The House

Welcome to the White House :)

However...it is not the white house you thought about :) I have got this card from Grodno - Belerus. Grodno is a city in Belarus. It is located on the Neman River, close to the borders of Poland (about 20 kilometers away) and Lithuania (about 30 km away). This city is the capital of Grodno Region and Grodno district.

On the postcard you can see the house, where Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910) used to live. She was a Polish novelist, born in Belarus, to the noble Pawłowski family. In her sixteenth year she married Piotr Orzeszko, a Polish nobleman, who was exiled to Siberia after the January 1863 Uprising. 

Orzeszkowa wrote a series of powerful novels and sketches dealing with the social conditions of her country. Eli Makower (1875) describes the relations between the Jews and the Polish nobility, and Meir Ezofowicz (1878) the conflict between Jewish orthodoxy and modern liberalism. "On the Niemen" (1888), perhaps her best work, deals with the Polish aristocracy, and Lost Souls (1886) and Cham (1888) with rural life in Belarus. Her study on patriotism and cosmopolitanism appeared in 1880.

A uniform edition of her works was published in Warsaw between 1884-1888. Much of her work is available in a German translation.

According to official records of the Nobel Prize committee, she was considered for a prize in 1905, to share it with Henryk Sienkiewicz, but only the latter ended up as laureate.

Only 283 km and need 11 days....not that bad ;)