Polish · 1812–1859
Krasiński was the son of a Polish general who served the Tsar, which made him, in the eyes of Warsaw students, the child of a traitor; he was beaten out of the university and sent abroad, and spent his life writing anonymously because publishing under his own name would have endangered his father. He wrote The Un-Divine Comedy at twenty-one, in Vienna, in a few weeks. He was a conservative aristocrat who believed revolution would destroy everything he valued and also that his class deserved to be destroyed, and the play holds both positions without resolving them. He corresponded voluminously, went nearly blind, and is counted with Mickiewicz and Słowacki as one of the three bards of Polish Romanticism — the one who saw class war coming sixteen years before the Communist Manifesto.