Adam Mickiewicz (1798 - 1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist and political activist, widely regarded as the national poet of Poland and a central figure of Romanticism in Central and Eastern Europe. [1] His 1822 collection Ballady i romanse is conventionally taken to mark the beginning of the Polish Romantic period, and his epic Pan Tadeusz is the best-known long poem in the language. [2] He spent most of his adult life in exile and died in Constantinople while organising Polish forces during the Crimean War.
Early life and education
Mickiewicz was born on 24 December 1798 at Zaosie, near Navahrudak in the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then recently annexed by the Russian Empire. [1] His family belonged to the minor gentry, and the region's landscape and folklore shaped his writing.
He studied at the Imperial University of Vilnius from 1815, where he helped found the Philomath Society, a student association devoted to learning and patriotic self-improvement. [3] In 1823 the Russian authorities broke up the Philomaths, and Mickiewicz was imprisoned and then deported into the interior of Russia.
Exile in Russia
Between 1824 and 1829 he lived in Saint Petersburg, Odessa and Moscow, moving in literary circles that included Alexander Pushkin. [2] A journey to the Crimea produced the Sonety krymskie, a sonnet sequence that brought an oriental landscape and an exile's sensibility into Polish verse.
The narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, published in 1828, told of a Lithuanian who destroys the Teutonic Order from within; contemporaries read it as an argument about conspiracy against an occupying power. [1] The following year Mickiewicz obtained permission to leave Russia and travelled through Germany, where he met Goethe, and on to Italy and Switzerland.
The Great Emigration and major works
Mickiewicz did not reach the November Uprising of 1830 before it was crushed, and in 1832 he settled in Paris among the Polish political emigration. [3] There he completed the third part of Dziady, or Forefathers' Eve, a dramatic cycle blending folk ritual, prison scenes drawn from the Philomath arrests and a messianic vision of Poland's suffering.
Pan Tadeusz, published in 1834, is a verse narrative in twelve books set in the Lithuanian countryside of 1811 and 1812, recounting a feud between two gentry families against the background of Napoleon's advance on Russia. [2] Written far from the places it describes, it combines comedy, domestic observation and elegy for a vanished way of life, and became the most widely read poem in Polish literature.
Later years and death
He married Celina Szymanowska in 1834. From 1839 he held a chair of Latin literature at Lausanne, and from 1840 the newly created chair of Slavic literature at the Collège de France in Paris. [1] He was suspended in 1844 after using the platform to promote the teachings of the mystic Andrzej Towiański.
During the revolutions of 1848 Mickiewicz attempted to raise a Polish legion in Italy and afterwards edited the radical newspaper La Tribune des Peuples in Paris. [3] In 1855, during the Crimean War, he travelled to Constantinople to help organise Polish units to fight Russia, and died there on 26 November, most likely of cholera.
Legacy
His remains were first buried at Montmorency near Paris and in 1890 transferred to Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, among the tombs of Polish kings. [2] Pan Tadeusz and Dziady are fixtures of the Polish school curriculum and of the national stage, and monuments to Mickiewicz stand in Warsaw, Kraków, Vilnius, Poznań and elsewhere. [1] His work is also claimed within the literary heritage of Lithuania and Belarus.
