"The best epic saga of the prewar period"
Czesław Miłosz: History of Polish Literature
Nights And Days
The Wonderful World of Maria Ro.
Novelist. Feminist. Conservative. Political exile. Capitalist. Agriculturalist. Tree-hugger. Catholic. Dyke. Perhaps the most interesting woman author of the turn of the 20th century. Critics have hated her for her politics but she remains the readers' favorite 80 years after her death.
Maria Rodziewiczówna (to keep it simple, I call her "Maria Ro") lived an extraordinary life. She was born to a Polish gentry family in the Pinsk Marshes in today's Belarus in 1864, in the middle of a large-scale, multi-ethnic uprising against Russian rule. After crushing the uprising, Russians instituted wide-ranging ethnic cleansing. They confiscated her family's property and sent them into internal exile in Siberia. Her novel Anima Vilis (An Expendable Soul) written at about the time when this portrait was painted, is based on her family's experiences in exile. In 1875, the Russians allowed the family to "return" but not home: they were ordered to live in an area designated for ethnic Poles (a kind of "reservation," more or less today's Poland).
Penniless and now in a part of the country where they had no friends, the family experienced great hardships, culminating in the death of her father. But soon fate smiled upon the orphaned mother and daughter: they inherited a large estate in the Pinsk Marshes, their old "little fatherland"--and back to Belarus, they went. The property had been badly mismanaged and heavily indebted and, with her mother's permission, Maria cut her hair, donned man's clothing, and took over the management of the farm. Over the next forty years, she drained marshes, introduced new crops, built roads, churches, and hospitals, ran a large women farmer's cooperative, and... wrote beautiful, wise, and very successful novels.
Maria's novels were a huge hit and have continued to be very popular with readers, but she has had rotten luck with critics, chiefly on political grounds. The right has hated her for her more or less open lesbianism (she dressed like a man and lived "in sin" with two women) and her firm stance in favor of women's liberation and the rights of ethic minorities--all important elements of her novels. And the left has hated her for her Polish patriotism, her firm opposition to Russia and Russian communism, and her attachment to traditional religious practice. Aged about 60--just about when this photo was taken--she wrote her most beautiful novel, A Summer of the Forest Folk, portraying the summer she and her two lovers spent in a remote cabin deep in the Pinsk marshes, the last virgin forest of Europe.
Maria's novels tell tales of people and issues of her times: men and women, landowners and tenant farmers of Eastern Europe coping as best they can with Russian oppression and mismanagement, the bounds of the ossified social rules and outdated legal practices, changing social and ethnic norms, and the hard rules of beautiful but harsh nature. They portray life in a complex, multi-ethnic and multi-denominational society and describe the nature of the Pinsk marshes--the waterlogged last stand of virgin forest in Europe. Her writing style is sparse with an occasional flash of great literary beauty achieved with surprising economy of words. Her position in Polish literature is somewhat like that of a cross between Thackeray and Jane Austen in English and many have found her similar in mood and style to her near contemporary, the great Russian classic Igor Turgenev.
The publication of each volume of this trilogy was a great political event in its own right. Written over the period of 50 years, these books were intended as great historical novels pure and simple, but they were read by their contemporaries as an insightful commentary on current affairs--perhaps because they treat of a universal problem: they offer a profound insight into the individual entangled against his will in great politics of tyranny. Their reception made their author into a political figure, something he had never intended, either, and led him to become one of the leading Polish dissidents and coauthors of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
Jacek Bocheński in Berlin in 1988, soon after his release from communist prison.
Like most young people who experienced World War II under German rather than Russian occupation, Bocheński experienced a moment of youthful enthusiasm for Marxism. But as he watched the practice of communism in Eastern Europe, he became disillusioned and decided to drop out of politics and into innocuous classicism. Little did he know that writing a commentary on Julius Ceasar's Memoirs of the Gallic War would offend his rulers. Yet, to the regime's eyes, Divine Julius showed all too clearly how a dictatorship corrupts and coopts the elites.
The banning of the first book, eventually led to other banning of his subsequent books, and eventually to a blanket ban of any text by Bocheński from any media--or as much as any mention of him at all.
Cornered, Bocheński helped to cofound an underground literary magazine, and, one thing leading to another, in time became one of the leading dissidents in Eastern Europe and--after the fall of Communism--one of the most widely respected and most decorated heroes of the struggle.
The most beautiful book you will read this year.
Irresistibly charming.
I will never stop reading this.
I'm stunned and enraptured; you will be too.
A book about love, in its purest form, for anything and everything.
Gorgeous writing. What a joy.
This book has the status of a cult classic in Poland. Everyone knows it, everyone has had it read to him or her as a child. More: it is a book with an avid, almost religious following, "forest souls" as they say of themselves: people who read this book endlessly over and over, quote whole passages from memory, relive and replay its story, its attitudes and situations in their own lives. The story is the simplest thing on earth: tree women spend their summers in a remote cottage deep in the last virgin forest in Europe. This summer, their teenage big-city nephew joins them. But the goodness of the book does not lie in the story. It lies in how it tells it--and what deeper sense the reader can derive from it. At bottom, it is a heart-warming, feel-good tale of love and friendship, of coming of age, and of the healing power of nature. But it contains hidden meanings: one can read it between the lines, also. This is a book like nothing you have ever read, a phenomenon, a genre of its own. The most beautiful book I have ever done, bar none, wrote the audiobook narrator about her experience with it. A cult classic since its publication in 1920, it has had 52 editions in 102 years. Now finally in English in a highly readable, beautifully illustrated translation.
eBook $9.99
paperback $15.99
hardcover $23.99
audiobook $9.99
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Love in the cold climate.
In 1891, 27-year-old Maria Rodziewiczówna put pen to paper to record her experiences as a political exile in Siberia: the severity and beauty of nature, the extraordinary life of the steppe, the daily struggle to survive, and the lives of the exiles: some withering and dying, some barely eking out a living, and some adapting, thriving and even--finding love.
The book's message of hope in the face of great adversity, the mysterious figure of The Shaman, and the special sense of "being there," evoked with extraordinary beauty and economy of words have kept the book permanently in print for 130 years.
The book, who for plot and style can easily compete with the best of Turgenev or Tolstoy, was unlucky with its choice to translator. The first English translation of the book, published in 1900, never made a splash and has since faded away. This new translation updates the style and corrects many mistakes and omissions, giving us the first accurate and highly readable English version of this great, timeless classic.
If you love great literature and beautiful prose, you will love this. Pick up your copy today.
eBook $9.99
paperback $16.99
hardcover $24.99
Our other great books:
Aleksander Krawczuk. These beautifully written, insightful, wise bolks books on antiquity have had a cult following for two generations and are proving equally popular with Western readers.
Jacek Bocheński. These three beautiful and wise novels portraying the fall of the Roman Republic and the first decades of the Empire were understood by their readers and critics to portray the political and moral issues under Soviet rule. Their publication caused an uproar and led to their author's complete publishing ban and eventually forced him into the unasked for role of one of the leaders of the independence movement which led to the fall of Russian rule in Eastern Europe.
Witold Makowiecki. Two witty and entertaining tales of adventure set in Classical Greece. International best-sellers since 1946, they are are, in the words of Czesław Miłosz, "the best epic saga of the prewar period."
Arkady Fielder. A great action and saga about the life of a Polish-Virginian renegade among the Arawak Indians of the Orinoco in 1726 by Poland's best-selling travel writer.
Joe Alex. The best-selling epic saga about a Minoan expedition of exploration searching for a route to the Baltic in 1600 BC written by the only man in the world to have translated all of Shakespeare.
Zbig Nienacki. The cult classic tales of Mr. Wheels (Pan Samochodzik): Poland's bumbling art detective.
