MICKIEWICZ, ADAM (BERNARD)

born , Dec. 24, 1798, Zaos'ye, near Novogrudek, Belorussia, Russian Empire died Nov. 26, 1855, Constantinople one of the greatest poets of Poland and a lifelong apostle of Polish national freedom. Born into an impoverished noble family, Mickiewicz studied at the University of Vilnius between 1815 and 1819; in 1817 he joined a secret patriotic student organization, the Filomaci, later incorporated in the Filareci. His first volume of poems, Poezja I (1822; Poetry I), included ballads, romances, and an important preface explaining his admiration for these western European forms and his desire to transplant them to Polish soil. Poezja II (1823) contained parts two and four of his Dziady (Forefather's Eve), in which he combined folklore and mystic patriotism to create a new kind of Romantic drama. With the other Filareci, Mickiewicz was arrested in 1823 and sentenced to deportation to Russia for spreading Polish nationalism; he worked in Moscow and was befriended by most of the leading Russian writers, including Pushkin. In 1825 he visited the Crimea and soon after published his erotic Sonety Krymskie (1826; Sonnets from the Crimea). Konrad Wallenrod (1828) is a poem describing the wars of the Teutonic Order with the Lithuanians but actually representing the age-old feud between Poland and Russia. Mickiewicz was finally able to leave Russia on the grounds of ill health in 1829. He traveled throughout Germany but missed participating in the unsuccessful Polish insurrection of 1830. In the third part of Dziady (1833; Dziady III), which he completed in 1832, Mickiewicz views Poland as fulfilling a messianic role among the nations of western Europe by its national embodiment of the Christian themes of self-sacrifice and eventual redemption. In 1832 he settled in Paris and there wrote, in biblical prose, the Ksiegi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (Books of the Polish Nation and its Pilgrimage), a moral interpretation of the history of the Polish people. His masterpiece, the great poetic epic Pan Tadeusz (1834; Master Thaddeus), describes the life of the Polish gentry in the early 19th century through a fictional account of the feud between two families of Polish nobles. The poem conveys perfectly the ethos of an archaic society in which the ideals of chivalry are still alive and shows the effect of the Napoleonic myth on honest and simple minds, to whom the French emperor is an instrument of Providence. He was appointed professor of Latin literature at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1839 but resigned a year later to teach Slavonic literature at the Collge de France. He remained there until 1844, when he was suspended for teaching the mystical doctrines of the mesmerist Andrzej Towianski. In early 1848 he went to Rome to persuade the new pope to support the cause of Polish national freedom. Between March and October 1849 he edited the radical newspaper La Tribune des Peuples (People's Tribune). Napoleon III relieved him of his post at the Collge de France in 1852 but appointed him librarian at the Arsenal. In September 1855 he was sent to Turkey by Prince Adam Czartoryski to mediate between factions of Poles preparing to fight on the side of the Allies in the Crimean War, but he did not survive the trip. In 1890 his remains were reburied in the vault of Wawel cathedral in Krakw, where many Polish kings are laid to rest. Mickiewicz was the principal poet of Polish Romanticism. His love lyrics, succinct and charged with emotion and meaning, raised the image of woman to ideal heights previously unknown in Polish poetry. With his exalted patriotism, mystical feeling, and passionate appreciation of the positive aspects of Polish life, he came to epitomize the Polish spirit for succeeding generations of his nation's writers.