Adam Mickiewicz

A portrait of Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (December 24 1798 – November 26 1855) is considered to be Poland's greatest poet, alongside Zygmunt Krasiński and Juliusz Słowacki, all of whom belonged to the school of poetic Romanticism. Like other Romantics, Mickiewicz was inspired by nature, and in nature he hoped to find an organic way to the truth — a way, that is, of communicating a message with the freshness and immediacy of the natural world. Additionally, like other young Romantic poets, Mickiewicz was a large-hearted troublemaker. He devoted much of his poetic oeuvre to writing political poems that would generate huge amounts of controversy. He was a champion of the cause of Polish and Lithuanian independence at a time when the Russian Empire was all but inexorable, and because of this he would be exiled, like so many other Slavic writers, to Western Europe for the remainder of his life.

Mickiewicz is an almost legendary figure in Polish literature, comparable only to Pushkin's place in Russia, in terms of the number of Polish writers who cite him as an inspiration and a fountainhead. In terms of the English-speaking world, Mickiewicz can be most readily compared to Lord Byron—both were wild, youthful, exuberant poets of the Romantic school; both were well ahead of their times in terms of their radical political views; and both, by a strange coincidence, would lose their lives fighting for another country's freedom.

Regardless, Mickiewicz is a monumental figure in Eastern Europe literature, and his influence cuts as wide a swath as any other major figure of the Romantic movement. Like Goethe in Germany, Coleridge in England, Rousseau in France, or even Emerson in America, Mickiewicz is a father-figure to an entire nation's literary history, and his importance to any survey of literary history is unparalleled

Biography

Mickiewicz was born in the Zavosse manor of his uncle near Navahradak (Polish: Nowogródek, Lithuanian: Naugardukas, Belarusian: Наваградак, Russian: Новогрудок) of the Russian Empire (formerly in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now in Belarus). His father, Mikołaj Mickiewicz, belonged to the szlachta, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. The poet was educated at the University of Wilno; becoming involved in a secret Polish-Lithuanian freedom organization there. After his studies he worked as a tutor in a regional school in Kowno from 1819-1823.

In 1823 he was arrested and put under investigation for his political activity. Subsequently he was banished to live in central Russia. He had already published two small volumes of miscellaneous poetry at Wilno, which had been favourably received by the Slavic public, and on his arrival at St. Petersburg he found himself admitted to the leading literary circles, where he was a great favourite both from his agreeable manners and his extraordinary talent of improvisation. In 1825 he visited the Crimea, which inspired a collection of sonnets (Sonety Krymskie, Crimean Sonnets) in which we may admire both the elegance of the rhythm and the rich Oriental colouring. The most beautiful of these sonnets, "The Storm", is worthy of quotation, as it will provide the reader with a sense of Mickiewicz's wonderful imagery, his inventive, clattering rhymes, and his noble sense of humanity:

The rudder breaks, the sails are ripped, the roar

Of waters mingles with the ominous sound

Of pumps and panic voices; all around

Torn ropes. The sun sets red, we hope no more -

The tempest howls in triumph; from the shore

Where wet cliffs rising tier on tier surround

The ocean chaos, death advances, bound

To carry ramparts broken long before,

One man has swooned, one wrings his hands ,one sinks

Upon his friends, embracing them. Some say

a prayer to death that it may pass them by.

One traveller sits apart and sadly thinks:

"Happy the man who faints or who can pray

Or has a friend to whom to say goodbye."

In 1828 his poem Konrad Wallenrod appeared, a narrative poem describing the battles of the Teutonic Knights with the heathen Lithuanians. Here, under a thin veil, Mickiewicz represented the sanguinary passages of arms and burning hatred which had characterized the long feuds of the Russians and Poles. The objects of the poem, though obvious to many, escaped the Russian censors, and the poem was allowed to be published, complete with the telling motto, adapted from Machiavelli: "Dovete adunque sapere come sono duo generazioni da combattere - bisogna essere volpe e leone" — "Ye shall know that there are two ways of fighting - you must be a fox and a lion." The poem cemented Mickiewicz's fame — and sealed his fate. After Konrad Wallenrod he would almost interminably be on the run from the controversy.

After a five years' exile in Russia the poet obtained leave to travel; he had secretly made up his mind never to return to that country or native land as long as it remained under the government of Imperial Russia. Wending his way to Weimar, he there made the acquaintance of Goethe, who received him cordially, and, pursuing his journey through Germany, he entered Italy, visited Milan, Venice, and Florence, and finally took up his abode at Rome. There he wrote the third part of his poem Dziady (Forefathers Eve), the subject of which is the religious commemoration of ancestors practised among Slavic nations, and Pan Tadeusz, his longest poem, by many considered his masterpiece. The poem consists of a graphic picture of Lithuania on the eve of Napoleon's expedition to Russia in 1812. In this village idyll, as Brückner calls it, Mickiewicz gives us a picture of the homes of the Commonwealth magnates, with their somewhat boisterous but very genuine hospitality. We see them before us, just as the knell of their nationalism, as Brückner says, seemed to be sounding, and therefore there is something melancholy and dirge-like in the poem in spite of the pretty love story which forms the main narrative.

Mickiewicz turned to Lithuania, firmly stating it as his Fatherland (but Adam used Polish term "Litwa" in sense that his native Navahradak area was a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, most of which at the end of the 18th century consisted of modern Belarus), with the loving eyes of an exile, and gives us some of the most delightful descriptions of "Lithuanian" skies and "Lithuanian" forests. He describes the weird sounds to be heard in the primeval woods in a country where the trees were sacred. There is nothing finer in Shelley or Wordsworth.

In 1832 Mickiewicz left Rome for Paris, where his life was for some time spent in poverty and unhappiness. He had married a Polish lady, Celina Szymanowska, who eventually became insane and required institutionalization. In 1840 he was appointed to the newly founded chair of Slavic languages and literature in the College de France, a post which he was especially qualified to fill, as he was now the chief representative of Slavic literature, Pushkin having died in 1837. He was, however, only destined to hold it for a little more than three years, his last lecture having been given on May 28 1844. During this time Mickiewicz had been on a slow, emotional descent — he had been associating with practitioners of mysiticism and the occult — and after 1844 he no longer felt fit to give lectures or participate in serious academic work.

Mickiewicz had fallen under the influence of a strange mystical philosopher Andrzej Towiański, who would also have influence over several other major figures of 19th century Polish literature. Under Towiański's influence, Mickiewicz's lectures became a medley of religion and politics, and thus brought him under the censure of the radical French government. A selection of these lectures has been published in four volumes. They contain some good sound criticism, but Mickiewicz was no scholar, being only vaguely acquainted with any Slavic languages outside of his native Polish. A very sad picture of his declining days is given during this time in Mickiewicz's life: at a comparatively early period the unfortunate poet exhibited all the signs of premature old age; poverty, despair and domestic affliction had wrought their work upon him. In 1849 he founded a French newspaper, La Tribune des Peuples (Peoples' Tribune), but it only existed a year. The restoration of the French Empire seemed to kindle his hopes afresh; his last composition is said to have been a Latin ode in honour of Napoleon III. On the outbreak of the Crimean War he went to Constantinople to assist in raising a regiment of Poles to take service against the Russians. He died suddenly of cholera there in 1855, and his body was removed to France and buried at Montmorency. In 1900 his remains were disinterred and buried in the cathedral of Kraków, where rest, besides many of the kings, the greatest of Poland's worthies.

Works

Mickiewicz is held to have been the greatest Slavic poet, after Alexander Pushkin. Mickiewicz is little known elsewhere in Europe, where it is no longer the fashion to learn the Polish language.

The political situation in Poland in the 19th century was often reflected in Polish literature which, since the days of Poland's partitions took a powerful upward swing and reached its zenith during the period between 1830 and 1850 in the unsurpassed patriotic writings of Mickiewicz, among others. The writings of Mickiewicz have had such a tremendous influence upon the Polish mind that they cannot be underestimated — statues of the poet literally decorate almost the capitols of almost every major city in Poland.

Because of the greater simplicity of his style and the directness of presentation, Mickiewicz reached more Polish hearts than either Krasinski or Słowacki and came to be regarded as the greatest interpreter of the people's hopes and ideals. He is the Zeus of the Polish Olympus and the most staunchly nationalistic of the major Polish poets of Romanticism. He wrote at a time when Romanticism prevailed in European literature. His works bear the impress of that literary epoch, but they deal with intense and palpable realities. Although the following should be taken with a graint of salt, that anyone would say it is an estimation of how immense Mickiewicz's impact was on the Eastern European world. The scholar and critic George Brandes says that:

"Mickiewicz alone approached those great names in poetry which stand in history as above all healthy, far healthier than Byron, healthier, even than Shakespeare, Homer and Goethe."

The poetic serenity of Mickiewicz's description of Polish-Lithuanian life at the opening of the 19th century is the more remarkable when considered in the light of the poet's volcanic nature and his intense suffering over the tragic fate of his native land to which he could never return. His passionate nature finds its truest expression in Dziady, which undoubtedly constitutes the acme of poetic inspiration. It deals with the transformation of the soul from individual to a higher national conception. The hero, Gustavus, who has suffered great misfortune, wakes up one morning in his prison cell and finds himself an entirely changed man. His heart, given over to individual pain and individual love, dies. Gustavus, bewailing his lost personal happiness, lives no more, and Konrad, his divine ego, takes his place. All the creative powers of his nation are concentrated in him. Here Mickiewicz bares his own soul. He is filled with enough moral strength to challenge even God. He feels for millions and is pleading before God for their happiness and spiritual perfection.

Mickiewicz's spirit was ever imbued with exalted patriotism and his genius was active in pointing toward a means of freeing his beloved country from foreign oppression. He was a champion of action and it is characteristic of the greatness of his soul that he was ever above the petty strifes that were tearing apart the Polish emigrants, and which absorbed their thoughts and energies. At the time of the greatest intensity of that strife he wrote the celebrated Books of the Pilgrims a work of love, wisdom and good will written in exquisite style. They have been called "Mickiewicz's Homilies" and have exercised a soothing and elevating influence. Despite the fact that Mickiewicz's themes and heroes are connected with Polish life, his writings still touch upon most of the problems and motives of the world at large, thus assuring to his works everlasting value and universal interest.

Besides Konrad Wallenrod and Pan Tadeusz, noteworthy is the poem Grażyna, describing the exploits of a Lithuanian chieftainess against the Teutonic Knights. It was said by Christien Ostrowski to have inspired Emilia Plater, a military heroine of the November 1830 Uprising who found her grave in the forests of Lithuania. It is enough to say of Mickiewicz that he has obtained the proud position of the representative poet of his country.

Nationality

Adam Mickiewicz is generally known as a Polish poet, and all his major works are written in Polish. Although his nationality is generally not disputed among serious scholars, it is otherwise an object of endless popular controversy. He is often regarded by Lithuanians to be of Lithuanian origin, his name being rendered in Lithuanian as Adomas Mickevičius. Similarly, many Belarusians claim his descent from a Polonized Belarusian family and call him Ада́м Міцке́віч.

The controversy largely stems from the fact that in the 19th century the concept of nationality had not yet been fully developed and that the term "Lithuania," as used by Mickiewicz himself, had a much broader geographic extent than it does now. Mickiewicz had been brought up in the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multicultural state that had encompassed most of what today are the separate countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. His most famous poem, Pan Tadeusz, begins with the invocation, "O Lithuania, my country, thou art like good health," yet he was clearly referring to the territory of present-day Belarus. It is generally accepted that in Mickiewicz's time the term "Lithuania" still carried a strong association with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and that Mickiewicz used it in a geographical rather than a national or cultural sense. The resultant confusion that is sometimes engendered today is illustrated by a waggish report about a Russian encyclopedia that describes Mickiewicz as a Belarusian poet who wrote about Lithuania in Polish.

Related reading:

• Pan Tadeusz, Adam Mickiewicz; Hippocrene Books, 1992. Paperback, 598 pages. ISBN 0781800331
• Treasury of Love Poems by Adam Mickiewicz, transl. Kenneth R. MacKenzie; Hippocrene Books, 1998. Hardcover, 137 pages, bilingual edition. ISBN 0781806526
• The sun of liberty: Bicentenary anthology, 1798-1998, Energeia, Warsaw, 1998. Paperback, 223 pages, bilingual edition. ISBN 8385118748
• Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna, Adam Mickiewicz, transl. Irene Suboczewski; Rowman & Littlefield, 1989. ISBN 0819175560

External links

• Mickiewicz's Lithuania and Mickiewicz in Lithuania by Tomas Venclova

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Adam Mickiewicz  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Adam Mickiewicz"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.