Helena Radziszewska i jej rodzina. Suplement do Dzienników Stefana Żeromskiego

This article attempts to reconstruct the biography of Helena Radziszewska, née Zeitheim (1855–1934), as well as the history of her family. Helena was one of the most important women in Stefan Żeromski’s life, as he had strong feelings for her and devoted many pages to her in his youthful diaries. Until recently, the writer’s biographers had had limited information about Helena. They knew she was a sister of Żeromski’s stepmother, was almost ten years older than him, was a mother of two (later three) daughters, the wife of a stationmaster, Leon Radziszewski, and a lover of young Żeromski. The first incomplete biography of Helena ended with the events of World War I and was published in the Biographical Dictionary for the first volume of the critical edition of the writer’s Diaries (2021); a brief biography of her husband was published in the Biographical Dictionary for the second volume (2023). The author of the article managed to obtain new materials that allowed for a much more complete reconstruction of the fate of Radziszewska and her family.