Polish · 1793–1876
Fredro joined Napoleon's army at sixteen, marched to Moscow, was awarded the Légion d'honneur, and came home to Galicia to farm and write comedies in rhymed verse. He wrote about the Polish gentry with an affection and an accuracy that made him the most quoted comic writer in the language; whole lines of Revenge have become proverbs. In the 1830s the Romantic critics attacked him for writing frivolous domestic comedy while the nation was under occupation, and he stopped publishing for a decade in genuine hurt. He came back, sat in the Galician provincial assembly, and left a set of memoirs about the Napoleonic campaigns that are among the best military writing in Polish. He also wrote a quantity of obscene verse that his family suppressed for a century.