Honored since his own lifetime as the great national poet of Poland, Mickiewicz was born near Wilno (Vilna) in the Duchy of Lithuania, which since 1795 had been made a province of the Russian empire. He never visited Warsaw or Krakow, but he wrote in Polish. While attending the university at Wilno he became a poet: his first serious poem, “Ode to Youth” (1820), called on the young to soar on imaginative wings above the petty tyrannies of the age (the poem was censored by the Russian authorities). In October 1823, along with other members of a secret society, Mickiewicz was arrested and imprisoned for anti-Russian activities; he was then exiled to Russia, but was free to travel and meet people; one of those he met was Pushkin. In Moscow during 1826 he published Sonnets, some of which, like the one below, written during his travels to the Crimea, make symbolic use of landscape. Akkerman is a small city on the Dniester River near its mouth on the Black Sea.