ASIN: B00I90VP7K
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Pages: 658
In the early 1900s, Eliza Orzeszkowa was repeatedly a top contender, with Leo Tolstoy, for the Nobel Prize in literature. Neither won. Nevertheless, her novels have remained classics of Polish literature, and her most famous, On the Niemen, is not only an unusual love story, but is strikingly relevant today. Unhappy after being abandoned by her fiancé, Justyna, an impoverished young woman who lives in a manor house belonging to relatives, desires a life of greater usefulness. While being pursued by a wealthy aristocrat and by her former love – now married – she meets Jan, a man of lower social standing, who introduces her to a different world: one of closeness to nature, manual labor, and communal enjoyments. To leave the manor for a farmstead would be a very peculiar proceeding, however, and furthermore, the farming community is feuding with Justyna's uncle. Set in the 1880s among the ...
