[2] Kalinowski conducted his activities in the spirit of resurrecting the common state of Lithuania, Ruthenia (now Belarus and Ukraine), and Poland in the traditions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

[3] After graduating from a local school in Svislach in 1855, Kalinowski entered the faculty of Medicine of the University of Moscow as an external student.

Along with his brother Wiktor, he got himself involved in Polish students' conspiracies and secret cultural societies, headed by Zygmunt Sierakowski and Jarosław Dąbrowski.

After graduating in 1860, Konstanty traveled to Vilnius where he unsuccessfully applied to join the civil service under Vladimir Ivanovich Nazimov [ru].

[3] In his literary work, Kalinowski underlined the need to liberate all people of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from Russia's occupation and to conserve and promote the Greek Catholic faith and Belarusian language.

He was imprisoned in Vilnius, where he wrote one of his most notable works – Letters from Beneath the Gallows (Pismo z-pad szybienicy), a passionate credo for his compatriots.

[3] Kalinowski's remains, along with those of others, were clandestinely buried by the Tsarist authorities on the site of a military fortress on top of the Gediminas Hill in Vilnius.

In Uladzimir Karatkievich's novel King Stakh's Wild Hunt, one of the principal characters, Andrey Svetsilovich, had a portrait of Kalinowski above his writing desk.

[13] The Polish Government's scholarship program for Belarusian students expelled from their studies after the Jeans Revolution has been named after Konstanty Kalinowski since 2006.