While living in Chotiaczów in Volhynia, Malczewski was a frequent guest of the Ruciński couple. Zofia Rucińska was seriously ill, and one of her paroxysms ended with a spontaneous magnetic intervention by Malczewski, which turned out to be surprisingly effective. This event was the beginning of a magnetic treatment lasting almost two years – and probably not entirely voluntary as far as Malczewski was concerned – with which the poet was to cure his patient. In an eyewitness account of these events, quoted by Maria Dernałowicz in her monograph on Malczewski, we read:
The sick woman was so overcome with faith that she did not take her eyes off the good doctor sitting by the bedside for a moment. Malczewski soon lost all freedom and sat in an armchair for two years as if he could not walk; when the poor man left for a moment, he soon had to return.
To summarise the subsequent, somewhat grotesque, events, the effect of the treatment was that the patient became completely fascinated by the young magnetiser. She divorced her husband and left with Malczewski. In 1824, the strange couple appeared in Warsaw. Malczewski was in a jam. Torn by a sense of duty and weariness of the whole unfortunate situation, he could not find a way out.
Anyway, it was in Warsaw, living in this strange concubinage, that Malczewski wrote Maria, in which he processed his youthful fascination with Byron and an evoked the Ukrainian landscapes of his youth. In Maria, Malczewski made use of authentic events connected with the crime committed on 13th February 1771 on Gertruda Komorowska – Szczęsny Potocki’s first wife, murdered on the orders of Franciszek Salezy Potocki, a father-in-law opposed to the marriage. He moved the plot back to the 17th century and set it in Dnieper Ukraine. Although initially undervalued, Maria has with time earned a reputation as one of the finest achievements of the genre in Poland, sometimes described as ‘a poem of extreme pessimism’. As Dr Bolesław Oleksowicz wrote:
Malczewski, using the pattern of Byron’s and Scott’s poetic novels, transformed this event into a pessimistic parable about man’s powerlessness in the face of the mystery of the world, in which evil, appearing in the form of death, reveals the true quality of being.