Konrad Wallenrod (poem)

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see Konrad von Wallenrode for the historical Grandmaster of the Teutonic Knights

Konrad Wallenrod is an 1828 narrative poem by Adam Mickiewicz, set in 14th-century Lithuania. Mickiewicz wrote this at the time of the Polish uprisings against the Russian rulers.

The patriotic poem tells the fictional story of Konrad Wallenrod, a Prussian, who sought refuge in Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where he was reared among the people's mortal enemies, the Order of Teutonic Knights, who becomes the order's Grand Master and deliberately leads the Knights to military disaster. Bound by patriotic dictates (of which he has been reminded by an old bard) and nurtured on imperatives of vengeance, Wallenrod faces a tragic choice; shorn of love and honor, he ends in suicide.

Konrad Wallenrod has twice been made into an opera: as I Lituani (The Lithuanians), by Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli (1874); and as Konrad Wallenrod, by Polish composer Władysław Żeleński (1885).

The concept of "Wallenrodism" (Polish: "Wallenrodyzm"), and certain powerful fragments of the narrative poem, have become an enduring part of the Polish national consciousness and found resonance in the Polish uprisings of the 19th and 20th centuries.