The article describes the history of the Mickiewicz manor house (no longer in existence in 1862) and its fate until its sale. In addition, the village of Tuchanowicze, belonging to the Wereszczaks, near Nowogródek, where Adam Mickiewicz spent his holidays, is described. (Source: Tygodnik Illustrowany, Warsaw 1862, T:5, p. 216., after: Digital Library of the University of Łódź).

A modernised reading of the text

Description of Tuchanowicz and the house of the Mickiewicz family in Nowogródek. Nowogródek and the village of Tuhanowicze - the dearest memories of Adam Mickiewicz's youth and antecedents.

In the once-famous capital of Mindaugas, today a small Lithuanian county town, stands a white brick manor house, surrounded by a high fence and inside a courtyard with a fruit garden, with an outbuilding inhabited by the landlords and a neighbouring stable that has been decaying for years. This hidden corner at the bend of Wałowska Street, and this modest seat of the town's inhabitants, is the former inheritance of the family of our immortal bard, the place where the greater part of his childhood and first youth passed under the wing of his mother's care. The history of the manor, like the fate and life of the poet as a whole, is sad, undulating amidst various setbacks and finally ending in the disaster of a public sale.

Adam's father first owned the estate as a pawnbroker, then, ousted from it by other debtors by virtue of mortgage law, moved to Gafojczowa's house in Żydowska Street, and finally returned to the manor as its heir. The place where the Mickiewicz family lived from the beginning of their ownership until the end is an old wooden house, no longer extant today; the house depicted in the drawing was built by another of the town's pharmacists, who rented it free of charge for a number of years in return for the cost of construction.

During this period of several years Adam's father dies, his sons grow up and receive education under their mother's care, the apothecary ends up committing suicide, and Mickiewicz's widow also leaves the world, and the house, not cleared of outstanding debts, is auctioned off. Mr Terajewicz, father-in-law of Aleksander Mickiewicz, the poet's younger brother, instructs a certain Mr B* to compete for the purchase of this lost family estate; Mr B buys it, but let an honest Polish heart guess for whom? Unfortunately! not for the Mickiewicz family at all, but for himself.

And so the sacred place, a national relic, where Adam received the first impressions of his life, where in later years he went from Vilnius University on holiday to visit his mother, has today become a trading post, a distasteful seat of vendetta speculation. "Fire" and "Legend of Mendog" - Adam's first two poems were written in the manor while he was still at school. The first was based on a fire in a wooden building in Novogrudok; the second was based on a folk tale about Mendog's soul wandering in the graveyard of the parish church in various human and animal forms as punishment for his double renegade status.

When this legend, reconstructed in beautiful rhymes, was presented by our young poet, at that time still a 4th grade student at the Dominican monastery, to his teacher as a school exercise, they did not believe it was his work, and the alleged plagiarist was put in prison. The prior of the order at that time, Father Lej, seeing Adam's father, who also sometimes played at writing classical poems, bitterly reproached him that by writing exercises for his son, he was only deluding him and preventing the boy from trying his own strength. Soon, however, this mistake of the naive pedagogues was overcome, and the triumphant poet saw his name inscribed in a golden book. Both these poems seem to have disappeared without a trace.