Trzy liryczne komentarze (Gosławski - Garczyński - Mickiewicz)

Abstract

A clearly Romantic feature of Pan Tadeusz is the coexistence within it of various generic conventions, and also of elements belonging to various literary genres the dividing lines between which were in Romantic literature deliberately blurred. In Mickiewicz’s epic poem, this intention is signalled by the narrator’s coming into view and becoming a specific character that assumes the form of the lyrical subject. Such passages form the lyrical framework of the poem, and become a fundation of the epic tale told from the point of view of the present time which is pretext and a justification for the recalled memories of the poet’s youth. It is possible then to talk of the narrator’s double role. As an epic narrator, his consciousness os clearly reduced to the time of the poem’s action, and does not include either the later historical events, or the further course of the poem’s characters’ lives. His full historical awareness is revealed only in lyrical passages in which he looks at the past from an emigre’s point of view. This solution is not exceptional in the Polish Romantic literature, as both Stefan Garczyński in his Wacława dzieje (Venceslaus’s Life) (1833) and Maurycy Gosławski in his Tęsknota (Longing) (1833) resorted to it. The above argument also lends support to the opinion that the Epilogue of Pan Tadeusz should be ragarded as an integral part of the whole.