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Pan Tadeusz
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Overview
- Full title
- Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie. Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem (Sir Thaddeus, or The Last Foray in Lithuania: A Tale of the Gentry in the Years 1811 and 1812, in Twelve Books of Verse)
- Author
- Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), born near Nowogródek in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania; in exile from Russian-ruled lands from 1829
- Written and published
- Written in Paris, 1832–34; published in Paris in June 1834
- Form
- Twelve books, nearly 10,000 lines of the Polish thirteen-syllable line in rhymed couplets
- Setting
- Soplicowo and its neighbourhood in Russian-ruled Lithuania, near the Niemen
- Time of action
- Five days in late summer 1811 (Books I–X) and one day in spring 1812 (Books XI–XII), on the eve of Napoleon's invasion of Russia
- Narrator
- An exiled poet remembering his homeland, who appears as a guest in the last line
- Genre
- Verse epic of gentry life, combining idyll, comedy, mock-heroic and national history
- Translations quoted
- G. R. Noyes, prose (1917), main quote edition; Maude Ashurst Biggs, blank verse (1885), for some verse quotations
- Famous for
- The invocation 'Lithuania, my country', the mushroom-gathering and hunting scenes, Jankiel's concert and the polonaise
Context
Adam Mickiewicz was born in 1798 near Nowogródek, in lands of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had passed to Russia in the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He studied at the University of Wilno, where he belonged to the student societies of the Philomaths and Philarets; in 1823–24 he was arrested and sent into internal exile in Russia. His Ballads and Romances (1822) are usually taken as the start of Polish Romanticism, and in Russia he wrote the Crimean Sonnets and Konrad Wallenrod (Welsh 1966) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Mickiewicz left Russia in 1829 and never returned to Lithuania. He did not take part in the November Uprising of 1830–31, a fact that troubled him, and after its defeat he settled in Paris among the thousands of Polish exiles known as the Great Emigration. There he published the third part of Forefathers' Eve and The Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrimage (1832), and began Pan Tadeusz as, in part, an escape from the bitter quarrels of émigré politics (Koropeckyj 2008) (Kridl 1951).
The poem looks back to 1811–12, the moment when Napoleon's war with Russia seemed to promise the restoration of Poland. The Duchy of Warsaw had been created in 1807, Polish legions had fought for France since 1797, and Lithuanian gentry hoped for liberation. By 1834 all these hopes had failed twice, in 1812 and in 1831, and the poem's recovery of a vanished world is coloured by that knowledge (Davies 2005) (Zamoyski 2004).
Pan Tadeusz combines many traditions: the classical epic, with its invocations and similes; the gentry's oral tale (gawęda); the descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century; Walter Scott's historical novel; and comic poetry. Mickiewicz drafted an epilogue, published only after his death, in which he speaks of the exiles' sufferings on the streets of Paris and of his wish that the book might reach country houses at home. The poem became the national classic of Polish literature, read in schools and often regarded as the last great European epic (Miłosz 1983) (Weintraub 1954) (Krzyżanowski 1978).
Mickiewicz wrote little poetry after 1834. He held the chair of Slavic literatures at the Collège de France from 1840 to 1844, became a follower of the mystic Andrzej Towiański, and in 1855 travelled to Constantinople to organise a Polish legion in the Crimean War, where he died that November. His remains were moved to Wawel Cathedral in Kraków in 1890 (Koropeckyj 2008) (Lednicki 1956).
Plot overview
In the summer of 1811 young Tadeusz Soplica returns from Wilno to the manor of his uncle, the Judge. The neighbourhood is divided by a lawsuit over the ruined castle of the Horeszko family, now claimed by the young Count, a distant Horeszko relative. The castle's old Warden, Gerwazy, tells the Count how Jacek Soplica, the Judge's brother, killed the last Horeszko lord, the Pantler, years before. Tadeusz is torn between the worldly Telimena and her young ward Zosia, while a mysterious Bernardine, Father Robak, works secretly to prepare the gentry for an uprising when Napoleon invades.
Days of hunting, feasting, mushroom-gathering and disputes end in a brawl at the castle. Gerwazy rouses the poor gentry of Dobrzyn and, with the Count, they attack Soplicowo in a foray. Russian troops arrive and arrest the attackers, but the Poles unite and defeat them. The participants must flee to the Duchy of Warsaw.
The dying Robak reveals that he is Jacek Soplica, Tadeusz's father. He confesses his pride, his crime and his life of penance, and Gerwazy forgives him.
In spring 1812 the Polish and French armies enter Lithuania. Jacek is honoured posthumously, the feud ends, Tadeusz and Zosia are betrothed and decide to free their serfs, and the last old-Polish banquet ends with Jankiel's concert and the polonaise.
Book by book
Book 1: The Farm
Book I (Polish: Gospodarstwo)
Summary
The poem opens with an invocation to Lithuania, compared to health, which is valued only once it is lost, and to the Virgin of Częstochowa and the Ostra Brama in Wilno, who once restored the poet to health as a child. The narrator asks to be carried back in spirit to the fields along the Niemen. The scene then settles on Soplicowo, the modest manor of the Judge Soplica, where young Tadeusz returns from his studies in Wilno at the end of summer 1811.
Wandering into his old room, Tadeusz glimpses a girl at the window who flees in confusion. At supper, which is laid out in the ruined castle of the Horeszkos nearby, he sits beside the elegant Telimena and wrongly assumes she was the girl. The Judge delivers a lecture on courtesy and the old order of precedence; the Chamberlain (Podkomorzy) mocks the fashion for French manners; and two neighbours, the Assessor and the Notary, begin a long dispute over the merits of their hounds, Bobtail and Falcon. The Seneschal (Wojski) laments the decline of hunting, and the last Apparitor of the old courts, Protazy, is introduced. The book ends with a sketch of Lithuania under Russian rule, where people wait for news of Napoleon and the mysterious Bernardine Father Robak, scarred like a soldier, moves among the gentry.
Analysis
The invocation sets the poem's double perspective. The 'I' who speaks is an exile in Paris who knows that what he describes is lost, and the world he describes is seen with an affection that comes precisely from distance. The famous comparison with health makes the homeland a condition of well-being rather than a political abstraction, and the Marian prayer joins private memory (the poet's childhood cure) to the hope of national restoration (Weintraub 1954) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Book I also establishes the poem's comic economy. Manners, precedence, clothes and table order are described with loving exactness, but the Judge's sermon on courtesy and the Chamberlain's tirade against French fashions are themselves performances of an old world that knows it is old. The quarrel over the two dogs, trivial and endless, is a miniature of the gentry's love of litigation and dispute, which on a larger scale will produce the castle feud and the foray (Miłosz 1983).
LITHUANIA, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee.
The opening of the invocation. 'Lithuania' here means the historic Grand Duchy, the poet's native region within the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Litva! my country, like art thou to health, For how to prize thee he alone can tell Who has lost thee.
Biggs's blank-verse rendering of the same lines, closer to the movement of the original verse, though Mickiewicz writes in rhymed couplets.
but each day I perceive how our young men suffer because there are no schools that teach how to conduct oneself in polite society.
The Judge's lecture on courtesy: the old gentry's code is presented with sympathy and a smile.
Book 2: The Castle
Book II (Polish: Zamek)
Summary
At dawn Robak wakes Tadeusz for a hare hunt. The young Count, a distant relative of the Horeszkos who has returned from abroad full of Romantic and Gothic tastes, visits the ruined castle and meets its last retainer, the Warden (Klucznik) Gerwazy. The castle is the subject of a lawsuit between the Count and the Judge. Gerwazy tells the story of the last of the Horeszkos: the Pantler (Stolnik) had welcomed the swaggering young Jacek Soplica, who loved his daughter Eva, but refused him her hand. Later, when Russian troops attacked the castle, a shot from Jacek killed the Pantler, who with his dying gesture pointed out the culprit. Gerwazy swore vengeance.
From the castle the Count sees a girl in white gathering cucumbers in the Judge's garden; Robak breaks the spell, warning him off with a joke. At breakfast Telimena tells a story of St Petersburg society, the dispute over Bobtail and Falcon flares up again, and Robak and the Seneschal calm it. A wager is set to be settled by a hunt, and the company goes off to gather mushrooms.
Analysis
Gerwazy's tale is the poem's buried tragedy, told in the manner of an old servant's gawęda (a garrulous oral tale). It gives the feud its origin and its moral weight, but it is a partial account, told by a partisan who saw only the shot and not its causes; Book X will retell the same events from the other side. The structure of withheld knowledge, in which the reader learns the truth only at the end, is one of the ways the poem turns a domestic quarrel into a story of guilt and atonement (Weintraub 1954) (Welsh 1966).
The Count is the poem's satirical portrait of a Romantic: he reads the ruin as a Gothic setting, is moved to vengeance by a picturesque tale and falls in love with a girl seen from afar. Mickiewicz, the author of Romantic ballads and Konrad Wallenrod, here laughs at the posture he had helped make fashionable (Miłosz 1983).
For in Lithuania a hunter is like a ship upon the sea; wherever he will, and by whatever path he will, he roams far and wide!
The open landscape of memory, before fences and boundaries: hunting is both a social ritual and an image of freedom.
I recognised that villain Soplica, I recognised him!
Gerwazy's account of the Pantler's death, the origin of the feud and of his oath of vengeance.
“Will you have cucumbers?” he cried; “Here they are!”
Robak, holding up the knotted cord of his Bernardine belt, interrupts the Count's spying on Zosia: the monk watches over the girl whose identity is still a secret.
Book 3: Flirtation
Book III (Polish: Umizgi)
Summary
The Count steals into the garden and watches the mysterious girl feeding geese, but she escapes. The company gathers mushrooms in silence, each kind described with its place in song and lore. In a garden pavilion, the 'Temple of Meditation', Telimena receives Tadeusz and flirts with him. She also discusses with the Judge the plans for Tadeusz's future, which, unknown to the young man, are bound up with her ward Zosia.
The Count sketches the landscape and argues that only the Italian sky is fit for painting; Telimena tells of the painter Orłowski's homesickness in St Petersburg, and Tadeusz answers with an eloquent description of Lithuanian clouds. A bell calls the company to dinner, Telimena passes Tadeusz a love note, and a cry goes up that a bear has been sighted.
Analysis
The quarrel about the sky is a small manifesto. Against the Count's borrowed aesthetic of the Italian picturesque, Tadeusz claims the native landscape as worthy of art. The poem itself is the proof of his case: its descriptions of clouds, forests, mushrooms and weather are among its most admired passages, and they turn ordinary Lithuanian nature into poetry without making it exotic (Weintraub 1954) (Witkowska 1975).
Mushroom-gathering shows Mickiewicz's habit of mock-heroic comparison. The gentry in their linen dusters move through the wood like shades in the Elysian Fields, an epic simile applied to a domestic pastime. The effect is affectionate rather than deflating: the poem treats everyday rituals as if they had the dignity of epic, and lets the reader feel both the dignity and the comedy (Miłosz 1983).
In them the Count saw an image of the shades in the Elysian Fields, who, not subject to disease or care, wander calm and quiet, but gloomy.
A classical simile for silent mushroom-gatherers: the mock-heroic tone in miniature.
and sky, the Italian sky! Hence in landscape art Italy was, is, and will be the country of painters.
The Count's fashionable aesthetic, which the poem answers through Tadeusz.
that Italian sky of yours, so far as I have heard of it, is blue and clear, but yet is like frozen water: are not wind and storm a hundred times more beautiful?
Tadeusz's defence of the northern sky, a statement of the poem's own poetics.
Book 4: Diplomacy and the Chase
Book IV (Polish: Dyplomatyka i łowy)
Summary
Tadeusz wakes to see a girl in curl papers at his window and realises that the girl of the first evening was not Telimena. Galloping to join the hunt, he passes the rival inns by the forest chapel, one of them kept by the Jewish innkeeper and dulcimer player Jankiel. There Robak, acting as an emissary, talks to the gentry about Napoleon, the Polish army in the Duchy of Warsaw and the hope of liberation, steering the conversation with the help of his snuffbox.
In the forest a bear charges Tadeusz and the Count; both miss, and the bear is brought down by a single shot from the old Horeszko carbine, fired by Robak, which settles the hunters' argument about famous muskets. The Seneschal plays his great horn, whose echoes seem to fill the whole forest. Over bigos, the hunters' stew, he tells the tale of the duel of Dowejko and Domejko.
Analysis
Robak's speech in the inn makes the politics of the poem explicit for the first time. The monk is preparing the gentry for an uprising to coincide with Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and his presentation of Napoleon as a good Catholic is diplomacy for a pious audience. The reader is not yet told who he is, but his skill, his scars and his secret care for Tadeusz are signs that he has a past to atone for (Koropeckyj 2008).
The Seneschal's horn concert is the first of three great musical set pieces (the others are Jankiel's concert and the polonaise in Book XII). Music in the poem is a form of memory: the horn imitates the whole history of a hunt, and its echo, which goes on after the player has stopped, is an image of the poem itself, which keeps sounding a world that has fallen silent (Weintraub 1954).
His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon is a most exemplary Catholic; the Pope himself anointed him
Robak's political tact: the emissary adapts the Napoleonic cause to his listeners' piety.
In the horn there seemed to be a hundred horns;
The Seneschal's performance, which holds a whole hunt in a single instrument.
the oaks repeated it to the oaks and the beeches to the beeches.
The echo through the forest: nature preserves and repeats the music.
Book 5: The Brawl
Book V (Polish: Kłótnia)
Summary
Telimena plans how to win either the Count or Tadeusz, and prepares her ward Zosia for her entry into society. Zosia is seen feeding her birds, surrounded by poultry, doves and peacocks. Tadeusz, now aware of his mistake, is angry with Telimena, but they are reconciled in the Temple of Meditation, helped by some ants that send Telimena leaping from her seat.
At supper in the castle hall the conversation turns to the hunt, and the Seneschal begins a story about Rejtan and the Prince de Nassau. A reconciliation between the Judge and the Count seems possible, but Gerwazy appears with the castle key and taunts the guests; the old clock strikes, insults fly, and the feast turns into a brawl. Afterwards the Count and Gerwazy decide to take the law into their own hands.
Analysis
Book V shows how near peace and violence lie in this society. Every reconciliation is interrupted, and the cause is less real hatred than pride, memory and the theatre of honour. Gerwazy's appearance with the key, the symbol of his office and of the Horeszkos' claim to the castle, turns a dispute over property into a ritual of vengeance (Welsh 1966).
Telimena is the poem's comic counterpart to the noble heroines of Romantic verse. She is calculating, theatrical and cosmopolitan, but the narrator treats her with amusement rather than scorn, and her schemes keep the love plot moving (Miłosz 1983).
she was pursuing two beasts; she was searching for means to invest and capture them both at once—the Count and Thaddeus.
Telimena's 'hunt' parodies the men's chase in Book IV.
a thousand eyes like stars glittered upon Zosia.
Zosia among her birds: the image presents her as a figure of the household and of nature, the opposite of Telimena.
Book 6: The Hamlet
Book VI (Polish: Zaścianek)
Summary
Preparations for the foray begin. The Apparitor Protazy sets out to serve legal papers on the Count, but finds his household already gone. Meanwhile Robak and the Judge confer: Robak tells the Judge of the coming war and of the rising planned in Lithuania, and urges him to end the quarrel with the Count.
The narrator then describes Dobrzyn, a hamlet of poor gentry (a zaścianek), famous for brave men and beautiful women, and its patriarch Maciek Dobrzyński, a veteran of the confederations and of Kościuszko's time, who lives austerely among his kin and is respected for his judgement.
Analysis
The zaścianek shows the lower end of the gentry estate: families who were legally noble, with coats of arms and the right to vote at the dietines, but who lived and worked like peasants. Their poverty, pride and dependence on great patrons made them easy to mobilise for private wars, and Mickiewicz treats them with a mix of affection and critical clarity (Davies 2005).
Maciek is one of the poem's moral centres. Old, sceptical and honest, he remembers the last years of the Commonwealth and distrusts both the magnates and easy enthusiasm. His presence prepares the debate of Book VII, where good sense is drowned by rhetoric (Welsh 1966).
The hamlet of Dobrzyn has a wide reputation in Lithuania for the bravery of its gentlemen and the beauty of its gentlewomen.
The opening of the description of the zaścianek.
Now they were forced to work for themselves, like mere serfs, except that they did not wear peasants’ russet doublets
The economic decline of the petty gentry, distinguished from peasants mainly by dress and privilege.
Book 7: The Consultation
Book VII (Polish: Rada)
Summary
The gentry of Dobrzyn meet at Maciek's house. Bartek 'the Prussian' talks of the Prussians; Maciek 'the Sprinkler' argues for fighting; Buchmann proposes a political programme with committees; Jankiel advises harmony, and is cut short when Gerwazy raises his huge sword, the 'Penknife'.
Gerwazy's speech, an appeal to the Horeszko name, to old grievances against the Judge and to the coming liberation, carries the assembly. Old Maciek protests that the gentry are being used and leaves them to their folly. The Count arrives with his armed retainers, and the cry goes up: 'Down with the Soplica!'
Analysis
The consultation is a satirical miniature of a dietine (sejmik), the local assembly of the gentry, with its factions, set speeches and appeals to liberty. The narrator shows how eloquence can turn private grudges, about cattle, timber and boundaries, into a cause. The scene reflects the critique, common in the Polish emigration, that the gentry's anarchic freedom had helped destroy the Commonwealth (Davies 2005) (Walicki 1982).
Jankiel's attempt to counsel peace, cut off by the Penknife, is an early sign of his role as the poem's loyal outsider, whose voice is heard only when it is too late (Opalski 1992).
“Where you go,” cried all the gentry, “where you go, there will we go also! Long live the Horeszkos! Vivant the Half-Goats! Vivat the Warden Rembajlo! Down with the Soplica!”
The climax of the dietine: rhetoric and family loyalty overwhelm Maciek's caution.
And thus the eloquent Gerwazy carried them all away, for all had their grudges against the Judge, as is usual among neighbours
The narrator's dry explanation of how private quarrels become a cause.
Book 8: The Foray
Book VIII (Polish: Zajazd)
Summary
In the calm before the storm, the Seneschal talks about the stars and the Chamberlain about the great comet of 1811, taken as an omen of war. In the Judge's room Robak and the Judge speak mysteriously. Tadeusz, now in love with Zosia, tries to break gracefully with Telimena and only provokes her fury, like a 'new Dido'.
At night the Count and the gentry of Dobrzyn attack Soplicowo in a foray (zajazd), the old practice of enforcing a legal claim by force. Protazy makes a last legal protest and escapes through the hemp. The house is taken, the Judge and his household are held captive, the gentry slaughter livestock for a feast, and Gerwazy acts as butler at a banquet of victory.
Analysis
The zajazd gives the poem its subtitle, 'the last foray in Lithuania'. The custom belonged to a world where courts could issue judgements but the gentry often enforced them themselves. Mickiewicz describes it as both a comic war and a sign of the lawlessness that weakened the old state; the word 'last' marks the end of an era, and the coming of a larger war in which these quarrels will be absorbed (Davies 2005) (Miłosz 1983).
The comet links the domestic plot to history. Its appearance in 1811 was widely read as a portent, and the poem uses it to make the reader feel the approach of Napoleon's campaign behind the noise of the foray (Zamoyski 2004).
BEFORE a thunderstorm there is a quiet, sullen moment, when the cloud that has gathered over men’s heads stops and with threatening countenance checks the breath of the winds;
The opening of Book VIII: an extended simile of suspense.
After this protest, which resounded like the last cannon shot on conquered ramparts, all resistance subsided in the mansion of the Soplicas.
Protazy's legal protest given the grandeur of a battle: law and war meet in mock-heroic form.
Book 9: The Battle
Book IX (Polish: Bitwa)
Summary
While the victors sleep off their feast, Russian troops, called in to restore order, arrive under Major Płut and Captain Ryków and seize the gentry. Robak appears, apparently collecting alms. Płut, drunk and insolent, offends the women and provokes a pistol shot that starts the fight.
The gentry, the Count's men and the Judge's household now fight together against the Russians. Maciek, the Sprinkler and others perform great deeds, the Seneschal turns the battle with a well-aimed manoeuvre, Robak directs the defence and is wounded, and the Russians are defeated. Gerwazy's bloody deeds include the death of Płut.
Analysis
The battle reverses the logic of the foray. The feuding Poles unite against the occupier, and the private war becomes a rehearsal for the national uprising. The fighting is told in the mock-heroic style of the rest of the poem, with comic individual feats, but the narrative now points clearly towards 1812 (Weintraub 1954).
The two Russian officers are not drawn alike. Płut is a Pole in Russian service, vulgar and corrupt, while Ryków is an old soldier with a sense of honour. The contrast keeps the poem's politics from simple national caricature (Koropeckyj 2008).
lighted it with a bank note,
Major Płut's vulgar display, part of the portrait of the corrupt official in Russian service.
“Surrender, Judge, or I will order your house to be burned!”
Captain Ryków's demand at the turning point of the battle.
Book 10: The Emigration. Jacek
Book X (Polish: Emigracja. Jacek)
Summary
A storm breaks after the battle. The victors consider how to escape punishment; Ryków agrees to a version of events that will protect them, and the gentry who fought, Tadeusz among them, prepare to flee across the Niemen to the Duchy of Warsaw to join the Polish legions. Tadeusz takes leave of Zosia.
The wounded Robak calls Gerwazy and the Judge and reveals that he is Jacek Soplica, the Judge's brother and Tadeusz's father. He tells his story: his love for Eva Horeszko, the Pantler's contemptuous refusal, his pride, the shot fired in rage during the Russian attack, the stigma of being called a traitor, his refusal of Russian rewards, and his years of penance as a monk, emissary and soldier (he was wounded at Jena). He secretly supported Eva's orphaned daughter Zosia. Gerwazy forgives him, revealing that the dying Pantler had made the sign of the cross towards him. News of the coming war arrives and Jacek dies.
Analysis
Jacek's confession is the moral and structural key to the poem. It retells Gerwazy's tale of Book II from the inside, and transforms a story of villainy into one of pride, error and long atonement. The Romantic hero of passion becomes a penitent working anonymously for the nation, and his life shows a path from private violence to public service that the gentry as a whole must learn (Weintraub 1954) (Koropeckyj 2008).
The confession is also where the poem's personal and national themes meet. Jacek was called a traitor though he refused to serve Russia, and the distinction between appearing a traitor and being one recalls the Targowica Confederation of 1792, the real betrayal that haunts the poem. The forgiveness between Gerwazy and Jacek anticipates the reconciliation of the families (Welsh 1966) (Kridl 1951).
“I am Jacek Soplica.”
The revelation of Robak's identity, made to the man who has sworn to kill him.
“The Horeszkos refuse a wench to a Soplica! They serve me, Jacek, with black soup!
Jacek recalls his wounded pride: the 'black soup' was a traditional sign that a suitor was rejected.
There is merit in refusing to betray your country, though your own people proclaim you a traitor! Especially for a man who had such pride as mine!
The core of Jacek's self-defence and penance.
Book 11: The Year 1812
Book XI (Polish: Rok 1812)
Summary
The narrator hails 1812, the year of harvest and the year of war, and describes the omens of spring: restless cattle, anxious peasants, birds returning early, and then the bright plumes and pennons of the armies. The Polish and French forces enter Lithuania, and Soplicowo receives Generals Dąbrowski and Kniaziewicz with their officers.
After a church service, Jacek Soplica is publicly rehabilitated: his services to the national cause are proclaimed, and he is posthumously awarded the cross of the Legion of Honour. Gerwazy and Protazy let it be understood that the lawsuit will end; Tadeusz, now an uhlan officer, and Zosia meet in a love scene; the dispute over Bobtail and Falcon is finally settled; and three betrothed couples are presented to the generals.
Analysis
The apostrophe to 1812 is one of the most famous passages in Polish poetry. Written after the failure of Napoleon's campaign and of the November Uprising, it remembers a moment of pure hope, and the narrator knows, as his first readers did, that the hope was disappointed. The poem's joy is therefore retrospective, an act of memory rather than of prophecy (Zamoyski 2004) (Miłosz 1983).
Jacek's rehabilitation joins the private plot to the national one: the traitor of local gossip is honoured by the army of the restored Poland. The settlement of the dogs' dispute, alongside these great events, keeps the poem's comic proportion between history and everyday life (Weintraub 1954).
MEMORABLE year! Happy is he who beheld thee in our land! The folk still call thee the year of harvest, but the soldiers the year of war;
The opening apostrophe to 1812.
Thou year! who in our country thee beheld, The year of beauty calls thee even now, But year of war the soldier;
Biggs's verse version of the same passage.
Book 12: Let Us Love One Another!
Book XII (Polish: Kochajmy się!)
Summary
At the last old-Polish banquet, the Seneschal, acting as marshal, seats the guests and explains the great centrepiece, a sugar landscape showing the history of a dietine, which changes with the seasons as it melts. Dąbrowski and Kniaziewicz receive gifts, and Gerwazy shows the generals his Penknife. Tadeusz, with Zosia's consent, announces that they will free their serfs, and Gerwazy suggests that the freed peasants should be ennobled with the families' coats of arms.
Jankiel is persuaded by Zosia to play the dulcimer. His concert recalls the Constitution of 3 May 1791, the treason of Targowica, the massacre of Praga, the song of the wandering soldier and Dąbrowski's Mazurka, 'Poland has not yet perished', and he hails Dąbrowski as the Jews await the Messiah. The Chamberlain leads the polonaise with Zosia, and the guests say that he may be the last to lead it in such a style. The feast continues into the evening with toasts to all present and to the dead, and the narrator closes by saying that he was among the guests and has written what he saw.
Analysis
Book XII gathers the whole poem into a final ceremony. The centrepiece, the concert and the polonaise each compress history into art: the dietine in sugar, the Commonwealth's last decades in music, and the old social order in a dance. All three are fragile and fleeting, and the cry that the Chamberlain 'is perhaps the last' sums up the elegiac mood (Weintraub 1954) (Witkowska 1975).
Jankiel's concert is the poem's culminating image of national memory, and it is significant that it is given to a Jewish musician. Critics have praised the portrait as a vision of Polish–Jewish fellowship, and have also noted its limits: Jankiel's patriotism is measured by Polish standards, and the narrator's tone, however warm, belongs to its time (Opalski 1986) (Opalski 1992).
The emancipation of the serfs looks forward to the reforms that the Polish emigration debated in the 1830s. Gerwazy's objection that liberty belongs to gentlemen, and his comic solution of ennoblement, show the old order trying to adjust its categories to a new idea (Walicki 1982) (Davies 2005).
“I know, I know those notes; that is Targowica!”
Gerwazy recognises the false chord in Jankiel's concert: the treason of 1792 rendered as discord.
the honest Jew loved his country like a Pole!
The narrator's comment on Jankiel, both generous and revealing of its assumptions.
shall the peasants by that happy change gain only this much, that they receive another lord?
Tadeusz's argument for freeing the serfs.
And I was there among the guests, and there drank wine and mead; And what I saw and heard I wrote, that all of you might read.
The closing lines, which Noyes sets in rhyme: the narrator places himself at the feast, in the manner of a folk-tale ending.
Characters
Soplicas
- Tadeusz Soplica
- The title character, about twenty, the Judge's nephew and, as he learns only at the end, Jacek Soplica's son. Good-natured, impulsive and not very reflective, he moves from an infatuation with Telimena to love for Zosia, and from the domestic world of Soplicowo to the Polish army. He is less a hero than the centre around whom the world of the poem gathers; his decision to free the serfs gives him a mature role in the last book.
- The Judge (Sędzia) Soplica
- Jacek's younger brother and the master of Soplicowo, a hospitable, conservative and slightly pompous guardian of old customs. His lecture on courtesy in Book I is a statement of the gentry ideal. He is drawn into the feud through pride, but he is reconciled readily at the end.
- Jacek Soplica / Father Robak
- Once the most famous brawler of the district, he loved Eva Horeszko, was refused, and in a moment of rage shot her father. Branded a traitor, he became a Bernardine monk under the name Robak ('worm'), served as an emissary and soldier, and secretly arranged the futures of Tadeusz and Zosia. His deathbed confession and his rehabilitation make him the poem's tragic hero.
- Protazy Brzechalski
- The Apparitor (Woźny), the court officer who serves summonses and makes official proclamations. He is a comic survivor of the old legal culture of the Commonwealth; his last protest during the foray shows law reduced to a ritual.
- Telimena
- A relative of the Soplicas and guardian of Zosia, a sophisticated woman who has lived in St Petersburg. Vain, calculating and charming, she flirts with Tadeusz and the Count before settling for the Notary. She embodies the cosmopolitan manners that the poem mocks, but without bitterness.
- The Seneschal (Wojski) Hreczecha
- An old gentleman of the household, master of the hunt and of ceremony, storyteller and horn player. His tales and his management of the banquet make him a guardian of tradition.
Horeszkos
- The Count (Hrabia)
- A young magnate and distant relative of the Horeszkos, back from Italy with Romantic tastes for ruins, art and heroic gestures. He is a gently satirised figure of fashionable Romanticism, but he fights bravely against the Russians and joins the army in 1812.
- Gerwazy Rębajło
- The Warden (Klucznik) of the castle and last servant of the Horeszkos, with his enormous sword, the Penknife (Scyzoryk). Loyal, violent and eloquent, he keeps the feud alive and sparks the foray. His forgiveness of Jacek is one of the poem's turning points.
- Zosia (Zofia)
- The granddaughter of the Pantler and daughter of Eva, brought up in seclusion at Soplicowo at Jacek's expense. Associated with the garden, birds and household, she is the poem's ideal of natural innocence, and her marriage to Tadeusz reconciles the two families.
Neutral
- The Chamberlain (Podkomorzy)
- The highest-ranking local dignitary, a polished old gentleman who mocks foreign fashions and leads the final polonaise, perhaps 'the last' to dance it in the old style.
- Jankiel
- A Jewish innkeeper and master of the dulcimer (cymbały), a Polish patriot who works with Robak. His concert in Book XII is the poem's great summary of national history.
- The Assessor and the Notary
- Two neighbours whose endless dispute over their hounds, Bobtail (Kusy) and Falcon (Sokół), runs as a comic refrain through the poem.
Dobrzyn gentry
- Maciek Dobrzyński
- The aged head of the hamlet of Dobrzyn, a veteran of the last wars of the Commonwealth, sceptical and wise. He protests against the foray but fights bravely in the battle.
Russians
- Major Płut and Captain Ryków
- Officers of the Russian garrison. Płut, a Pole in Russian service, is corrupt and vulgar; Ryków is an honourable old soldier. Their contrast prevents the poem's enemies from being uniform.
Polish army
- Generals Dąbrowski and Kniaziewicz
- Historical commanders of the Polish legions, who visit Soplicowo in 1812. Their presence marks the meeting of the poem's domestic world with history.
Themes
Exile and the lost homeland
The poem is written from Paris, about a place the poet cannot return to, and the invocation makes loss the condition of seeing clearly. The precise, loving descriptions of food, clothes, customs and landscape are acts of memory and preservation, and their beauty is inseparable from the knowledge that this world has passed.
The homeland is the historic Lithuania of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multi-ethnic region with a Polish-speaking gentry, Lithuanian and Belarusian peasants and Jewish communities. The poem's 'my country' therefore raises questions about nation and identity that later Lithuanians, Belarusians and Poles have answered differently.
The gentry world and its comedy
Mickiewicz portrays the szlachta with affection and irony together. Their hospitality, courage, sense of honour and love of tradition are celebrated; their litigiousness, quarrels over trifles, vanity and readiness for private war are laughed at. The comedy is never merely satirical: it belongs to an intimacy with the world described.
The poem's mock-heroic style serves this double vision. Epic similes are applied to mushroom-gathering, the hunt and the foray, so that the reader both admires and smiles. The tone allows the poem to be a national epic without becoming a monument.
Guilt, penance and reconciliation
The story of Jacek Soplica gives the poem a moral centre. His crime arises from wounded pride, and his atonement takes the form of anonymous service to the nation. The poem's movement from feud to reconciliation, sealed by the marriage of Tadeusz and Zosia, applies the same pattern to the families and, by implication, to the divided nation.
The motto of the last book, 'Let us love one another', was an old toast; here it becomes a programme for a society that has destroyed itself by quarrels.
History and hope
The domestic plot is framed by Napoleon's campaign of 1812, the last moment of great hope before the failures that followed. The poem's joy is retrospective: the narrator and his readers know that the hope failed. Book XI's celebration of 1812 is therefore both triumphant and elegiac.
Music, especially Jankiel's concert, condenses the history of the Commonwealth's last decades, from the Constitution of 3 May to the partitions and the legions, making the poem a work of collective memory.
Nature and the native landscape
The landscape of Lithuania is described with a precision rare in epic: forests, clouds, birds, mushrooms and weather are presented as worthy of art in themselves. Tadeusz's defence of the Lithuanian sky against the Count's Italian ideal makes this a conscious aesthetic choice.
Old order and social change
The poem honours old customs but does not idealise them uncritically. The freeing of the serfs at the end, and Gerwazy's confused attempt to understand it, show the old order adapting to the ideas of a new age, and reflect debates in the Polish emigration about the peasant question.
Motifs
Quarrels and lawsuits
Disputes over the castle, the dogs, boundaries and precedence run through the poem, from the comic dispute between the Assessor and the Notary to the foray. Their resolution at the end marks the restoration of social harmony.
Music and echoes
The Seneschal's horn, Jankiel's dulcimer and the polonaise are set pieces in which music carries memory. The echo that continues after the horn has stopped is an image of the poem itself.
Meals and feasts
The poem moves from supper to breakfast to banquet: the castle supper, bigos after the hunt, the foray's feast and the last old-Polish banquet. Food and table order express the gentry's social order.
Mistaken identities and secrets
Tadeusz's confusion of Telimena with Zosia, Robak's disguise and Zosia's hidden origin build a plot in which truth emerges slowly.
Omens
The comet of 1811, the restless cattle and birds of spring 1812, and the false chord in Jankiel's concert signal history's approach.
Symbols
The castle
The ruined Horeszko castle stands for the old Commonwealth: noble, disputed, half-ruined and claimed by rival heirs. Its fate mirrors the nation's.
The Penknife (Scyzoryk)
Gerwazy's huge sword, comically named, embodies the old gentry's violent honour; his gift of it to Dąbrowski transfers that violence to the national cause.
The centrepiece
The sugar landscape at the last banquet, depicting a dietine and melting with the seasons, is a symbol of the old political world as beautiful, artful and transient.
Jankiel's dulcimer
The instrument holds the history of the nation in its strings; the broken string of Targowica marks the betrayal that destroyed the Commonwealth.
Critical debates
The last epic?
Pan Tadeusz is often called the last European epic. Its twelve books, invocations, similes and catalogues recall Homer and Virgil, and its subject, the life of a whole community at a moment of historical change, has an epic scope. Weintraub and Miłosz treat it as a successful modern epic, in which the epic's objectivity and fullness are recovered through a narrator's memory (Weintraub 1954) (Miłosz 1983).
Others stress its hybrid character: idyll, comic tale, historical novel in verse in the manner of Scott, and gawęda. The debate turns on whether the poem's comedy and nostalgia are compatible with epic, or whether they make it something new (Witkowska 1975) (Welsh 1966).
Idyll or critique?
A long tradition reads the poem as an idealised picture of gentry life, a consolation for exiles. Its warmth, its happy ending and its affectionate descriptions support this view (Krzyżanowski 1978).
Other readers emphasise the poem's criticism of the szlachta: their lawlessness, their readiness for private war, their susceptibility to rhetoric, and the oppression of the peasants that the ending acknowledges. In this reading the comedy is a moral judgement, and the poem shows the faults that contributed to the fall of the Commonwealth (Davies 2005) (Walicki 1982).
Whose Lithuania?
The opening words address 'Lithuania', meaning the historic Grand Duchy within the Commonwealth, not a modern ethnic nation. The poem's Lithuania is a Polish-speaking gentry world, but its landscape is shared with Lithuanian, Belarusian and Jewish communities.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian nationalisms each claimed Mickiewicz. Historians such as Snyder use the poem to show how a pre-modern patriotism of the Commonwealth was later reinterpreted in national terms (Snyder 2003) (Davies 2005).
Jankiel and the Jews of the poem
Jankiel, a patriotic Jew who plays the history of Poland, has been read as a symbol of Polish–Jewish fellowship. Studies of Polish literature's Jewish characters have noted that he is one of the most sympathetic, and that his concert is the poem's climax (Opalski 1986).
Critics have also observed the limits of the portrait: Jankiel's virtue is measured by Polish patriotism, the narrator's praise has a patronising note, and other references to Jews in the poem repeat common prejudices. The figure thus reveals both the hopes and the assumptions of Polish Romantic culture (Opalski 1992).
Napoleon and the politics of hope
The poem celebrates the Napoleonic hope of 1812, but it was written after that hope had failed. Some readers see in Book XI a Romantic Napoleonic legend; others note that the poem's knowledge of the outcome makes its celebration elegiac and even ironic (Zamoyski 2004).
The relation between Pan Tadeusz and Mickiewicz's messianic writings is also debated. The Books of the Polish Nation present Poland as a suffering Christ among nations; Pan Tadeusz is more earthly and comic, but Jacek's penance and the hope of resurrection in 1812 can be read as a secular version of the same pattern (Walicki 1982) (Koropeckyj 2008).
Jacek Soplica and the Romantic hero
Jacek is often compared with Mickiewicz's earlier heroes, such as Konrad Wallenrod and Konrad of Forefathers' Eve, who act out of passion or patriotic deceit. Jacek's story moves away from Romantic self-assertion to humility and service, and has been read as Mickiewicz's revision of his own Romanticism (Weintraub 1954) (Kridl 1951).
Others argue that Jacek remains a Romantic figure in his secret life, his disguise and his self-sacrifice, so that the poem transforms the Romantic hero rather than abandoning him (Koropeckyj 2008).
Translating Pan Tadeusz
The poem's rhymed thirteen-syllable couplets, its puns, its gentry vocabulary and its comic rhythm make it notoriously hard to translate. English versions range from Biggs's blank verse and Noyes's prose to the later verse translations of Kirkconnell, Mackenzie and Johnston (Mickiewicz 1885) (Mickiewicz 1917) (Mickiewicz 1962) (Mickiewicz 1966) (Mickiewicz 2018).
Prose renders content accurately but loses the music and the comedy of rhyme; verse renders movement but must compromise on meaning. The case of Pan Tadeusz is often cited in discussions of why Mickiewicz's reputation outside Poland has lagged behind his standing at home (Lednicki 1956).
Key passages
LITHUANIA, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee. To-day thy beauty in all its splendour I see and describe, for I yearn for thee.
The opening of the invocation, one of the most famous passages in Polish literature. The homeland is compared with health, valued only after loss, and the poet's act of description is presented as the product of longing. The exile's perspective governs the whole poem.
Litva! my country, like art thou to health, For how to prize thee he alone can tell Who has lost thee.
The same lines in Biggs's blank verse. Comparing the two versions shows what prose and verse translations gain and lose.
that Italian sky of yours, so far as I have heard of it, is blue and clear, but yet is like frozen water: are not wind and storm a hundred times more beautiful?
Tadeusz's defence of the native landscape against the Count's admiration for Italy is a statement of the poem's aesthetic: the northern, changeable world is worthy of art.
In the horn there seemed to be a hundred horns;
The Seneschal's horn concert, the first of the poem's great musical set pieces. The single instrument contains the whole hunt, as the poem contains a whole world.
And thus the eloquent Gerwazy carried them all away, for all had their grudges against the Judge, as is usual among neighbours
The narrator's ironic comment on the dietine at Dobrzyn shows how private grievances are dressed up as public causes.
There is merit in refusing to betray your country, though your own people proclaim you a traitor! Especially for a man who had such pride as mine!
Jacek's confession turns on the gap between reputation and truth. His refusal of Russian rewards, and his pride, are the elements of his tragedy and of his penance.
MEMORABLE year! Happy is he who beheld thee in our land! The folk still call thee the year of harvest, but the soldiers the year of war;
The apostrophe to 1812 recalls the moment of greatest hope, but is written with knowledge of its failure.
“I know, I know those notes; that is Targowica!”
In Jankiel's concert the betrayal of the Targowica Confederation of 1792 is rendered as a false chord. Gerwazy's cry shows the audience reading their own history in music.
“Ah, perhaps he is the last—watch, watch, you young men—perhaps he is the last who can lead the polonaise in such fashion!”
The polonaise led by the Chamberlain is the last performance of the old order, and the guests' cry gives the elegiac keynote of the ending.
And I was there among the guests, and there drank wine and mead; And what I saw and heard I wrote, that all of you might read.
The closing lines place the narrator at the feast with a formula from folk tales, turning the poem into the testimony of a witness.
Questions for study
How does the invocation's comparison of Lithuania with health shape the reader's response to the rest of the poem?
Think about the exile's perspective, the act of description and the knowledge of loss.
In what ways is Pan Tadeusz an epic, and in what ways does it differ from Homer or Virgil?
Consider invocations, similes, scale, the narrator's tone and the role of comedy.
Compare Gerwazy's account of the Pantler's death (Book II) with Jacek's confession (Book X). What does the poem gain by telling the story twice?
Look at withheld knowledge, partisanship and the move from vengeance to forgiveness.
Is the poem's portrait of the gentry an idealisation, a critique, or both?
Examine the foray, the dietine in Book VII and the narrator's ironic comments.
What role does music play in the poem, from the Seneschal's horn to Jankiel's concert and the polonaise?
Think about memory, history and the echo.
How does the poem represent Jankiel, and what does his concert suggest about the place of Jews in the poem's vision of the nation?
Consider the narrator's praise, Jankiel's speech to Dąbrowski and the limits of the portrait.
How does the poem use the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, given that it was written after its failure?
Read the opening of Book XI closely, and think about the narrator's position in Paris.
Compare Telimena and Zosia. What values does each represent?
Think about city and country, artifice and nature, and how the narrator treats each.
Why does the poem end with the freeing of the serfs and Gerwazy's response?
Consider the social order of the gentry and debates of the 1830s.
Compare a passage in Noyes's prose with the same passage in Biggs's verse. What is lost and gained in each?
Consider rhythm, word order, precision and the comic effects of rhyme.
Further reading
- Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Koropeckyj, Roman. Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
- Kridl, Manfred, ed. Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Poland: A Symposium. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.
- Krzyżanowski, Julian. A History of Polish Literature. Warsaw: PWN–Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978.
- Lednicki, Wacław, ed. Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature: A Symposium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Master Thaddeus; or, The Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by Maude Ashurst Biggs. 2 vols. London: Trübner, 1885.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz. Translated by Kenneth R. Mackenzie. London: J. M. Dent, 1966.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by Bill Johnston. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2018.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz; or, The Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by George Rapall Noyes. London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917.
- Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz; or, The Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by Watson Kirkconnell. New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1962.
- Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
- Opalski, Magdalena, and Israel Bartal. Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1992.
- Opalski, Magdalena. The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and His Tavern in Nineteenth-Century Polish Literature. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1986.
- Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
- Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
- Weintraub, Wiktor. The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. The Hague: Mouton, 1954.
- Welsh, David. Adam Mickiewicz. New York: Twayne, 1966.
- Witkowska, Alina. Mickiewicz: Słowo i czyn. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975.
- Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.