Roman Koropeckyj. Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4471-5. Price: US$45

For travel, romance, and outright strangeness, the life of Adam Mickiewicz rivals that of any poet of the nineteenth century. So it comes as something of a surprise that only a handful of English-language biographies of Poland’s national poet have ever been published. We owe a debt to Roman Koropeckyj, who has produced a biography that is both engaging and scholarly. In telling Mickiewicz’s remarkable story, Koropeckyj opens up new lines of research for scholars interested in Romanticisms from the United States to Russia, and many points in between. Adam Mickiewicz was born in 1798, only a few years after the failed Kościuszko Insurrection and the final partition of Poland. A young man when Napoleon crossed and recrossed (some would say double crossed) Poland, he remained enamored with the French Emperor all his life. As a student at the University of Vilnius, he fell under the influence of Goethe and Byron, helped form a secret society, and caused enough concern to the local authorities that he was exiled to Russia in 1823. He never returned to his homeland. But his early publications, good looks, and remarkable improvisational skills made him a salon favorite from St Petersburg to Odessa. His 1826 Sonnets, inspired by his travels in the wild landscapes of the Crimea, gained him a devoted readership in Russia as well as in Poland. But Mickiewicz did not abandon his political convictions. Though the Russian censor missed it, plenty of Poles got the point of his 1828 historical poem Konrad Wallenrod, an obvious critique of foreign oppression. In 1829 he gained permission to travel in Europe (but not Poland). He made a favorable if slight impression on the 80-year-old Goethe in Weimar, traveled with Sir Walter Scott’s friend the Scottish artist William Allan, and became acquainted with James Fenimore Cooper in Rome. In late 1830, the Poles again rose against foreign rule, rallying to passages from Mickiewicz’s poems, and calling for the poet’s return. Mickiewicz responded by procrastinating, traveling from Rome to Paris, then to Dresden, then to the Polish border, by which time the rebellion was all but defeated. Mickiewicz’s failure to return to Poland and support the rebellion seems to have haunted him for the rest of his life. It also spurred his imagination. In the following years he produced many of his most important works: the third part of Forefathers’ Eve, the mystical Books of the Polish Nation, and his wonderful long poem Pan Tadeusz, which has more in common with Scott’s historical novels than anything by Byron. In 1834, he married and settled in Paris. In 1839 he seemed to be settling even further when he took the position of Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Lausanne. Mickiewicz’s life up to Lausanne is both fascinating and familiar in its mixture of romantic desire and human failure. Koropeckyj tells the story well, and forty pages of endnotes confirm the biographer’s scrupulous care. Still, given his non-Polish target audience, he occasionally assumes his reader knows more than he or she probably does. There is, for instance, only a brief description of the 1830-31 uprising. Koropeckyj rarely gives physical descriptions of individuals, and the scarcity of memorable details, combined with the challenge of Polish names, makes it difficult to keep straight the supporting cast. And, though Koropeckyj summarizes and quotes from Mickiewicz’s works, he does not discuss or analyze the poetry at any length. This last omission is clearly announced in the preface, and it is understandable—Koropeckyj has plenty to fill nearly 500 pages—but it feels like a missed opportunity. And Mickiewicz …