This larger than life bronze bust depicts Polish writer Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski as a man about 50 years or so. He has a serious look and wears a suit and tie. It is set on a stone pedestal about 6 feet high and has the wording:
"Tadeusz
Boy-Zelenski
1876 - 1961"
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"Tadeusz Kamil Marcjan Zelenski (better known by his pen name, Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski; 21 December 1874 – 4 July 1941) was a Polish stage writer, poet, critic and, above all, the translator of over 100 French literary classics into Polish. He was a pediatrician and gynecologist by profession.
A notable personality in the Young Poland movement, Boy was the enfant terrible of the Polish literary scene in the first half of the 20th century. He was murdered in July 1941 by the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Poland, in what became known as the massacre of Lviv professors.
Early life
Tadeusz Kamil Marcjan Zelenski (of the Ciolek coat-of-arms) was born on 21 December 1874 in Warsaw, to Wanda, née Grabowska, and Wladyslaw Zelenski, a prominent composer and musician. Tadeusz's cousin was the notable Polish neo-romantic poet Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. Because higher education in Polish was forbidden in Warsaw under Russian rule, in 1892 Zelenski left for Kraków, in Austrian-ruled Galicia, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University medical school.
Completing his studies in 1900, Zelenski began medical practice as a pediatrician. In 1906 he opened a practice as a gynaecologist, which gave him financial freedom. The same year, he co-organised the famous Zielony Balonik ("Green Balloon") cabaret, which gathered notable personalities of Polish culture, including his brother Edward and Jan August Kisielewski, Stanislaw Kuczborski (painter), Witold Noskowski, Stanislaw Sieroslawski, Rudolf Starzewski, Edward Leszczynski, Teofil Trzcinki, Karol Frycz, Ludwik Puget, Kazimierz Sichulski, Jan Skotnicki, Feliks Jasienski and Zenon Pruszynski.
In the sketches, poems, satirical songs, and short stories that he wrote for Zielony Balonik, Boy-Zelenski criticized and mocked the conservative authorities and the two-faced morality of the city folk, but also the grandiloquent style of Mloda Polska and Kraków's bohemians. This earned him a reputation as the "enfant terrible" of Polish literature."