Wirydianna Fiszerowa


Wirydianna Fiszerowa was a Polish noblewoman best known for her memoirs, which mention her life in pre- and post-partition Poland as well as her relations with prominent people of the time, including King Frederick II of Prussia, Izabela Czartoryska, King Stanisław II Augustus, Józef Poniatowski, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, and Tadeusz Kościuszko, whom she adored.
Events which she lived through include the Bar Confederation, which caused local upheaval, the work of the Great Sejm, Kościuszko Uprising, and the Napoleonic Wars.

Life

She was the eldest daughter of Katarzyna Raczyńska, popular in Wielkopolska and Józef Radoliński, with sisters: Katarzyna and Antonina. She was named for her material grandmother Wirydianna Bnińska.
At the age of 25, she married Antoni Kwilecki, the son of Franciszek Antoni Kwilecki having chosen him over an older man, fearing that otherwise she would have become his nursemaid. They had two children: Anna and Józef. The marriage was not particularly happy, mostly because of his alcoholism which at times made him turn violent, and the hostility of his parents. However, he did defend her against them, though Wirydianna credited this less to the love he held for her, than to the family custom of fighting. When he fell for a fourteen-year-old peasant girl, he divorced Wirydianna.
He was an envoy at the Four-Year Sejm, and she wrote speeches for her him and her cousins.
In 1806 she married Stanisław Fiszer, a general who fought with Napoleon in his campaign against Russia, who loved her, though for Wirydianna this was more about rewarding him for his patriotic service and to bring herself closer to Kościuszko, who cared for Fiszer.
Personally she was witty, called the "Voltaire in skirts", and spoke of her fellow citizens as "always brave and always beaten", believing that if they had banded together, they could have defended themselves from foreign aggression and prevented the partitions, at which said adjutant left, having taken back the later which was to be the source of more amusement for her in the coming weeks.
She wrote in French; the memoirs were only published in a Polish translation in 1975 by Edward Raczyński, a kinsman who had been the Polish President in exile. In the meantime, it was widely unknown by historians, though mentioned in the pre-war Polish Biographical Dictionary with an entry by Adam Mieczysław Skałkowski, who knew only the year of her death.