ABSTRACT
The veracity of the many biographies of Fryderyk Chopin published since his death in 1849 has often been questioned on the grounds of their factual errors and interpretative inaccuracies resulting from these errors. However, these biographies have rarely been analyzed as cultural products embodying political assumptions, values, and methodologies specific for the time and place in which they originated; it has been overlooked that biographies are documents that tell us as much about their authors as about their subjects. As a result, new or corrected evidence continues to be presented within the nineteenth-century paradigm of biography writing because a scrutiny aimed at correcting factual errors can not by itself seriously affect the assumptions of traditional biography and its narrative plots. And since many aspects of Chopin's biography continue to be assumed after the paradigm set by nineteenth-century biographers, it keeps shaping the direction and agenda of biographical inquiry.
