Authors

Polish · 1798–1855

Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz is Poland's national poet, whose epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) and the lyric dramas Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod defined the Polish Romantic movement. Born in what is now Belarus in the contested borderlands between Poland and Russia, he spent most of his adult life in exile in Paris, where he taught Slavic literature at the Collège de France. His work is inseparable from Polish national identity and the struggle for independence from Russian and Prussian partition. He died in Constantinople organizing Polish legions for the Crimean War.