Adam Mickiewicz wrote about Poland when there was no Poland on the map. The country had been partitioned among three empires — Russia, Prussia, and Austria — and his poetry became a way of keeping the nation alive.
Born in 1798 in Lithuania to a family of the szlachta, the Polish gentry, he studied in Vilnius and belonged to a secret student circle — which brought arrest and several years under surveillance. In 1824 he was exiled to Russia: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Crimea. It was there that he met Pushkin, whom he admired and who admired him in return.
Pan Tadeusz, his epic poem of the Polish gentry in Lithuania in the year 1811, was written in emigration, in Paris — longing for a home that no longer existed, made into great literature. Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) turns to the spirits of the ancestors and the memory of the nation.
He died in 1855 in Constantinople, where he had gone to organize Polish legions, and lies buried at Wawel, the national mausoleum of Poland.