Maria Dąbrowska

Maria Dąbrowska (born Szumska in Russów, 1889; died in Warsaw, 1965) was one of the most widely read Polish writers of the first half of the twentieth century. She wrote in Polish, and her reputation rests above all on Nights and Days, a historical novel in four volumes that remains a landmark of Polish fiction.

She came from a family of impoverished rural gentry in Congress Poland, under Russian rule. She studied philosophy, sociology and natural sciences in Lausanne and Brussels before settling in Warsaw in 1917. There she worked briefly for the Ministry of Agriculture while contributing pieces to the press. From 1927 she devoted much of her energy to human rights, while her literary criticism was never taken very seriously. Her strength lay in fiction.

In her stories and novels she paid close attention to the inner lives of her characters and to the way public events and hardship leave their mark on ordinary people. Her protagonists are often poor, displaced or landless, and she portrayed them with realism and sympathy. She stayed in Warsaw during the German occupation and supported cultural life in the underground. She also translated Samuel Pepys's diary and stories by Anton Chekhov into Polish. Her diaries and the novel Adventures of a Thinking Man, both published after her death, have drawn renewed interest.

Her legacy rests mainly on Nights and Days, which was adapted for film in 1975 and for television in 1978. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times between 1939 and 1965.