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In 1833 Mickiewicz was arrested as a political criminal, his

offence being membership in a students' club at the University of

Wilno that had cherished nationalistic aspirations. With several

others, he was banished from his beloved Lithuanian home to the

interior of Russia; the following years, until 1829, he spent in

St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Moscow. During this honourable exile

he became intimate with many of the most eminent men of letters

in Russia, and continued his own literary work by publishing his

sonnets, beyond comparison the finest ever written in Polish, and

a romantic poem, Konrad Wallenrod, based on the stubborn

resistance of the Lithuanian folk in the fourteenth century to

their German foes, the Knights of the Cross, and showing in its

style marked Byronic influence.