SOURCE: Dudli, Monika A. “Pan Tadeusz and the Epic Tradition” and “Some Conclusions.” In Pushkin, Mickiewicz and The Overcoming of romanticism, pp. 33-55. Stanford, CA: Stanford Honors Essays in Humanities, 1976.

[In the following essay, Dudli examines the unique aspects of Pan Tadeusz, comparing it with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.]

Where Pushkin's choice of genre, the novel in verse, synthesized a number of eighteenth-century and contemporary strains, and yet unmistakably anticipated the forms and themes of the nineteenth century, Pan Tadeusz is a work of culmination and reminiscence, in form as much as in content. It is difficult to classify decisively as a novel in verse, a heroic or mock-heroic epic, or even a fairytale, but one thing is clear: it is not a forerunner of the nineteenth-century novel, in spite of its incorporation of some of the techniques of realism. Mickiewicz composed his masterpiece at the same time that he wrote the Books of the Polish Nation; if the latter can be called his work of attempted prophecy, then Pan Tadeusz emerges as a kind of “Remembrance of Things Past”—and yet the two are somehow opposite sides of the same Messianic coin. His reconstruction of Poland's past, and his representation of her spiritual future blend in an apotheosis of a single, dreamed-of order which will transcend both objective reality and subjective consciousness.

Leaving transcendence aside for the moment, let us look at the formal structure and surface of the work. Like Eugene Onegin, it represents an amalgamation of the most diverse devices—classical, romantic, realistic—with the result that its author can generally be located “between two general modes of poetry: the logical-rhetorical structure of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment, and the emotional-expressive structure of romanticism.”¹ His treatment of these polarities differs significantly from Pushkin's; except in fairly obvious cases of parody, Mickiewicz commits himself to the mental attitudes associated with the conventions he uses. Parody is not, for Mickiewicz, the fundamental poetic approach to reality, as it was for Pushkin. The restoration of classical order and propriety is more than a literary or organizational device: it is a way of being for the characters in his story, and a way of perceiving and structuring their reality for the poet, and also for his audience.

It is no accident that Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania does not focus on any single problematical figure; the characters are average and somewhat simplified, in harmony with their society and natural environment. The hero of this “last epic” is the old order, whose very mundaneness is treasured as a lost Eden, enveloped in a curiously complementary blend of realistic and Arcadian elements. Epic objectivity is balanced by romantic vividness and lyricism, classical control by a free flow of images, rhetoric by the use of a rich, colloquial language. In the words of Czeslaw Milosz, “Pan Tadeusz was the return of a prodigal son to Homer and Virgil, but the prodigal returned rich in experience … The secret of his continuity may be found in the poet's latent yearning for order.”²

When we invoked “classicism” in relation to Pushkin, we were actually referring, as his contemporaries often did, to the French neo-classical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Pan Tadeusz we tend to think back further, to the epics of Homer and Virgil, particularly in such matters as the balancing of elements—war and peace, victory and defeat, sublimity and triviality, battle-scene and pastoral, to create an effect of “wholeness.” The scope is too broad and varied, too concerned with the larger relations of social and natural order to focus very persistently on one or another set of individuals. Moreover, characters are defined in terms of their actions, rather than their subjective perceptions, because only by their actions do they place themselves in a tangible relation to their society. So where in Pushkin we were made intensely aware of the mental framework of a few characters, in Mickiewicz we will tend to see them in terms of their physical identity and especially their social roles. One might make an analogy with Shakespearian comedy: it is not so much the individual plots and sub-plots, the misguided alliance of Tadeusz and Telimena or the self-renewing quarrel of the Rejent and the Asesor that are important, as is the pattern which emerges from the final restoration of equilibrium and reaffirmation of life in marriage and laughter.

One of our key words in dealing with Pushkin was “artifice,” and yet in the end we arrived at the somewhat surprising conclusion that he had achieved a peculiar brand of realism. With Mickiewicz we have just the opposite. We will have many occasions to note the extraordinary naturalness of his poetry, the leisurely pace of his line, the effortless, colloquial quality of his verse, his vivid organic descriptions of nature and human activities, and yet ultimately we have to bear in mind that Mickiewicz has given physical reality to a well-ordered dream, to artifice on a grand scale. The closest analogue that comes to mind is Walter Scott, who was admired by both poets but absorbed only by Mickiewicz. Pushkin castigated the whole genre of the historical novel and its imitators in the following words: “Like Agrippa's apprentice they have evoked the demon of antiquity but do not know how to handle him. … Is it because the portrayal of bygone times, even if feeble and inaccurate, has an inexplicable charm for the imagination sunk in the humdrum monotony of the present?”³

In Mickiewicz's case, however, we must look beyond Pushkin's hypothetical “hidden monotony of the present” to the predicament of the emigre, for whom every reminiscence, every humdrum detail of the old, lost life is indeed “radiant with value.” It is true that “in much nineteenth-century fiction which descends from and develops the historical fashion and genre, backgrounds, scene-paintings, and minor picturesque characters assume a disproportionate importance and often became the real raison d'être of the work. History and geography replace the proper human hierarchy of interest.”⁴ This must be qualified in Mickiewicz's case; for history and geography could not be taken for granted as they were in England. “La moralité” in Pan Tadeusz does not emerge from the very nature of things in themselves; rather, Mickiewicz constructs his reality in accordance with a preconceived mental pattern in which every relation, every bond reaffirms the ordering of the whole.

A comparison of the beginnings of Eugene Onegin and Pan Tadeusz is a study in contrasts. Where Pushkin plunged right into a whirl of activities and perceptions, Mickiewicz lingers on a formal introductory apostrophe to Lithuania and a beautiful celebration, not of action or thought, but of the land. He is singing not arms and the man, or at least not primarily, but the society and nature in which they are embedded. “You are like health,” he writes, and already we begin to associate the old social order evoked by the magic name “Litwa” with the natural organic order of things. Like Pushkin, Mickiewicz the narrator is present from the beginning, but his persona is somewhat different, certainly less salient; he is the genial host, but with a distance and propriety, and even a certain lack of individualization, that tend to remove him from us, though without destroying the rapport. His tone is a combination of rhetorical devices and a tender, personal strain of reminiscence: “I see and write because I long for you.” Its effect is analogous to the nostalgic counterpoint in Eugene Onegin, but in a more limited way. There is no contact between the narrator and the characters and events he is describing except the crystal of memory; hence there is none of that sense of urgent participation in the story itself, none of that mutual reflection and refraction between creator and creature which made so much of Eugene Onegin fly by in the present tense. Pan Tadeusz is located definitely in an almost legendary past; its long, leisurely lines give it a stately, epic quality, while the beginning of the story calls to mind the inviting “once upon a time” beginning of a fairytale:

Among such meadows, years ago, on the edge of a brook, on a small hill, in a birch grove, flourished a manor-house, built of wood, but on a brick foundation. …⁵

(Bk. I, p. 350)

We are instantly struck by Mickiewicz's unique combination of a misty idealized setting with an amazingly tactile, vivid feeling for nature. Through a meditation on the past, on the lost Eden of his youth, he tries to recreate a poetical millenium in as tangible terms as possible, to serve as a surrogate while he waits for the advent of the real millenium, the rebirth of the Polish nation:

Thus you shall return us, miraculously, to the bosom of the fatherland—But meanwhile, transport my nostalgic soul to those woody hillocks, to those green fields. …

(Bk. I, p. 350)

From the beginning it is apparent that Mickiewicz intends to promulgate a certain set of values, and that reality has been structured in retrospect to facilitate this. The judge's home is not just a house in the country; it is a stronghold of the old-fashioned virtues of a prosperous rural household, such as hospitality, the observance of propriety and social distinctions, especially in the mealtime ritual, the cyclic health of an existence ordered according to the rising and setting of the sun. For example, contrast the following concord of natural and human wisdom with Pushkin's breathless description of Petersburg nightlife:

Thus does the Judge ordain; in his household, the farmers' labors end with the day. The lord of the world knows how long we should work; when the sun, His worker, declines from the sky, it is also time for the land-owner to relinquish the fields. This is what the Judge used to say.

(Bk. I, p. 353)

There is something almost pagan in the slow ripening of the day, the fullness of the day's work, and the praise of the sun, which reminds us of the nature-similes in the Iliad.

It is somewhat tiresome to keep invoking Homer, but it is he who characteristically combines the particular elements we are dealing with here: the profound underlying consciousness of a cosmic order, and the various stylistic components of the epic which reflect this mentality, such as the emphasis on social decorum as well as the heroic virtues of strength and valor, the detailed descriptions of feasts, gifts, and catalogues of national heros, and the seemliness or propriety which shapes the characterization of most of the protagonists. Zosia, for example, is a perfect specimen of her type; every word, every gesture contributes to the realization of that type, the maidenly maiden, just as the judge exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the rural patriarch and Tadeusz those of a healthy, simpleminded, and absolutely un-romantic youth:

His name was Soplica; all the Soplicas are, as everyone knows, vigorous, stout, and strong, well-endowed for a soldier's life, less diligent in their studies.

(Bk. I, p. 357)

It is the genius of Mickiewicz to incorporate the most eccentric and minutely realistic details, such as Zosia's debut in curlers, without disturbing the calm harmonious outlines of her portrayal. In Zosia, in fact, we see two powerful and complementary systems of artistic organization lending cohesion to the details of her characterization: the classical patterning decorum which is imposed from without to produce a “maidenly maiden,” and the organic, “esemplastic” romantic image which works from within to lend a certain aura to everything she does—in Zosia's case, it is the pervasive bird-imagery which shapes, rather than decorates, the whole description. She is light, fragile, and innocent like a bird, and her daily feeding of the chickens also symbolizes her potential as a “womanly woman,” which to a Slavic mind is often synonymous with “mother.”

In Pushkin and Mickiewicz we see several of the same themes and methods of characterization blended in completely different configurations. Where in Eugene Onegin, each character is an indissoluble composite of solid Russian elements and romantic strains imbibed through reading, in Mickiewicz the dichotomies are much more clear-cut and superficial. There is a similar satire of French manners and the Polish imitations engendered by them, but it is obvious that the core of Polish truths and ways is still intact, hardly disturbed by the transient infiltration of romantic idioms, French waistcoats, and other extravagances. This is made evident in the highly explicit opposition of the two sets of young people—the solid rural Tadeusz and Zosia, who from beginning to end are nothing more nor less than themselves, and the excessively affected, sentimental, citified Count and Telimena, who enliven the text with their rash efforts to project themselves into roles and illusions which contrast both with the homogeneous consistency of Zosia and Tadeusz, and with the mundane actuality of their situation. Over and over again Mickiewicz deflates their garish attempts at romanticism: Telimena's poignant pose on the hillside is rudely interrupted by an attack of ants; the Count's pursuit of a bucolic nymph ends in bewilderment on each side when she proves to be a common goose-girl. Mickiewicz's characterization resembles high-quality caricature; the perfect self-consistency of each person, and their facile categorization by ideology and physical attribute removes them quite far from romantic techniques, including his own.

There is never any real confrontation of conflicting values within a single character, as there is in Pushkin, nor of discrepant cultural values and the conventions that reflect them. In Pushkin each juxtaposition of romantic or realistic or classical idioms dramatizes a contemporary, on-going conflict which we experience insistently, vitally, in the present tense, while Mickiewicz's description is suffused in the comfortable, hazy glow of reminiscence. Pan Tadeusz is explicitly oriented in the past, and not just the historical past, but in the Golden Age.

The Golden Age is a theme which has, for better or for worse, haunted man throughout his civilized history. A necessary ingredient for the elaboration of the myth seems to be nostalgia; there has probably never been a Golden Age described by people who were actually experiencing it, or who had irrevocably lost it. Rather, it seems to appear as an image of the past which incarnates the future, provided certain conditions are met. Pan Tadeusz represents a rather remarkable integration of classical and Christian modes of perception. We have already commented on its pagan aura, reminiscent of unallegorical pastoral poetry. At the same time, we are acquainted with the Messianic mythology of Poland's redemption that governed Mickiewicz's thoughts, and we realize that he is remembering a dream which not only approximates Poland's past, but is pregnant with her future as well. His work thus confronts us with another dichotomy: its naturalism bespeaks a loving attentiveness to the experiences of the moment, yet the narrative as a whole is embedded in two very different levels of significance, one oriented toward the past, the other toward the future. As we shall see, the link between them is very much more complicated than a simple imaginative recovery of the Paradise Lost. But while we remain aware of the prophetic stratum of the work, there is no doubt that it represents a consciously symmetrical culmination, in terms of its structure, style, and language as well as its subject-matter.

In contrast to the simplicity of Eugene Onegin, Mickiewicz's plot bustles with an activity which is much more physical, historical and geographical, than psychological. None of the characters undergoes any profound psychological change, since they are designed simply to act out the uncomplicated impulses of their respective, and, one has the feeling, immutable natures; otherwise most of the suspense is motivated by such picaresque exploits as bear hunts, mushroom-picking, and the mock-heroic foray against the Soplicas, rather than by the tension of inter-personal confrontations. Even the occasional romantic crises of Telimena and Tadeusz are more mildly diverting than anything else; we have no sense that there is more here than meets the eye, and so can enjoy their antics with little real involvement. Also the tone of the narrative is supple and buoyant enough to absorb all shocks; there is too much humor underlying the sentiment, too comfortable a consciousness of the gap between past and present, for us to respond with much urgency to the peripeties of the plot.

In spite of its broad diversity, the basic structure of the work is very well-defined. Like a Shakespearian comedy, it is full of plots and sub-plots, but these all serve to reinforce the same network of motifs. In many ways, Pan Tadeusz might be toyed with as a series of variations on the Odyssey, rather than the Iliad. It is definitely more closely allied with comedy and romantic adventure than with tragedy, and in Tadeusz's situation it is not too hard to discern traces of Telemachus. The story opens with his return home to the Judge's estate in Lithuania. The roles are somewhat rearranged, with the Judge's acting as a kind of surrogate father, but there is a distance between Tadeusz and his legendary father Jacek Soplica which recalls the long separation of Odysseus and his son. The first half of the work establishes the sanctity of the household, and the various concomitant virtues associated with social and natural order; in the second half, the household is challenged from without, and order is threatened and finally restored, thanks to the intervention of the prodigal father, disguised in this case as a monk, in Odysseus's case as a shepherd. In Pan Tadeusz Robak dies but the reconciliation of the households (and the blighted love of Jacek and Ewa) is consummated by the marriage of their respective children, Tadeusz and Zosia. The Count and Telimena, as representatives of artifice (though of a fairly innocuous variety) are disruptive elements in the epic world; he might be compared with the suitors who disrupt Penelope's household, and she with the various feminine incarnations of unnatural temptation (Circe, Calypso, the Sirens) who try to seduce Odysseus away from the proper fulfillment of his fatherly, husbandly, and kingly role.

As in Homer and Shakespeare, social order is treated as a reflection or reaffirmation of natural order, and the household (as well as the sexual union which is its foundation) as an emblematic fusion of both. We have seen that every character is defined much more in terms of his proper role in society than with any attention to his self-fulfillment as an individual; or rather, the two are conceived, in a very classical way, as indissoluble. With romantic individualism departs romantic egalitarianism: the foundations of an orderly existence, “the ladder of all high designs,” is degree, a hierarchy which is not imposed from without, but somehow emerges of its own accord, as a reflection of “the nature of things”:

(The maidens walked ahead of the young men, by a half-step or so (as propriety demands). Nobody there debated about order, nobody arranged the men and women, yet each involuntarily observed the order, for the Judge preserved by-gone ways in his house and never permitted that respect be neglected for age, birth, reason, position … By this order, he said, households and nations prosper; with its fall, households and nations perish.)

Somehow we accept the bland didacticism of the Judge's pronouncements; they are integral to the world of the work, while we are not. There is no Pushkinian fellowship of opinion: either we participate in the Mickiewiczan dreamworld, or we cast ourselves in the role of outsiders. For propriety is reflected everywhere, in the vegetable-garden society, in the orderly enactment of meal-time ritual, in which even the food is segregated according to sex, in the twilight music of the forest or the melody of a hunting-horn, and in the structuring of language itself; for while the naturalness of Mickiewicz's language is ingrained in his poetry, he still observes a hieratic differentiation of diction in speech according to characterization and social role.

On a larger scale, harmony is reflected in the balancing of the poetic structure itself. Where in Pushkin dichotomies arise by themselves to dictate the nature of reality, in Mickiewicz every impulse is balanced by an equal and opposite movement, darkness is followed by light, violence by peace. Here again we are far afield from Mickiewicz's own romanticism, in which a single mood, usually a fairly sombre one, dominated the narrative to the bitter end. In a way this conscious balancing of parts and strict alternation of moods is “artificial,” yet it does succeed in capturing a different kind of “whole truth” from Pushkin's. As in Homer and Tolstoy, in contrast, say, with Dostoevsky and the earlier Mickiewicz, there is a calm certainty about the processes of daily life, if not about the patterning of events. Mickiewicz's whimsical fantasizing over the vegetable garden is far removed from Pushkin's impassive “froide nature” interpretation, but like his Russian contemporary he seems to derive comfort from nature's cyclic, self-renewing stability. We know that no matter how dramatic a battle or hunt will be, no matter how fearful a love-scene will be, the physical processes of life will continue: bigos (hunters' stew) will be made, the periodic mealtime affirmation of the unity of body and spirit, nature and human society will be celebrated again. Like Achilles, unlike Raskolnikov or Konrad Wollenrod, Tadeusz has to eat and sleep; and, like Pushkin, Mickiewicz tends to measure narrative-time and reinforce social order by the mealtime ritual. In Eugene Onegin, however, no analogy is drawn between the order of nature and the somewhat more tenuous ordering of human society; occasionally they correlate, but, as we have seen, Pushkin seems to feel no need for a pathetic fallacy. A prominent element in Mickiewicz's treatment of nature is, on the other hand, personification, and its persistent use reveals a tendency on his part to see nature, music, social degree, propriety as mutually related, and not just occasionally overlapping, manifestations of a higher order, a kind of Shakespearian “music of the spheres.” The tendency can at least partly be accounted for as an over-compensation for Poland's political insecurity. It had experienced the unsettling intoxication and the nightmare of 1812, and harmony and order were not ideas she would lightly forget.

Mickiewicz's depiction of society is one of the corner-stones of his fictional order. Significantly, we are aware of the characters more as social than as individual entities, and indeed, in the initial canto we are introduced first to the basic unitary structure of society, the household, before any individuals are brought into focus. And when they do begin to emerge, we are struck more by the brightness of their coloration than by any profundity of mind or heart; like Dickens' characters, they have extraordinary concreteness in terms of their physical attributes; we could pick any one of them out of a crowd, not because of their “individualism,” but because they capture the essence of a type. Instead of the intensive fixation on a single subject or problem, the emphasis is on action—in the plot, and, on a smaller scale, in the Dickensian type of physical gesture which summarizes the character's psychic reality; for example, Zosia's role as nourisher of the birds, which presages her own fruition, places her in implicit contrast to her guardian Telimena, whose acquisitive machinations and vain artifice reveal her sterility—although even she finally refuses to play Laura to the Count's bumbling Petrarch, crying out in a burst of irate honesty:

Enough of this—she interrupted—I'm not a planet, for God's sake; enough, Count—I am a woman!

In the end she reaffirms the “bourgeois” values of her surroundings and chooses the concreteness of an unromantic marriage over a starring role in the Count's fantasies.

The Count, the other half of the romantic travesty, is a significantly different case. His contact with reality remains tenuous and yet so banal, that it is impossible to take him seriously; his function in the story is to be manipulated, by Telimena, by Gerwazy (he would never have initiated the feud on his own), and by his own pseudo-sentimentalist delusions. It is pointless to try to penetrate through to the human being suffering behind the tears and rhetorical lamentations; unlike Lensky, he simply does not exist. But in one way, the Count's characterization is a pointed commentary on a certain romantic predilection—the maintenance of a self-conscious, almost artistic distance between the self and its “real life.” It is essentially the same as his pseudo-serious expatiation on the distinction between (mere) nature and (sublime) Art:

My friend—spoke the Count—Beautiful nature is the form, background, matter, while the soul, inspiration, which arises on the wings of imagination, is polished with taste, buttressed by rules. Nature is not enough, not enough enthusiasm. The artist must fly off into the sphere of the ideal! Not everything that is beautiful can be painted! You'll find out about all of this from books, in your own time.

The last line of the speech reminds us of the influence of books on Pushkin's characters. The Count has this in common with Eugene (although otherwise, as a parody of silly Sentimentalism on the one hand, and satanic Byronism on the other, they are quite dissimilar): in both their cases, the suggestiveness of literary conventions of sensibility and Parisian fashions fall on sterile ground; instead of combining with a solid native stratum, such as Lensky's good-heartedness or Tanya's naturalism, they take the place of a more substantial inner core. There is no personal morality underlying the pose. As in the case of Eugene and the duel, the sentimental Count falls right in with the provocation of the blood-feud, although once he finds himself in its unaesthetic midst he is eager to escape back to his books. But in his own feeble way, he is, like Byron, like Mickiewicz himself, dedicated to the “realization of poetry,” the creation of an artistic masterpiece out of the incongruous raw material of life.

To return to our theme of classical, consciously sustained balance, one of Mickiewicz's devices is this somewhat didactic playing off of opposite pairs—Tadeusz and Zosia against the Count and Telimena, the Judge and Podkomorzy, the wise old patriarchs against Gerwazy and Protazy, the faithful servants, with the addition of various cross-juxtapositions: the older generation vs. the new, the landed gentry vs. the city people, the Russians vs. the Poles. Tabulated like this, the method seems mechanistic, but it is part of Mickiewicz's decorative and humanistic genius that we are aware much more of the teeming, densely-detailed texture of life, complete with the incongruities of a decent Russian, a decadent Pole, and even a worthwhile Jew, than of the spare artistic structure underlying it. But although he works through dualities to present his vision of the truth, the nature of that truth is, unlike Pushkin's, essentially monistic. This is not to deny or discount the rich pagan surface of the poem, nor Mickiewicz's very tangible contact with physical reality; these are the source of the work's enduring popularity. I would submit, however, that the flight into the “sphere of the ideal” via a romantic crisis of the spirit, though sublimated, is still there.

Because, of course, there is one character who does not fit the formulas, who seems to have wandered out of Konrad Wollenrod or Dziady into the Lithuanian fairytale by mistake. Unfathomable at first, second, and even third glance, he is interpolated at the end of the first canto, an outsider even structurally. He is accorded a description as ambiguous and darkly suggestive as that of any Byronic hero; cowled in black, with mysterious battle-scars and a somber, haughty demeanor that belie his monastic title and garb, Father Robak (“Worm”) remains, for the first, harmonious half of the narrative, a strangely incongruous figure on the outskirts of the action, or so we think. Like Eugene Onegin, he has an aura of fatal significance, magnetic and repellent at the same time, but here it is no pose. In Robak we encounter the last of Mickiewicz's transfiguration heroes.

In chapter five, the harmony and peace of the Lithuanian microcosm are disrupted and reveal themselves as being, on both an internal and an external level, illusory. Within the placid rural society itself lies buried the evil seed of a murder perpetrated, for romantic reasons, by Jacek Soplica. Outside, in the real world, the storm clouds are gathering which will erupt all over Europe in the spring of 1812. In this context, Robak appears as a figure both out of time and out of place. His personal fate is bound up with the past, and is responsible for the present, in which, however, as a monk, he plays no essential part; while his fate as a political leader in the impending revolution, as a redeemer, not only of his sin, but of his nation, is bound inextricably with the future. Similarly, his primary function is as a messenger from western Europe; although he takes part in the Lithuanian foray and finally sacrifices his life to it, it always has the air of a toy soldier battle, into which Robak injects an occasional note of realism with his news from the Napoleonic front. One uses the word realism with a grain of salt, for the actual events of the time, in and out of Poland, lend themselves much more convincingly to the realm of romance.

Once upon a time, Jacek Soplica was an ordinary man like his son, an integral member of his society, a little more hot-tempered than most, but otherwise an unlikely candidate for the role of prophetic misfit. He fell in love with the daughter of a neighboring landlord, Ewa Horeszko, neither realizing that her father had no intention of condoning so unexalted an alliance. Ewa was married off to an aristocrat and died soon afterward in childbirth; in his bitterness Jacek married a woman he cared little about, fathered Tadeusz, and finally shot and killed Horeszko during a Russian raid, only to be tagged a traitor by his countrymen and hounded out of the country, where all trace of him was lost. Many years later, Father Robak relates the story of his repentance:

The label “traitor” pounded in my ears, resounded like an echo, in the house, in the fields. This label from morning 'til twilight writhed before me, like a spot in a sick eye. For I wasn't a traitor to the fatherland … I fled the country! Where haven't I been! What haven't I suffered? … Until God deigned to reveal the only medicine: how much power it had … Out of stupid pride, perhaps, more than out of love, I killed—hence, the punishment; I entered a monastery. I, once proud of my birth, I who was a nobleman, lowered my head, a collector, and became a Worm, so that, as a worm in the dust … An evil example for the fatherland, an inclination to treason, had to be redeemed with good examples—blood, self-sacrifice.

(Bk. X, pp. 446-7)

Jacek did not plan to be a significant character. By a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, a purely personal, aristocratic gesture (although it is part of the integrated quality of Mickiewicz's world that no gesture is isolated from its repercussions) becomes an act of general, symbolic importance for which only an equally “national” act can atone. On an internal, Lithuanian level he killed the father of his true love, but on a broad European level he assassinated a Pole who was defending the fatherland. Once again we see the motifs of treason and redemption linked. In Konrad Wollenrod the hero had to play the part of a traitor in order to fulfill his higher, transfigured vocation as the ultimate savior of his country. Similarly, Jacek is forced into metamorphosis and redemption by the intolerable echo of “traitor.” To do this, he must, in a sense, die to himself and the world, and step outside his own personality and the involuted consciousness of Lithuania onto the stage of Europe, and, according to Mickiewicz's metaphysic, the cosmos.

So in one way, Robak may be seen as a vestige of Mickiewicz's earlier art-forms, a partially sublimated exponent of his romantic preoccupations. At the same time, in spite of his decentralized role in Pan Tadeusz, he can be regarded as the hidden hero of the work; his figure is the key to both the past and the future of the very immediacy-oriented Lithuanian world. He is the only character who is not comfortably cut off from his creator by the one-way flow of reminiscence, but who actually exemplifies his deepest values and aspirations. For we must not forget that in a sense Mickiewicz still had one more transfiguration to go through, just as Pushkin had one more duel to re-enact. After the completion of Pan Tadeusz Mickiewicz abandoned poetry and devoted himself to his peculiar religio-philosophical brand of politics, ending his life in a defiantly activist gesture which begs to be interpreted as an atonement for his non-participation (treason?) in the Revolution of 1830.

A more dissonant figure could not be imagined in the world of Pan Tadeusz, and yet Robak is integrated into the “Remembrance of Things Past” with consummate artistry. The transfiguration-motif of romanticism is mingled with the classical, Odyssean theme of the return of the prodigal father in disguise; at the same time, if Tadeusz as the eponymous hero of the work represents the simpler mentality of a golden, but bygone era, that is, a new Adam, then Robak combines in himself the roles of fallen man and redeemer, through whom the Golden Age will be reconquered. And on a political level, Robak is the spokesman for Napoleon, the romantic redeemer of Europe, on whom all eyes were fixed as the spring of 1812 approached:

My dear Robak—he called—if only it's true! My dear Robak—he repeated—if only it's true! How many times were we deceived! Remember? They chattered: Napoleon is coming! And we were already waiting!

(Bk. VI, pp. 405-6)

Very little of the Robak-oriented web of motifs lies close to the surface of the work. Until the foregoing confession-scene, he has stood in the background, coming forward now and then with a cogent comment on the political situation, shooting the bear at a moment when all, including his son's life, seemed lost. For a moment he is allowed to occupy the center of the stage, and then he must perish, according to the exigencies of classical equilibrium and the preservation of the Golden Age. Mickiewicz has, through Robak, given us a glimpse of darker and more serious elements in the past and future, but now he must be eliminated, so that the unhaunted moment might live. As in Greek tragedy, the cycle of retribution has come full circle with the death of the original murderer, and Mickiewicz is ready to bring his pagan symphony to a close. But first Robak is permitted one last transformation: the visionary hero dies redeemed and a redeemer, apotheosized by the vestigial pastoral world which he is leaving behind, and which will soon be left behind by the real world and history forever:

In fact, night was just descending, across the milky sky ran the first pink beams of the sun; they fell through the window, like diamond arrows, reflected from the bed around the sick man's head, and dressed with gold his face and temples, so that he glowed, like a saint in a flaming crown.

(Bk. X, p. 417)

Robak, the unhappy messenger from a new, romantic, and chaotic world, receives recognition, if not understanding, but must be eliminated if the microcosm is to remain, for the duration of artistic time, intact.

In the last two cantos the “motifs of order” familiar to anyone who has studied Greek, Shakespearean, or neo-classical drama are reintroduced: the storm reflecting nature's perturbation over human conflict is replaced by the bright new promise of spring; the partisans in the political conflict, the Judge and the Count, are reconciled; romantic fantasy, personified by the Count, is rejected in favor of an unexalted but tangible marriage-bond; the son and daughter of the ill-fated lovers Jacek and Ewa reunite the two households and reanimate their parents' love in their marriage; the propriety that had governed the Judge's household before the foray is reaffirmed:

Officers, gentlemen, nobility, farmers, men and women alternating, by pairs, sit down in order, where Wojski indicates.

(Bk. XII, p. 456)

And finally, the return of harmony to human and natural relations is celebrated in the music and stately polonaise, as well as in the triumphant, measured cadences of Mickiewicz's language, at the end. The emphasis on cadential symmetry, on the fulfillment of the earlier motifs and promises of the poem is complemented by an emphasis on renewal and the cyclical patterning of existence that makes stability and order possible. The opening apostrophe to spring in the canto entitled “The Year of 1812” is almost painful in its dramatic irony:

O spring! Whoever saw you then in our land, memorable spring of war, spring of good harvest! O spring, whoever saw you, as you were blossoming with grains and grasses, and radiant with people, opulent with events, pregnant with hope! I still see you, beautiful dreamy specter! Born in slavery, shackled in infancy, I had only one such spring in my life.

(Bk. XI, p. 448)

The resonant, impassioned quality of the verse reflects the exhilaration of the time, the combined faith in spring and revolution which is to bring about the liberation and rebirth of Poland. Only one false note, the disturbingly prophetic song of the old Jew, reminds us that Lithuania's joyful anticipation of rebirth was to end in her betrayal by Napoleon, renewed enslavement, and the demise of the old way of life. The seed of her destruction is already burgeoning in the ecstatic hopes of that spring. The poem ends on a curious note of apotheosis—both of every-day life and of change, but the politico-Christian transfiguration of Poland was not to come within Mickiewicz's lifetime.

In the epilogue to Pan Tadeusz, discovered among his manuscripts after his death, Mickiewicz the emigre, the former-poet-turned-prophet, the visionary of the future, of “poeticized reality,” of a dream, glances back into the past, and recreates reality in the image of that dream:

I wanted to overlook, like a bird of small flight, to overlook the zones of shower and thunder, and search out only the shade and serenity, the ages of childhood, domestic cottages … But about the blood, which freshly flowed, about the tears, in which all of Poland is submerged, about the glory, which is still unextinguished—to think about this we hadn't the soul! … O mother Poland! You are so freshly laid in the grave … You have no strength to talk about yourself! … Today, for us, in the world of uninvited guests, there is only one country in which there is a little happiness for a Pole: the land of childhood years! It will always remain saintly and pure, like a first love … This land, happy, poor, and cramped, as the world is divine, so it was our own.

(pp. 466-7)

Mickiewicz dedicated himself to romanticism, but in the last analysis, the millenium recedes before the more potent, tangible charm of a lost era, a golden age which was partly real, and partly the creation of a nostalgic mind, but in any case, for generations of Poles—“our own”—much more so than the visionary land evoked in the Books of the Polish Nation. Robak is dead, the future has been forestalled, and the moment is given artistic eternity by the vibrant, life-giving breath of its creator:

And I was there with the guests, drank the mead and wine, and what I saw and heard, I put into my books.

(Bk. XII, p. 466)

IV. SOME CONCLUSIONS

When Pushkin and Mickiewicz embarked on their respective masterpieces, they had passed through two somewhat analogous patterns of development with quite different results. They were both associated with romanticism, but while Mickiewicz was consciously immersed in the mainstream of the movement, equally committed to its technical renovations and its philosophy of “feeling and faith,” Pushkin just as consciously located himself outside of it, fascinated by the phenomenon and borrowing extensively from it, but never completely involved. Perhaps the essential difference between them is their approach to art. Valuing it for its own sake, Pushkin did not seek to establish a system of correspondences between it and life; the rules and symmetry he observes are operative within the sphere of the artistic structure, and not beyond. Mickiewicz's art, as we have seen, was always dedicated to a cause, that of Poland's regeneration and eventual redemption of Europe and all of Christian humanity. In his works we see two parallel systems of organization at work—one internal and artistic, the other external and didactic; thanks to Mickiewicz's genius, the two rarely come into obvious conflict, but until Pan Tadeusz, the strain of “poeticized reality” which sought to transform the external world was dominant.

Pan Tadeusz marks, then, the reassertion of art and pleasure in Mickiewicz's work, and this can be interpreted as a component of his “overcoming of romanticism,” at least in terms of his personal definition. However, while Eugene Onegin emerges explicitly as an analysis of the romantic “spiritual sickness,” and particularly of the effect of European literary stereotypes on Russian characters, Pan Tadeusz only superficially parodies romantic mannerisms, leaving the romantic core intact, if in abeyance, in the figure of Jacek Soplica.

One fruitful approach has been to see how the two poets deal with the central problem of romantic subjectivity, the relation of creator to his world and work, as revealed in the handling of the persona. In the case of Mickiewicz, we have seen that in previous works, his consciousness had infused the entire work; the hero could always be classified as a Mickiewiczan alter-ego, and very little distance was maintained between the author, the narrator, and the hero. In Pan Tadeusz there is a complete reversal: the author's voice is subordinated to the epic whole. This has been made possible by a major shift in emphasis; in Pan Tadeusz collectivity prevails over romantic subjectivity, and society emerges as the hero. The characters derive their significance from their successful integration into that society (such as young Tadeusz's), not from their alienation and rebellion. Nature is presented as reflecting social equilibrium, not the internal turmoil of any individual. The narrator is no longer a protagonist, but a formal unifying device, an ironic but sympathetic commentator who can reconcile conflicting elements because he is not involved with them.

A Mickiewiczan hero would be out of place within this scheme. The earlier transfiguration heroes all enacted a variation on his personal process of penance and rebirth. However, there are two limited alter-egos: Jacek-Robak, a prophetic figure oriented toward the future and values beyond the Lithuanian microcosm, and Tadeusz, who is completely a part of the circumscribed, rural society of Lithuania, and who serves to focus Mickiewicz's “remembrance of things past.” Reminiscence, not prophecy, predominates: hence the title of the book. But Jacek is the hidden hero who secretly directs activity in Pan Tadeusz, who is responsible for the conflict among the gentry and for their participation in the imminent war, and in whom Mickiewicz's subjectivity is sublimated, leaving the narrator free, ironic, and objective. To accomplish this, Mickiewicz had to define artificially a microcosm which excluded the dialectical process and progress of history in which he believed so devoutly; Jacek belongs to the future and therefore must die; he has no place in Lithuania.

The persona in Eugene Onegin comes surprisingly close in tone to Mickiewicz's. Eugene Onegin is exceptional, for Pushkin, in that the narrative voice is such an integral and dominant part of the poem. For one thing, it is more continuous with the poet's life than his other works are; he wrote it over a long period of time during which he changed a great deal, and this is reflected in the changing conception and structure of the novel. However, close and amiable as the narrator is in Eugene Onegin, Pushkin never sacrifices his artistic distance. A characteristic duality is maintained between personal statement (narrator as friend, commentator) and impersonal embodiment (narrator as independent creator).⁶ The subjective sensibility functions as an ornament or digressive unifying device, and the consciousness of the writer is thus prevented from becoming the world of the novel. Instead, the contours of the persona are well-defined and finite, and there is a mutual refraction of narrator and characters; each is shaped by the other. In Mickiewicz the relation is more one-way, by the very definition of “reminiscence”; the poetic experience, broad and variegated though it may be, is inevitably filtered through his consciousness and memory. There is no romantic effort in Pushkin to “twist reality into metaphors for poetry, history into cycles of personal emblems”⁷; the poet echoes nature, not vice versa, and his art is not impoverished by that fact.

Pan Tadeusz, we have seen, is also relatively detached from the world of Mickiewicz's ego; we must look elsewhere for the key to his ordering of reality. Nature plays a crucial role in this order; Mickiewicz places a classical, almost Shakespearean emphasis on the correlation between the harmony of nature and rural society. The “epic scope” of the poem reminds us of Homer's “whole truth”: food ceremonies, hunting, war, peace, and marriage all contribute to the sense of equilibrium attained at the end, as in a Shakespearean comedy. There is a constant emphasis on classical values such as degree, propriety, and the sanctity of the household, and the integration of society and nature is periodically reinforced by rural ceremonies and rites. Nature is presented in terms of a curious combination of eighteenth-century pastoral and nineteenth-century realism and attention to detail, that is, nature as idea and as physical phenomenon. Mickiewicz also manifests a strong, almost pagan tendency to personify natural forces, and even to organize them into metonymic societies, such as the vegetable garden. His appreciation of nature is more organic than aesthetic. The whole poem is unique in its reassertion of physical reality over the noumenal: for the first time in his work, physical and spiritual health are synonymous.

Pushkin holds two basic attitudes toward nature. One involves nothing more than a detached aesthetic appreciation. On the other hand, he seems to derive a comforting sense of stability from the very immutability and independence of natural cycles. In a way, the latter emerge as ultimately more real than the vicissitudes of human fate. Thus at the end, as in Pan Tadeusz, there is an implicit reaffirmation of natural and social order in Tatyana's marriage and adjustment to society.

This brings us to the romantic dichotomization of society and the individual. Pan Tadeusz can be considered a throw-back to an older, more socially-oriented tradition like Shakespearean comedy, in which each individual is meaningful only in positive relation to his society. It is obviously not a forerunner of the nineteenth-century novel with its problematical, rebellious hero; while his other poems do look ahead to the psychological novel, Pan Tadeusz must be considered a culminating, summarizing work, an anachronism in its own time, a “last epic.”

In contrast, Eugene Onegin, with its analysis of the alienated hero, seems much more akin to an orthodox romantic work, a tragedy of character, or to the later “psychological novel,” for which Russian literature became famous. We must bear in mind, however, that Eugene is left in his sterility within the fictional framework, while Tatyana escapes to reaffirm society, order, marriage, and nature in the implicit life-context that surrounds the formal symmetry of the poem and its “twice-rejected” love story. In this sense, Eugene and Jacek Soplica are both outsiders in relation to their respective societies. But Eugene is also an outsider with respect to his creator's life-oriented value system, in which he figures as a superfluous negativity. On the other hand, Jacek, like Tatyana, belongs to Mickiewicz's real, if temporarily excluded context of values, which extends beyond the spring of 1812. Eugene stands outside the processes of life, incapable of change, while Jacek is a premature embodiment or portent of change in a static society.

We come now to one of the most important aspects of artistic order: the way the poet deals with the concept of change. We may divide change into two different categories: circular (or cyclical) flux and linear (historical, progressive) dialectic. “Linear change” defines historical development as a meaningful movement in a definable direction, while “circular change” emphasizes natural cycles, birth, marriage, death, and the pendulum movement of history as perpetual shifts in a basically immutable, Heraclitean flux. Most of Mickiewicz's work elaborates an extremely historical, teleological concept of change. Pan Tadeusz is an exception, because in it he arrests history, creating an artificial microcosm in time in which the cyclical processes of life come to the forefront. Life is depicted as a formal, orderly celebration, in contrast to the chaotic historical processes Mickiewicz knew surrounded it. He arrests history at the spring of 1812, when the old order was still intact, and when Polish illusions of Napoleonic liberation were at their peak. It is thanks to this elimination of the nightmare which the future would bring, that the present moment is allowed to flourish so vividly in Pan Tadeusz.

Throughout Pushkin's work the cyclical view generally dominates. “Eugene stands outside the processes of life”⁸—and not surprisingly he has not changed at all by the end of the book (although his image, as reflected in Tatyana's eyes, has varied with her literary tastes: at first a sentimental hero, then an empty Byronic poseur, he finally emerges in her imagination as a cynical seducer along the lines of Adolphe—which he is not). It is Tatyana who relinquishes her romantic alienation, submits to social custom and marriage, the natural fulfillment of the human life cycle, and turns out to be most at one with nature and life. The whole novel is colored by a consciousness of the revolving seasons (especially autumn, the time of decay and the renewal of his own poetic creativity) and a sense of the vanity of men's vacillations in the face of the monumental impassiveness of natural cycles.

To summarize, both poems evoke a context of meaning outside the strict bounds of the poem, relating to life and history. Pan Tadeusz circumscribes, recapitulates, deliberately excluding Mickiewicz's mature historical context of meaning. But we know that his imaginative recreation of the Lithuanian Eden is the physical incarnation of a dream which he expects to reappear—sometime in the future. Eugene Onegin is also seminal, projecting beyond its artistic framework: “Artifice has liberated meaning and created a wide field of human speculation.”⁹ The difference is that, characteristically, Pushkin does not define that speculation for us. We see at the end of Pan Tadeusz the all-encompassing drive toward symmetry at work, in its final, cadential ordering of a world which is completely in its creator's (i.e., Mickiewicz's) control; while Eugene Onegin, that “masterpiece of formalism,” ends with a typically Russian suspension, implying further development in a world which ultimately slips through the hands, and artistic direction, of Pushkin and his Muse.

“Nothing is more characteristic of the fate of Polish literature than that Mickiewicz, unlike Pushkin, did not attempt to write prose fiction.”¹⁰Pan Tadeusz was indeed Mickiewicz's final poetic cadence, followed by twenty years of silence and the almost parodic martyrdom toward which he had focused his life and work. In spite of its many forward-looking elements, Pan Tadeusz must be considered a work of symmetrical culmination which was to dominate, and in a sense impoverish Polish literature throughout the century. Pushkin, on the other hand, was experimenting with dramatic and short-story forms right up to his sudden, and equally ironic death in a duel, which suspended him in mid-stream, like a Russian ending. His work lacks a sense of completion and finality, and his genius did not dominate his age as the embodiment of Russian literature, but rather inseminated it, providing it with forms and themes which might have developed under his own pen had he lived, but which would instead recur and expand in the hands of other writers even into the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Milosz, op. cit., p. 368.

2. Ibid., p. 366.

3. Bayley, op. cit., p. 331.

4. Bayley, op. cit., p. 352.

5. All translations of Mickiewicz are by the author.

6. Bayley, op. cit., p. 149.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 266.

10. Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1969), p. 355.