Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz was born in Zaosie, in the former grand duchy of Lithuania, into an impoverished noble family. He studied at the University of Vilno in the years 1815-1819 and in 1819-23 he was a teacher in Kaunas. His early interest in the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire soon changed into admiration of the two great Romantic writers, Schiller and Byron. In Vilno he took part in a semisecret group known as the Philomaths and Philarets. It protested Russian control of Poland and in 1823 Mickiewicz was arrested with many other Philomaths by the Russian police. He was jailed for several months and then exiled to Russia. Mickiewicz never saw his home again. He lived in Odessa, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. During this period he was befriended by many leading Russian writers, including Aleksandr Pushkin.

As a poet Mickwicz gained first attention with Balady i romanse (1822), which had on its background a disappointment in love. The book included ballads, romances, and a preface about western European literature. The collection opened the romantic era in Polish literature. It was followed by the fantastic drama Dziady (1823-32, Forefathers' Eve), in which Poland had a messanic role among the nations of westerns Europe.

The title of the play was taken from an ancient folk celebration in Belorussia, held on All Souls' Day, which honors the memory of the dead and were common in Lithuania during Mickiewicz's youth. The second part dealt with the theme of earthy suffering. It portrayed the ghosts of the ill-treated tenants, children who cannot reach heaven because they have not suffered on earth, and the virgin shepherdess who had experienced neither love nor grief. Part III depicted the martyrdom of Poland and presented a vision of the future country in which the sufferings are equated with the Passion of Christ. This vision concludes with a prophecy about a mysterious future savior of Poland, bearing the name "44." Part IV was a monodrama. The protagonist is the spirit of a young suicide victim, consumed with a passion that leads to insanity and death.

During his exile Mickiewicz wrote among others Konrad Wallenrod (1828), a philosophical poem, which inspired the Polish youth in the struggle against oppression. In the work a Lithuanian master in a Teutonic order undermines its activities. In 1825 he visited the Crimea and published his erotic Sonety krymskie (1826, Crimean Sonnets). Although Mickiewicz was inspired by the landscapes of the steppe, his Polish nationalism intensified. In his poetical works Mickiewicz expressed a romantic view of the soul and the mysteries of life, often employing folk themes. His approach was fresh and new - when writers had depicted with polished language the life of the educated classes, Mickiewicz used colloquial expressions and portrayed peasants.

In 1829 Mickiewicz was permitted to leave Russia. He went to Bohemia, Germany, where he met Goethe, Switzerland, and Italy, where he met James Fenimore Cooper. The author had appealed to the American people to aid Poland during the rebel against Russia in 1830-1831. Mickiewicz tried to join the insurrection but the authorities stopped him in Prussian Poland. In Dresden he met refugees and used their hard fate as material in the third part of Dziady.

Mickiewicz eventually settled in Paris. He served as professor of literature at the University of Lausanne (1839) and at the Collège de France (1840–44). Mickiewicz's academic career ended when he was accused of using his position for political activities. For a time in 1848 he edited the radical newspaper La Tribune des peuples. He also became the center of enthusiastic followers to his lectures, both Polish émigrés and French intellectuals.

Pan Tadeusz (1834) expressed Mickiewicz's nostalgia for his homeland. It is a humorous epic of the Polish gentry in the early 19th century and accounts of the feud between two noble families. Mickiewicz's work is regarded as a monument of Polish national literature. The masterpiece was born three year after Frédéric Chopin's famous 'Revolution Etude.' Chopin's ballads captured the same charm and fire typical for Mickiewicz's poems and his polonaises have been regarded in some respect as a national manifestation.

Soon after the publication of Pan Tadeusz Mickiewicz married Celina Szymanowska. The marriage was unhappy. The family lived on the brink of poverty and his wife suffered a nervous breakdown. Mickiewicz's espousal of the mystical and political doctrines of Andrzej Towianski (1799-1878) caused his dismissal from the college.

In the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 Mickiewicz's idealism renewed. He attempted unsuccessfully to enlist Polish regiments to help Garibaldi in the Italian struggle against Austria. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, Mickiewicz went to Turkey to raise Polish armies in Turkey. He died during a cholera epidemic in Constantinople on November 26, in 1885. His body was was first transported to Paris. In 1890 Mickiewicz's remains returned to Poland and were buried with the Polish kings in the national shrine in Cracow.