The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Orzeszkowa, Eliza

Born June 6, 1841, in Miklowszczyzna, near Grodno; died May 18, 1910, in Grodno. Polish writer.

The daughter of a wealthy landowner, Orzeszkowa studied in a private school in Warsaw from 1852 to 1857. She began publishing in 1866. Her early novels and novellas, Mr. Graba (1869) and Marta (1873), are devoted to women’s struggle for dignity and emancipation. In the novels Eli Makower (1874–75) and The Brochwicz Family (1876) she portrays the dissolution of the patriarchal way of life among the gentry and the rise of the bourgeoisie, a persistent theme in her works. Until the 1880’s Orzeszkowa wrote in the so-called tendentious style. Among her most popular works were the novel Meir Ezofowicz (1878), the short-story collection From Different Spheres (vols. 1–3, 1879–82), and the novellas about the life of Byelorussian peasants—Lower Strata (1883), Dziurdziowie (1885), and The Boor (1888). Her mature style is best represented by the novel Along the Neman (1887), in which the degenerate gentry is contrasted with the hardworking tillers of the soil, faithful to the patriotic traditions of the Polish Uprising of 1863. Orzeszkowa’s last major works are the novel The Argonauts (1889) and the short-story collection Gloria Victis (1910). Her prose constitutes one of the crowning achievements of 19th-century Polish realism.

WORKS

Listy zebrane, vols. 1–7. Warsaw, 1954–71.
In Russian translation:
Poln. sobr. soch., vols. 1–8. Kiev-St. Petersburg-Kharkov, 1902–10.
Soch., vols. 1–5. Moscow, 1953–54.

REFERENCES

Tsybenko, E. Z. “Eliza Ozheshko.” In Istoriia pol’skoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow, 1968.
Jankowski, E. Eliza Orzeszkowa, 2nd ed., Warsaw, 1966. (Bibliography pp. 634–43).
żmigrodzka, M. “Eliza Orzeszkowa.” In Obraz literatury polskiej XIX i XX wieku, series 4, vol. 2. Warsaw, 1966. Pages 7–81.

I. K. GORSKII

Mentioned in

Orzeszkowa, Eliza

References in periodicals archive

Specific topics include: the faces of evil in King Lear, evil in disguise in the form of the convent in the Victorian Protestant novel, the problem of violence in the poetry of Theodore Roethke, social evil in the writings of Eliza Orzeszkowa and Charles Dickens, evil and intertextuality in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, reading and writing evil in J.M.

Fictions and Metafictions of Evil: Essays in Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies

The pogrom worsened Polish-Jewish relations, and was criticized by almost the entire Polish elite, including writers Eliza Orzeszkowa and Boleslaw Prus, and several other noted activists.

Antisemitica remembering pogroms--Kishniev, Limerick, Warsaw

Skaff recounts a rather bizarre episode concerning one of Hertz's first feature-length films (1911) based on the novel Meir Ezofowicz (1878) by the Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa. The story is about a Jewish man living in the Russian partition who shared his Polish neighbors' aspirations for Polish independence.

The law of the looking glass: cinema in Poland, 1896-1939

Among the early female participants in the discourse, Eliza Orzeszkowa, whose views also reflected the "progressive" liberal agenda of Warsaw positivism, was the most noteworthy.

The "woman question" in Russian Poland, 1900-1914

Glasenapp also discusses the depiction of ghetto life by non-Jewish writers, notably the Polish realist Eliza Orzeszkowa and the notorious Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose propensities introduce a striking note of eroticism into an otherwise somewhat sexless genre.

Aus der Judengasse: Zur Entstehung und Auspragung deutschprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19