Poetry
Marya: A Tale of Ukraine
Maria
Antoni Malczewski · 1825
Synopsis
In seventeenth-century Ukraine, Wacław, son of a powerful palatine, has secretly married Maria, daughter of a sword-bearer of lesser rank. The palatine pretends to be reconciled with his son and sends him to fight the Tatars; the old sword-bearer, who smells a trick, goes with him. Maria waits for her husband in her father's house, where one evening a troop of masked figures enters, singing of death.
Context
The poem, in two cantos, was written in Warsaw in 1824 and published at the author's expense the following year, with a dedication to Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz; the manuscript is in the Raczyński Library in Poznań. It transposes the story of Gertruda Komorowska, the young wife of a magnate's son, killed on the orders of her in-laws. At first mocked by critics, it was reissued twenty-six times before the 1863 uprising; Słowacki paraphrased it and Roman Statkowski drew an opera from it. An English translation appeared in London in the 1830s, a French one in 1845.
Who it is for
A poem in a dark language, where the steppe landscapes matter as much as the characters. Old French translation, from 1845.
Prizes and reception
The only book by its author, whose tomb calls him “the author of Maria”; it is counted among the masterpieces of Polish Romanticism.
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