Maria Konopnicka, born to the Wasiłowski family, used the pseudonym Jan Sawa and others. She was born on May 23, 1842 in Suwałki and died on October 8, 1910 in Lwów. She was a poet, a novelist, a writer for children and youth, a translator, journalist and critic.

From 1878 she lived in Warsaw, where she engaged in wide literary and social activity. She traveled extensively. In 1883 she went to Italy, in 1884 to Prague. In 1890 she left Warsaw and lived abroad: in Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and in Austrian and Czech health resorts, returning to Poland only occasionally. The literary outcome of her numerous journeys was, among other things, Wrażenia z podróży (1884).

In 1906 she stayed in Gdańsk for over a month – from the beginning of April to the first days of May. The next year, in Żarnowiec, she finished the novel W Gdańsku, which portrays the life of the mixed family of the Polish knight, Mikołaj Myszkowski, who married into the patrician family of the Mí¶kins, Gdańsk Germans.

She was the co-organizer of the worldwide protest against the repressive German measures towards Polish children in Września (1901-1902), the affranchisement acts (among others in 1908), and against the persecutions of the Uniates. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of her literary career (1903) she received a small manor-house in Żarnowiec near Krosno in the Carpathian Mountains as a gift from the nation. She used this home as a base for her journeys around southern Europe, mainly to Italy. She is buried in the Łyczakowski Cemetery in Lwów.

She made her literary debut with a poem W zimowy poranek (published in “Kaliszanin” 1870), however her real poetic start was the cycle W górach (“Tygodnik Ilustrowany” 1876).

The first decade of her literary activity established her position as a poet among her contemporaries. The fragments of a drama Z przeszłości (1881), three series of Poezja (1881, 1883, 1887) two of which included Obrazki, the poem Imagina (appearing in parts from 1886, published in its entirety in 1913), became an important phenomena in the literature of the period, a stimulus for ideological discussions. Her works drew on the radical inspirations of the Romantic outlook and the model of Romantic poetics, and reached for anti-feudal and independent Positivistic aims. The earliest crystallization of her work which revealed Konopnicka’s poetic individuality became the poems she stylized into folk songs. While these types of works had been part of her repertoire from her debut, they reached their peak dominance in series II and III (among other things, the cycles Wieczorne pieśni, Na fujarce, Z łąk i pól, Łzy i pieśni, Piosenki i pieśni, Po rosie, Pieśni bez echa). These types of works continued through the last years of her literary activity.

Her short stories have endured the test of time better than her poetry. She began work in this area from 1882. Initially, she drew inspiration from the experiences of Prus, Sienkiewicz and Orzeszkowa, then she developed her own ideas in the sphere of small forms. After her debut collection Cztery novele (1888), the collection Moi znajomi (1890), and soon afterwards Na drodze (1893), Nowele (1897), Ludzie i rzeczy (1898), Na normandzkim brzegu (1904), revealed on a wide scale the individual artistry of her narration and composition. Concentrating on contemporary issues and respecting the requirements of realistic poetics, she cultivated different variations of the poetics, such as: reportage sketches (Za kratą 1886, Obrazki więzienne 1887-88); narrative memoirs; psychological portrait studies; and stories with a developed plot and descriptions of various milieu.

Works for children, in prose and verse, published from 1884, eliminating importunate didacticism, arousing the aesthetic sensitivity of the reader and combining authenticity and fantasy, were a revelation in this domain of writing. The most valuable accomplishments in this area belongs the poetic stories written in prose and verse, O krasnoludkach i sierotce Marysi (1896). O Janku wędrowniczku (1893) and Na jagody (1903) all of which are reissued up to this day.

Pan Balcer w Brazylii, an epic poem in six cantos, shows, from the viewpoint of the participant and observer, the shrewd smith Balcer and the history of the peasants’ emigration exile, to which Konopnicka gave a symbolic meaning: the martyrs’ pilgrimage of people. In sufferings and struggle he becomes the lord of his fatherland.