Galicia’s autonomous status was in fact a doubletrack affair. On the one hand Galicia became a shining example of freedom and autonomy, embedded in the new constitutional order of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while on the other hand it was tied down to a monarchical absolutism which offered only limited protection of individual rights. The press in particular was caught in the dilemmas produced by this situation, especially in the sensitive areas of political loyalty and religion.
This article attempts to show the importance of newspaper advertisements as a factual source which offers valuable insights into past events. The study of advertisements helps the researcher to complement and verify what has been gleaned from the usual documents, and sometimes can even provide a corrective to conclusions reached by other means. In particular, the advertisements in Lwowskie Tygodniowe Wiadomości [Lwów Weekly News], published 1786–1788 show how much information about property from the monasteries of Galicia, dissolved by Emperor Joseph II in 1782–1788, can be found in the local press. It is a source which not only contains important clues about the history and the scale of the dissolution but also a wealth of minor details that it would be hard find anywhere else.
This article examines the occasional verse published by the daily Czas [Time] in 1864–1879, i.e. over a decade and a half after the suppression of the January Rising. These texts, which feature both solemn occasions and local ephemera, present us with a unique chronicle of life of Cracow and its environs. In addition to listing all the relevant texts, the article attempts to identify their authors, i.e. unlock their initials or pseudonyms, to outline the conventions and genological peculiarities of that verse, and to gauge the attitudes of the Cracovians towards the question of Poland’s independence, Romanticism, patriotism as well as some well-known authority figures.
Maria Hagen-Schwerin was a 19th-century novelist and poet. She was a prolific author of popular romances with aristocratic heroes and plots that revolve around love and marriage in high society. However, what kept Mrs Hagen in the public eye was her unconventional life style, her debts and an unending string of affairs whose sensational twists eclipsed anything that could be found her polite fiction. Her feuds, especially with another controversial woman of the fin-de- siècle Cracow, the playwright and novelist Gabriela Zapolska, were the talk of the town. Maria Hagen descended, on her father's side from a long line of nobles (Łoś) and on her mother's side from one of Cracow's wealthiest merchant families (Kirchmayer). Her elder brother Wincenty Łoś was an acclaimed writer and art collector. It is no exaggeration to say that Maria Hagen was heir to a family legacy of great achievements and of great scandals, too, in politics as well as in economic and social life. Some of her ancestors also ventured into literature thus building a family tradition which continued for three centuries. Maria Hagen picked up that thread and became a successful writer in her day. Now she belongs to that large category of writers once famous, but quickly forgotten. The problem lies not in the fact that nobody reads her books, but that her work has attracted virtually no attention from students of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and, astonishingly enough, no critical study of her work has been written for over 150 years since her death.