle’s Steward and sworn enemy of the Soplicas. Having resolved to take the castle by force, the two call to their aid the neighboring Dobrzyńskis, a fractious gentry clan of very modest means with its own list of grievances against the prosperous Soplicas. As they are staging their foray, a detachment of Russian soldiers arrives to restore order, in response to which the feuding parties join forces to repel a common enemy. This act of armed resistance against the occupying power compels the Polish combatants to flee into exile, where they are nonetheless able to contribute to Poland’s liberation struggle by enlisting in Napoleon’s Polish Legions. The final two books of Pan Tadeusz chronicle the exiles’ triumphant return with the Grande Armée in the spring of 1812, marking the passing of old gentry Poland and its attendant rebirth as a modern nation. The poem concludes with the engagement of Tadeusz and Zosia, at which the guests are treated to a magnificent centerpiece representing the collective’s ethos, a musical retelling of recent Polish history performed on a dulcimer by a Jewish innkeeper, and a toast enjoining those gathered—and reading—to “love one another.”

Like most feuds, the conflict between the Soplicas and the Horeszkos has its origins in a personal drama sometime in the past. Stung by his rejection for the hand of Zosia’s mother, the daughter of the haughty magnate Horeszko, Tadeusz’s father Jacek Soplica, a spirited but impecunious gentryman, had shot the girl’s father just as a Russian garrison was about to storm the latter’s castle, in this way conflating a personal as well as social transgression with (the appearance of) national apostasy. To atone, Jacek donned a monastic habit and assumed the self-abasing name Robak (“worm”). His subsequent engagement as a warrior-monk in the Napoleonic wars, then as a secret emissary who appears in his native Lithuania to prepare the ground for the arrival of Bonaparte’s army, and, finally, his fatal lunge during the foray that shields the Count, the last male of the Horeszko line, from a Russian bullet are all gestures that serve as a template for the collective’s transformation, one founded on sacrifice and thankless toil for the national cause. Jacek’s change of identity marks yet one more in a series of metamorphoses that had come to characterize Mickiewicz’s fictional heroes over the years, each commencing a new chapter in the poet’s symbolic autobiography.

Together with the posthumously published epilogue to the poem, which speaks poignantly of the poet’s sense of émigré dislocation and ache for the land of his childhood, the autobiographical subtext situates Pan Tadeusz squarely in the Romantic nineteenth century. So, too, do the names of Walter Scott and Goethe (as author of the idyll Hermann und Dorothea), which crop up in connection with the early stages of Mickiewicz’s work on the poem. Yet already from its opening thirteen-syllabic line, the traditional meter of Polish epic poetry since the sixteenth century, the poem’s own epic intentions are clear. Pan Tadeusz is a foundational narrative about change and continuity, in which, as one of its early readers put it, “one can not only read [a nation’s] entire soul, but even recognize those everyday features […] that constitute passage from the generation of the dead to the generation of the living, bond it with the future, and bring forth from the grave the nucleus of a future life” (Stanisław Worcell to Mickiewicz, 7 November 1838, Listy, 392–93). And it is precisely Mickiewicz’s capacity to materialize those everyday features, to evoke in a poetic language of remarkable concreteness the colors, smells, and sounds of a provincial, backward world on the verge of extinction, with its bear hunts and tribunals, repasts and vegetable patches, gentry estates and Jewish taverns, petty quarrels and forays, that renders a seamless, “noumenal” tapestry, wherein nature constitutes the woof to society’s warp and where amid humor and pathos there is no room for winter. As yet another early reader of the poem proclaimed, in Pan Tadeusz “the Polish nation will never die” (Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz to Stefan Witwicki, 15 July 1837, Korespondencja, 70).