Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
1812–1887
Biography
Józef Ignacy Kraszewski was a Polish novelist, journalist, historian and publisher, born in Warsaw in July 1812 to a family of the Polish nobility. As a boy he lived for long stretches with his mother's parents at Romanów, and later he studied at Vilnius. He began publishing in 1830, and the same year he was caught up in a patriotic movement linked to the November Uprising. He was imprisoned from late 1830 until 1832, and the rest of his life was shaped by the struggle for Polish independence.
He is one of the most prolific writers in the history of Polish literature, with more than two hundred novels to his name, as well as novellas, plays, travel accounts and articles. His best-known works are the historical novels, including a long cycle that retells Polish history from its legendary beginnings to the partitions, and the peasant novels of the 1840s and 1850s, which criticise serfdom and the power of landowners. In 1863 he left Warsaw under pressure from the Russian authorities and settled in Dresden, where he spent most of the rest of his life. In 1884 a German court sentenced him to imprisonment in Magdeburg. Released on bail, he left the country and died in Geneva in March 1887.
Two of his books on this site come from the peasant cycle. Ulana (1843) looks at a peasant woman who is mistreated by her landlord, and Jermoła (1857), subtitled village pictures, is a sequence of sketches of rural life. Both show the sympathy for ordinary villagers that made his name among Polish readers, and both are a good way into a body of work too large for any single reader to cover.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Jermoła
by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
In a backwater where the small gentry still live by the customs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a world of tiny manors, market days and monthly newspapers, a story of country life takes shape. Kraszewski's tale of 1857, in twenty-two short chapters, is told with a…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Ulana
by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
In a village on a lake in Volhynian Polesie, with its manor on the hill, its inn and its old church, the peasant girl Ulana lives out her story. Kraszewski's early tale of 1843 is as much a portrait of the village and its people as of its heroine.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.