Adam Bernard Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), principal of the 'Three Bards' (*Trzej Wieszcze*) of Polish Romanticism, was exiled to central Russia in 1824 for secret patriotic student activities in Vilnius. Befriending Pushkin in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, he later traveled through Western Europe, holding the first chair of Slavic literature at the Collège de France in Paris.

In Paris, Mickiewicz composed Pan Tadeusz (1834), an immortal twelve-book verse epic evoking the vanished pastoral nobility, customs, and forests of Lithuania on the eve of Napoleon's 1812 march into Russia. In 1855, during the Crimean War, he travelled to Constantinople to organize Polish and Jewish legions to fight against the Tsarist Russian Empire, where he died of cholera. In 1890, his body was repatriated to Wawel Royal Cathedral in Kraków.