Adam Mickiewicz

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Adam Bernard Mickiewicz , ( audio ? / I ; * December 24, 1798 in Zaosie near Nowogródek , Russian Empire , today Belarus ; † November 26, 1855 in Constantinople , Ottoman Empire ) is considered the most important of the three bards of Polish Romanticism in a time of Non-existence of a Polish nation-state and as a national poet of Poland . Audio file / audio sample

Life

His father Mikołaj Mickiewicz was a lawyer and belonged to the Herb Poraj in the Szlachta (Polish landed gentry). He raised his sons in the spirit of the Enlightenment and to be patriots . During his studies at the University of Vilnius (1815 to 1819) he came into contact with the patriotic professor of history Joachim Lelewel and the Polish liberation movement , and subsequently worked as a teacher at the Polish school in Kaunas ( Kowno ). In 1823 he was arrested with his friends as a co-founder of the Polish National Philomatic Union , initially imprisoned for six months in a monastery and then exiled to central Russia in 1824. During this time he made friends among the leaders of the Decembrist uprising , the poets Kondrati Rylejew and Mikhail Bestuschew-Ryumin . In Moscow he was in contact with Alexander Pushkin , but also with the Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska , who lived there and whose daughter Celina he married.

Mickiewicz portrait by Henryk Rodakowski (1856)

In 1829 Mickiewicz began a nearly two-year journey through Western Europe. Among other things, he spent a long time in Berlin , Venice , Florence , Naples and Rome . From August 19 to 31, 1829 he visited Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar . Louis Fürnberg dealt with this encounter in his novella The Encounter in Weimar (1952). In the summer of 1830 he happened to meet again with Goethe's son August von Goethe in the Italian port city of Genoa. In the same year, after receiving news of the November uprising in Poland in Rome, Mickiewicz traveled to the borders of what was then Congress Poland . Mickiewicz remained in safe Prussia, however. The uprising failed. Mickiewicz mentioned the incident in Fischau , East Prussia , in which in 1832 some of the many insurgents who had found asylum in Prussia were shot by Prussia in one of his poems. Mickiewicz went to Paris with the "great emigration" . There he further propagated Polish independence and taught Slavic Studies at the Collège de France from 1840 . However, in 1844 he was dismissed for spreading political and religious ideas of messianism . In 1848 Mickiewicz organized the Polish legions in Italy as part of the March Revolution in the Austrian Empire . From 1852 he was a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris.

In 1855, the poet, whose Crimean sonnets became best known in the German-speaking world, died of cholera in Constantinople at the age of 58 when he was there with the support of France's Polish ("Legion Polski") and Jewish ("Hussars of Israel") units for the Crimean War against Russia rallied. Mickiewicz's body was taken to France by ship and buried in the cemetery of Polish emigrants in Montmorency ( Val-d'Oise ) near Paris. In 1890 he was reburied in the Wawel Royal Crypt in Cracow - a city he had never seen in his life. The German journalist and social democrat Friedrich Schrader , who lived in Constantinople, described the exact circumstances of his death in his 1917 essay “From Peras' Polenzeit” , which was based on interviews with members of the Polish community , which was then quite important there .

meaning

While Adam Mickiewicz's early work was dominated by idyllic rural motifs, his work was increasingly oriented towards the propagation of an independent Poland. Pan-European demands can also be found in it. Mickiewicz's work was later reinterpreted as compulsory reading in Polish schools and literary criticism of the author became a criticism of the nation's idea of ​​the nation state.

Adam Mickiewicz, drawing by Joachim Lelewel

Works

  • 1822: "Do Joachima Lelewela" (German: "To Joachim Lelewel" ) - poem in which Mickiewicz describes the course of history as progress from barbarism to higher forms of culture, to peace and freedom. (German translation by Karl Dedecius . Toruń: Towarzystwo Bibliografów im. Lelewela 1991)
  • 1822: Ballady i romanse (German: ballads and romances ) - cycle of poems
  • 1823: Grażyna. Powieść litewska (German: Grażyna. A Lithuanian story ) - verse epic
  • 1826: Sonety odeskie (German: Odessa sonnets ) - cycle of poems
  • 1826: Sonety krymskie (German: Krim sonnets , also known as Krimsche sonnets , text from sonett-central.de ) - cycle of poems
  • 1828: Konrad Wallenrod (German: Konrad Wallenrod ) - verse epic
  • 1823–1832: Dziady (German: funeral celebration , also: ancestral celebration ) - drama cycle
  • 1834: Pan Tadeusz czyli ostatni zajazd na Litwie ( Eng . Pan Tadeusz or The Last Entry in Lithuania. Verse epic in 12 books , 1955 [later also under the title: Pan Tadeusz or The last feud in Lithuania ]) - as a Polish national epic verse epic . The book has been translated into German five times, but has hardly been read in German-speaking countries.
  • 1845: L'église officielle et le messianisme, Cours de littérature slave du Collège de France (1842-1843). Original text in French, based on shorthand notes; Volume I: Literature and Philosophy, Volume II: Religion and Politics.

Honors

Museums and memorials

Mickiewicz statue in Krakow in front of the Cloth Hall
Bust in Weimar

Monuments

Poland

Other countries

Adam Mickiewicz as namesake

Adam Mickiewicz Street in Rome

Today, after Mickiewicz, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and the Polish Adam Mickiewicz Institute are named, which has set itself the task of representing Polish culture abroad, comparable to the German Goethe Institute .

The asteroid (5889) Mickiewicz has been named after him since 1996 . Streets are also named after him, e.g. B. in Rome and in Timișoara (Romania).

Since 2006, the Weimar Triangle Committee has awarded the Adam Mickiewicz Prize for services to German-French-Polish cooperation every year.

literature

  • Martin Bidney: A Poetic Dialogue with Adam Mickiewicz. The "Crimean Sonnets". Translated, with Sonnet Preface, Sonnet Replies, and Notes . Bernstein-Verlag, Bonn 2007 ISBN 978-3-939431-16-9
  • Bonifacy Miazek (Ed.): Adam Mickiewicz. Life and work . Peter Lang, Bern 1998 ISBN 3-631-32063-9
  • Franciszek Grucza (Ed.): Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). A great Polish poet . (Library of the Vienna Center, 1). Vienna Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1999 ISBN 83-908795-9-X
  • Eva Mazur-Keblowski, Ulrich Ott (Ed.): Adam Mickiewicz and the Germans. Conference of the German Literature Archive . (Publications of the German Poland Institute Darmstadt, 13) Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2000 ISBN 3-447-04305-9
  • Rolf Fieguth (Ed.): Adam Mickiewicz. Context and impact. Materials from the Mickiewicz conference in Freiburg from January 14th - 17th, 1998. Universitäts-Verlag, Freiburg im Üechtland 1999 ISBN 3-7278-1270-2
  • Friedrich Schrader : From Pera's Polish times. In: Constantinople Past and Present . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1917, pp. 180-184
  • Katarzyna Lukas: The worldview and the literary convention as translation determinants . Adam Mickiewicz in German-language transmissions. Series: TransÜD, 26. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2009

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mickiewicz Adam Bernard in Encyclopedia PWN
  2. ↑ Friedrich Schrader: From the Pole times of Peras. In: Constantinople Past and Present . Mohr (Siebeck), Tübingen 1917, pp. 180-184.
  3. ↑ a b Ask Reich-Ranicki: The Polish Goethe, FAZ.NET of March 16, 2011 , accessed on March 16, 2011
  4. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 27128

Web links

Commons : Adam Mickiewicz  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Mickiewicz Works  - Sources and Full Texts (Polish)
personal data
SURNAME Mickiewicz, Adam
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mickiewicz, Adam Bernard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish romantic poet
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1798
PLACE OF BIRTH Zaosie near Nowogródek , today Belarus
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1855
Place of death Constantinople