"I had accepted an invitation to deliver three lectures in French in the town-hall of Warsaw." Thus begins the description of the first of several travels of the author, a well-known Danish literary critic, to what was then known as "Russian Poland". During the course of several such travels, spanning more than a decade, he familiarizes himself with the conditions of life in all three parts of Poland, giving the reader an account of the situation of the language, theatre, everyday life and certain points of the law looming large in the lives of Poles.
In the second part of the book the reader receives a summary of the author's opinion about various works of literature with special emphasis on the great poets of Romanticism, i.e., Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński (Summary by Piotr Nater)
