Adam Mickiewicz Biography and List of Works

Polish romantic poet and playwright, the leader of Polish Romanticism. Mickiewicz's best-known works include Forefathers' Eve, Grazyna, Konrad Wallenrod, and the long narrative poem Pan Tadeusz. Much of Mickiewicz's work was written in exile in Russia. After release he spent the rest of his life in Western Europe, where he became the spiritual leader of Polish émigrés.

"Litva! My country, like art thou to health,
For how to prize thee alone can tell
Who has lost thee. I behold thy beauty now
In full adornment, and I sing of it
Because I long for thee."
(from Pan Tadeusz)

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. In Vilno he took part in a semi-secret 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, where he lived in Odessa, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and 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 disappointing love affair. 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 messianic role among the nations of westerns Europe.

The title of the play was taken from an ancient folk celebration in Byelorussia, held on All Souls' Day, which honours the memory of the dead and were common in Lithuania during Mickiewicz's youth. The second part dealt with the theme of earthy suffering and 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 saviour 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 veiled the Polish struggle in old Teutonic disguise. In 1825 he visited the Crimea and published his erotic Sonety krymskie (1826). 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.

In 1829 Mickiewich was permitted to leave Russia. He went to Bohemia, Germany, 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 in the third part of Dziady.

"Fair words and fairer thoughts are mine;
Much do I feel, writing early and late;
My soul like a widow's must still repine -
To whom my songs shall I dedicate?

To thoughts and words I give birth each day -
Why do they not my sorrow appease?
Because my soul is a widow grey
And only many orphans sees."
(from 'The Pilgrim's Song,' 1832)

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). For a time in 1848 he edited the radical newspaper La Tribune des peuples. He also became the centre 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 ballades 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 first transported to Paris. In 1890 Mickiewicz's remains returned to Poland and were buried with the Polish kings in the national shrine in Krakow.

For further reading: Adam Mickiewicz, the National Poet of Poland by M. Gardner (1911); Mickiewicz by J. Kleiner (1948, 2 vols.); Palmira i Babilon by W. Kubacki (1951); The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz by W. Weintraub (1954); Czytajac Mickiewicza by J. Przybos (1956); Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature, ed. by W. Lednicki (1956); Kronica zycia i twórczoski Adama Mickiewicza, ed. by S. Pigon (1957); Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Poland by Manfred Kridl (1970); Swiat teatralny mtodego Mickiewicza by Michal Witkowski (1971); Adam Mickiewicz : Leben und Werk, ed. by Bonifacy Mizzek (1998) - See also: Adam Mickiewicz and Conrad ; Adam Mickiewicz Museum ; Biography of Adam Mickiewicz ; Pan Tadeusz (in Polish) ; Adam Mickiewicz

Oda do mlodósci, (1820)