“Wondrous Fire": Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz and the Romantic Improvisation
Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834), which can fairly be argued to be the central work of Polish romanticism, to this day has been a subject of critical attention. The recent Balsam i trucizna is a collection of essays consisting of sometimes arcane, sometimes unorthodox interpretations of the work, as well as an inquiry into the title itself, and an analysis of single words or other neglected aspects of the poem. Thus, it would seem that little remained in the work's content to explore, that after numerous articles, dissertations, and in particular, the exhaustive twovolume study by Kazimierz Wyka, only observations of a modest or limited scale could be made. [...]
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