Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz (born December 24, 1798, Zaosye, near Nowogródek, Belorussia, Russian Empire [now in Belarus]—died November 26, 1855, Constantinople [now Istanbul], Turkey) was one of the greatest poets of Poland and a lifelong apostle of Polish national freedom.

Born into an impoverished noble family, Mickiewicz studied at the University of Wilno (now Vilnius University) between 1815 and 1819; in 1817 he joined a secret patriotic student society, which was later incorporated into a larger clandestine student organization. Together with his fellow students in the organization, Mickiewicz was arrested in 1823 and deported to Russia for illegal patriotic activities. In Moscow he established friendly relations with Aleksandr Pushkin and other Russian intellectuals.

Mickiewicz’s first volume of poems, Poezye (1822; “Poetry”), included ballads, romances, and an important preface explaining his admiration of western European poetic forms and his desire to transplant them to Polish literature. The second volume of Poezye (1823) contained parts two and four of his Dziady (Forefather’s Eve), in which he combined elements of folklore with a story of tragic love to create a new kind of Romantic drama. While in Russia he visited Crimea in 1825, and, soon after, he published his cycle of sonnets Sonety Krymskie (1826; Crimean Sonnets). Konrad Wallenrod (1828; Konrad Wallenrod and Grazyna) is a poem describing the wars of the Teutonic Order with the Lithuanians but actually representing the age-old feud between Poland and Russia.

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A Study of Poetry

Mickiewicz was finally able to leave Russia in 1829, on the grounds of ill health. Traveling throughout Germany, he missed participating in the unsuccessful Polish insurrection of 1830–31. In the third part of Dziady (1833; Dziady III), which he completed in 1832, Mickiewicz views Poland as fulfilling a messianic role among the nations of western Europe by its national embodiment of the Christian themes of self-sacrifice and eventual redemption. In 1832 he settled in Paris and there wrote, in biblical prose, the Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (“Books of the Polish Nation and Its Pilgrimage”), a moral interpretation of the history of the Polish people.

Mickiewicz’s masterpiece, the great epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834; Eng. trans. Pan Tadeusz; film 1999), describes the life of the Polish gentry in the early 19th century through a fictional account of the feud between two families of Polish nobles. The poem conveys perfectly the ethos of an archaic society in which the ideals of chivalry are still alive and shows the effect of the Napoleonic myth on the minds of Poles for whom the French emperor and the Polish troops under his command represented the only hope for liberation from Russian rule.

Mickiewicz was appointed professor of Latin literature at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1839 but resigned a year later to teach Slavonic literature at the Collège de France. He remained there until 1844, when Napoleon III relieved him of the post—because he was teaching the mystical doctrines of the mesmerist Andrzej Towiański—and appointed him librarian at the Arsenal. In early 1848 he went to Rome to persuade the new pope to support the cause of Polish national freedom. Between March and October 1849 he edited the radical newspaper La Tribune des Peuples (“People’s Tribune”). In September 1855 he was sent to Turkey by Prince Adam Czartoryski to mediate between factions of Poles preparing to fight with the Allies in the Crimean War, but he did not survive the trip. In 1890 his remains were reburied in the vault of Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, where many Polish kings are laid to rest.

Mickiewicz was the principal poet of Polish Romanticism. His love lyrics, succinct and charged with emotion and meaning, raised the image of woman to a level of ideality previously unknown in Polish poetry. With his exalted patriotism, mystical feeling, and passionate appreciation of the positive aspects of Polish life, he came to epitomize the Polish spirit for succeeding generations of Polish writers. Selections of his poetry can be found in two bilingual editions: Treasury of Love Poems by Adam Mickiewicz (1998) and The Sun of Liberty: Bicentenary Anthology: 1798–1998 (1998).

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