A. J. (Antoni Józef) Gliński

Born in 1817 in Szczorse near Nowogródek and dying in Vilnius on June 30, 1866, Antoni Józef Gliński was a Polish writer associated with the Romantic era. Sources describe him as coming from a peasant family and being largely self-taught, a background that makes his literary career especially striking.

He is best known for Bajarz polski, a four-volume collection of fairy tales, legends, and folk stories first published in 1853. The book drew on storytelling traditions from Polish noble hamlets and Belarusian villages, and it was reprinted many times, suggesting that it found a lasting audience.

Gliński is remembered less as a novelist than as a preserver of oral tradition. For listeners and readers today, his work offers a lively path into the older folk imagination of the region—full of wonder, local color, and the feeling of stories passed from one voice to another.