Pan Tadeusz
All of Mickiewicz's works, including "Pan Tadeusz", are written in the Polish language. He had been brought up in the multicultural Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a state that incorporated most of what today are the separate countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. (Hence a waggish witticism has it that Mickiewicz, who grew up in a Polish speaking family in Russian empire, Lithuania Governorate, Zaosie and studied at Vilnius University in Lithuania, Of numerous passages from "Pan Tadeusz" that are familiar to Poles, the most celebrated is its opening quatrain: