Poland's bard wrote empire-shaking verse in exile
Adam Mickiewicz, born 24 December 1798, stands as national poet for Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and one of Polish Romanticism's Three Bards. Dziady and the epic Pan Tadeusz fueled uprisings against the partitioning empires. He died in Istanbul in 1855 organizing anti-Russian forces.
He grew up in Navahrudak, today in Belarus, a Polonised gentry son in lands Russia had taken in the 1795 partition. After an unremarkable Dominican schooling he trained as a teacher at Vilnius from 1815, taught at Kaunas, and printed his first poem, City Winter, in 1818. Anthologies of 1822 and 1823 carried Grażyna and early parts of Dziady, marking his turn to Romanticism, while his Ode to Youth was judged too revolutionary to print.
As a student he co-founded the Philomaths, a self-education circle with links to pro-independence radicals. An 1823 investigation led to his arrest and, in 1824, banishment to central Russia. There he became a salon favourite for improvised verse, befriended Pushkin and Decembrist leaders, and published Konrad Wallenrod in 1828, whose subversive message slipped past Moscow's censors. Influential friends secured him a passport in 1829; he heard Hegel lecture in Berlin and was received by Goethe at Weimar.
He never reached the November 1830 Uprising in Russian Poland, lingering instead in Prussian territory before settling in Paris in 1832. There he published the third part of Dziady, befriended Chopin, and in 1834 completed Pan Tadeusz, his longest poem, whose opening Lithuania's anthem later paraphrased. That year he married Celina Szymanowska; they had six children and lived in chronic poverty.
He lectured on Latin at Lausanne and then held the new Slavic chair at the Collège de France until 1844, losing it amid clashes over Andrzej Towiański's mysticism. In 1849 he founded the newspaper La Tribune des Peuples. He died in Istanbul in 1855, probably of cholera, while raising Polish and Jewish units against Russia.
Source: Adam Mickiewicz
