| dc.description.abstract | A. Dygasiński’s works may be considered as specific evidence of that epoch, from which one can infer what types of surnames were the most popular in different social groups in Poland, especially in Lesser Poland in the latter half of the 19th century. The surnames given by the writer to characters of his works refer to their affiliation to a society and an environment as well as to their origins and nationality.
Aristocrats’ surnames of the adjective type are mainly compounds. Most representatives of the nobility and some townspeople, especially the intellectuals often tracing their origins from the landed gentry, were given surnames of the adjective or patronymic types that form a contrast to appellations of peasants and servants. Surnames of townspeople and some landed proprietors have mainly patronymic forms with suffixes -icz, -ewicz, -owicz (exceptionally -ic). Representatives of mostly impoverished nobility very rarely bear surnames equaling appellatives or of nickname type. Such surnames are more popular among townspeople and characteristic of lower classes: peasants and manorial servants, and sometimes also of handicraftsmen and workers coming from villages, small vendors, pub-keepers and waiters, policemen in settlements and country towns. Surnames of the adjective type ending with -ski, -cki (some of them improved according to a nobleman’s paradigm) are rare among representatives of the peasantry but a little more popular among Brazilian emigrants in Podlasie who may have been impoverished croft noblemen. In this environment some people bear meaningful or characterizing their owners surnames. Native surnames both in Dygasiński’s works and in other literary works from the latter half of the 19th century realize the requirement of surname typicalness.
In the writer's texts there are few foreign surnames pointing to other nations (German, American, English, Brazilian, French, Hungarian, Italian, and exceptionally Czech, Swedish, Hindu, and Mexican) or given to representatives of the Jewish minority where Polish surnames of the nickname type can be met. Dygasiński skillfully used the structure of native surnames to emphasizing social typicalness of the named characters and foreign forms to distinguishing non-Polish origins and nationalities of some literary heroes. | en_EN |
