Jan Kasprowicz. Into the Fires. Biographical Impressions

A hundred years after Jan Kasprowicz died, the Tatra Museum retraces the poet’s road from a village in Kuyavia, in central Poland, to his house at Harenda outside Zakopane - not in his own home but in his friend’s: the Kornel Makuszyński Museum at 15 Tetmajera Street. It runs from 2 May to 10 October 2026. The museum’s words below are our translation of its Polish text; it publishes no English version.

Tatra Museum on the exhibition:

Taking as our starting point the poet’s words “from a cramped room (…) I went for years into the fires, where life burns through and smoulders”, we made the road itself the exhibition’s guiding theme - leaving a place one knows and setting out into the world - and chose the various forms of fire as the image that illustrates that journey.

The poet’s work is accompanied by pieces by artists of different eras (from 19th-century paintings on glass to works by Wojciech Weiss, Witkacy, Andrzej Wróblewski and Władysław Hasior), which answer, by means other than poetry, similar questions that have troubled people in every age.

What to expect

This is a biography told through verse and pictures rather than display cases of personal relics. The stages of Kasprowicz’s life - a peasant childhood, the Lviv years, the final move to the foot of the Tatras - are set out in his own lines and in art ranging from anonymous 19th-century folk painters on glass to Hasior. Speaking to the local station Radio Alex, the curator promised a few surprises along the way and said the artworks are meant to work like the illustrations in a volume of poems.

The venue is deliberate: Makuszyński, one of the most widely read Polish writers before the Second World War, was Kasprowicz’s friend and admirer. According to Radio Alex, the show fills the part of Villa Opolanka devoted to literary Zakopane and is the first temporary exhibition this branch has held.

The show opened on 30 April 2026. A curator-led tour followed in May, and two summer lectures covered the poet’s mausoleum at Harenda and his Lviv.

Allow 30-45 minutes for the exhibition itself; that is our estimate, as the museum gives no visiting time. Add the permanent display on Makuszyński and the visit comes to about an hour.

Context

Jan Kasprowicz was born in 1860 in Szymborze near Inowrocław, one of fourteen children in a peasant family, and rose to become one of the leading poets of Young Poland, the country’s turn-of-the-century modernist movement, as well as a prolific translator; his best-known collections are “Hymns” and “The Book of the Poor”. In the 1921/1922 academic year he served as rector of the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, then a Polish city. In 1923 he settled at Villa Harenda between Poronin and Zakopane, died there on 1 August 1926, and since 1933 has rested in a mausoleum beside the house, which is now a museum dedicated to him.

Tickets and time

Temporary exhibition: 10 PLN, reduced 5 PLN. A combined ticket for the permanent and temporary exhibitions costs 18 PLN (reduced 9 PLN); the permanent display alone is 15 PLN (reduced 7 PLN). The combined ticket is worth it: 8 PLN more buys the permanent exhibition on Makuszyński himself.

Thursday will not get you in free. The branch’s price list names Thursday as the free day for permanent exhibitions and says nothing about the temporary one, so expect to pay for it. That is our reading of the price list; the museum does not state it outright.

Holders of the Large Family Card (Karta Dużej Rodziny) pay 5 PLN; residents of Zakopane and of the neighbouring municipalities named on the price list, from Poronin and Kościelisko to Nowy Targ, pay 1 PLN. A weekly ticket to all open branches of the Tatra Museum costs 69 PLN (reduced 34 PLN). For two branches it does not pay: a full ticket to the main building on Krupówki plus the combined ticket here comes to 52 PLN.

Hours: Tuesday to Friday 9:00-17:00 (9 AM to 5 PM), Saturday 10:00-18:00, closed Sunday and Monday. Last entry half an hour before closing. Watch out on Sundays: the main building on Krupówki is open, this branch is not. Wednesday to Saturday you can see both in one day.

Worth it for readers of Polish modernist poetry and for anyone drawn to Witkacy or Hasior, two artists with deep Zakopane roots. If you have a single afternoon in Zakopane and no Polish, start with the main building of the Tatra Museum instead: this show is built on poems in Polish.

English on site: the museum states nothing about English labels or English-language tours for this exhibition. The branch rents an audio guide for 5 PLN, but its languages are not given; ask at the desk before you pay.

Events

• 1 October 2026, 18:00 - “Czego Jaś się nie nauczy, tego Jego Magnificencja nie będzie umiał”, a talk on Kasprowicz’s youth by Katarzyna Mruk, in Polish, free admission - museum programme .
• 3 October 2026, 10:15 - “Jak mały Janek chciał zostać poetą”, a museum lesson for children aged 7-9 led by Katarzyna Mruk, in Polish, free admission - museum programme .
• 10 October 2026, 14:00 - closing event with the curator, dr Kinga Nędza-Sikoniowska, in Polish, free admission - museum programme .

What the press says

Two previews in Polish, no review of the display itself.

Radio Alex (29 April 2026, interview by Beata Denis-Jastrzębska): the curator explains that the title comes from one of the poet’s own lines and that the show follows both his life’s road and the changes in his writing - article, in Polish .

dzieje.pl (PAP) (1 May 2026): presents the exhibition as the Tatra Museum’s contribution to Zakopane’s Kasprowicz year, joining biography with reflection on his poetry, from his Kuyavian beginnings to Harenda - article, in Polish .

The curator on Kasprowicz’s road, speaking to Radio Alex (our translation): “Such a road is a road to the summit, but here we put a question mark.”

See also

• Tatra Museum profile - the main building at 10 Krupówki, with its permanent exhibition on Podhale, the region where Kasprowicz settled at the end of his life, and the weekly ticket to all branches.
• Tatra National Park Nature Education Centre - a model of the Tatras and dioramas on Chałubińskiego Street: the mountains Kasprowicz hiked and wrote about from his 1898 collection “Krzak dzikiej róży w Ciemnych Smreczynach” onwards.
• Podhale Museum in Nowy Targ - the art and crafts of Podhale in the Nowy Targ town hall, on the road from Kraków to Zakopane.

Museum profile: Tatra Museum in Zakopane .