Konopnicka, Maria (1842–1910)

Polish poet, writer, and nationalist activist, who was one of the leading exponents of the realistic school of literature. Name variations: Marja Konopnicka; Marii Konopnickiej; (pseudonyms) Marko, Jan Sawa, and Jan Warez. Born Maria Wasilowska on May 23, 1842, in Suwalki; died on October 8, 1910, in Lemberg (Lvov), Austrian Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine); daughter of Józef Wasilowski; married a landowner; children: six.

Maria Konopnicka was born the daughter of a lawyer into the restrictive small-town environment of Suwalki in 1842. She married at an early age, moved to her husband's rural estate, and had six children. Self-taught and seized by an urge to learn about the newest ideas of her day, she avidly read classic works by Montaigne and others as well as new books by such contemporary thinkers as John Stuart Mill. She was also strongly influenced by the writers of the Polish Positivist school of thought, whose works embraced the progressive social, political and economic ideals of the West. After some years, Konopnicka's marriage to her much older husband became strained, and when Russian repressive measures made life on the estate difficult, she moved with her children to Dresden, where they lived for two years.

After returning to Poland, she spent more and more time on her literary activities and made her debut as a poet in 1870. By 1876, her poems appeared in national journals, and her cycle of poems "In the Mountains" was published that year in the well-respected Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly).

In 1877, she separated from her husband and moved to Warsaw to be in the thick of Polish literary and intellectual life, supporting herself and her children as a private tutor. Accepted as a valuable addition to the city's cultural landscape, she took part in the many official as well as underground actions to assist both political and ordinary prisoners of the Russian regime that governed Warsaw. Konopnicka was committed to raising the educational level of the poor and devoted large amounts of her time to working in educational organizations for working-class women and men. The more she came into contact with the social realities of the poor, the more radicalized she became. As a passionate Polish nationalist, Konopnicka blamed some but not all of Poland's problems on the Russian and German empires which occupied much of the nation's territory (she was less critical of the Austro-Hungarian regime in Galicia, which had granted autonomy to the Polish population in that province).

She was convinced, however, that foreign occupiers were not solely responsible for Poland's woes. Konopnicka saw the lack of interest in the plight of the poor by the landowning szlachta (gentry) class as a major reason for Polish poverty and backwardness. She also attributed these problems to the reactionary attitude of the Roman Catholic Church, which she believed fostered a negative attitude toward progress with teachings based on superstition and civic passivity. As a result of the critical messages which permeated her poetry, she found herself constantly in trouble not only with Russian tsarist censors, who quite rightly considered her to be a Polish patriot, but also with Polish conservatives, who saw in her writings an open incitement to the peasants to revolt against their szlachta lords and masters. Equally sensitive to the horrific conditions suffered by both urban and rural proletarians, in her cycle Obrazki (Tableaux) she raged against the merciless exploitation of a virtually defenseless working class. Given the fact that Konopnicka rarely missed an opportunity in her works to present the clergy in a negative light, Poland's clergy also regarded her writings with great suspicion, considering them to be dripping with anti-clerical venom and harboring an impious spirit.

Confidently, Konopnicka ignored both foreign and domestic critics, increasingly writing not only poems but also short stories and children's books. After three collections of her poems appeared in print between 1881 and 1886, she authorized the publication of a volume of short stories. She also wielded her pen as a critic, publicist, and translator, crafting readable Polish versions of works by Heinrich Heine, Gerhart Hauptmann, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Edmond Rostand.

Outspoken as a feminist in a society that had traditionally prayed to Mary the Virgin but believed that mortal women should be silent and remain contentedly within the domestic sphere, Konopnicka experienced frustrations that were sometimes hard to contain. Her editorship of the women's magazine Swit (Dawn) from 1884 to 1886 served as one outlet. Frustrated by censorship and criticism from Polish conservative circles, in 1890 she lived in Western Europe and did not return to Galicia until 1902. From then until her death in 1910, she would live in Lemberg (now Lviv).

By the time Konopnicka returned from exile in 1902, she had gained universal recognition as a major poet and writer. Her short stories "Niemczaki" (German Boys), "Nasza szkapa" (Our Jade), "Dym" (Smoke), "Urbanowa" and "Milosierdzie gminy" (Township Charity), published between 1888 and 1897, are considered to be among the best in Polish literature. Vividly conceived and written, her literary studies, particularly that of the revered national poet Adam Mickiewicz, continue to be of interest to both readers and scholars alike.

As she grew older, Konopnicka grew increasingly belligerent in both her Polish nationalism and her desire to see the birth of a more just social order. While in exile, she had remained in close contact with her publishers, the press, and various organizations dedicated to the cause of national regeneration. She fell easily into the role of an activist and helped to organize protests opposing the repressive measures taken against Polish-speaking children by the Prussian government in Wrzesnia in 1901–1902. In 1903, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her literary and social work, she was offered a house in Zarnowiec as a gift from the Polish nation. Although no longer young, on numerous occasions from 1905 through 1907 Konopnicka visited Russian-occupied Warsaw on missions of

mercy to assist incarcerated political prisoners and their families. Her concern for the impoverished and socially marginalized extended not only to those Poles of Roman Catholic or Socialist persuasions, but also to Polish Jews. Unlike some intellectuals in Poland who began during this period to regard Jews as dangerous aliens, Konopnicka wrote sympathetically about Polish Jews both as individuals and as a people, the best of her writings on a Jewish theme being her 1897 story "Mendel of Gdansk (A Sketch)."

As German-Polish ethnic tensions became increasingly uncompromising in the years leading to World War I, Polish writers like Konopnicka accepted the challenge of inevitable Slav-Teuton clashes, at least on the printed page. Scholars and poets alike in both Germany and the occupied Polish lands re-fought the wars of the 14th and 15th centuries, when a growing Polish state had defeated the Teutonic Knights. History and literature became highly politicized, with the arts serving as simply another weapon in the bitter nationalist struggles of the day.

In 1910, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the epic Battle of Grunwald, in which Poles decisively defeated Germans, a public subscription was launched to raise funds to erect a monument to recall Poland's hour of glory. Forbidden by Prussia to erect the monument on their sacred soil, the organizers had to content themselves with unveiling the monument in Cracow, in Austrian Galicia. When the ceremony took place on July 15, 1910, with the great pianist Ignacy Paderewski in attendance, the throng was thrilled to hear for the first time a rousing anthem specially composed for the occasion by Maria Konopnicka, which closed with the lines:

By the very last drop of blood in our veins
Our souls will be secured,
Until in dust and ashes falls
The stormwind sown by the Prussian lord.
Our every home will form a stockade.
May God so lend us aid.

In the final years of her life, Konopnicka invested much time and effort in writing an epic poem entitled Pan Balcer w Brazylji (Mister Balcer in Brazil, 1892–1906, complete edition 1910). Following a tradition set by other Polish poets like Krasicki and Slowacki, she wrote this work in ottava rima (used centuries earlier in the Renaissance by Tasso to depict exploits of chivalry). It centered on a topical issue of the early 20th century, the emigration of masses of impoverished Polish peasants to various parts of the New World. The author intended it to be the historical epic of the Polish peasant in the same way that Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz had been one for the proud Polish szlachta. While the lives of Polish emigrant workers were invariably difficult in Germany, France, the United States, and Canada, it was in Brazil, where they were brought to clear primeval forests for agricultural use, that their lot may well have been the hardest. Konopnicka's work, in which the hero of the poem, Mr. Balcer, is a simple village blacksmith, is now more of historical rather than literary interest, though some of its passages remain vivid and gripping for Polish readers. The poet's Ukrainian contemporary, the writer Ivan Franko, greatly admired her work in general and was so moved by Pan Balcer w Brazylji that he devoted a cycle of his own poetry, Do Brazilii, to it.

Honored by virtually all of her contemporaries as one of the leading representatives of the realist school of Polish literature, Maria Konopnicka died in Lemberg on October 8, 1910. Although many of her writings now appear dated to modern readers, the best of her poems and short stories remain living works of literature displaying both heart and soul. In the generations since her death, millions of copies of her books have been printed and reprinted in Poland.

sources:

Brodzka, Alina. Maria Konopnicka. 4th ed. Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1975.

Czerwinski, E.J., ed. Dictionary of Polish Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. NY: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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Prymak, Thomas M. "Ivan Franko and Mass Ukrainian Emigration to Canada," in Canadian Slavonic Papers. Vol. 26, no. 4. December 1984, pp. 307–317.

Segel, Harold B., ed. Stranger in Our Midst: Images of the Jew in Polish Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Wawrzykowska-Wierciochowa, Dionizja. "Siedem melodii skomponowanych do tekstu Roty Marii Konopnickiej," in Muzyka. Vol. 29, no. 3, 1984, pp. 63–89.

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John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia