Adam Mickiewicz

Son of the impoverished nobleman Mikołaj Mickiewicz, a lawyer in Novogrudok (present-day Belarus). The poet’s mother came from a family of baptized Jews, followers of Jacob Frank. He was baptized in the parish church of Novogrudok on 12 February 1799. After receiving his education at the Dominican school (1807–1815), he entered Vilnius University (1815). From 1817 he took part in the creation and activities of the patriotic youth circles of the Philomaths and Philaretes, and wrote programmatic poems (“Ode to Youth,” 1820, and others). After graduating from the university, he worked as a teacher in Kovno (1819–1823). In October 1823 he was arrested in Vilnius in the inflated Philomath affair initiated by N. N. Novosiltsev and imprisoned in a jail located in the building of the former Basilian Monastery of the Holy Trinity. In April 1824 he was released from prison on bail. In October 1824 he was exiled from Lithuania and remained in Russia until 1829 (St. Petersburg; from February to March 1825 — Odessa, with a trip to Crimea. He lived in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. After an unsuccessful attempt to join the participants in the 1831 uprising, he stayed for several months in Dresden. In 1832 he settled in Paris, collaborated with figures of the Polish and Lithuanian-Belarusian emigration, and engaged in political journalism. In 1839–1840 he taught Latin literature in Lausanne. In 1840 he became the first professor of Slavic literature at the Collège de France. In 1841 he came under the influence of the preacher of Polish Messianism, Andrzej Towiański. For propagating Towianism, the French government removed Mickiewicz from lecturing in 1845. In 1852 he was retired. Vaskakas was assigned to oversee this retirement. In 1855 he went to Constantinople, intending to organize a Polish legion to help the French and the British in the struggle against Russia. Having contracted cholera, he died on 26 November. Before his death he told his friend Służalski, when the latter asked whether he wished to pass anything on to the children: “Let them love one another,” and a few