The Lithuanian forests

..."What do you think?" He knelt and showed his drawing.

Telimena studied his efforts with much grace,
Though clearly she was a connoisseur.  Her praise
Was sparing, but she encouraged him generously.
"Bravo!" she said. "You've great ability.
Though never forget: an artist has a duty
To seek out nature's loveliness.  Oh, the beauty
Of Italy's skies!  Of Rome's imperial
Rose gardens! Tibur's ancient waterfall,
Pausilippo's fearsome tunnel!  Now that's a land
For art!  This place is pitiful my friend!"

'This place' was Lithuania, setting for the epic poem, Pan Tadeusz, which has been newly translated by Bill Johnston and published in a beautiful edition by Archipelago. My quotation exemplifies a scene often encountered in early nineteenth century literature, where a 'connoisseur' (usually male) is unable to see beyond classical ideals of landscape and appreciate what is in front of them. The conversation between Telimena and the artist, a wealthy young Count, turns to the 'azure skies' of Italy whilst all around them 'the Lithuanian woods stretch limitless'.  Pan Tadeusz, the story's hero and a simple young man who 'still felt nature's draw', urges the Count to paint the trees surrounding them. Tadeusz cares little for "those skies of Italy / All clear and blue - they look like stagnant water! Wind and rain are surely so much better. / Look up right now..." and he goes on to describe the variety and endless beauty of the clouds.

In addition to its forests and skies, Pan Tadeusz celebrates the music, clothing, food and customs of Lithuania in a plot that dramatises the cause of Polish nationalism (Poland and Lithuania had existed as a powerful joint state in Europe before being carved up by its neighbours).  The book was set in Lithuania but written in Polish from Paris, where Adam Mickiewicz (who was actually born in what is now Belarus) had gone to live. Reading Pan Tadeusz I was conscious of the influence of Scott, Byron and Pushkin, but it also reminds me of Turgenev, while Bill Johnston sees elements of Thomas Hardy.  Some of the poem's most famous scenes lend themselves to landscape illustration, such as the bear hunt (below), or a mushroom picking excursion in which the young men look for chanterelles and the ladies seek 'the slim boletus known / In song as the mushroom's general.'

Franciszek Kosttrzevski, Hunting scene in 'Pan Tadeusz', 1886

It is not possible now to write about Pan Tadeusz without referring to Landscape and Memory, which opens with Simon Schama in the puszcza, the woodland wilderness that has become the 'consolatory myth of sylvan countryside that would endure uncontaminated whatever disasters befell the Polish state'.  He discusses Pan Tadeusz and the life of Adam Mickiewicz at some length, showing how, for example, 'no writer before Mickiewicz had described the etiology of the ancient forest with such a keen eye, or worked harder to convey its shifting zones of light and darkness.'  Beyond its tangle of broken trunks there are deep ponds 'half overgrown with grass' where 'the water has a bloody, rust-red sheen / While wisps of noxious smoke rise from within.'  But at the centre of the forest, Mickiewicz imagined a hidden world, ruled by bears, aurochs and bison, where 'decorousness prevails' and an unarmed man would be left unharmed.  Schama pictures Mickiewicz writing this in his Paris apartment, where it was a 'landscape of memory, seen through a lead-pane window: grey houses metamorphosing into timber ruins, the streets invaded by the forest primeval; an unattainable Lithuania governed by bison, a commonwealth of perfect justice and peace, impregnable behind palisades of splintered hornbeam.'