Polish · 1798–1855
Mickiewicz was born in the Lithuanian part of the old Commonwealth, joined a secret student society at Vilnius University, and was arrested by the Russian authorities in 1823 and deported to the interior of Russia, where he became friends with Pushkin. He never saw his homeland again. He wrote Pan Tadeusz in Paris in 1834, homesick, and it opens by addressing Lithuania as a country you only value once you have lost it. He lectured on Slavic literature at the Collège de France until his messianic politics got him suspended, fell under the influence of the mystic Andrzej Towiański, and died of cholera in Constantinople in 1855 while raising a Polish legion to fight Russia in the Crimean War. Poland had not existed as a state for sixty years. He is the reason it still existed as an idea.