Jeske-Choiński, Teodor, 1854-1920

Teodor Jeske-Choiński (ru: Еске-Хоинский, Теодор. 27 February 1854 – 14 April 1920) was a Polish intellectual, writer, historian and literary critic. He was born to a bureaucrat, Fryderyk Jeske-Choiński, of the Abdank coat of arms, and Franciszka née Choińska. Some sources suggest that the Jeske-Choiński family was of German origin and later Polonized. He was a friend, as well as an opponent, of Henryk Sienkiewicz. Whilst Sienkiewicz's novels were focused on Polish history, Jeske-Choiński’s looked at the broader European context. In 1900 he published Tiara i korona, a novel about the dispute between the Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. Jeske-Choiński was actively engaged in ideological debates with Warsaw's positivists, who opposed the legacy of romanticism and sought to reshape Poland's national priorities through education and press control. He viewed their program as an attempt to impose a rigid intellectual hierarchy, while he himself was critical of their pragmatism and rejection of revolutionary aspirations. Joanna Michlic named him "one of the leading theorists and exponents of antisemitism in Poland". In 1951, the communist censors completely banned all of his books, resulting in Jeske-Choiński being largely forgotten amongst the Polish public.