INTRODUCTION
"No European nation of our day has such an epic as Pan Tadeusz. In it Don Quixote has been fused with the Iliad. The poet stood on the border line between a vanishing generation and our own. Before they died, he had seen them; but now they are no more. That is precisely the epic point of view. Mickiewicz has performed his task with a master's hand; he has made immortal a dead generation, which now will never pass away. . . . Pan Tadeusz is a true epic. No more can be said or need be said."[1]
This verdict upon the great masterpiece of all Slavic poetry, written a few years after its appearance, by Zygmunt Krasinski, one of Mickiewicz's two great successors in the field of Polish letters, has been confirmed by the judgment of posterity. For the chapter on Pan Tadeusz by George Brandes, than whom there have been few more competent judges of modern European literature, is little more than an expansion of Krasinski's pithy sentences. The cosmopolitan critic echoes the patriotic Pole when he writes: "In Pan Tadeusz Poland possesses the only successful epic our century has produced."[2]
Still more important than the praises of the finest literary critics is the enthusiastic affection cherished for
- ↑ Quoted from a letter of Krasinski, by Kallenbach, Adam Mickiewicz (Cracow, 1897), vol. ii. p. 174.
- ↑ Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature (London and New York, 1903), p. 284.
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