Jan Lorentowicz

Jan Lorentowicz (14 March 1868 – 15 January 1940; occasional pen name, M. Chropieński) was a Polish theatre director, literary critic, publicist, editor and book collector; president of the Polish PEN Club (1925–27); and from 1938, an elected member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature. In 1919, in celebration of Poland's return to independence (1918) after over a century of partitions, Lorentowicz published the most complete collected works of the poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584), who had laid the foundations for Polish literary language. Life Lorentowicz was born in Pabianice, in present-day central Poland, in 1868, five years after the opening of the Polish 1863 Uprising that was eventually suppressed by the Russian Imperial Army. His parents had moved to present-day central Poland from the old eastern Kresy borderlands, escaping poverty and oppression. Jan obtained his secondary-school diploma at Płock by way of home schooling and soon went to France, where he lived until 1903 and studied at the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he became editor-in-chief of Pobudka (Awake!) in 1891, and on 17 November 1892 took part in an assembly leading to the founding of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). A major controversy surrounded the Paris conference, regarding the potential use of terror by the PPS. Supporters of such violence against the Russian governorate included Aleksander Dębski, but the idea did not take hold and no terror attack took place in the following decade.