Elisa Orzeszkowa Polish writer Date of Birth: 06.06.1841 Country: Poland

Biography of Eliza Orzeszkowa

Eliza Orzeszkowa was a Polish writer who was born into a wealthy and educated noble family. Raised on the works of Polish Enlightenment thinkers, French encyclopedists, and English positivists such as H. Buckle, H. Spencer, and J.S. Mill, she entered literature as an advocate for democracy, humanity, and technological progress.

In her first work, the story of the death of a peasant couple during the famine years titled "In the Years of Famine" (1866), Orzeszkowa called on writers to descend to the social depths. However, her involvement with the positivist movement limited her literary interests to the secular salons and business world.

Orzeszkowa's early writings were shining examples of tendentious positivist prose, marked by reasoning and didacticism. The young writer passionately condemned the vices of traditional upbringing in "The Diary of Wacława" (1867) and the economic incompetence and idleness of the nobility, which hastened their ruin in "Eli Makower" (1875) and "The Brochwicz Family" (1876). Her angry attacks targeted the narrow-mindedness of provincial bourgeoisie in "In a Cage" (1869), the arrogant attitude and moral confusion of the aristocracy in "The Pompałkiewicz Family" (1876), and more. In her journalism and many of her novellas and novels, she championed the idea of women's emancipation, as seen in "Marta" (1873) and others.

Orzeszkowa was also interested in the situation of Jews in Poland and, in addition to several stories, she wrote the novel "Meir Ezofowicz" (1878) on this subject, which, like "Marta," gained recognition throughout Europe.

A discord between the positivist belief in the benefits of bourgeois transformations and the writer's actual experiences of life, which intensified in the late 1870s, led to a creative turning point. Orzeszkowa shifted from praising bourgeois civilization to criticizing it. She responded to the spread of socialist ideas with a series of novels, including "Ghosts" (1880) and others. While rejecting socialist ideas, she also spoke with respect for the self-sacrifice of the new generation of rebels who dreamed of social restructuring. The intensification of class struggle once again drew Orzeszkowa's attention to the lives of the lower classes, particularly the Belarusian peasants, whose tragedy she revealed in her famous novellas "Lowlands" (1884), "Dziurdzi" (1885), and "Ham" (1886).

As her attitude towards reality changed, so did Orzeszkowa's poetics. Her prose became less schematic, illustrative, and moralizing. It gained more objectivity in depicting characters, plasticity in drawing, psychological depth, and subtlety in character delineation. These changes were vividly reflected in the novel "On the Neman" (1887), which synthesized the writer's highest creative achievements and became one of the finest works of Polish critical realism. The novel's elevated thoughts, dramatic plot, colorful types of degenerate aristocracy, oppressive landowners, and hardworking farmers, comprehensive depiction of economic structure, landed gentry and rural life, picturesque genre scenes, and enchanting Belarusian landscape all imbued it with poetic warmth and epic grandeur. In this most Tolstoyan of her works, Orzeszkowa encompassed all post-reform Polish life in the Prussian lands.

The rise of patriotic sentiments in Polish society contradicted the previous positivist reaction to the events of 1863, and Orzeszkowa, sensitive to changes in public consciousness, paid tribute to the memory of the insurgents, with whom she had been connected during the days of struggle and as an active participant. She now made her attitude toward the traditions of the 1863 rebels a measure of a person's moral and civic value. "On the Neman" ends with the reconciliation of warring factions based on loyalty to the traditions of the noble liberation movement. The condemnation of urban culture, which morally corrupted people and injured their souls and lives, as well as bourgeois relationships, permeates almost all of Orzeszkowa's later novels. Her collection of short stories, "Gloria Victis" (1910), is considered one of her best works. Remembering the heroism of the 1863 insurgents, she linked the patriotic ideal with the struggle for the freedom of the people and social justice.

Orzeszkowa's main contribution to Polish literature was the development of the social and domestic novel genre. Her work contributed to strengthening the ties between Polish literature and French, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and other literatures. During the heyday of her realistic talent, Orzeszkowa maintained contact with Saltykov-Shchedrin and, perhaps, contributed no less than Prus to introducing Leo Tolstoy's discoveries into Polish art. The portraits she created of "various spheres" of Belarusian life, especially peasant life, later became a kind of school of realistic mastery for Belarusian writers in the early 20th century. Orzeszkowa's ideological and creative evolution is particularly noticeable in the intersection of two paths of Polish literary development: the path of the "irreconcilables" and the path of the positivists who overcame their limitations. It is at this crossroads that the most significant works of Polish critical realism, including those by Sienkiewicz and Prus, were born.