Lidia Michalska-Bracha
Nineteenth-century women’s memoirs, diaries and letters are excellent research material for describing their lives in exile. It is through their eyes that it is possible to recognise women’s spaces of experiencing the world and to bring their individual stories out of oblivion, thus creating a collective portrait of the silent heroines of 1863. Maria Bruchnalska (1867–1945), a social activist in women’s organisations in Lviv and a writer, played a special role in its creation. Over the years, she diligently collected accounts of women’s participation in the January Uprising and their lives in exile. Her Lviv and Wrocław legacy includes many lesser-known or somewhat forgotten exile biographies.
One such story is undoubtedly the life and artistic activity in exile of Helena Skirmuntowa (Skirmunttowa) (1827–1874), a painter and sculptor from Pińszczyzna (Pinsk region), creator of the magnificent historical chess set – an artistic vision of Jan III Sobieski’s Relief of Vienna. In historical accounts, Skirmuntowa came to be seen as ‘a model Polish woman and Christian,’ as described by Bronisław Zaleski – a political exile, writer, and secretary of the Historical and Literary Society in Paris – shortly after her death. A similar view can be found in a handwritten biographical sketch of Helena, penned in June 1939 by the aforementioned Bruchnalska, who – full of admiration for Lithuania and for ‘steadfast and persevering’ women – emphasised:
Helena Skirmuntowa – that indomitable Polish-Lithuanian woman – sculptor and painter at a time when women abroad scarcely dared to pick up a pen, let alone a paintbrush – painted and sculpted in clay and plaster: crucifixes, busts, historical chess sets!
Skirmuntowa was, by the standards of her era, undoubtedly a remarkable woman – well-educated in the arts and notable for the passion she brought to her creative work. Her famous historical chess set was described in detail shortly after her death by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Antoni Pietkiewicz (writing under the pen name Adam Pług) in the Warsaw press, including ‘Tygodnik Ilustrowany’ and ‘Kłosy’ between 1875 and 1876. She was also remembered in this way by fellow exiles in Tambov – most notably by Wacław Lasocki (1837–1921), a well-known physician and member of the National Organisation in Volhynia during the January Uprising, who was deported to Tambov and Usol in September 1863 and recorded his memories in vivid detail. In a longer passage describing his encounter with Skirmuntowa, Lasocki wrote tellingly that among the ‘Tambov exiles, Mrs Helena Skirmuntowa, the sculptor-artist, was a truly remarkable figure,’ and that he owed to her a ‘depiction of their Tambov prison.’
Who, then, was Helena Skirmuntowa – the very same artist whose historical chess set Jadwiga Zamoyska described at the end of the 19th century as a bearer of patriotic meaning and ‘an inspiring example of Polish art – of purely Polish, yet outstanding, inspiration and execution’?
‘Singing stubbornly on’
She came from a landed gentry family. She was born on 5 November 1827 in Kolodne, in the Pinsk district, as the daughter of Aleksander Skirmunt. Her mother, Hortensja née Orda, was related to the renowned painter and illustrator Napoleon Orda. Helena’s biographers point out that her artistic talent began to emerge already in her early years. These aspects were noted by Zaleski, who was deeply impressed by her, and wrote that she ‘was born with such an exceptional and powerful gift for the visual arts that devoting herself to them and creating artistically was a necessary, irresistible need of her spirit.’ Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, she nurtured and perfected her natural artistic talent under the expert guidance of painters and sculptors in some of Europe’s most esteemed studios – from Vilnius to Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Paris, and ultimately Rome, which, together with Paris, left the deepest mark on her. Her stay in the Eternal City became for her, as she wrote, a kind of ‘touchstone of the soul.’ Over the years, she divided her time between the family estate in Kolodne – here she settled after marrying Kazimierz Skirmunt – and her travels across Europe, undertaken both for health reasons and, above all, to refine her artistic skills. Upon returning from her travels in the early days of October 1854, she established a sculpture studio at her family estate in Kolodne. There, she devoted herself to creative work, focusing mainly on religious sculptures and medallions depicting her loved ones. As Zaleski, previously quoted, described this period in Helena’s life:
The young couple did not leave Kolodne. Indeed, it was there, with a loving mother by their side, that they spent the first years of their life together. In the natural course of human affairs, this was the happiest conclusion to youth, promising a pleasant and peaceful life ahead.
Unfortunately, the early 1860s brought significant changes to Helena’s life, largely due to the widely discussed land reform issue of the time and the growing patriotic sentiments that preceded the outbreak of the January Uprising – both of which had a strong impact on the Pinsk region. Helena channelled the patriotic mood not only into her artistic work – creating, among other pieces, bas-reliefs of the coats of arms of the Crown, Lithuania, and Ruthenia as symbols of national unity – but also took part in patriotic religious demonstrations and ceremonies commemorating the Polish–Lithuanian Union, despite not belonging to any formal organisation. As she herself noted at the time, to emphasise her patriotic commitment: ‘Singing stubbornly on.’
In prison and in exile
During the January Uprising, she was among those who supported the national movement. She was sentenced to four years of exile in the Tambov Governorate and the confiscation of her property for attempting – albeit unsuccessfully – to deliver correspondence to Romuald Traugutt, who, along with his insurgent unit, was active in the nearby area and fought one of his battles near Kolodne in July 1863. As Bronisław Zaleski recorded, based on detailed notes in Helena Skirmuntowa’s pocket diaries:
Helena took a cart drawn by a single horse and, accompanied only by a young boy, set out alone at dawn into the forest. Having driven deep into the woods, she came upon a narrow embankment where the traces of a recent skirmish were still visible. Alighting from the cart and suppressing her inner emotions, she walked among the bodies of fallen Russian soldiers – no insurgents were among the dead. As she went further, she came across a recently abandoned camp. The still-visible tracks led into the forest thickets, along a newly trodden path. Clearly, it was the route taken by Traugutt’s unit. Determined to deliver the dispatch at all costs, Helena ventured further into the forest on her own, calling out and shouting in the hope of being heard. But all around her was silence – no voice replied. Before long, she reached treacherous marshland, where all traces disappeared, and it became impossible to go any further.
In the ‘list of women imprisoned and exiled to Sybir and the depths of Russia, based on documents and registers held in the State Archive within the former Franciscan buildings – the so-called Office of the Governor General in Vilnius’ – compiled at the request of Maria Bruchnalska by Wacław Wejtko (and preserved among her papers in Wrocław), it is recorded that Helena Skirmunt was exiled for maintaining ‘relations with the insurgents,’ by a sentence dated 19 September 1863. Initially, she was to be sent to Tobolsk. However, the sentence was ultimately changed to residence in Tambov, located in central Russia. In a private letter to her friend Jadwiga Kieniewiczówna, sent from the Dereszewicze estate on the Pripyat River, Skirmuntowa noted: ‘I am going to Tambov, where I am to find many fellow exiles already there.’ It is difficult to determine precisely how many women were exiled to Tambov during this period. Some estimates were made during the interwar period by Maria Bruchnalska, in her ‘list of deported women or those who voluntarily accompanied exiles, including the locations where they stayed individually or in groups,’ preserved among her papers in Lviv. The list was compiled based on personal accounts, memoirs, and a card index of women’s names drawn from the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. She recorded seven women who were either exiled to or residing voluntarily in Tambov.
She finally left Pinsk on 17 October 1863, at dawn – five o’clock in the morning – accompanied by a maid and a military escort, setting out on the road into exile. Importantly, Skirmuntowa left behind a substantial body of documentation that enables a detailed reconstruction of her daily life in exile in Tambov and Kirsanov. This includes valuable private correspondence and a diary spanning the years 1863–1867, now preserved in the collections of the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław. She recorded her entire journey into exile almost day by day, in fine handwriting across several notebooks she called ‘pocket diaries,’ leaving behind an invaluable testimony of a woman’s experience of Sybir exile, enriched with extensive ethnographic observations.
Her journey into exile took her from Pinsk through Slutsk, Bobruysk, Rahachow, Slawharad, Shumovka, Bryansk, and many other towns, which she passed through during a journey lasting over twenty days. Tambov made a rather unfavourable impression on her – a ‘grey’ town situated on a muddy lowland, surrounded by wooden suburban buildings in contrast to the brick-built part of the provincial city:
A large stretch outside the town, sloping steeply down to its muddy lowland, was a vast turf-covered pasture, hard and flat as a table (…), a huge, muddy, churned-up square, enclosed by large wooden huts, booths, and small theatres, empty and dilapidated, apparently erected only for the fair season. From many perspectives, the sight upon entering was, quite simply, ugly.
Patriotic chess
In Tambov, she settled in a modest three-room flat and, as she noted in her writings, began her new life by getting to know the small Polish exile community, which, at the time of her arrival, numbered only a dozen or so individuals. However, as successive groups of exiles arrived, that number steadily grew. Helena spent the first few months of her stay in Tambov alone, until, with the permission of the Russian authorities, her husband – relocated from Kostroma – was allowed to join her. From that moment on, their welcoming home became a centre of Polish spirit and comfort for the exile community. It was here that she formed a close friendship with the young Anita Bujnicka, wife of Zygmunt, a military commander from 1863, who had been exiled to Tambov on 17 June 1863 for ‘unorthodox views.’ Helena remembered her as ‘by nature reserved and inward-looking, with an independent, self-reliant character, marked by rare determination and a deep sense of duty.’ She maintained social ties with Maria née Mianowska and Wacław Lasocki, as well as with Fortunat Nowicki (1830–1885), a physician from Volhynia who had been exiled to Tambov for conspiratorial activity as early as 1861 and who would later become the founder of the health resort in Nałęczów. He also undertook the treatment of Helena’s progressing eye condition.
The period of exile in Skirmuntowa’s biography was also a time which, despite her declining health, she devoted to artistic work – including her renowned coats of arms of the Crown, Lithuania and Ruthenia, as well as bas-reliefs depicting her fellow exiles. However, her most celebrated work – undoubtedly – remains the historical chess set, begun in Tambov in 1864. It was an artistic interpretation of King John III Sobieski’s Relief of Vienna in 1683. The idea for this remarkable piece was inspired in part by the previously mentioned Wacław Lasocki and Fortunat Nowicki. Lasocki wrote that Skirmuntowa’s chess set was created indirectly at his suggestion, but directly at the initiative of Fortunat.
As I have already mentioned, I often modelled various things out of bread when I had nothing to do in prison. Among these creations, the chess set was the most practical in terms of outcome, as it allowed my comrades to play chess, and for those to whom I sent the pieces behind bars, they could also serve some purpose. I gifted such a chess set to Nowicki. The very next day, he brought me a few coats of arms modelled by Mrs Skirmuntowa to look at. We were delighted with the Eagle and the Pursuer. It then occurred to me to wonder whether the creator of these beautiful sculptures might be willing to recreate artistic, national chess pieces, using the Battle of Vienna as the chessboard?
Helena accepted Fortunat’s proposal and, despite serious health problems with her eyesight, undertook the creation of chess pieces illustrating Sobieski’s campaign against the Turks. Most likely, however, before she prepared their plaster version – which was originally intended, according to her plans, to be made in several copies for the exiles to use in playing the game. The first version of the chess set was made out of bread. A brief note on this subject can be found in Bruchnalska’s Lviv archive. She continued work on the chess set, begun in Tambov, after being relocated with her husband to Kirsanov in June 1864. Unfortunately, she was unable to complete the entire project during her exile. In Kirsanov, her fourth child and third daughter, Kazimiera, was born in 1865 – unfortunately, she passed away quite early. Skirmuntowa had to face motherhood under such challenging conditions. While in exile, she witnessed her child’s christening and vividly described preparing a cradle for her daughter, adorning it with symbols of Providence and the Holy Spirit, alongside intricate floral motifs. Based on Helena’s notes, Zaleski stated:
The year 1865 was the most difficult for her; to all the hardships of our situation at that time, to the constant boredom and longing inseparable from exile life, were added deeper inner storms – storms of an artistic nature struggling against the banality of daily existence, which, for a time, were suppressed by the new duties imposed by her circumstances.
The period of exile in Skirmuntowa’s life came to an end in the spring of 1867. As she herself wrote, ‘exiles always anticipate such a journey back to their homeland.’ Subject to a ban on returning to Lithuania, she was only able to stay there temporarily until September 1869, after which she left and permanently settled on her father-in-law’s estate in Balaklava, Crimea. However, the story of her historical chess set did not end there. After a long pause, she returned to work on it in 1870–1871. As Jerzy Sienkiewicz emphasised when analysing the sculptor’s artistic output, by 1873 she had completed a significant portion of the plaster figurines, paying careful attention to the accurate recreation of historical armour. Ultimately, cast in bronze at J. Cesar’s workshop in Vienna, gilded and silvered, they were intended for the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna. As Zaleski recalled, the chess set created by Helena’s artistic hand ‘can rightly be called a historical poem. (…) History supports and enriches the artistic creation throughout.’
A great artist in exhile
Helena Skirmuntowa passed away on 1 February 1874 in Amélie-les-Bains, France, where she had gone a year earlier for health reasons. Her ashes were brought to Pinsk in 1875, where she was buried on 2 October 1875. After the artist’s death, her historical chess set was exhibited by the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków and Lwów, as well as at Warsaw’s Zachęta between 1874 and 1876. Their images were published years later in photographs by J. Kostka and L. Mulert in Warsaw (1887), in a jubilee publication commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Relief of Vienna (1883), as well as in a lithograph by Maksymilian Fajans (1883). As Jerzy Sienkiewicz emphasises, the plaster models of the chess set, carefully preserved for years by her daughter Konstancja, were kept in the family home in Pinsk. Unfortunately, they were destroyed in a fire in 1901. One of the bronze casts was transferred to the Polish Academy of Learning after the First World War and is now part of the collection of the National Museum in Kraków.
Thanks to Maria Bruchnalska, who for many years maintained close contact with Konstancja Skirmuntowa (1851–1934) and was herself fascinated by Helena, a portfolio with photographs of the historical chess set – and most likely a version made of bread – was exhibited at the Museum of Distinguished Polish Women in Lviv, opened in 1930.
A visitor to our little treasury, our Museum of Memorabilia, rightly remarked – while admiring their beauty – that even if there were nothing else in our fledgling Museum but these chess pieces, it would still be worth coming from afar just to see and admire them. And what should be said of the magnificent crucifixes, sculpted with true artistry and the utmost devotion by this great exiled artist! – Bruchnalska recalled years later, while at the same time considering writing Helena’s biography – something Konstancja Skirmunt persistently encouraged her to do.
Prof. dr hab. Lidia Michalska-Bracha (Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce), historian and museum curator, researcher of the history of historiography and historical thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, the January Uprising, the fate of Poles in emigration and in Siberia in the 19th century, the history of Galicia and Lviv, and women’s history. She participated in the work of international research teams within the framework of projects funded by the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities: ‘Memoirs and letters of Polish authors from the Taken Lands (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) in the years 1795–1918’ and ‘Polish exiles in Western Siberia in the second half of the 18th century– 19th century in the eyes of Russians and the Siberian population. Author of over 160 publications, including recently published monographs: Wspomnienia Emilii ze Szwarców Heurichowej (1819–1905) i jej córki Teodory z Heurichów Kiślańskiej (1844–1920) z czasów powstania styczniowego, Warszawa 2023 (co-authored with E. Noiński); Józef Kajetan Janowski (1832–1914). Po powstaniu styczniowym… Emigrant, weteran 1863 roku, lwowianin z wyboru, Warszawa 2021; Wspomnienia Wandy z Wolskich Umińskiej (1841–1926), Warszawa 2020 (co-authored with E. Noiński).
Translated by Małgorzata Giełzakowska