Quo Vadis : Polish Culture : Famous Poles

Most of the following are exerpts from The Polish Biographical Dictionary – Profiles of nearly 900 Poles who have made lasting contributions to world civilization by Stanley S. Sokol, available from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

Year		Name		Nobel Prize
1943-		Lech Walesa		Peace 1983
1926-		Andrzej Wajda
1923-		Wislawa Szymborska		Literature 1996
1920-		John Paul II
1911-		Czeslaw Milosz		Literature 1980
1908-		Joseth Rotblat		Peace 1995
1868-1925		Wladyslaw Reymont		Literature 1924
1867-1934		Maria Sklodowska Curie		Chemistry 1911
1857-1924		Joseph Conrad
1846-1916		Henryk Sienkiewicz		Literature 1905
1810-1849		Frederick Chopin
1798-1855		Adam Mickiewicz
1746-1817		Tadeusz Kosciuszko
1473-1543		Nicholas Copernicus

Frederick Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, about thirty miles west of Warsaw, to Nicolas and Justyna nee Krzyzanowska. As a young child he would crawl beneath the piano and stay there for hours, awe-struck, as his mother played. His mother began teaching him to play after she discovered him seated at the keyboard one night. He grasped the mechanics at once, learning the positioning of his hands with amazing speed, and was soon able to play every tune he heard.

When Chopin was seven, Wojciech Zywny was hired to teach him. He taught Chopin to love Bach and introduced him to Mozart. Frederick Chopin learned with extraordinary ease and less than a year later, he was well-known for his performances for the most prominent families in Warsaw. His first composition, Polonaise in G Minor, was published in 1817. The event was acllaimed by the “Warsaw Review” which officially acknowledged him as a child prodigy. His first public concert was organized for the benefit of the local charitable society and was supported by the elite of Warsaw society. The concert took place on February 24, 1818, two days after his eighth birthday and was an immense success.

The following year, it became obvious that Chopin had surpassed Zywny as a pianist, and his musical knowledge and skill had outstripped the experience of the Czech master. In 1826, Chopin registered at the Warsaw Conservatory of Music with Jozef Elsner, who was revered as a great composer-teacher. Elsner showed Frederick Chopin exceptional favors, sharing hours of intimate discussions and suggestions.

Chopin constantly composed rondos, mazurkas, polonaises and a nocturne. The third and final year at the Conservatory was merely a formality, for he had outgrown the school. The director had given everything he had to bestow upon him. Chopin completed his studies at the Conservatory, and Elsner declared him a musical genius.

At age twenty, Chopin left Warsaw for good. His travels included Paris, Nohant, Majorca and England. He exerted a great influence on all fields of music, although he himself composed exclusively for piano. His compositions are true masterpieces, embodying the qualities of spontaneity, lilt, consistency and highlighted by patriotic accents and undisguised affinity with Polish folk songs. His major works include Sonata in B Minor with its renowned Funeral March, adn two piano concertos, E Minor and F Minor, listed as Nos 1 and 2 but written in reverse order.

Chopin suffered from tuberculosis, which eventually killed him. He died in Paris on October 17, 1849 and was buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, where people still come to kneel at his tomb and leave tributes of violets, the flowers he so dearly loved. His heart was carrried back to Poland by his sister, Ludvika, and placed in a silver urn at the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, according to his wishes.

related music

A sailor and a writer, Joseph Korzeniowski Conrad was born in a country manor in the Ukrainian border province of old Poland. He moved to Cracow at a very early age. In 1874, he was sent to France to begin a sailor's life on French ships. At the age of twenty-two, Conrad entered into the British merchant service. Within the next eight years, he had reached the rank of master mariner.

During his life at sea, Conrad did much writing. In 1894, his book Almayer's Folly, based on his experiences as a seaman, was published. Shortly thereafter he married Jessi George and they sttled in the English countryside south of London.

Other books by Conrad: Lord Jim, Victory, The Rescue, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The Shadow Line and The Arrow of Gold. Conrad died suddenly on August 3, 1924 while at work on his 28th novel. He is unsurpassed as a novelist of the sea.

Nicholas Copernicus was born in Torun on February 19, 1473 of a well-to-do merchant family. He attended St. John's school in Torun. He studied canon law at the University of Cracow from 1491 to 1495, and from 1496 to 1503, he studied at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. He because fascinated by celestial motion and observed this phenomena with his naked eye. He then began drawing the positions of the constellations and planets to support his theory.

His uncle Lucas, the Bishop of Varmia, appointed Copernicus a canon of the Church, which provided Copernicus a stipend which he used to study medicine and science. He held the position as a canon of the Chapter of Varmia in Frombork, a little town in the north of Poland, from 1510 until his death in 1543. This position allowed him to spend most of his time working out his theory. He made astronomical observations using very simple wooden instruments with no lenses (lenses were not invented until one hundred years later). About 1515, he earnestly began to compile data and he wrote a short report on his theory which he circulated among astronomers. The first words of the text supplied its title, Commentariolus (Commentary). It took him many years to give the final form to his principal work on the detailed theory of motions in a heliocentric system. In 1539, he published his theory, His De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (Concerning The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). The published theory reached him on his death bed.

Copernicus will be forever remembered for his epoch-making theory that the sun and not the earth was the center of the universe. The citizens of Torun, his birthplace, erected a monument in front of the city hall with the following dedication: “Nicholas Copernicus, A Torunian moved the Earth; Stopped the Sun”. In 1945, the Nicholas Copernicus University was organized in Torun. In 1973, the 500th anniversary of his birth was aptly observed by all higher institutions of learning, astronomical observatories, historians, mathematicians, scientists, and biographers. Musical compositions were inspired by his life, and seventy nations throughout the world issued commemorative postage stamps honoring this Polish genius.

Maria Sklodowska Curie was the youngest of five children, born to Wladyslaw and Bronislawa nee Boguska in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Both parents were educators, and she received her early education from them. After completing her studies in chemistry and physics, Curie was unable to receive an assistantship to a school of higher learning since there were no vacancies for women in science in Occupied Poland. She was accepted at the Sorbonne in France in 1891. In 1895, shortly after graduation, she married Pierre Curie (1859-1906), a professor of physics in the school of Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris. The couple had two children, Irene and Even Denise.

In 1903, Maria received her doctorate and continued to work in the laboratory with her husband. The same year, the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of radioactivity and of the new radioactive elements. After the tragic death of Pierre in 1906, Maria Curie continued her work and was awarded her second Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911. She received over 125 degrees, medals and decorations from universities and organizations around the world, and both she and her husband have been honored philatelically many times by many nations of the world. Her discoveries have had inestimable significance for the world of science, making her the greatest Polish scientist of modern times and undoubtedly the most outstanding woman scientist in history. The Curies' daughter Irene and her husband Frederick Joliot jointly shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The younger daughter Even became a well-known author and lecturer.

Although Maria Curie lived the greater part of her life in France, she never lost her love for the land of her birth. Her loyalty was deep and abiding. In 1932 she made her last trip to Poland to attend the dedication of the Radium Institute of Warsaw which was sponsored jointly by Curie and her sister, Bronislawa Dulska. Maria Curie died in Sancellemoz, France on July 4, 1934.

Karol Wojtyla was born in Wadowice near the Polish-Czech border. His mother and only brother died while he was very young. In 1938, Karol enrolled as a student of literature at the University of Cracow. His father was killed when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Karol left his studies and worked first as a laborer in a stone quarry and then as a worker in a chemical factory to avoid being taken to Germany in a work force or being placed in a concentration camp. He made a decision to become a priest and began to study philosophy and theology secretly at night. The Nazis closed all Polish Universities and deported most of the professors. At this time, Wojtyla joined the underground Rhapsody Theatre, a small group that met in private homes to avoid the Nazis. The group held poetry readings and gave plays.

At the end of the war, he continued his studies, graduated Summa Cum Laude, and received his Doctorate in Theology in 1948. He wrote his dissertation at the Angelicum in Rome (the Pontifical University of St. Thomas). He then returned to Poland and became a parish priest in the Archidiocese of Cracow. In 1954, he began teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin. In 1958, he became a Bishop, and in 1966, Pope Paul VI elevated him to Cardinal.

During the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), he began to attract attention among his fellow cardinals and bishops for his statements on the pastoral role in the modern world. He joined the Eastern European Bishops in helping to win a council statement on religious liberty. In the years following the Vatican Council, he broadened his knowledge of the world by extensive travel to the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1969 and 1976, he visited eleven cities in the United States with large Polish-American populations. His travels prompted many Cardinals and Bishops from the United States, South America, Spain, Europe, and Africa to visit him in Poland. This undoubtedly contributed to his election as Pope.

On October 15, 1978, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope of the Roman Catholic Church in a bold break with a four hundred and fifty-five year tradition of electing Italian Pontiffs. He took the same name as his predecessor, John Paul. His election as the 264th Pontiff came on the sevent or eighth ballot of the secret conclave of 111 Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

John Paul I was only a Pope for a month when he died of a massive heart attack. A second conclave of Cardinals was held to select a new pope in little more than one month. Of all of the Popes, John Paul II alone had the direct experience of living under Nazi rule. He is the only Pope to have lived under a Communist government, and he played a great role in defending the Christian faith in a Communist country that is perhaps the most ardently Roman Catholic in all of Europe.

Poland's most revered national hero, Tadeusz Kosciuszko was born at Mereczowsczyzna in Polesie Province. An aristocrat and patriot of Poland, he was a hero of the American Revolution. In 1776, Kosciuszko went to America to participate in the Revolution as a Colonel of Engineers. He was a skilled military engineer, trained in Poland, and a graduate of academies in France. He won distinction in the defense of Sarotoga and saw further service with the army of the South. Kosciuszko was appointed Chief Engineer of the building of West Point and charged with the planning and building of hilltop forts, gun emplacements, and troop barracks. West Point is considered Kosciuszko's greatest achievement. In 1784, Kosciuszko returned to Poland and served as a general in the War of 1792. In 1794, he led the unsuccessful insurrection agianst the Russians, after which he was imprisoned in St. Petersburg. In 1796, Kosciuszko was released. He returned to the United States and settled in Philadelphia. He left for France to join the Polish Legions there. Before leaving, Kosciuszko requested of his friend Vice-president Thomas Jefferson to draft a will for him and become his executor. He requested that upon Kosciuszko's death, Jefferson should buy Negro slaves and free them.

From 1798 to 1801, he lived in Paris where Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia sought his services. He resisted their offers and played no direct role in the Napoleonic wars. In 1802, the West Point Fortress became a military academy. The cadets, led by Robert E. Lee, commissioned and paid for a monument to honor Kosciuszko. It still stands in a corner of the parade ground. In 1815, he appeared before the congress in Vienna to plead Poland's cause for independence and the removal of foreign troops from Polish territory. He returned to Poland and died on October 15, 1817, as a result of a horseback riding injury.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Kosciuszko is the huge kopiec (mound) which was built in Cracow. Poles from all walks of life brought soil from all parts of the country to build the mound that now dominates the modern city that has grown up around it. His Philadelphia residence was designated a National Memorial in 1976. He has been honored on postage stamps in Poland and the United States.

related site The Koscziuszko Foundation

Poland's greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz was born on December 24, 1798, in the vicinity of Nowogrodek. He received his early education from the parochial school at Nowogrodek and entered the University of Wilno, at that time one of the best in Poland. Young Mickiewicz devoted the major part of his studes to Polish literature, ancient languages, and history. After the completion of his formal education, he accepted the Chair of Latin Languages and Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. One year later, he took over the Chair of Slovanic literature in the College de France. In 1822 and 1823, he published his first two volumes of poetry.

Michiewicz was involved with a secret society in Wilno, a student group organized to fight for the freedom of Poland against the Tsarist regime. After being incarcerated in a monastery, he was exiled to Odessa, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, where he was surrounded by sympathetic Russian poets and intellectuals, notable amng them Pushkin and Decabrists. years later, he dedicated his moving poem Do Przyjaciol Moskali (For My Moscow Friends) to them. After the failure of the 1830 Insurrection, he proceeded to France. His masterpiece Pan Tadeusz (Mr. Tadeusz) was written in this period. In 1834, he married Celina Szymanowska. At the first news of an outbreak of the revolution in Italy in 1848, he went to Rome and organized a Polish Legion which took part in the brief Italian War. In 1855, the Crimean War broke out and Mickiewicz went to the capital city in Constantinople, Turkey to organize a Polish Legion with the Turkish Army to demonstrate to the world the unwavering determination of the Poles. He was stricken with cholera and died on November 26, 1855. His body was transported to Paris. In 1890, his remians were taken to Cracow and placed in the Wawel Castle Cathedral among the tombs of the nation's greatest men.

Written by Mickiewicz over a ten-year period, Dziady (Forefather's Eve) is Poland's greatest national drama. In the Place D'Alma in Paris, the French erected a monument to him by Bourdelle, the renowned sculptor and admirer. Where the city council meets in Rome, a bust of Mickiewicz stands next to the towering monument of Julius Ceasar. He was the only foreigner so highly honored, and was also honred on postage stamps in Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania.

related film Pan Tadeusz

A poet, writer, and historian of Polish literature, Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejna, a village near Wilno. He studied law in Wilno and made his literary debut as a poet in 1930. From 1934 to 1935, he studied in Paris on a scholarship. He returned to Poland and worked for Polish radio in Wilno and Warsaw. An outspoken Socialist of Warsaw, he was active in the Polish resistance against the German Occupation during World War II. He brought out some anti-Nazi poems during this period. He worked as a diplomat in Washington, D.C. and Paris from 1945 to 1950. He refused a recall to Poland saying, “I know perfectly well that my country has become a province of an empire.” In 1960, with his wife and two sons, Milosz settled in Berkeley where he taught Slavonic languages at the University of California. He became a United States citizen in 1970. In 1978, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize in literature. His poetry remains under the influence of ancient Polish poets and he is passionately interested in everything that is Polish. On December 10, 1980, the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, presented the Nobel prize for literature and $212,000 in prize money to Milosz in the Philharmonic Hall in Stockholm. In June of 1981, Milosz visited Poland and received an Honorary Doctorate from the Catholic University at Lublin. Among his best known works: Rescue; The Captive Mind; The Seizur of Power (a novel of war-time Poland); Native Relm (an autobiography); The History of Polish Literature; Emperor of the Earth; Selected Poems; and Bells in Winter.

Author Wladyslaw Reymont was born on May 7, 1868 in the village of Kobiele Wielkie near Piotrkow. One year later, his family migrated to a settlement called “Tuszyn,” seven miles from Lvov. He joined a provincial theatre group and traveled throughout Poland's small provincial towns to the country's remotest corners. At Czestochowa, he joined another theatrical company. Several years later, Reymont gave up the theatre and returned to the railway. His writings during this period include poetry and prose as well as his book Meeting. He compiled his writings and sent them to a publisher for an opinion. Glos (The Voice), a weekly paper, agreed to publish his Death. Reymont was expelled from several schools in Russian-occupied Poland for using the Polish language, a practice banned by the Russians. In 1893, he settled in Warsaw and continued to write. He wrote The Comedian, The Fermentations, and a book of short stories on the industrial life of Lodz entitled The Promised Land. The next ten years were devoted to his enormous and panoramic novel The Peasants. This novel consolidated his position in Polish and world literature. In 1924, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his work. He died the following year.

Polish-born British physicist who became a leading critic of nuclear weaponry. He was a founding member (1957), secretary-general (1957–73), and president (1988–97) of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a London-based worldwide organization of scholars that seeks solutions to problems of national development and international security. In 1995 Rotblat and his organization were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their longtime promotion of nuclear disarmament, most notably by sponsoring discussions between scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union.

Rotblat was educated in Warsaw at the Free University of Poland (M.A., 1932) and at the University of Warsaw (Ph.D., 1938). In 1939 he won a fellowship to the University of Liverpool, England, with which he was associated until 1949. In 1944 he moved to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that developed the first atomic bombs, but he quit the project and returned to Britain that same year after learning that Nazi Germany would not build a competing atomic bomb. After the war Rotblat shifted the focus of his research to medical physics. In 1950 he became a professor of physics at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College at the University of London.

In 1955 Rotblat was among a handful of prominent scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed a manifesto by Bertrand Russell that criticized the proliferation of nuclear arms. The manifesto led to the founding of the Pugwash Conferences, named for the native village in Nova Scotia, Canada, of the industrialist and philanthropist Cyrus Eaton, where they were inaugurated in 1957. The conferences have gathered scientists from many countries and are held regularly at various sites throughout the world. Rotblat published several works on the Pugwash movement, nuclear physics, and world peace.

–Encyclopædia Britannica

A writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz was born to a family of the Polish gentry at Wola Okrzejska in Russian-occupied Poland. He was educated in Warsaw and excelled at Polish Composition. In 1866, he entered the University of Warsaw and studied medicine, history, and philology. As a student, he wrote articles for the press and left the university in 1870 to take up journalism. His first novel In Vain was published in 1873. He visited the United States and wrote Letters From A Journey In America. Returning to Poland, he published Janko The Musician, For Bread, The Lighthouse Keeper, and Bartek The Victorious. One of his most popular novels Fire and Sword (1890) described life in Poland during the wars of the 1860's. In 1895, Sienkiewicz published the popular romance Quo Vadis, a tale of Roman society under Nero. It was the first internationally-renowned Polish novel. In 1897, his last great book The Knights of the Cross was published. When World War I borke out, Sienkiewicz devoted himself to the Red Cross Fund which he inaugurated in Poland. He died at Vevey, Switzerland on Novbember 16, 1916 while performing relief work for war victims. In 1905, Sienkiewicz became the first Pole to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

related film Quo Vadis

Polish poet whose intelligent and empathic explorations of philosophical, moral, and ethical issues won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

Szymborska's father was the steward on a count's family estate. When she was eight, the family moved to Kraków, and she attended high school there. Between 1945 and 1948 she studied literature and sociology at Kraków's Jagiellonian University. Her first published poem, Szukam slowa (I Seek the Word), appeared in a Kraków newspaper in March 1945. Dlatego zyjemy (1952; That's Why We Are Alive), her first volume of poetry, was an attempt to conform to Socialist Realism, the officially approved literary style of Poland's communist regime. In 1953 she joined the editorial staff of Zycie Literackie (Literary Life), a weekly magazine of intellectual interests, and remained there until 1981. During this period she gained a reputation not only as a poet but also as a book reviewer and translator of French poetry. In the 1980s she wrote for the underground press under the pseudonym Stancykówna and also wrote for a magazine in Paris.

Between 1952 and 1993 Szymborska published more than a dozen volumes of poetry. She later disowned the first two volumes, which contain poems in the style of Socialist Realism, as not indicative of her true poetic intentions. Her third volume, Wolanie do Yeti (1957; Calling Out to Yeti), marked a clear shift to a more personal style of poetry and expressed her dissatisfaction with communism (Stalinism in particular). Subsequent volumes, such as Sól (1962; Salt), Sto pociech (1967; No End of Fun), and Wszelki wypadek (1972; Could Have), contain poems noteworthy fortheir precise, concrete language and ironic detachment. Selections of her poems were translated into English and published as Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems (1981), People on a Bridge: Poems (1990), View with a Grain of Sand (1995), and Nothing Twice: Selected Poems (1997). Poems, New and Collected, 1957–1997 appeared in 1998.

–Encyclopædia Britannica

A stage and motion picture director, Andrzej Wajda was born in Suwalki, Poland. Wajda joined the Resistance at the age of sixteen. After his father, an artillery officer, was killed, Andrzej worked as a barrel maker, an iron smith, and an assistant to a church painter and decorator. When World War II ended, he enrolled in the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. In 1950, Wajda attended the newly formed Film School in Lodz. As a student, he made several film shorts and graduated in 1953. In 1954, he made his first feature film A Generation. In 1957, he directed Kanal, and in 1958, his Ashes and Diamonds made international celebrities of both Wajda and his star, Zbigniew Cybulski. Other films by Wajda: Lotna, Samson, Love At Twenty, Ashes, The Gates of Paradise, Everything For Sale, Hunting Flies, Landscape After Battle, The Wedding, Man of Marble, and Man of Iron. In 1965, Wajda made headlines for speaking out against political censorship and poor technical facilities in Poland. He has been a guest director at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut where he staged Dostoyevsky's The Possessed in 1974 and Tadeusz Rozewicz's White Marriage in 1977.

related film Pan Tadeusz

A labor and political leader, Lech Walesa received vocational training and worked as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. A founder of the free labor union Solidarity in 1979, he led a strike in July and August of 1980 that involved 300,000 workers. He signed an historic agreement with the Communist government on August 31, 1980 that granted workers the right to independent unions and the right to strike. Solidarity eventually attracted ten million members. Martial law was declared on December 13, 1981 and the Solidarity Union was suppressed and Walesa was held in detention for a year. In May 1982, Walesa was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in absentia. In 1983, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, presented to his wife Danuta in Oslo, Norway. Walesa was apparently fearful that the communist regime would not allow him to return to Poland. In April, 1989, the Polish government and Solidarity concluded a far-reaching accord intended to rejuvenate the political, social and economic life of the nation. This agreement frameworked Poland's transition from dictatorship to democracy. On November 25, 1990 the first round of presidential elections were held in Poland. Lech Walesa eventually won the run-off election. On December 22, 1990, Walesa took the oath of office before a joint session of Parliament that marked the crowning moment of a remarkable journey both for him and for Poland. Blinking back tears, he promised to shake the nation of 38 million from “passivity and discouragement... With this moment, the Third Republic of Poland is solemnly beginning,” Walesa told legislators.

Related Links

• Polish contributors to world sciences

last edited Tuesday, March 30, 2004