Maria Dabrowska

Maria Dąbrowska was a Polish writer, novelist, essayist, journalist and playwright, author of the popular Polish historical novel Noce i dnie (Nights and Days) written between 1932 and 1934 in four separate volumes. The novel was made into a film by the same title in 1975 by Jerzy Antczak. Besides her own work, she was also known for translating Samuel Pepys' Diary into Polish. In addition, Dąbrowska was awarded the prestigious Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1935, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature eleven times between 1939 and 1965. Dąbrowska was born into a relatively impecunious family of landowners, and studied sociology, philosophy, and natural sciences in Switzerland and Belgium. She settled in Warsaw in 1917, and became involved in both literature and politics. She devoted herself to help those born into poverty, and supported the cultural life of the Polish underground during the occupation of Poland. She was also a feminist and a supporter of human rights. She married Marian Dąbrowski, a socialist activist, in 1911, but he died in 1925. Her second long-term partner was Stanisław Stempowski, a former landowner, librarian, and freemason, with whom she lived in a common-law marriage until the outbreak of World War II. After his death in 1952, she formed a ménage à trois with Anna Kowalska and Jerzy Kowalski, a literary couple, and had a child by Jerzy in 1946, but he died in 1948. The two women stayed together until Dąbrowska's death in 1965. Dąbrowska was a prolific writer, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays, and diaries. Her most famous work, Noce i dnie, is a saga of four generations of a Polish noble family, set in the historical context of the 19th and early 20th century Poland. The novel explores the themes of love, marriage, family, social class, patriotism, and feminism. Dąbrowska also wrote about the lives of ordinary people, especially women, and the psychological consequences of hardship and trauma. She was influenced by the realism of Leo Tolstoy, whom she translated into Polish, as well as by the modernism of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. She was also an avid reader of Samuel Pepys, whose diary she translated and commented on. Dąbrowska was a respected figure in the Polish literary scene, and a moral authority for many. She was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta during the Stalinist period, and in 1964 she was one of the signatories of the Letter of 34 to Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, regarding freedom of culture. She died on May 19, 1965, at the age of 75, at a clinic in Warsaw.