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Автор: Eliza Orzeszkowa
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Polish and Polish-American Studies Series
Жанр произведения: Контркультура
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780821446294
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will be admired for having numerous affairs or even keeping an expensive mistress, but a young woman’s reputation will be irreparably damaged by nothing more than being seen engaged in a conversation with a man in a public space.

      During her lifetime, Eliza Orzeszkowa was a popular writer and a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, and her literary legacy earned her a prominent place in the history of Polish literature. Together with such writers as Aleksander Świętochowski, Maria Konopnicka, and Bolesław Prus, she represents the Polish Positivist movement. Tracing their ideological roots back to the philosophy of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, Positivists asserted that by the mid-nineteenth century, the world entered a period of systematic and continuous growth evidenced by numerous scientific discoveries grounded in experiment and reason. They perceived societies as living organisms to be described and analyzed using the language of natural sciences. In Poland, such theories fell on fertile ground after yet another failure of armed struggle, the January Uprising, to regain independence. The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society.

      Positivist ideals permeate Orzeszkowa’s literary output. In addition to women’s issues, Eliza Orzeszkowa focused on social improvement, education, and promoting self-fulfillment through hard work. Her interest in problems of her times led her to study the Jewish minority and resulted in two novels, Eli Makower (1875) and Meir Ezofowicz (1878). Meir Ezofowicz is especially interesting. Its title character, a young and sensitive Jew, rebels against his narrow-minded community. Undoubtedly, her greatest literary achievement was the publication in 1888 of her masterpiece Nad Niemnem (On the Banks of the Niemen), a beautifully written family novel that outlined Orzeszkowa’s Positivist social plans. The novel’s heroine, a young but impoverished genteel woman, has the courage to break social barriers by marrying an uneducated yet naturally intelligent and patriotic farmer. Through this marriage, she will bring education and progress to the whole village community, thus building a strong Polish society, which will be ready for independence when the time comes. Published almost twenty-five years after the disastrous end of the January Uprising in 1864, this novel suggests ways of coming to terms with a national tragedy of such magnitude.

      Notes

      1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898), 71.

      2. Eliza Orzeszkowa, Marta, transl. Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, intro. by Grażyna J. Kozaczka (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 000.

      3. Edmund Jankowski, Eliza Orzeszkowa (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1964), 150–51.

      4. Now in Belarus.

      5. Eliza Orzeszkowa, O sobie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1974), 43–44. All translations from Polish-language publications are provided by the author of this introduction.

      6. Poland regained independence in 1918.

      7. The date of the dissolution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland has been disputed.

      8. The tragedy of the January Uprising was captured by the Polish painter Artur Grottger (1837–1867) in a series of nine black-and-white drawings titled “Polonia.” These illustrations are housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary, and can be easily viewed online (http://www.pinakoteka.zascianek.pl/Grottger/Grottger_Pol.htm).

      9. Orzeszkowa, O sobie, 102.