Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
Was Orzeszkowa interested in economics? Perhaps she was aware of Simonde de Sismondi because at the point when she first took an interest in the rational laws of social and economic development in the mid-1860s, the historian and economist was often mentioned in debates. An interesting story about Sismondi’s biography, included in Zofia Węgierska’s Kronika paryska [Paris Chronicle], may have found its way into her hands and piqued her interest. Węgierska noted in Biblioteka Warszawska (1864, vol. 1) that Sismondi, author of the sixteen-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge, 1807–1818, had no connection to either economics or history and was more interesting as a person than as a writer but still showed courage and a sense of responsibility when he sought to assist refugees and deserters from the French-Austrian-Russian front that at the turn of the nineteenth-century cut through Switzerland. She found that he enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his mother, one that we might today deem toxic but in the nineteenth century could be perceived as an element of a praiseworthy attachment to a loved one.[18] Orzeszkowa might have learned about Sismondi from another source, too. During the physiocrat Hieronim Stroynowski’s term as rector of the University of Vilnius, when Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski held the chair in economics – a time before her birth but nevertheless a period when her enlightened father could collect information on local economic issues – a renowned economist was sought. Around the same time, Sismondi published De la richesse commerciale ou Principes d’économie politique (1803). He was offered a position at the university. He made significant financial demands and submitted an essay to the university, as required by the call for applications. His work compared the theory of the physiocrat François Quesnay with that of Adam Smith, who connected wealth to, among other things, labour. Stroynowski thus became aware just how much Sismondi’s thinking diverged from the ideas relating to physiocratic theory that he and the Vilnius physiocrat elite. He thus rejected Sismondi for the position.[19] Węgierska in fact offers a different take on events suggesting that it was his mother, fearing separation from her son, who convinced him that it would be a mistake to take up the post in Vilnius. And so it was Sismondi, she argues, who broke off negotiations with the university. The study accompanying his application for the position, which might have irritated readers in Vilnius with its explicit suggestion that serfdom might have contributed to the collapse of Poland, was translated into Polish by Antoni Gliszczyński, an economist who had authored many studies on taxes. According to the historian Jerzy Jedlicki, Gliszczyński was the most bourgeois-minded Polish economist of the time and an enthusiastic supporter of industrialism.[20] The work subsequently appeared in Pamiętnik Warszawski,[21] which is how Orzeszkowa might have come across it, particularly since Sismondi’s sensibilities were not only economic but also social, something that might have attracted her.
