Eliza Orzeszkowa
1841–1910
Biography
Eliza Orzeszkowa was a Polish novelist who lived from 1841 to 1910 and became one of the leading voices of Positivism, a school of Polish writing that came to prefer patient, practical work for social betterment over armed struggle after the failed uprising of 1863. Born on a family estate in the old Polish–Lithuanian lands, she died in Grodno, then part of the Russian Empire.
Her best-known novel is Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen, 1888), which follows the rural gentry and their neighbours along the river of that name. Over her career she wrote more than 150 novels and novellas, and her subjects included women's place in society, working people in town and village, and the difficult relations between Poles and Jews under partition. In 1905 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, together with Henryk Sienkiewicz.
The library holds three of her works: Ad astra, Argonauci and Cham. Readers who want her own voice rather than a summary can begin with those titles, and the two Wikipedia articles cited here are the places to check the details of her life.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Ad astra
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
Orzeszkowa's novel of 1891 opens with a long hymn to the primeval forest and the pine-wood estate of Bór-Lada, and carries its people from there through the loves and ambitions of life in the Lithuanian countryside. Its title, 'to the stars', names the heights its characters aim…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Argonauci
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
Alojzy Darwid, a Warsaw millionaire who made his fortune with his own iron industry, lives in a house of enormous luxury among people who chase gold like the Argonauts of old. Orzeszkowa's late novel of 1900 is a satire and a study of money and the lives it shapes.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Cham
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
Paweł Kobycki, a silent widowed fisherman, lives on the high bank of the Niemen and prefers the river to the loom and the farm. Orzeszkowa's short novel of 1888 follows his life with Franka among the villagers of the river, and closes years later with the old fisherman and a…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Dziurdziowie
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
Peasants of a village, led by Stepan Dziurdzia, murder Pietrusia, a smith's wife who looks after her blind grandmother, out of pride, jealousy and a belief that she is a witch. Orzeszkowa's 1885 novel, a social study that opens like a riddle, follows the crime and the trial and…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Eli Makower
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
A two-volume novel of Polish and Jewish life by Orzeszkowa, who made the question of how the two peoples could live together one of her great subjects. It opens on an ageing woman whose proud, brilliant youth has long gone, and goes back from her to the family of the title. This…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Marya
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
A woman who says she never dwells on the past, because action and the present absorb her, writes a long series of letters to a friend about her life, her views and the people around her. Orzeszkowa's early novel in letters (first published in 1866) is short and plain-spoken.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Meir Ezofowicz
by Eliza Orzeszkowa
Meir Ezofowicz, a young man from a family of just men, returns to his small town in the east of old Poland with a mind full of books and ideas and tries to reform its rabbis, its customs and its schooling. Orzeszkowa's novel draws a closed community and the cost of the one who…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.