Aleksander Fredro

Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876) was a Polish poet, playwright and writer whose comedies made him one of the central figures of Polish theatre. He lived in an era when Poland had vanished as an independent state and its lands were divided among neighbouring empires. Although he wrote during the Romantic period, he kept his distance from its concerns and turned instead to the everyday life of the Polish nobility.

Born in the village of Surochów, near Jarosław, then part of Austrian territory, he came from a landowning family and was educated at home by private tutors. At sixteen he joined the Polish army and fought in the Napoleonic wars, including the Moscow campaign. A stay in France in 1814 sparked his interest in French drama, an influence visible in his later work for the stage. After leaving the army he settled on his estate and began to write, making his literary debut in 1817.

His comedies portray the manners of the Polish gentry with a sharp eye for character and plot and a supple, flexible language. They also draw on folk humour and on fast-paced farce. Two of his fables, The Monkey in the Bath and Paul and Gawel, became among the country's best-loved children's stories. His memoir, Topsy Turvy Talk, echoes the digressive style of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy while recounting his military campaigns.

His best-known play, Zemsta (The Revenge), remains in the repertory, and Andrzej Wajda adapted it for the screen in 2002. Some contemporaries criticised his light humour and even its supposed immorality, and he fell silent as a writer for years. Many of his plays were published and popularised only after his death in Lwów in 1876. His grandson Andrey Sheptytsky would become a prominent figure in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.