ZEROMSKI, STEFAN. — Polish writer, born at Strawczyn near Kielce on 1 November 1864, died at Warsaw on 20 November 1925.
He had a difficult youth and was imprisoned for political reasons. The publication of the novel Ceneri freed him from financial hardship. He travelled on the Riviera and in Corsica, and stayed for a long time in Paris. His first works—Opowiadanie (“Stories”); Rozdrobia nas kruki, sorony (“The crows and jackdaws will devour us”); Aryman mici sig (“Ahriman takes revenge”)—and other stories were published under the pseudonym Mauricy Zych. The novel Sisyfouse pracy (“The labours of Sisyphus”), largely autobiographical, recounts Polish resistance to the denationalization of the schools; in Ludzie bezdomni (“The homeless”), social themes predominate. A group of novels and dramas is inspired by the history of Poland: Popioly (“Ashes”); Wierna rzeka (“Faithful River”); Sulkowski, Turon (the name of a carnival bogeyman). Of all these, the masterpiece is the novel Ceneri, a true epic of Poland in the Napoleonic age, remarkable for its portrayal of character, its feeling for nature, and the ardour that pervades it and raises it to the level of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to which it is inferior in artistic balance, but which it surpasses in the passion with which the author lives through historical events.
In the somewhat stagnant atmosphere of the late positivism, the work of Z. brought a pure breath of new life, embodying the sorrow of his homeland, a reflection of universal sorrow. Profoundly pessimistic, he nevertheless saw the value of life in man’s struggle for the collectivity or against it and against hostile nature.