European value of great national artists and writers. Past, present, future…

PAST

Adam Mickiewicz Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (December 24, 1798 – November 26, 1855) was a Polish (Polish-Lithuanian) poet, publisher and political writer of the Romantic period. One of the primary representatives of the Polish Romanticism era, a national poet of Poland, he is seen as one of Poland's Three Bards and the greatest poet in all of Polish literature. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic language or European poets.

Mickiewicz’s tomb in Kraków

Mickiewicz’s monument in Kraków

Juliusz Słowacki Juliusz Słowacki (4 September 1809 – 3 April 1849) was a Polish Romantic poet. He is considered one of the "Three Bards" of Polish literature — a major figure in the Polish Romantic period, and the father of modern Polish drama. His works often feature elements of Slavic pagan traditions, Polish history, mysticism and orientalism.

Słowacki’s tomb in Kraków

Józef Ignacy Kraszewski Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (Warsaw, July 28, 1812 – March 19, 1887, Geneva) was a Polish writer, historian, and journalist, who produced more than 200 novels and 150 novellas, short stories, and art reviews (including of painting, e.g. Michał Kulesza). He is best known for his epic series on the history of Poland, comprising twenty-nine novels in seventy-nine parts.

Kraszewski’s tomb in Kraków

Jacek Malczewski Jacek Malczewski (15 July 1854 in Radom – 8 October 1929 in Kraków) was one of the most famous painters of Polish Symbolism. In his creativity he successfully joins the predominant style of his times with motifs of Polish martyrdom.

Malczewski’s tomb in Kraków

Stanisław Wyspiański Stanisław Wyspiański (15 January 1869 – 28 November 1907) was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas within the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement. Wyspiański was one of the most outstanding and multifaceted artists of his time in Europe.

Wyspiański’s stained glasses

Jan Matejko Jan Matejko (June 24, 1838 – November 1, 1893) was a Polish painter known for paintings of notable historical Polish political and military events.His most famous works include oil on canvas paintings like Battle of Grunwald, paintings of numerous other battles and court scenes, and a gallery of Polish kings. He is counted among the most famous Polish painters.

Matejko’s house

His painting, „Kościuszko pod Racławicami”

Henryk Sienkiewicz Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz (May 5, 1846 – November 15, 1916) was a Polish journalist and Nobel Prize- winning novelist. A Polish szlachcic (noble) of the Oszyk coat of arms, he was one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer."

PRESENT

Andrzej Wajda Andrzej Wajda (born 6 March 1926) is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film School". He is known especially for a trilogy of war films: A Generation (1954), Kanał (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Four of his movies have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyń (2007).

The Japaneese Art Museum

Czesław Miłosz Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin and subsequent American citizenship. His World War II-era sequence The World, is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. He defected to the West in 1951 and his non-fiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is one of the classics of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Miłosz’s tomb in Kraków

Wisława Szymborska Wisława Szymborska (born July 2, 1923, in Prowent, now part of Kórnik, Poland) is a Polish poet, essayist and translator. Many of her poems feature war and terrorism. Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality".

FUTURE

Dorota Masłowska Dorota Masłowska (born 1983) is a Polish writer and journalist. Masłowska was born in Wejherowo, and grew up there. She first appeared in the mass-media when her debut book Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną was published. Largely controversial, mostly because of the language seen by many as vulgar, cynical and simple, the book was praised by many intellectuals as innovative and fresh. A notable example of post- modernist literature, her book became a best-seller in Poland and won Masłowska several notable awards as well as general support among the critics.

The end Sources: own sources