Ludwik Władysław Franciszek Kondratowicz (29 September 1823 – 15 September 1862), better known as Władysław Syrokomla, was a Polish romantic poet, writer and translator working in Vilnius and Vilna Governorate, then Russian Empire. Biography Syrokomla was born on 29 September 1823 in the village of Smolków, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Smolhava, Minsk Region, Belarus), to an impoverished noble family. His parents were Aleksander Kajetan Kondratowicz (d. 1858) and Wiktoria (née Złotkowska). His uncle was Hilary Kondratowicz (1790–1823), a Polish teacher of maths in gymnasium in Vilnius, who published some articles in Wiadomości Brukowe. A year after his birth his parents moved to another village (Jaśkowicze). In 1833 he entered the Dominican school in Nesvizh (Nieśwież). He had to give up his studies due to financial problems. In 1837 he began work in a Marchaczewszczyzna folwark. Between 1841 and 1844, he worked as a clerk in the Radziwiłł family land manager's office. On 16 April 1844 in Niaśviž he married Paulina Mitraszewska, with whom he had four children; three of them would die in the same year (1852). In 1844 he published the first of his poems – Pocztylion – under the pen-name Władysław Syrokomla, coined after his family's coat of arms. The same year he also rented the small village of Załucze. In 1853, after the death of three of his children, he sold it or gave his manor to his parents, and settled in Vilnius itself. After a few months he rented the village of Bareikiškės, near Vilnius. He became one of the editors (1861–1862) of the Kurier Wileński, the largest and most prestigious Polish-language daily newspaper published in the Vilnius area. In 1858 he visited Kraków, and some time later he visited Warsaw. For taking part in an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861 in Warsaw he was arrested by the Okhrana and then sentenced to home arrest in his manor in Bareikiškės. He died on 15 September 1862 and was buried in the Rasos Cemetery in Vilnius. Throughout his life, Syrokomla would remain impoverished; Czesław Miłosz wrote that he was "forever struggling against his lack of education and his poverty". Despite that, Syrokomla had many influential and even wealthy friends; his manor was visited by count Eustachy Tyszkiewicz, Stanisław Moniuszko, Ignacy Chodźko, Mikołaj Malinowski, Antoni Pietkiewicz and others. Works Syrkomla was influenced by Adam Mickiewicz. In his prose he supported the liberation of peasants