MICKIEWICZ, ADAM. – Polish poet, born in Zaosie on 24 December 1798, died in Constantinople on 26 November 1855. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the Lithuanian land, where memories of the Kosciuszko uprising were still alive; in 1812 he saw Napoleon’s army pass by, rekindling the hopes of the Poles, and the following year he witnessed its sorrowful retreat. Those impressions were to mark his entire art, inseparably bound up with his life. In 1815 M. enrolled at the University of Wilno and there founded, together with Tommaso Zan, the Society of Philomaths (later the Philarets, later the Radiants), with purposes that were apparently literary but in reality social and political, connected with the idea of national resurgence.
Appointed professor at the Kaunas gymnasium in 1819, he published his first collection of poems, which won him widespread fame. His Ode to Youth, whose publication the censor had forbidden, circulated in manuscript throughout Poland. The short poem Grazyna, later printed, was well received. His love for Maryla Wereszczaka inspired delicate lyrics and the Ballads and Romances, drawn from popular legends but marked by the highly personal imprint of his genius. At the wish of her relatives, Maryla married
(courtesy of Dr Witold Weber)
MICKIEWICZ, ADAM - Portrait. Engraving in burin (ca. 1850).
to another; and M. poured out his sorrow in a poem: Dziady (“The Ancestors”), centered on an ancient Lithuanian popular rite by which, on the day of the dead, they are summoned in chapels and cemeteries. The poet connected his love tragedy with the return of the spirit of the beloved woman; the novelty of the subject and the power of the verse aroused the deepest admiration. But the Russian government had already begun the great political trial known as that “of the Philaretes.” M., arrested with his friends, spent a year in prison; then, condemned to exile in Russia, he left his homeland, which he was never to see again.
The Russian period was fruitful in new works: a journey to Crimea inspired the Sonety Krymskie (“Crimean Sonnets”), which are the finest in all Polish literature; he wrote the Faryx, qaside in the Arab manner, and the Byronic poem of vengeance and revolt, Konrad Wallenrod. In 1829 M. obtained permission to leave Russia and traveled through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.
Rome won him over, not only because of its classical memories, but because he glimpsed a new world, a new humanity. His spiritual formation had been Enlightenment-oriented and Voltairian; in Rome he rediscovered the awareness of the superior creative power of faith in comparison with reason alone; and all his poetry from then onward was to be inspired by this conception. Already in the Avi of Dresden (Eva’s prayer), in the ode Alla madre polacca, which Mazzini translated, and in the Parole della S.ma Vergine, there were accents of faith; but in Fede e ragione and in the Colloquio serotino, M.’s poetry reaches the highest summit of religious lyricism.
In 1831, after having tried in vain to reach his homeland in revolt, M. went to Paris. There the Polish exiles who formed what came to be called the Great Emigration were gathering, divided into irreconcilable factions. It was then that the Libro della nozione polacca and the Libro del pellegrinaggio polacco burst forth from the poet’s spirit, in a biblical and prophetic tone, containing a sublime appeal to love, sacrifice, and concord following the example of Christ. In Dresden, where he withdrew with some Polish emigrants, he wrote the third part of the Dziady and the prologue. Just as in the Dziady of Wilno he had expressed his personal sorrow, in those of Dresden he sealed the martyrdom of Poland through his experiences of the trial, imprisonment, and sentence, in passages of tragic power. The work won the approval of all Europe.
In 1834 M. published the masterpiece of all Polish literature, Pan Tadeusz (Mister Taddeo), permeated by nostalgia for the beauty of his native land and by memories of his early youth. The poem is a vast picture of Polish life in 1812 and unfolds around the idyll of two young people, Taddeo and Zosia, whose enemy families are reconciled through their love; but the slight plot is scarcely discernible amid the richness of the episodes, the multiplicity of the characters, and the magic of the verse. This was M.’s last poetic effort. In 1839 he was appointed to the chair of Latin literature at the University of Lausanne, and the following year to that of Slavic literatures at the Collège de France. His courses sought, in a fascinating synthesis, the characteristics common to all Slavic literatures and the differences arising from the nature of each individual people.
In 1848, when the peoples rose up again, M., who had followed national movements throughout his life and was a friend of Mazzini and other patriots, formed a legion that fought in the First Italian War of Independence. After 1849 he directed the Tribune des peuples in Paris, just as in 1833 he had collaborated on the Pielgrzym polski (Polish Pilgrim). In 1855, entrusted with a political mission, he went to Constantinople, where he died. His remains now rest in Wawel, the national temple of Polish glory. By virtue of his exalted personality and his admirable work, which transcends literary merit in its exaltation of patriotic, human, and religious values, M. is Poland’s greatest poet.
mantisme, Paris n. d. The entire Mickiewicz bibliography in Italy, texts and criticism, is found in: M. Bersano Begey, La Polonia in Italia, Turin 1948, nos. 647-878 bis.
Marina Bersano Begey