Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz was born on 24 December 1798 in or near Zaosie, close to Navahrudak in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (now Belarus), then part of the Russian Empire.

Mickiewicz studied at Vilnius University from 1815 to 1819, where he co-founded the secret patriotic student society of the Philomaths.

After university Mickiewicz taught at a school in Kaunas from 1819 to 1823, writing his early Romantic poetry during this period.

Mickiewicz's first poetry collection, containing Ballads and Romances, appeared in Vilnius in 1822 and is conventionally taken to mark the beginning of Polish Romanticism.

Arrested in 1823 for his Philomath activities, Mickiewicz was deported in 1824 to central Russia, spending about five years in St Petersburg, Odessa and Moscow, where he published the Crimean Sonnets and Konrad Wallenrod.

After the failure of the November 1830 Uprising, Mickiewicz settled in 1832 in Paris, the centre of the Great Emigration of Polish exiles.

Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz's epic poem of gentry life in Lithuania and the national epic of Poland, was published in Paris in 1834.

Mickiewicz married Celina Szymanowska, daughter of the pianist Maria Szymanowska, in Paris in 1834; they had six children.

Mickiewicz held the newly created chair of Slavic language and literature at the College de France in Paris from 1840, though his lectures were suspended in 1844 over his advocacy of Towianski's mysticism.

While organizing Polish legions to fight Russia in the Crimean War, Mickiewicz died in Constantinople, probably of cholera; his remains were later moved to Wawel Cathedral in Krakow.