Cyprian Norwid

Biography

Norwid died on 23 May 1883 at the St. Casimir’s Institute nursing home in Ivry, on the outskirts of Paris, and was first buried in the local cemetery. His remains were later moved to a Polish grave at Montmorency cemetery, and then to a mass grave of Polish emigrants. Only in 2001 was an urn with soil from that grave buried in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, beside Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki.

He was born on 24 September 1821 on his mother’s estate at Laskowo-Głuchy, about forty kilometres north-east of Warsaw. His father came from an impoverished noble family. His mother died when the boy was four, and his father in 1835. He studied in Warsaw together with his elder brother Ludwik, but did not reach the end of the fifth grade at grammar school and moved to a private school of painting; his drawing teacher was the Warsaw painter Jan Klemens Minasowicz. He never received a systematic education and taught himself everything, and later, by some accounts, learned about a dozen languages. In 1840 the periodical Piśmiennictwo Krajowe published his first poem, “Mój ostatni sonet” (“My Last Sonnet”).

In 1842 Norwid left for abroad, officially to study sculpture, and stayed in emigration. He lived in Dresden, Venice and Florence, and in 1844 settled in Rome. Then came Berlin, where he attended university lectures and meetings of the Polish emigrants. In 1846 he was arrested and expelled from Prussia. He went to Brussels, and in the revolutionary year of 1848 found himself in Rome again, where he met Adam Mickiewicz and Zygmunt Krasiński.

From 1849 to 1852 he lived in Paris. There he met Słowacki and Frédéric Chopin, Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen. Money ran out, critics received his work with hostility, and his hearing and sight were failing. He also took on craft commissions. In these years came the drama “Zwolon” and the verse treatise on art “Promethidion” (1851), which his contemporaries received coolly.

In December 1852, with the help of Władysław Zamoyski, Norwid set out for the United States. In February 1853 his ship, the Margaret Evans, reached New York. He took a job in a graphic studio, where he took part, among other things, in work on the memorial album of the New York exhibition. In the autumn he learned of the outbreak of the Crimean War, grew disillusioned with America and asked Mickiewicz and Herzen to help him return. In 1854 he went back to Europe, settled in London and lived on odd jobs. In 1855 the Russian authorities informed him that his property was confiscated and that he was sentenced to exile. By the end of the year Krasiński had helped him move to Paris.

In Paris he managed to publish a few things: the poem “Quidam” (1857), the stories “Czarne kwiaty” (“Black Flowers”) and “Białe kwiaty” (“White Flowers”), and the collection “Poezje” (“Poems”), which came out in Leipzig in 1862. In 1860 he gave a series of lectures on Słowacki. The uprising of 1863 against Russian rule absorbed him, but his health kept him from taking part, and he hoped to influence events in print; the newspaper he planned was never founded. In 1866 he finished “Vade-mecum”, a large cycle of poems. He could not get it published: Prince Władysław Czartoryski did not grant the loan he had promised. The cycle appeared only a hundred years later. The following years passed in poverty, yet he wrote: the philosophical poem “A Dorio ad Phrygium”, the comedy “Pierścień Wielkiej Damy” (“The Ring of a Grand Lady”), and the tragedy “Kleopatra i Cezar” (“Cleopatra and Caesar”).

From 1877 Norwid lived in the nursing home at Ivry, where his cousin Michał Kleczkowski had placed him. It was run by Polish nuns, and destitute emigrants lived there. His last texts, among them the novellas “Ad leones!” and “Stygmat” (“Stigmata”), were written there. More than a thousand of his letters survive. I think that against this background it is especially striking that in his lifetime he published only a small part of what he wrote, and that some of his papers were burned after his death.

The critic Zenon Przesmycki, who began to publish Norwid in the late nineteenth century, rediscovered him.

The collected works in eleven volumes appeared in Warsaw in 1971–1976 and include reproductions of his drawings. Four of his oil paintings survive, among them “Jutrznia” (“Dawn”), which is in Wrocław.