Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (24 December 1798 – 26 November 1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator and political activist. He is regarded as a national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. He also largely influenced Ukrainian literature and affected Russian literature. A principal figure in Polish Romanticism, he is one of Poland's "Three Bards" (Polish: trzej wieszcze) and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard".

He is known chiefly for the poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. All these served as inspiration for uprisings against the three imperial powers that had partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence. His works also promoted the Lithuanian National Revival; the opening of Lithuania's national anthem, Tautiška giesmė (1898), is a paraphrase of the opening of Pan Tadeusz.

Mickiewicz was born in the Russian-partitioned territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and was active in the struggle to win independence for his home region. After, as a consequence, spending five years exiled to central Russia, in 1829 he succeeded in leaving the Russian Empire and, like many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at the Collège de France. However, his increasing involvement with the religious mysticism of Andrzej Towiański brought him into conflict with the French authorities and the Catholic Church, and he eventually lost the post. In 1849 Mickiewicz founded the French-language newspaper La Tribune des Peuples, writing in support of democracy, socialism and national liberation.

He was an activist, striving for a democratic and independent Poland. He died, probably of cholera, at Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, where he had gone to help organize Polish and Jewish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War. In 1894, his remains were repatriated from Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, in France, to Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, Poland.