Pan Tadeusz

Poland’s national epic began as an exile’s act of memory. Writing in Paris in the 1830s, Adam Mickiewicz set his long narrative poem in the Lithuanian countryside of his youth, in the years just before Napoleon’s march on Russia stirred hopes of national freedom. The story turns on a feud between two gentry families, a buried grievance over a castle, and the tender romance of young Tadeusz and Zosia, all told with warmth, humor, and a deep love for a vanishing way of life. Its famous opening lines, an address to a lost homeland, are known to every Polish schoolchild. Maude Ashurst Biggs rendered the verse into English. This edition is free to read as a PDF and EPUB.