Eliza Orzeszkowa Among Positivist Writers from the Perspective of Warsaw. Leopold Méyet’s Letters to Eliza Orzeszkowa

The article discusses Leopold Méyet’s selected letters to Eliza Orzeszkowa from the period 1878–1910. The original manuscripts are kept in the Eliza Orzeszkowa Archive in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Leopold Méyet was an attorney, writer, publisher, social activist and philanthropist of Jewish descent, and he lived in Warsaw in the second half of the nineteenth century. Orzeszkowa then resided in Grodno. Méyet’s letters do not represent a high literary quality, and should rather be considered as a collection of personal details about the author and the addressee, recounting his efforts to publish Orzeszkowa’s works or his struggles with the Russian administration and censorship. Méyet also portrays the people of his time, looks at the social and political events and discusses the significance of literature or the status of a writer. A specific concern of some of the letters is Orzeszkowa’s place in Polish literature toward the end of the nineteenth century.