Adam Asnyk

Adam Asnyk was a Polish poet and dramatist of the late nineteenth century, born in Kalisz in 1838 and dying in Kraków in 1897. He wrote in Polish at a time when Poland did not exist as an independent state, its lands divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria after the partitions of the eighteenth century. Born into the szlachta, the Polish noble class that descended from the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he belonged to the Positivist movement, which valued usefulness, education and work over romantic rebellion.

His training was meant to prepare him to manage a family estate. He studied agriculture and forestry at Marymont and medicine in Warsaw, then continued his education in Breslau, Paris and Heidelberg. In 1862 he returned to Congress Poland to fight in the January Uprising against Russian rule. When the revolt failed he had to leave the country and settled in Heidelberg, where he took a doctorate in philosophy in 1868. He later moved to the Austrian-held part of Poland, first to Lwów and then to Kraków, where he married in 1875 and began working as a journalist, editing the daily Reforma.

In Kraków he sat on the city council from 1884 and, a few years later, was elected to the Diet of Galicia and Lodomeria. He took part in cultural causes such as the founding of a society for popular schools and the transfer of Adam Mickiewicz's ashes to Poland, and he was among the first members of the Tatra Society. His lasting contribution, though, lies in verse. He mastered iambic metre, and poems such as Ulewa and Daremne żale are often cited among the finest iambic works in Polish. He also tried demanding stanza forms such as ottava rima, and he is credited with the first use of rhyme royal in original Polish poetry. Later scholars studied his versification closely.

Asnyk died in Kraków in 1897 and was buried at the Skałka church, a resting place for many of Poland's most distinguished figures, especially those connected with Kraków. He is remembered as a disciplined craftsman who combined the civic concern of Positivism with careful technique, and his poetry is still read as an example of the Polish verse of his day.