Virgil Krapauskas noted that "Lithuanians like to prove that Adam Mickiewicz was Lithuanian"; and Tomas Venclova described this attitude as "the story of Mickiewicz’s appropriation by Lithuanian culture". For example, the Lithuanian scholar of literature writes that Mickiewicz's family was descended from an old Lithuanian noble family (Rimvydas) with origins predating Lithuania's Christianization but the Lithuanian nobility in Mickiewicz's time was heavily Polonized and spoke Polish. Mickiewicz had been brought up in the culture of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multicultural state that had encompassed most of what today are the separate countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. To Mickiewicz, a splitting of that multicultural state into separate entities, due to trends such as Lithuanian separatism, was undesirable, if not outright unthinkable. According to Romanucci-Ross, while Mickiewicz called himself a " Litvin" ("Lithuanian"), in his time the idea of a separate "Lithuanian identity", apart from a "Polish" one, did not exist. This multicultural aspect is evident in his works; his most famous poetic work, "Pan Tadeusz", begins with the Polish-language invocation, "O Lithuania, my country, thou art like good health ..." (""Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie ..."". It is generally accepted, however, that Mickiewicz, when referring to Lithuania, meant a historical region rather than a linguistic and cultural entity, and he often applied the term "Lithuanian" to the Slavic inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.