ASNYK, ADAM

born Sept. 11, 1838, Kalisz, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland] died Aug. 2, 1897, Krakw, Austria-Hungary [now in Poland] Polish poet and playwright. Asnyk was a member of the Polish revolutionary government in 1863, and after the failure of the insurrection he settled in Galicia (as Austro-Hungarian Poland was officially called). A disciple of the Polish Romantic poets, Asnyk adhered to the positivist school of political thinking, and in the 1880s he was recognized as a leading poet of the period. His first poetic volume, Poezje (Poems), appeared in 1869, followed by three others. In 188394 he published a cycle of 30 sonnets, Nad glebiami (Over the Depths), in which he lays stress on the evolutionary character of nature; the struggle for survival is shown not as the law of the jungle but as a mutual interdependence and cooperation between human communities. Deprived of independence, doomed to a political death, Poland, according to Asnyk, would be reborn sooner or later because it refused to commit spiritual suicide. Asnyk also wrote comedies of manners, such as Galazka heliotropu (1869; A Sprig of Heliotrope), and historical tragedies.