Adam Mickiewicz’s „Pan Tadeusz” and the culture of remembrance

Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, published in Paris in 1834, can be seen as an expression of a romantic culture of remembrance which emerged in Poland and Lithuania in the aftermath of a traumatic political event, the January Uprising of 1830–1831. This article discusses the poet's transformation of the devices and generic model of heroic epic for the double purpose of expressing a notion of historical time which holds out an open future for both the individual and the national community, and of promoting the acceptance of a complicated past through the resolution of its conflicts. Both in Poland and in Lithuania, Pan Tadeusz was regarded as a monumental tribute to the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a major influence on the modern national literatures in Lithuanian, Belarusian and Yiddish, sprouting on the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.