Eliza Orzeszkowa

Eliza Orzeszkowa (6 June 184118 May 1910) of the Positivism movement during the foreign Partitions of Poland. In 1905, together with Henryk Sienkiewicz, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life and career

She was born as Eliza Pawłowska at an estate in Milkowszczyzna (then in the Russian Empire, now Miĺkaŭščyna in Belarus) to the noble Polish–Lithuanian Pawłowski family, and died in Grodno (now in Belarus) nearby. From 1852 to 1857, she lived in Warsaw, where she attended school. There she met another future Polish writer Maria Konopnicka. After returning to Milkowszczyzna, at the age of sixteen, Eliza married Piotr Orzeszko, a Polish nobleman twice her own age, who was exiled to Siberia after the January Uprising of 1863. They were legally separated in 1869. She married again in 1894, after a 30-year-long relationship with Stanisław Nahorski, who died a few years later. In 1866, she moved to Grodno and turned novelist.

Remembrance In 1929, the statue of Orzeszkowa was unveiled in Grodno (present-day Belarus). In 1938, Eliza Orzeszkowa's bust designed by Henryk Kuna was unveiled in Warsaw's Praski Park.

In 1978, a biographical film titled Ty pójdziesz górą... devoted to Orzeszkowa was directed by with Hanna Maria Giza portraying the novelist. The film was part of a cycle of films Figures of Polish literature and premiered in 1980.

In 2023, during the 12th edition of the National Reading Day, her book Nad Niemnem was read in numerous public places. The President of Poland Andrzej Duda as well as the First Lady of Poland Agata Kornhauser-Duda took part in the campaign.

Selected works

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