Człowiek według Smilesa. Kraszewski pozytywistów (Struve, Chmielowski, Orzeszkowa)
A Man in Smiles’s View. Kraszewski’s Perception by Positivist Authors (Struve, Chmielowski, Orzeszkowa)

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on three Positivistic attempts at writing about Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. As interpreted by the essay’s author, these attempts tell us a lot about the importance Kraszewski enjoyed within the horizon of Positivist readings, whilst testifying to a need for such a model of man-of-letters, social worker, and thinker. Common to the utterances of Piotr Chmielowski, Eliza Orzeszkowa and Henryk Struve is an effort made to describe Kraszewski’s literary and social sensitivity. This effort subsequently leads to a reconstruction of the novelist’s life philosophy. The question about Kraszewski’s way of life and way of thinking – posed straight away there, implicitly elsewhere – refers the commentator to the life and (the) literature, pointing out to their interpenetration. The author regards the motif of coexistence of life and literature as characteristic not only to a narration on Kraszewski but to the quests made by the Main School generation overall. The assumption is, thus, that the way a story of Kraszewski is told reflects the literary-philosophical preferences of the Positivists.

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