Death of Ellenai

When Malczewski painted this in 1883, there was no country called Poland on any map. It had been carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria for nearly a century, and the failed uprising of 1863 had sent a fresh wave of Poles into Siberian exile. He took his subject from a poem every educated Pole knew, Juliusz Slowacki's Anhelli, about exiles wasting away in the frozen emptiness. Ellenai is the young woman who dies out there in the wilderness. A companion sits keeping watch over her body on its bed of straw. Malczewski, not yet 30, was reaching for a way to paint the national grief without a single soldier or flag in sight. He would return to this exile world for the rest of his career.