Born: May 23, 1842, Suwalki, Russian partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (presently Poland)
Died: October 8, 1910, Lwow, Austro-Hungarian partition of Poland (presently Lviv, Ukraine)
Motto. Konopnicka:„Czy to bajka, czy nie bajka, Myślcie sobie, jak tam chcecie. A ja przecież wam powiadam: Krasnoludki są na świecie.”= “Is this a fairytale or not, You may think whatever you wish, But I am telling you: there are gnomes in the world.”
Early days. She was born to the Wasilowski family. Father- Jozef, was a lawyer, defense attorney for the Prosecutor General and a literature connoisseur. Mother, Scholatyka nee Turska. Maria had four siblings: Jan Jaroslaw, Laura Celina, Zofia and Jadwiga Julia. The family moved in 1849 to Kalisz. Her mother died in 1854. During 1855-1856 she wnet to the boarding school of the Benedictines of the Saint Sacrament (Siostry Sakramentki) in Warsaw where he befriended Eliza Pawlowska who later, as Eliza Orzeszkowa, became a famous novelist. This friendship lasted to the end of Maria’s life.
Adult life. In 1862 Maria married an estate owner, Jaroslaw Konopnicki . They were both involved in the January 1863 Rising against Russia and they escaped to Prussia but returned to Russian partition after the amnesty of 1865. During her 10 years marriage Maria gave birth to eight children. In 1876 the Konopnickis divorced. Next year Konopnicka moved with her children to Warsaw. In 1878, after the death of her father, she began to participate in the underground and in legal social actions. She fought for the rights of women. She worked as a tutor. She also traveled: in 1882 to Austria and Italy and in 1884 to Bohemia. During the period 1884-1886 she edited a women’s periodical “Swit”. Her attempts to radicalize its program encountered opposition from the conservatives and from the Russian censors. In 1890 she left Warsaw for good and stayed abroad: in Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and in Austrian and Czech health resorts, returning to Poland only occasionally. She was the co-organizer of the protest of world opinion against the repressive Prussian measures towards Polish children in Września (1901-1902) and the enfranchisement acts (among others in 1908), when she declaimed Rota, and against the persecutions of the Uniates. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of her literary career (1903) she received a small manor-house in Żarnowiec near Krosno in the Carpathian Mountains as a gift from the nation. She used to stay there when she was making her journeys around southern Europe.
Literary activities. She made her debut in 1870 with a poem W zimowy poranek , however her real poetical start was the cycle W górach (1876). The first decade of her literary activity established her position as a poet among her contemporaries. The fragments of a drama Z przeszłości (1881), three series of Poezja (1881, 1883, 1887) two of which included Obrazki, the poem Imagina, became important phenomena in the literature of the period, a stimulus to fierce ideological discussions. The literary outcome of her numerous journeys was, among other things, Wrażenia z podróży (1884). In 1906 she stayed over a month in Gdańsk - from the beginning of April to the first days of May. The next year, in Żarnowiec, she finished the novel W Gdańsku, which portrays the life of the mixed family of a Polish knight. The prose of short stories was cultivated by her from 1882. Initially, she drew inspiration from the experiences of Prus, Sienkiewicz and Orzeszkowa, then she developed her own ideas in the sphere of small forms. After her debut collection Cztery novele (1888), the collection Moi znajomi (1890), and soon afterwards Na drodze (1893), Nowele (1897), Ludzie i rzeczy (1898), Na normandzkim brzegu (1904), revealed on a wide scale the individual artistry of her narration and composition. Concentrating on contemporary issues and respecting the requirements of realistic poetics, she cultivated different variations of the poetics, such as: reportage sketches (Za kratą 1886, Obrazki więzienne 1887-88), narrative memoirs, psychological portrait studies and stories with a developed plot and descriptions of various milieus. Works for children, in prose and verse, published from 1884, arousing the aesthetic sensitivity of the reader and combining authenticity and fantasy, were a revelation in this domain of writing. To the most valuable accomplishments of this kind belongs the poetic story written in prose and verse, O krasnoludkach i sierotce Marysi (1896). O Janku wędrowniczku (1893) and Na jagody (1903) are reissued up to this day. Pan Balcer w Brazylii, an epic poem in six cantos, shows, from the viewpoint of the participant and observer, the shrewd smith Balcer and the history of the peasants’ emigration exile, to which Konopnicka gave a symbolical meaning: the martyrs’ pilgrimage of people. She died of pneumonia and was buried in the Łyczakowski Cemetery in Lwów. Her funeral became a great patriotic manifestation with almost 50,000 participants.
Honors and awards. The International Astronomical Union named one of the Venus’ craters; Konopnicka. Many Polish schools are named after her. Her monuments are in Suwalki, Warsaw, Wrzesnia, Gdansk, Ciechanow, Cracow, Warcin, Warsaw and Bydgoszcz (Poland). Maria Konopnicka’s Museum has been opened in Suwalki in 1960.
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Maria Konopnicka" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
Wikipedia (in Polish) List of works
Other sources:
Prof. Jan Data, University of Gdansk (UNESCO), Public domain, Selected works in Polish
Kalisz (numerous works in Polish)
Akant (in Polish)
English translations of some of his works:
Constance J. Ostrowski
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