The borderlands, in fact, were even more Polish than Poland proper, because the provincial nobility, unlike the sophisticates of Warsaw, had stuck to old-fashioned szlachta ways. The fact that the actual population of those borderlands was mostly of a different nationality was immaterial. Hence Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet and a man who never visited Warsaw in his life, was able to open his patriotic epic Pan Tadeusz with the words ‘Oh Lithuania’.
