Author
Zygmunt Miłkowski 1824-1915

He was born in Saracea, in Podolia, on the 23rd of March 1824. He graduated from the University of Kyiv and took part in the Hungarian Revolution during the Spring of Nations in 1848. Already in his early youth, he engaged in conspiratorial pro-independence activity. He belonged to the Centralization of the Polish Democratic Society which he left in 1859, having failed to convince the other activists that the Polish emigration should cede the political leadership of the national cause to domestic circles. In 1862 he entered into collaboration with the Central National Committee (KCN), and four years later with the Union of Polish Emigration. In 1863, at the head of a unit he had formed, he tried to reach Southern Russia in order to take part in the January Uprising, but was arrested by the Austrian authorities. Then he stayed in Belgrade (1864-1866), Brussels (1866-1872), and Switzerland (from 1872 on). In 1887 his famous pamphlet was published called Rzecz o obronie czynnej i skarbie narodowym which – as Bohdan Cywiński was to write in his Rodowody niepokornych – became ‘the signal for a revival of Polish patriotism and new irredentist ideology’. One of the postulates it included was the establishment of a National Treasury that would accumulate funds and resources for various national causes. Miłkowski was also a co-founder of the secret Polish League (1887) which was transformed into the National League in 1893. In this new organization, young activists took the lead such as Roman Dmowski, Zygmunt Balicki, or Jan Ludwik Popławski, while Miłkowski remained a universally respected figure of the whole movement, with which he stopped to collaborate only in the late 1900’s, after the National-Democratic camp had adopted an attitude which was – in his opinion – overly conciliatory towards the tsarist autocracy. He published about eighty novels including Asan, Uskoki, Za króla Olbrachta, or Wasyl Hołub; most of them under the peen-name of Teodor Tomasz Jeż. He died in Lausanne on the 11th of January 1915.

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