On the first page of this excellent new biography, Roman Koropeckyj re­lates how, in 1968, the Polish communist government, which had hitherto praised Adam Mickiewicz as the country’s first patriotic poet, banned a production of his drama Forefather’s Eve. Its anti-Russian sentiments made them nervous. Reading this as a non-Slavist scholar of Byron and ro­manticism, I wondered to what extent Mickiewicz, known in cliché, after all, as “the Polish Byron,” united creativity on the page with activity on the street. Indeed, Part III of Forefather’s Eve (the part which, I surmise, the communists banned), is one long depiction of the way Russia is attempting to wipe Poland and Polish culture from the face of the earth. Action is the only possibility left when you leave the theater, and the communists were, from their own perspective, correct to ban it. In other words, Mickiewicz is not “the Polish Byron”: the analogy is false. Byron was all in favor of revo­lutions abroad (a revolution at home might have caused a fall in the value of his holdings in government funds), but he could have gone back home from exile any time he wanted, while Mickiewicz had already been exiled from Poland once, before the Polish Uprising of 1831—albeit to the com­forts of St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Moscow—and had he tried to return to Poland post-1831, he would have been at the very least sent to Siberia. Yet, as Koropeckyj writes, “Byron came to share the same space in Mickiewicz’s pantheon as Napoleon” (45). In 1822, we find Mickiewicz writing in a let­ter, “I read only Byron, and cast aside books if written in a different spirit, since I don’t like lies; if there’s a description of happiness, family life, this rouses my indignation as much as the sight of married couples and chil­dren; this is my only aversion” (46–47)—which puts an interesting, if sad, gloss on Mickiewicz’s interpretation both of “lies” and of Byron’s version of “happiness”: this last has indeed very little to do with marriage, or chil­dren. Byron was a bad husband and an indifferent father: Mickiewicz, as Koropeckyj shows, outgrew the adolescent distaste for breeding shown in this letter, married, and had six children, towards whom he was affection­ate in the normal way. He became, indeed, “the Byron of his country, but a moral and Christian Byron” (247) if that isn’t too glaring a contradiction in terms. When Mickiewicz translated The Giaour, it became accepted as a virtual Polish poem in its own right precisely because he changed the Giaour’s deathbed sneers at Christian consolation into pious acceptance of the same.