January Uprising - January Uprising in Literature

January Uprising in Literature

  • Polish poet Cyprian Norwid wrote a famous poem, "Chopin's Piano," describing the defenestration of the composer's piano during the January 1863 Uprising, when Russian soldiers maliciously threw the instrument out of a second-floor Warsaw apartment. Chopin had left Warsaw and Poland forever shortly before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising.
  • In the initial draft of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose family had been brutally murdered by the Russians during the January 1863 Uprising. Since France had only recently signed an alliance with Tsarist Russia, in the novel's final version Verne's editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, made him obscure Nemo's motives.
  • In Guy de Maupassant's novel Pierre et Jean, the protagonist Pierre has a friend, an old Polish chemist that is said to come to France after the bloody events in his motherland. This story is believed to refer to the January Uprising.

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