jotted down a thousand verses." He had evidently planned a village idyl of no great length, probably based on the love of Thaddeus and Zosia. In a draft of the first book that is still preserved, Thaddeus sees on the wall a picture of Joseph Poniatowski at the battle of Leipzig (October 19, 1813), "riding a mettled steed" but "stricken with a mortal wound." Thus the action of the poem could not have taken place earlier than 1814. Later, Mickiewicz threw back the time of his action to the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812; thus, by giving his poem a political background in the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, he transformed his village idyl into a national epic. The Monk Robak, or Jacek Soplica, and not his commonplace son Thaddeus, now became the real hero of the poem.[1] Nor was this hero wholly a product of the writer's invention. There has recently been discovered a petition by Mikolaj Mickiewicz, the father of the poet, praying the authorities to grant him protection from one Jan Soplica, "a man of criminal sort," who had slain the uncle of the petitioner and was now threatening to kill the whole Mickiewicz family and burn their house. With the character of this person the description of Jacek Soplica's early years agrees as closely as his name. Mickiewicz even mentions his own kindred as the ancestral enemies of the Soplicas (page 45). Yet one of that hated family he now made the hero of his greatest poem. By introducing him in the guise of Father Robak, repentant and striving to atone for past misdeeds through heroic service to his country, he infused into his poem a
- ↑ I am here indebted to Kallenbach (Adam Mickiewicz, Cracow, 1897), and Pilat (Introduction to edition of Pan Tadeusz of Towarzystwo Literackie, Lemberg).
