Adam Mickiewicz
1798–1855
Biography
Adam Mickiewicz was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist and political activist, born in 1798 in the Russian-ruled part of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was one of the three bards of Polish Romanticism and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. Poland treats him as its national poet, Lithuania and Belarus also count him as a national figure, and his influence reached Ukrainian and Russian writing as well.
His political activity brought exile. After five years of banishment inside the Russian Empire he left it in 1829 and spent the rest of his life abroad, first in Rome and then in Paris, where he taught Slavic literature at the Collège de France until his involvement with the mystic Andrzej Towiański cost him the post. In 1849 he founded a French-language newspaper that argued for democracy and national liberation. He died in Istanbul in 1855, probably of cholera, while trying to organise Polish and Jewish volunteers to fight Russia in the Crimean War. His remains were moved to Wawel Cathedral in Kraków in 1894.
His best-known works include the poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and the national epic Pan Tadeusz. The site holds Konrad Wallenrod, a narrative poem of 1828 set in fourteenth-century Lithuania. Its hero is a Lithuanian raised by the Teutonic Knights, who rises to become their Grand Master and then leads them into a ruinous defeat as a secret revenge. The poem's anti-Russian message was clear to most readers, yet it slipped past the censors partly because they disagreed among themselves. It helped inspire the November 1830 Uprising, and the idea of a treacherous blow against an enemy that it popularised became known as Wallenrodism.
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Books
Konrad Wallenrod
by Adam Mickiewicz
Konrad Wallenrod, a Lithuanian taken as a boy by the Teutonic Knights and raised among them, rises to become Grand Master of the Order in order to destroy it from within. Mickiewicz's narrative poem of 1828 is a story of betrayal for the sake of a country and of the love that…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.