Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (born Országh) was born in the village of Vyšný Kubín in the Orava region of northern Slovakia in 1849. His family was of land-owning (yeoman) origin although they lived from working their own large farm. After completing elementary school in his native district in 1862 he was sent to further studies, graduating from gymnázium (secondary school) in the Hungarian city of Miskolc where he began to write his first poems in Hungarian. While continuing his studies at the Kežmarok gymnázium, he had matured to a Slovak national consciousness and towards writing in Slovak. He graduated in 1870 and for two years studied at the Law Academy in Prešov. After working for various advocates in Dolný Kubín, Martin and Senica, he passed his examinations in Budapest in 1875 and was able to open his own practice in the small town of Námestovo in northern Orava. In 1876 he married Ilona Nováková, daughter of the Protestant senior clergyman Samuel Novák in Dolný Kubín, and gained a position in the Orava county court in this town. However, he remained in the service of the state for only a short time. In 1879 he returned to the life of an independent barrister, again in Námestovo, where he remained for the next twenty years. In 1899 he moved to Dolný Kubín again, but he was not successful in continuing his legal practice, so he formally retired in 1902. He continued his literary work, both writing and translating, for which he received a number of prizes even outside of the Slovak literary world. In 1912 he was elected a member of the Hungarian "Kisfaludi Society" and in 1913 a member of the Czech Academy of Science and Arts. At the beginning of the First World War he reacted from the standpoint of an unswerving humanist with the poetic cycle The Bloody Sonnets (written in August and September 1914) which could not be published until after the war. In May 1918 he led the Slovak delegation to the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre of Prague where he inserted into his speech a hint on the possibility of a close co-existence of Czechs and Slovaks in the future. So he accepted with enthusiasm the founding of Czechoslovakia at the end of that year and the establishment of realistic prospects for the free growth of Slovak national life. However, he did not live long enough to enjoy the new political situation, dying in 1921.
