The parents of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (Warsaw 1812 – Geneva 1887) belonged to the gentry and owned land in the Grodno region. As a student at Vilnius University Kraszewski participated in anti-Russian nationalist conspiracies and was imprisoned in 1830 and 1832. Although the history of Vilnius and Lithuania preoccupied him deeply, he lived mostly on his estate in Volhynia (some of his novels and tales testify to his interest in the everyday life and social situation of the Ukrainian peasants there) and, from 1853 until 1860, in the Volhynian city of Žytomyr, where he played a prominent part in the Polish nobility’s cultural and social life. In these years he travelled widely; professorial appointments to the universities of Kiev (1835) and Cracow (1851) were vetoed by the Russian and Austrian authorities.
In 1860 Kraszewski moved to Warsaw, where he edited the Gazeta codzienna (“Daily news”) and Gazeta Polska (“Polish news”); asked to leave Poland in 1863 following the January Uprising of that year, he settled in Dresden for the following two decades. Here he obtained Austrian (1866) and Saxon (1868) citizenship, and became a centre-point for the Polish émigré community in Saxony, editing journals and writing treatises on Polish history and antiquity (he participated in archeological congresses in Bologna and Stockholm and received honorary doctorates from Cracow and Lemberg) as well as literary criticism and political commentary. It was here that he also embarked on his great project of writing a large cycle of historical novels on the entirety of Polish history.
In 1883 Kraszewski was arrested in Berlin by the Prussian authorities as an alleged French secret agent. The charge eventually led to a prison sentence, from which he was temporarily released on medical grounds in 1885; he used the opportunity to flee to Italy.
Kraszewski’s popularity as a novelist arose as early as the 1830s; his subjects ranged from artists’ lives and history to folk culture and sometimes had autobiographical elements. His novels on the social life of the Polish nobility were rather critical in tone. His later work is dominated by the genre of the historical novel, arranged into a large-scale cycle narrating Polish history from the earliest period until the present. The most popular of these novels is the widely-translated first one, Stara baśn (“An old legend”, 1876) about the 9th-century origins of the early Piast Duchy; other popular and widely-translated highlights were the novels set in the 17th- and 18th-century period of the Saxon-Polish union: among them Hrabina Cosel (“Countess Cosel”, 1874) and Brühl (1875). Kraszewski was the first writer who consistently aimed his novels at the larger reading public; he is also undoubtedly the most prolific Polish writer of the century.
Besides his Polish preoccupations, Kraszewski also thematized Lithuanian history and culture throughout his writing career, both as a historian/archeologist and as a novelist. His 1881 novel Ksiądz (“The priest”; the anti-Prussian theme foreshadowing Sienkiewicz’s 1900 Krzyżaci) celebrated Lithuanian resistance against the Teutonic Order. Earlier, in 1840-45, he had published a three-volume epic poem, Anafielas, based on Lithuanian mythological themes taken from Teodor Narbutt’s Mitologia Litewska (1835, the first volume of that historian’s “Ancient history of the Lithuanian nation”). Anafielas’s first canto, Witolorauda (“Witold’s dirge”) became especially popular after Stanisław Moniuszko had used it for the cantata Milda (1848, named after canto’s protagonist, the putative ancient Lithuanian goddess of love – in reality a figment of Narbutt’s Romantic imagination). Translated into Lithuanian as Vitolio Rauda (by Audrius Vištelis, 1881-82), it obtained the status of a foundational epic for Lithuanians, comparable to Pumpurs’s Lāčplēsis in Latvia.
