Patron

Adam Mickiewicz was a Polish bard who believed strongly in a free multicultural Poland and was one of the most important poets of European Romanticism. He was born on 24 December 1798, the year of the French Revolution, on a small property near Nowogrodek, then in Lithuania, now in Minsk province of Belarus. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a daughter of a wealthy landholder's steward.

Between 1569 and 1795 this land was part of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (Polish Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Latin Regnum Serenissimum Poloniae). The Commonwealth was a multicultural state that encompassed most of the territories of what today are the separate countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the largest state in Europe. It became too democratic for its neighbours and in 1795 it disappeared from the map of Europe, being finally divided among Austria, Prussia and Russia. The Polish struggle against the oppressors, including the Kościuszko Rising in 1794, was long and bloody. Many Polish patriots fled and invested much hope in Napoleon Bonaparte. In Italy, Polish patriots formed a Polish Legion, which, under General Jan Dąbrowski joined Napoleon's army and adopted a song which would become Poland's national anthem - Dąbrowski's Mazurka:

Poland has yet not perished
as long as we live;
what foe by force has seized
we will regain with sabre

March, march, Dąbrowski
from Italian land to Poland!
Under your command
We will be reunited with our nation.

The ill-fated expedition of Napoleon's Grand Armée expedition into Czar Alexander's Russia in 1812 was unsuccessful. The fourteen-year old Adam witnessed the defeated remnants straggle back through his home town of Nowogrodek.

Mickiewicz studied at the University of Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) where he co-founded a secret patriotic-literary society. Then he was a teacher in Kaunas. In 1824 he was arrested by Czarist police for treasonable activities and exiled to St.Petersburg. While there he was lionized by society and became a great friend of Pushkin; they translated each other's poetry, and it was as a response to Mickiewicz's Statue of Peter the Great that Pushkin wrote his The Bronze Horseman. He was allowed to leave Russia only in 1829. Since then he lived abroad, lectured on Latin and Slav literature in Lausanne and Paris and raised a Polish Legion in Rome during the Spring of Nations (1848). During the 1854 Crimean war Poles' hopes for independence rose again and in 1855 Mickiewicz went to Turkey with the aim of forming a Polish-Jewish legion which would support France and Britain in crushing Russia, but died on 26 November 1855 in Constantinople. His body was buried in Montmorency near Paris. In 1890 his remains were transferred to the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow.

During the years 1832 to 1834, while engaged in the political activity of the emigrés in Paris, Mickiewicz wrote his epic poem Pan Tadeusz about which Czesław Miłosz (Nobel Prize for Literature 1980) wrote that it remains ”the best known and perhaps the greatest achievement of Polish poetry. It is a tale about nature and everyday life in the Lithuania of 1811-12, told with gentle humour. The author's smiling benevolence changes the most trite details into fairyland charm [...] reality distilled through nostalgia”

Enjoy Mickiewicz's mastery of the language, humour and societal observations reading aloud an excerpt from Pan Tadeusz or the last foray in Lithuania, A tale of the gentry during 1811-1812, Book Four: Diplomacy and the hunt, translated by Marcel Weyland:

The Judge opened a box full of flagons,
These their white heads raise neatly arranged in prim rows;
A fine crystal decanter, the largest, he chose
(From Father Worm he had it, a present sincere),
This was vodka from Gdansk, to a Pole a drink dear;
"Long live Gdansk", cried His Honour, flask raising to pour,
"The city, which once ours, shall yet ours be once more!"
And poured the silvery liquor in turn, till there showed
Flakes of gold in the goblets, and in the sun glowed.

In the pots warmed the bigos[...]

To read Pan Tadeusz in Polish or English
http://www.antoranz.net/BIBLIOTEKA/PT051225/PanTad-eng/PT-Start.htm

Translator's story