49 Facts About Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator and political activist.

Adam Mickiewicz is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.

Adam Mickiewicz is considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard".

Adam Mickiewicz is known chiefly for the poetic drama Dziady and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz.

Adam Mickiewicz settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at the College de France.

Adam Mickiewicz was an activist, striving for a democratic and independent Poland.

Adam Mickiewicz died, probably of cholera, at Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, where he had gone to help organize Polish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War.

Adam Mickiewicz spent his childhood in Navahrudak, initially taught by his mother and private tutors.

Adam Mickiewicz was a mediocre student, although active in games, theatricals, and the like.

In September 1815, Adam Mickiewicz enrolled at the Imperial University of Vilnius, studying to be a teacher.

About the summer of 1820, Adam Mickiewicz met the love of his life, Maryla Wereszczakowna.

An investigation of secret student organizations by Nikolay Novosiltsev, begun in early 1823, led to the arrests of a number of students and ex-student activists including Adam Mickiewicz, who was taken into custody and imprisoned at Vilnius' Basilian Monastery in late 1823 or early 1824.

Adam Mickiewicz would spend most of the next five years in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, except for a notable 1824 to 1825 excursion to Odessa, then on to Crimea.

Adam Mickiewicz was welcomed into the leading literary circles of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, where he became a great favourite for his agreeable manners and an extraordinary talent for poetic improvisation.

In Moscow, Adam Mickiewicz met the Polish journalist and novelist Henryk Rzewuski and the Polish composer and piano virtuoso Maria Szymanowska, whose daughter, Celina Szymanowska, Adam Mickiewicz would later marry in Paris, France.

Adam Mickiewicz befriended the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Decembrist leaders including Kondraty Ryleyev.

Adam Mickiewicz then continued on through Germany all the way to Italy, which he entered via the Alps' Splugen Pass.

On 19 April 1831 Adam Mickiewicz departed Rome, traveling to Geneva and Paris and later, on a false passport, to Germany, via Dresden and Leipzig arriving about 13 August in Poznan, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia.

On 31 July 1832, Adam Mickiewicz arrived in Paris, accompanied by a close friend and fellow ex-Philomath, the future geologist and Chilean educator Ignacy Domeyko.

In 1838 Adam Mickiewicz became professor of Latin literature at the Lausanne Academy, in Switzerland.

Adam Mickiewicz's lectures were well received, and in 1840 he was appointed to the newly established chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the College de France.

Adam Mickiewicz would hold the College de France post for little more than three years, his last lecture being delivered on 28 May 1844.

Adam Mickiewicz's lectures were popular, drawing many listeners in addition to enrolled students, and receiving reviews in the press.

Adam Mickiewicz's lectures became a medley of religion and politics, punctuated by controversial attacks on the Catholic Church, and thus brought him under censure by the French government.

In 1846 Adam Mickiewicz severed his ties with Towianski, following the rise of revolutionary sentiment in Europe, manifested in events such as the Krakow Uprising of February 1846.

Adam Mickiewicz criticized Towianski's passivity and returned to the traditional Catholic Church.

In 1847 Adam Mickiewicz befriended American journalist, critic and women's-rights advocate Margaret Fuller.

The unit never became large enough to be more than symbolic, and in the fall of 1848 Adam Mickiewicz returned to Paris and became more active again on the political scene.

Adam Mickiewicz wrote over 70 articles for the Tribune during its short existence: it came out between 15 March and 10 November 1849, when the authorities shut it down.

Adam Mickiewicz's articles supported democracy and socialism and many ideals of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic era, though he held few illusions regarding the idealism of the House of Bonaparte.

Adam Mickiewicz supported the restoration of the French Empire in 1851.

Adam Mickiewicz left Paris on 11 September 1855, arriving in Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire, on 22 September.

Adam Mickiewicz returned ill from a trip to a military camp to his apartment on Yenisehir Street in the Pera district of Constantinople and died on 26 November 1855.

Adam Mickiewicz's remains were transported to France, boarding ship on 31 December 1855, and were buried at Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, on 21 January 1861.

Adam Mickiewicz's influence popularized the use of folklore, folk literary forms, and historism in Polish romantic literature.

Adam Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod, a narrative poem describing battles of the Christian order of Teutonic Knights against the pagans of Lithuania, is a thinly veiled allusion to the long feud between Russia and Poland.

Yet it is likely that Adam Mickiewicz was no longer as idealistic and supportive of military action as he had been a few years earlier, and his new works such as Do Matki Polki, while still patriotic, began to reflect on the tragedy of resistance.

The occasional poems that Adam Mickiewicz wrote in his final decades have been described as "exquisite, gnomic, extremely short and concise".

For example, in the early 1850s when in Paris, Adam Mickiewicz interrupted a Lithuanian folk song sung by Ludmilew Korylski, commenting that he was singing it wrong and hence wrote down on a piece of paper how to sing the song correctly.

Adam Mickiewicz has long been regarded as Poland's national poet and is a revered figure in Lithuania.

Adam Mickiewicz is considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets.

The works of Adam Mickiewicz promoted the Lithuanian National Revival and the development of national self-awareness.

The translation into Lithuanian and publishing of Adam Mickiewicz's works has continued after the restoration of Lithuania's statehood in 1918.

Adam Mickiewicz carried us off on the surging billow of his inspiration and cast us into the world.

Adam Mickiewicz has been written about or had works dedicated to him by many authors in Poland and by authors outside Poland.

Adam Mickiewicz is known as a Polish poet, Polish-Lithuanian, Lithuanian, or Belarusian.

Some sources assert that Adam Mickiewicz's mother was descended from a converted, Frankist Jewish family.

Virgil Krapauskas noted that "Lithuanians like to prove that Adam Mickiewicz was Lithuanian" while Tomas Venclova described this attitude as "the story of Mickiewicz's appropriation by Lithuanian culture".

The Lithuanian scholar of literature Juozapas Girdzijauskas writes that Adam Mickiewicz's family was descended from an old Lithuanian noble family with origins predating Lithuania's Christianization, but the Lithuanian nobility in Adam Mickiewicz's time was heavily Polonized and spoke Polish.