page_title: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
section_title: Adulthood and literary career
hierarchical_section_title: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski / Biography / Adulthood and literary career
caption_attribution_description: &#32; This file was uploaded with Commonist. Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎: Партрэт Юзэфа Ігнацыя Крашэўскага. Дзяржаўны архіў у Лодзі, іканаграфічны збор, сыгн. 0-I K-34. Polski: Portret Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego. APŁ, Zbiór ikonograficzny sygn. 0-I K-34.
context_page_description: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski was a Polish writer, publisher, historian, journalist, scholar, painter, and author who produced more than 200 novels and 150 novellas, short stories, and art reviews, which makes him the most prolific writer in the history of Polish literature and the seventh most prolific in the world. He is best known for his epic series on the history of Poland, comprising twenty-nine novels in seventy-nine parts.
  The son of a nobleman, Kraszewski studied at the University of Vilna between 1829 and 1830. He was imprisoned from 1830 to 1832 for participating in a secret patriotic organization. Banished from Congress Poland in 1863, he settled in Dresden, where he remained until 1884. Throughout his life he was active in publishing and journalism. He began publishing in 1830, gradually evolving from a romantic to a realist writer. His literary legacy consists of about 600 volumes of prose, poetry, drama, literary criticism and works on history and philosophy.
context_section_description: In 1838 he married Zofia Woroniczówna, related to the late primate and poet J. P. Woronicz. He did this against the will of his father, who thought his son wanted to reach too high. Once married, the couple settled in Wołyń. In 1853 – already parents to four children – they moved to Żytomierz. From now on Kraszewski concentrated on his literary work, though he did not avoid other activities (he became the superintendent of a high school, the director of a theatre and the Charity Association). As a result of his dispute with conservative public opinion on his critical assessment of the gentry's attitude towards peasants, in 1859 he accepted the proposal of Leopold Stanisław Kronenberg, a wealthy Polish banker of Polish-Jewish origin from Warsaw, to become the editor of the "Gazeta Warszawska" and he moved with his family to Warsaw. Owing to his editorial skills, the number of the "Gazeta" subscribers within half a year rose from 500 to 8000, but at the same time he had to stand the vicious remarks of anti-Semites. Just before the outbreak of the January 1863 Uprising, he was politically active and thus, when military activities began, he was declared persona non grata in Warsaw by the Petersburg-submissive local authorities and was forced to emigrate, leaving his family in Warsaw. He went to Dresden, where he lived till 1884.
caption: Photograph of Kraszewski taken before 1886
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