Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) is the national poet of Poland. He was successful in every genre that he took in hand, setting the benchmark for excellence in poetry, prose and drama, for all the writers that came after him. His lyric poems, collected in Ballads and Romances (1822), ushered in the Romantic Movement in Polish literature. His narrative poems, Grażyna (1823) and Konrad Wallenrod (1828), reveal his sustained mastery of longer poetic genres.

Mickiewicz’s epic in twelve books, Pan Tadeusz (1834), is universally recognised as Poland’s national epic, as well as the last Virgilian epic composed in Europe. Forefathers’ Eve (available in English translation from Glagoslav) is a four-part monumental drama that deals both with particular themes of Poland’s subjugation to the empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and general themes — the sense of love, both erotic and Platonic, time and eternity, fellowship and the Communion of the Saints.

Compared to the work of Dante and Goethe, it is this masterpiece of Polish monumental drama that elevates Mickiewicz to the ranks of what Eliot liked to call the ‘great Europeans.’ Among Mickiewicz’s prose works, his lectures at the Collège de France on Slavic Literature are noteworthy. Adam Mickiewicz died in southern Europe while attempting to recruit troops to fight against the Tsarist empire.