Poland's great Romantic poet paid his own way by playing the Paris stock market
Juliusz Słowacki, one of the Three Bards of Polish literature, spent most of his adult life in exile after the November Uprising failed. Around 1839 he put his money into Parisian shares and invested well enough to write full time and pay to publish his own books.
He was born in Kremenets, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, in 1809. His father, a professor of rhetoric and poetry, died when Juliusz was small, and his mother's literary salon in Vilnius shaped him. There, at 13, he met Adam Mickiewicz, the older poet who would become his great rival. After studying law he took a treasury job in Warsaw, and when the November Uprising broke out in 1830 his patriotic Hymn made his name. Sent abroad as a courier for the rebel government, he was in London and Paris when the revolt collapsed, and he never lived in Poland again.
Paris did not welcome him at first. His early poems felt out of step with a nation under occupation, and Mickiewicz's drama Dziady cast Słowacki's stepfather, the physician August Bécu, as a villain, which left the younger man ready to demand a duel. He retreated to Switzerland, where in 1834 he published Kordian, a drama about Poland's soul-searching after defeat that is counted among his finest work. A long journey followed through Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land, feeding poems such as Anhelli.
Back in Paris from 1838, he wrote Mazepa, the only one of his dramas staged while he lived, the digressive poem Beniowski, and Testament mój, expressing faith that his work would outlast him. A spell in Andrzej Towiański's mystical circle, and summers at Pornic in Brittany, pushed him towards a spiritual philosophy of history. In 1848, already ill, he hurried to Poznań to join the uprising against Prussia, proclaiming an age of holy anarchy, but the revolt was crushed within weeks and he was deported back to France, seeing his mother on the way for the first time in nearly twenty years.
Tuberculosis killed him in Paris on 3 April 1849, leaving his visionary poem Król-Duch unfinished. Only about 30 people came to the funeral. In 1927 his remains were moved to Wawel Cathedral, though an empty grave still stands in Montmartre.
Source: Juliusz Słowacki
