‘Lithuania’ and ‘Poland’ in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz
Please join us for Prof. Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski's Inaugural Lecture
‘Lithuania’ and ‘Poland’ in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz
11 Mar 2026, 18:30 – 20:30
Why does the most famous poem in the Polish language open with the invocation ‘Lithuania! My Fatherland!’? And why is its author, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), variously claimed as Polish, Lithuanian, or Belarusian? Answering these questions will involve some statistical analysis and close reading of the twelve books of Pan Tadeusz (1834), during a journey back to the vanished world of Mickiewicz’s childhood. The lecture aims to show how the meanings of ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Poland’ in the first decades after the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the neighbouring powers in 1795 differed from those current today.
The Lecture will be followed by a reception.
Image credit: Grzybobranie (Mushroom picking) by Franciszek Kostrzewski (1826–1911), cca 1860. Wikimedia Commons.
Richard read History at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and gained his DPhil. at Hertford College, Oxford. From a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford he moved to the Queen’s University of Belfast and thence to UCL SSEES in 2005, where he has been Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History since 2013. In Warsaw he holds the European Civilization Chair at the College of Europe and is the Principal Historian of the Polish History Museum.
Further information
Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes