Famous People • Literature and Poetry

Jan Kochanowski

(1530–1584) is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet as well as the greatest Slavic poet prior to the 19th century. He is considered to be the father of Polish poetry as he established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language. Kochanowski was born into the country nobility. He studied at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and later at the University of Padua in Italy. At 1559 he returned to Poland and served as a secretary at the royal court. During those years, Kochanowski participated in major political and intellectual debates and was strongly influenced by the literary milieu of the royal court and of Cracow, capital of Renaissance Poland.
Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. He devoted himself to poetry. His most happy and productive period of life was interrupted in 1579 by the death of his daughter Orszula (Ursula).
Kochanowski excelled in lyrical poetry. His creative works are extremely varied; he started off writing epics moved on to lyrical poetry and Latin odes. His first poems, mostly elegies, were written in Latin, but he soon turned to the vernacular. He devised his own poetic syntax and patterns of versification, setting high standards for the centuries to come. His crowning achievement is the cycle Laments (1580), 19 poems inspired by the death of his beloved daughter. Kochanowski was also the author of the first Polish Renaissance tragedy The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys (1578), with a plot from Homer’s Iliad , written in blank verse.
Besides his achievements in versification, he employed with great artistry a number of literary forms, such as hymns, lyrical songs, epigrams, satires, translations from the Bible, and others.

Adam Mickiewicz

(1798-1855) is regarded as the greatest Polish Romantic poet. He is the author of the popular epic - "Pan Tadeusz" (Lord Thaddeus). He received a good humanistic education in the fields of classical philology, history, the theory of poetry and pronunciation at the University in Vilno. Later he travelled around Europe and worked as professor of literature in Lausanne (1839) and in Paris (1840-44). His public actions in defense of liberty, equality and moral idealism led to arrest and deportation to Russia in 1824 (he never returned to Poland). During the Crimean War he organized legions for Polish emancipation to help the Turkish army in its fight against Russia. He died in Constantinople during a cholera epidemic. His corpse was transported to France and buried in the cemetery in Montmorency. In 1890 the coffin was transferred to the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. In that period when Poland was forgotten and stricken from the roster of living nations, Adam Mickiewicz made its name known all over the world.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Also known as "Litwos" (1846–1916) was a Polish journalist and one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer".
Sienkiewicz wrote historical novels. Many of them were first serialized in newspapers, and even today are still in print. In Poland, he is best known for The Trilogy ("With Fire and Sword", "The Deluge" and "Fire in the Steppe") set during the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while internationally he is best known for Quo Vadis, set in Nero's Rome. Quo Vadis has been filmed several times.
Sienkiewicz was meticulous in preserving the authenticity of historical language. In the trilogy, for instance, he had his characters use the Polish language as it was spoken in the seventeenth century. In The Teutonic Knights , which relates to the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, he even had his characters speak a variety of medieval Polish which he recreated by utilizing many of the archaic expressions still common among the highlanders of Podhale.

Stanisław Wyspiański

(1869 – 1907) was a playwright, poet, theatre director, maker of modern Polish theatre. His plays, which are richly imaginative and often allegorical, generally treat the history or contemporary life of Poland. The examples are: The Legion (1900), The Wedding (1901), Liberation (1903), and November Night (1904). Other plays are drawn from Greek themes, e.g., Return of Odysseus. Wyspiański was a great patriot; his dominant concern was Polish independence and individual freedom. He successfully joined the trends of modernism with themes of the Polish folk tradition and romantic history. He was also a painter; he created numerous murals, stained-glass windows, and theatrical costumes.

Czesław Miłosz

(1911 -2004) was a poet, prose writer and translator. He is widely considered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He made his literary début in 1930. During the 1930s Miłosz published two volumes of poetry and worked for the Polish Radio. In the war time he worked for the underground presses in Warsaw. Then he worked for government in the diplomatic service. From 1951 Czeslaw Milosz settled in France where he wrote several books in prose. From 1961 to 1978 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He received many awards, one of them was the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

Stanisław Lem

(1921 – 2006) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. At his father's pressure Lem took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. Although he eventually received a certificate of completion of medical studies, he did not take the final exams for fear of ending up like many of his friends—with a lifetime commission in the Polish Army.
He began his writing career as a poet before turning to the novel. In his many science-fiction works, including Return from the Stars, His Master's Voice and The Futurological Congress he combines irony and grotesque humor with profound social, psychological, and philosophical analyses that show a concern for the moral implications of modern science and technology. Lem was also the author of notable essays concerning science fiction, including the collection Microworlds. He is perhaps best known as the author of Solaris, which has twice been made into a feature film. First time the book was adapted for film by Soviet director Andrey Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; a second adaptation, directed by Steven Soderbergh of the United States, was released in 2002.

Ryszard Kapuściński

(1932 - 2007) was a popular journalist, author, publicist and poet, fascinated by exotic worlds and people. He traveled throughout the world and reported on several dozen wars, coups and revolutions in America, Asia, and especially in Africa, where he witnessed the liberation from colonialism. He has devoted several books to Africa. Kapuscinski's best-known one is a reportage-novel of the decline of Haile Selassie's anachronistic regime in Ethiopia - The Emperor, which has been translated into many languages. Shah of Shahs, about the last Shah of Iran, and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union, have enjoyed similar success as he put a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world and people.
Although he was frequently mentioned as a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature, it was never awarded to him. In a 2006 interview with Reuters, Kapuściński said that he wrote for "people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world". His work has been criticised, however, for factual inaccuracies and for the image he creates of Africa.

Wislawa Szymborska

(1923) is a great poet. She made her début in 1945 with a poem I am Looking for a Word. She has published 16 collections of poetry. Her poems have been translated (and published in book form) in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages. They have also been published in many foreign anthologies of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska is the Goethe Prize winner (1991) and Herder Prize winner (1995). She has a degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters of Poznan University (1995). In 1996 she received the Polish PEN Club prize and the Nobel Price "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality".

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