Mickiewicz, ADAM

Mickiewicz, ADAM, the greatest of Polish poets, was born near Novogrodek in Lithuania (Minsk), on 24th December 1798, and educated at Vilna. In 1822, whilst teaching Polish literature at Kovno, he published his first collection of poems, full of the inspirations of Polish national life. Two years later he was banished to the interior of Russia for being concerned in the formation of a students' secret society. In 1825 he paid a visit to the Crimea, whose beauties he celebrated in a series of exquisite sonnets. Before quitting Russia in 1829 he published three epic poems, Dziady (1823-27), on the religious commemorations of their ancestors by the Slav races, and Konrad Wallenrod (1828; Eng. trans. 1841) and Grazyna (1827), the last two drawn from the struggle between the Lithuanians and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, and both glowing with patriotic feeling. From Russia Mickiewicz passed through Germany (where he visited Goethe and awakened the old Olympian's warm admiration) and France to Italy and Rome. In 1834 appeared his masterpiece, the epic poem Pan Tadeusz (Master Thaddeus; Eng. trans. 1886)—a most admirable delineation of Lithuanian customs and manners, traditions, ideas, and beliefs, and Lithuanian character, including fine poetical descriptions of the gloomy primeval forests and of the scenery of the country. After teaching for a while at Lausanne, Mickiewicz was appointed professor of the Slavonic Literatures at Paris in 1840; but three years later he was deprived of his chair, having given offence to the government of the day by political utterances in his lectures. For some years he lived a hard and unsettled life—in 1848 he was in Italy, helping to organise the Polish legion that fought side by side with the Italian republicans at Rome—until in 1852 Louis Napoleon appointed him a librarian in the Arsenal Library at Paris. He died 28th November 1855 at Constantinople, whither the French government had sent him to organise a Polish legion to fight against Russia. His body was taken to France and buried at Montmorency; but in 1890 his bones were transported to his native country and laid beside those of Kosciusko in the cathedral of Cracow. Mickiewicz is pre-eminently the national poet of the Poles, and next after Pushkin the greatest of all the poets of the Slavs. His collected works were issued at Paris in 11 vols. (1860-61), at Leipzig in 5 vols. (1862-69), and at Lemberg, a popular edition, in 4 vols. (1885 et seq.). See Life by his son Ladislas Mickiewicz (1888), Fontille (Mainard) (1862), both in French, and an anonymous one in German (1857); also the Memoirs of Herzen.