The Culture of memory: Adam Mickiewicz’s "Pan Tadeusz"

ENAdam Mickiewicz was raised in an aristocratic Polish family in areas of Lithuania that had been tied to Poland from the fourteenth century, but which, several years before the poet’s birth, had been forcibly incorporated into Russia and Prussia. The central idea of the epic and its aesthetic character reflected the political mood of the former Commonwealth’s society and the difficult situation in the aftermath of the defeat of the November Uprising against Russian rule. The different dimensions of epic time in the poem are shown most emphatically not so much by the plot, but rather by the structure of its poetic space. Mickiewicz’s epic poem influenced Lithuanian culture and literary traditions in multiple ways. Since it evoked local landscapes, topographies, cultural-historical realities, and patriotic themes, the text was received in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as a testimony to the culture and identity of the inhabitants of the historic Grand Duchy of Lithuania.