Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Mickiewicz is Poland's national poet, and wrote his greatest work about a country that no longer appeared on maps. Born in 1798 near Navahrudak in what is now Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire after the partitions had erased Poland-Lithuania, he studied at Vilnius University and joined the Philomaths, a secret student society devoted to learning and patriotism. He was arrested in 1823 and deported into the interior of Russia, where he spent five years in Odessa, Moscow and St Petersburg, moving in literary circles and meeting Pushkin. He was allowed to leave in 1829 and never returned to his homeland. His Ballads and Romances of 1822 is conventionally treated as the beginning of Polish Romanticism, drawing on folk song and the supernatural against classical rules. Dziady, or Forefathers' Eve, written across many years, fuses a Belarusian ancestor-veneration rite with political vision; its third part, written in Dresden in 1832 after the November Uprising he did not reach in time to join, presents Poland as the Christ of nations, suffering for the redemption of others. A 1968 production in Warsaw was closed by the authorities for its anti-Russian lines and triggered a political crisis. Pan Tadeusz, published in Paris in 1834, is an epic in thirteen-syllable couplets about quarrelling Lithuanian gentry in 1811-12, saturated with longing for a lost landscape. It opens by addressing Lithuania as his fatherland and is the most widely read poem in Polish. He lectured on Slavic literature in Paris, and died of cholera in Constantinople in 1855 while raising a legion to fight Russia.
- Lived: 1798 CE – 1855 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: poet, intellectual
