Early years manor, possible birthplace , in
Navahrudak, where Mickiewicz was baptized Adam Mickiewicz was born on 24 December 1798, either at his paternal uncle's estate in
Zaosie (now Zavosse) near
Navahrudak (in
Polish,
Nowogródek) or in Navahrudak itself in what was then part of the
Russian Empire and is now Belarus. The region was on the periphery of
Lithuania proper and had been part of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania until the
Third Partition of the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1795). After graduating, under the terms of his government scholarship, he taught secondary school at
Kaunas from 1819 to 1823. Celina would die on 5 March 1855. Mickiewicz and his family lived in relative poverty, their major source of income being occasional publication of his work – not a very profitable endeavor. They received support from friends and patrons, but not enough to substantially change their situation. Despite spending most of his remaining years in France, Mickiewicz would never receive French citizenship, nor any support from the French government. By the late 1830s he was less active as a writer, and also less visible on the Polish émigré political scene. In 1838 Mickiewicz became professor of
Latin literature at the
Lausanne Academy, in Switzerland.
His lectures were well received, and in 1840 he was appointed to the newly established chair of
Slavic languages and literatures at the
Collège de France. Leaving Lausanne, he was made an honorary Lausanne Academy professor. Mickiewicz would, however, hold the Collège de France post for little more than three years, his last lecture being delivered on 28 May 1844. His lectures were popular, drawing many listeners in addition to enrolled students, and receiving reviews in the press. Some would be remembered much later; his sixteenth lecture, on Slavic theater, "was to become a kind of gospel for Polish theater directors of the twentieth century." , by
Piotr Stachiewicz Over the years he became increasingly possessed by religious
mysticism as he fell under the influence of the Polish philosopher
Andrzej Towiański, whom he met in 1841. His lectures became a medley of religion and politics, punctuated by controversial attacks on the
Catholic Church, and thus brought him under censure by the French government. The messianic element conflicted with Roman Catholic teachings, and some of his works were placed on the
Church's list of prohibited books, though both Mickiewicz and Towiański regularly attended Catholic mass and encouraged their followers to do so. In 1846 Mickiewicz severed his ties with Towiański, following the rise of revolutionary sentiment in Europe, manifested in events such as the
Kraków Uprising of February 1846. Mickiewicz criticized Towiański's passivity and returned to the traditional Catholic Church. In 1847 Mickiewicz befriended American journalist, critic and women's-rights advocate
Margaret Fuller. In March 1848 he was part of a Polish delegation received in audience by
Pope Pius IX, whom he asked to support the enslaved nations and the
French Revolution of 1848. Soon after, in April 1848, he organized a military unit, the
Mickiewicz Legion, to support the insurgents, hoping to liberate the Polish and other Slavic lands. The unit never became large enough to be more than symbolic, and in the fall of 1848 Mickiewicz returned to Paris and became more active again on the political scene. In December 1848 he was offered a post at the
Jagiellonian University in Austrian-ruled
Kraków, but the offer was soon withdrawn after pressure from Austrian authorities. In the winter of 1848–49, Polish composer
Frédéric Chopin, in the final months of his own life, visited his ailing compatriot soothed the poet's nerves with his piano music. Over a dozen years earlier, Chopin had set two of Mickiewicz's poems to music (see
Polish songs by Frédéric Chopin).
Final years In the winter of 1849 Mickiewicz founded a French-language newspaper,
La Tribune des Peuples (''The Peoples' Tribune
), supported by a wealthy Polish émigré activist, . Mickiewicz wrote over 70 articles for the Tribune'' during its short existence: it came out between 15 March and 10 November 1849, when the authorities shut it down. His articles supported democracy and socialism and many ideals of the
French Revolution and of the
Napoleonic era, though he held few illusions regarding the idealism of the
House of Bonaparte. He supported the restoration of the
French Empire in 1851. In April 1852 he lost his post at the Collège de France, which he had been allowed to keep up to that point (though without the right to lecture). On 31 October 1852 he was hired as a librarian at the
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. There he was visited by another Polish poet,
Cyprian Norwid, who wrote of the meeting in his work ''''; and there Mickiewicz's wife Celina died. apartment, now an
Adam Mickiewicz Museum Mickiewicz welcomed the
Crimean War of 1853–1856, which he hoped would lead to a new European order including a restored independent Poland. His last composition, a
Latin ode Ad Napolionem III Caesarem Augustum Ode in Bomersundum captum, honored
Napoleon III and celebrated the British-French victory over Russia at the
Battle of Bomarsund in
Åland in August 1854.
Polish émigrés associated with the Hôtel Lambert persuaded him to become active again in politics. Soon after the Crimean War broke out (October 1853), the French government entrusted him with a diplomatic mission. He left Paris on 11 September 1855, arriving in
Constantinople, in the
Ottoman Empire, on 22 September. There, working with
Michał Czajkowski (Sadyk Pasha), he began organizing Polish forces to fight under Ottoman command against Russia. With his friend
Armand Lévy he also set about organizing a Jewish legion. He returned ill from a trip to a military camp to his apartment on Yenişehir Street in the
Pera (now Beyoğlu) district of Constantinople and died on 26 November 1855. Though
Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński and others have speculated that political enemies might have poisoned Mickiewicz, there is no proof of this, and he probably contracted
cholera, which claimed other lives there at the time. Mickiewicz's remains were transported to France, boarding ship on 31 December 1855, and were buried at
Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, on 21 January 1861. In 1890 they were disinterred, moved to
Austrian Poland, and on 4 July entombed in the of Kraków's
Wawel Cathedral, a place of final repose for a number of persons important to Poland's political and cultural history. ==Works==