Family
Gabriel Narutowicz was born into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family in Telšiai, in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire (earlier partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). His father, Jan Narutowicz, was a local district judge and also a landholder in the Samogitian village of Brėvikiai. As a result of his participation in the January 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, he was sentenced to a year of imprisonment; he died when Gabriel was only one year old.
Gabriel’s mother, Wiktoria Szczepkowska, was Jan's third wife. Following her husband's death she raised her sons herself. An educated woman, intrigued by the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment, she had a great influence on the development of Gabriel and his siblings' world view. In 1873 she moved to Liepāja, Latvia, so that her children would not have to attend a Russian school, since after the Uprising of 1863, Russification was less strongly enforced there.
After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gabriel Narutowicz’s brother, Stanisław Narutowicz, became a Lithuanian citizen. Earier towards the end of World War I, Stanisław became a member of the Council of Lithuania, the provisional Lithuanian parliament. He signed the Lithuanian Act of Independence of 16 February 1918.
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Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)
“A ball player’s got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That’s why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.”
—Joe Dimaggio (b. 1914)
“The value of a family is that it cushions and protects while the individual is learning ways of coping. And a supportive social system provides the same kind of cushioning for the family as a whole.”
—Michael W. Yogman, and T. Berry Brazelton (20th century)