Publisher's Synopsis
The most authoritative, fully annotated English rendering to date of a masterpiece of European Romantic literature still largely unknown in the Anglosphere.Includes a robust scholarly apparatus and an introductory essay by Dr. Andrzej Wasko, one of Poland's pre-eminent Mickiewicz scholars.Mickiewicz's romantic tale has everything: A love interest involving two estranged families, a disputed castle, a mysterious hooded friar à la Walter Scott, sumptuous banquets, hare courses, a bear hunt in Lithuania's old-growth forest, an uproarious brawl, stiff doses of political satire and Romantic irony, a full-scale battle replete with Homeric similes, and some of the most evocative descriptions of nature in all of world literature. A paean to the virtues of patriotism and national particularism with a timely implicit warning against Western civilization's inexorable drive toward eradicating national borders.
