Mickiewicz, Adam

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MICKIEWICZ, ADAM

MICKIEWICZ, ADAM (1798–1855), Polish Romantic poet.

Adam Mickiewicz was born on 24 December 1798 in or near Nowogródek (Novogrudok), a town in historical Lithuania, with Polish high culture, inhabited by Jews, surrounded by Belarusian peasants, featuring a mosque for Tatars, in the Russian Empire. Although the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned out of existence by Russia, Austria, and Prussia three years before Mickiewicz's birth, Polish culture remained dominant in historical Lithuania. From 1815 to 1819 Mickiewicz studied philology at the University of Vilnius, a center of Polish culture. He published Romantic manifestos in his Poetry in 1822 and two further works in 1823. In 1824 he was exiled for membership in secret student organizations. He spent five years in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Crimea, came to know Russian poets, and befriended Alexander Pushkin. In 1826 Mickiewicz published his Sonnets, which included erotic poetry and descriptions of steppe, sand, and sea. In 1828 followed Konrad Wallenrod, which included poetic formulations of the Romantic ideas of durability ("As butterflies drown in golden amber/Let us remain dear as we once were" or "O folk song! Ark of the covenant between days of old and these days of ours!"). The hero was a medieval Lithuanian who became a Teutonic Knight to rescue his people; Wallenrodism (apparent treason as national rescue) became an enduring political idea.

In the November Uprising of 1830, it appeared that Poland and Lithuania might liberate themselves from Russian rule. Mickiewicz was in Rome in 1830, and he failed to reach Russian Poland before the uprising was crushed. Like many refugees from Poland, he settled in Paris. There he quickly published three further works: the third book of Forefathers' Eve (1832), the Books of the Polish Nation and of Polish Pilgrimage (1832), and finally Pan Tadeusz (1834). The first two of these defined the current of messianism, articulating the special place of the poet in the life of the nation, and that of Poland in the general revival of European civilization. Pan Tadeusz, a gorgeous novel in poetry, was Mickiewicz's greatest technical achievement, and one of the most impressive poems of the nineteenth century. The hero, a humble young nobleman, disappears into his environment, the historic Lithuania of the early nineteenth century. The action is of little significance, while the descriptions of the habits of the petty gentry and the beauty of the land are, in addition to their limpid elegance, of anthropological and even botanical interest. The realism, the attention to private life, and the melancholy of the ending anticipate the end of Romanticism. It was Mickiewicz's last major poetic work.

In 1840 Mickiewicz was awarded the chair in Slavic literatures at the Collège de France. His lectures displayed a professional competence, as well as a particular affection for the Lithuanian and Belarusian languages. The "Springtime of the Peoples"—the Revolutions of 1848—found Mickiewicz in Rome. He gained an audience with Pope Pius IX, whom he is supposed to have told that the Holy Spirit was to be found in the blouses of the workers of Paris. Mickiewicz's heresy guaranteed that he was never in favor with the Roman Catholic Church. In Italy he organized a legion, which he provided with a list of Principles: among them equal rights for Jews, "our elder brothers in the faith." This formulation endured; it was employed, for example, by Pope John Paul II in the late twentieth century. In 1849 Mickiewicz published, in Paris, the journal La tribune des peuples (Peoples' tribune). The Crimean War (1853–1856) provided Mickiewicz with his last occasion to realize what he regarded as his mission. He traveled to Istanbul, with the intention of raising a Jewish legion to fight against the Russian Empire. There he died suddenly on 26 November 1855.

In his day, Mickiewicz was regarded as one of the greatest European poets. The French scholar Ernest Renan remembered him as part of the French heritage, associating him with the radical democrats Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet. Michelet called Mickiewicz "the greatest of us all." Poles remember him as a national "bard," a term that reveals the special role of poetry in Polish national consciousness during the partition period of the nineteenth century. The Poland that Mickiewicz imagined was the plural society of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His poems were dear to Polish socialists who wished to create a federation with Poland's eastern neighbors, and to Lithuanian and Belarusian patriots. Polish nationalists treated the poetry as pedagogical texts of the Polish language. Mickiewicz himself was of mixed national origins, likely both Belarusian and Jewish, and was concerned with the rejuvenation of Europe.

See alsoChopin, Frédéric; Nationalism; Poland.