| dc.description.abstract | Walery Wielogłowski was a very prolific author, which is usually not compatible with quality.
Between 1846 and 1865, he wrote a few hundred articles and about a dozen novels and short
stories, which expressed his interests in economic and social issues, and aimed to create
citizens’ awareness of their place in the society, tirelessly working towards the free and
prosperous Fatherland.
These issues are presented in a particularly interesting manner in Wielogłowski’s literary
works, especially those addressed to peasants: the novel Komornica (“Landless tenant”), five
collections of short stories, and a few shorter works. Today’s researchers of the 19th century
literature deny Wielogłowski’s work considerable literary value; indeed, his stories written
for the peasants have simple plots and present a well-known reality, populated by everyday
characters with common names, whose speech is full of dialectal expressions, and their
protagonists are simple personifications of flaws and misdeeds, while no attempt is made to
describe their motives and dilemmas.
However, in view of Wielogłowski’s didactic ambitions, the accusations on the limited
artistic value of his works appear to be less justified. His writings do not belong to the “high”
literature, but rather to a “service” literature”, which aimed first of all to be understandable
to their peasant readers, and to produce the desired effects. Wielogłowski’s contemporaries
recognised the fact that his stories faithfully described the peasants’ lives, appealed to the
peasant imagination, and vividly recorded the language of the Krakow region.
With all this in mind, does Wielogłowski deserve to be restored to memory? He certainly
does, as one of the pioneers of the organic work in the Galicia region, but also as an author of
literature for the people, in which he implemented, in a novel way, the conservative vision of
educating Polish peasantry. | en_EN |
