Józef Weyssenhoff
1860–1932
Biography
Józef Weyssenhoff, who lived from 1860 to 1932, is remembered in Poland as a novelist and poet, and he also worked as a literary critic and publisher. He was born on the family estate at Kolano, in Podlasie, then part of the Russian Empire, and his family had roots in Samogitia. He grew up between Vilnius and Samogitia, was schooled in Warsaw, and for a time ran his inherited property in the Lublin region. He settled in Warsaw in 1891, and in 1896 he began to publish a monthly review of learning and culture.
Much of his fiction draws on the world he knew. His satirical novel Żywot i myśli Zygmunta Podfilipskiego (1898) mocked the idle habits of the upper classes. After 1905, when he moved close to the National Democratic movement, he wrote political novels such as Hetmani (1911) that set out a conservative and nationalist view of Polish affairs. He was admired above all for his descriptions of nature and of hunting life, and he defended the traditional gentry culture of the eastern borderlands.
Soból i panna, the novel on this site, is one of the two books that brought him wide popularity, the other being Żywot. It belongs to the body of work in which he described hunting life and the countryside of the old estates. One early edition was illustrated by his cousin, the painter Henryk Weyssenhoff. Józef Weyssenhoff lived in Bydgoszcz for several years in the 1920s, and he died in Warsaw in 1932.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Soból i panna
by Michał Weyssenhoff
Weyssenhoff's novel of 1911 tells of the hunts, feasts and quiet seasons of the Lithuanian gentry on their estates around Wilno, in chapters such as the Evening Party, the Great Drive and Golden Autumn. It opens before dawn as Michał prepares to go out hunting with his neighbour…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.