Apollo Korzeniowski

Apollo Nałęcz Korzeniowski (born February 21, 1820 in Honoratka , † May 23, 1869 in Kraków ) was a Polish writer and patriot . He is the father of Joseph Conrad .

life and work

Korzeniowski's grave in the Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow .

Korzeniowski was born in 1820 in the village Honorotka ( Ukrainian Гоноратка ), which after the partition of Poland belonged to the Russian Empire and is now located in the Ukrainian Oblast Vinnytsia , as the son of Teodor Korzeniowski and his wife Julia, née Dyakiewicz. His father was an impoverished nobleman from the Nałęcz coat of arms community , who fought as an officer in the Napoleonic Army and joined the Polish Army in the November uprising in 1831.

After attending high school in Zhytomyr , Korzeniowski enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg , where he studied law and oriental studies from 1840 to 1846 . In 1852 he became an estate manager in a village called Łuczyniec in Podolia .

During the Crimean War in 1854 he took part in organizing an uprising in Poland. However, these plans came to nothing because the Polish side failed to gain foreign support.

In 1856 he married Ewelina Bobrowska, with whom he had their son Józef Korzeniowski in 1857, who was born in Berdychiv and who later became famous as Joseph Conrad . At the beginning of 1859 the family moved to Zhytomyr, where Korzeniowski first found employment with a publishing company and later with the management of a Polish theater.

At that time, a number of his poems were already in circulation, which he usually published anonymously and which were sometimes mistaken for the work of the also anonymously published writer Zygmunt Krasiński . He also made a number of translations for French authors such as Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, as well as correspondence for Warsaw newspapers.

His main works are his two plays: Komedia ( comedy ) from 1854 and Dla miłego grosza ( For a pretty penny ), which appeared in 1858 and premiered in Saint Petersburg in 1859. The socially critical satire Comedy was published in Vilnius in 1856 . However, the harsh criticism of the Polish nobility in the Ukraine caused a scandal, so that the play only had its world premiere in 1952 in Wroclaw .

At the end of the 1850s, Korzeniowski increased his social and political commitment again and moved to Warsaw in May 1861 . There he participated in the organization of the January uprising. He organized demonstrations, and a secret city committee was formed at his home in October of the same year. On the night of October 20-21, he was arrested by the tsarist authorities, imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel , and sentenced in May of the following year to be exiled to Vologda , 400 km east of Moscow . His wife and son followed him into exile. In early 1863 Korzeniowski was allowed to go to Chernihiv, northeast of Kiev , where his wife died in 1865.

Korzeniowski's literary work in exile was William Shakespeare , for whom he wrote a study ( Studia nad dramatycznością w utworach Szekspira , German for example: Study about the drama in Shakespeare's work ) and whose Die Komödie der Errungen he translated. Charles Dickens' translation into Polish also dates from this period .

Due to his poor health, he was allowed to leave Russia at the end of 1867. He moved to the then Austro-Hungarian Krakow , where he and his wife died of tuberculosis in 1869 . His grave is in the Rakowicki Cemetery .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Conrad, Joseph. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica online . Accessed May 7, 2009
2. ^ ^{A b} Czesław Miłosz: The History of Polish Literature . 1983, p. 265 .

literature

• Czesław Miłosz : The History of Polish Literature . 2nd Edition. University of California Press, Berkeley 1983, ISBN 0-520-04477-0 , pp. 263-266 .