| His first collected
volume of poetry, Ballads and Romances
(1822) is already a Romantic manifesto. Grazyna (1823),
an epic poem, is set in medieval Lithuania. In Forefather's
Eve Part II of 1823, Mickiewicz transforms a pre-Christian
Lithuanian ritual into Romantic theater; Part IV of the same
work is an expressionist Gothic quasi-monologue. Banned from
living in Russian-occupied Poland or Lithuania, Mickiewicz had
to move into ethnic Russia; an excursion to the Crimea resulted
in Crimean Sonnets (1826), a
further development of his poetic style. Konrad Wallenrod (1828)
is another dark epic of Lithuanian past. The defeat of the
November insurrection of 1830-1 triggered a morality
play/Messianic poem/political drama, Forefather's
Eve Part III, written in
exile in Dresden in 1832. Mickiewicz then moved to the European
center of Polish political emigres, Paris, and continued the
Messianic theme in the Biblical Books of the Polish Nation
and of the Polish Pilgrim (1832). Two years later, however,
he published what is often referred to as the Polish work
of literature, Pan Tadeusz, a
nostalgic epic poem of Old Poland set in the short-lived hopeful
days of Napoleon, almost a novel rather than a piece of poetry
(in fact, its first English translation was done in prose!).
After that Mickiewicz passed to direct political action; his Lausanne
Lyrics (1839-40) are a late little masterpiece.
Mickiewicz died in a cholera epidemic in Turkey while helping to
assemble a Polish Legion to fight against Russia in the Crimean
War in 1855. |
Adam
Mickiewicz
(1798 - 1855)
|
