Other literary forms
There can be no doubt that it was Henryk Sienkiewicz’s success as an author of historical novels that led the Swedish Academy to select him as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. He was at the same time, however, a prolific writer of short stories, many of which continue to be ranked among the finest ever written in the Polish language. One of his masterworks in this genre is titled “Janko myzikant” (1879; “Yanko the Musician,” 1893). In this story, a young peasant boy named Yanko is so obsessed with the beauty of music that he is unable to resist the temptation of stealing a violin from the manor house of the local squire. When caught, he is beaten so severely that he dies. The underlying irony of this tale stems from the fact that those who live in the manor house consider themselves to be patrons of the arts and frequently travel to Italy for the purpose of discovering and assisting young artists.
Equally popular is “Latarnik” (1882; “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall,” 1893), the plot of which centers on the fate of an aged Polish exile who finally succeeds in being hired as a lighthouse keeper on the island of Aspinwall near the Panama Canal Zone. One day he receives a parcel of Polish books that includes a copy of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz: Czyli, Ostatni Zajazd na litwie historia Szlachecka zr. 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu ksiegach wierszem (1834; Pan Tadeusz: Or, The Last Foray in Lithuania, a Tale of Gentlefolk in 1811 and 1812, in Twelve Books in Verse, 1917). He becomes so engrossed while reading this patriotic national epic that he forgets to light the beacon and, having caused a ship to run aground, is fired for his negligence. As is the case with most of Sienkiewicz’s short stories, those two works were first published in periodicals and subsequently incorporated into editions of his collected works, the first of which appeared while he was still in his early thirties. For this reason, the numerous collections of his short stories in English translation have no Polish-language counterparts as such and have actually been gathered together in accordance with the personal preferences of the individual translators themselves.
Throughout his adult life, Sienkiewicz was an inveterate traveler, and he wrote two works during his trips abroad that are still capable of holding the modern reader’s attention. The first of these is titled Listy z podróży do Ameryki (1876-1878, serial; 1896, book; Portrait of America: Letters, 1959). These letters, arising from a journey to the United States, were commissioned by a Polish periodical and record Sienkiewicz’s firsthand impressions of the United States—chiefly of New York City, the Plains states, and California. The Polish author’s views are, it should be noted, far more balanced than those to be found in Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842), in which life in the United States is depicted in largely negative terms. Later in his career, Sienkiewicz traveled throughout East Africa and wrote Listy z Afryki (1891; letters from Africa). In these reports, the role of European colonization is judged to be generally beneficial for the indigenous peoples, but Sienkiewicz is highly critical of the Arabs, who ruthlessly exploited the native populace in this region. Both the American and the African journals are, in short, valuable historical records pertaining to everyday life in a bygone era.
Achievements
Henryk Sienkiewicz is both a literary and a political phenomenon in his homeland. In order to appreciate the twofold significance of his major novels, it is necessary to recall the troubled state of Polish national life throughout the nineteenth century. Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria during the latter part of the eighteenth century and had completely disappeared from the map of Europe. The largest portion of Poland, including Warsaw itself, came under the control of the Russians, and Sienkiewicz was destined to spend his entire life as an involuntary subject of the czar. Two full-scale insurrections against the Russians, the first occurring in 1831 and the second in 1863, ended in defeat, and their failure served only to intensify the oppressive policies of the czarist officials. Both of these revolts were largely inspired by Romantic idealists. After the debacle of 1863, the Polish intelligentsia appeared to wash its collective hands of the doctrines of Romanticism and rapidly embraced the scientifically oriented philosophy of positivism as the best solution to the problems confronting the nation. The adherents of positivism in Poland openly abandoned the quixotic quest for national independence by means of political conspiracy and armed insurrection and focused their energies on promoting organic economic development in the various Polish territories as well as on expanding educational opportunities available to the masses. The transition from Romanticism to positivism signaled a rejection of the feudal values cherished by the landowning gentry and the adoption of the ideals of capitalism championed by the middle class.
For the positivists, writers had a moral obligation to tackle contemporary social problems in their works, and Sienkiewicz’s early writings were duly composed in accordance with this stricture. Before long, however, his own ancestral heritage and aristocratic temperament came to the fore, and in 1882 he began work on a historical trilogy that would dramatize Polish military exploits of the seventeenth century. The first volume bears the title With Fire and Sword; the other two are The Deluge and Pan Michael. These three novels are collectively designated the “Trilogia” (trilogy). Sienkiewicz’s decision to write about the seventeenth century stemmed from his desire to depict a period in Polish history during which the country successfully defended its national existence against the attacks launched by a combination of powerful enemies. Unlike the positivists, who tended to dwell on the failures of Poland’s ruling classes, Sienkiewicz chose to emphasize the valorous feats achieved by Polish arms. The inspirational intent of the author is explicitly acknowledged in his brief postscript to the final volume of the trilogy, in which he asserts that the entire series was written “for the sake of the strengthening of hearts.” Public response to these novels was so enthusiastic that sentiment for the cause of Polish independence increased immeasurably throughout the land, and Sienkiewicz soon found himself regarded as his nation’s foremost champion, both at home and abroad.
After the publication of the trilogy, Sienkiewicz wrote a pair of moderately successful novels on contemporary themes and then went on to compose two additional historical novels of major stature. The first deals with the persecution of Christians in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Nero and is titled Quo Vadis. It soon became an international best seller of unprecedented magnitude and remains Sienkiewicz’s most popular novel among the reading public outside the author’s native land. In the second of these works, Sienkiewicz returns to the annals of Polish history and depicts Poland’s struggle against an aggressive military order of Teutonic monks who are ultimately defeated in the year 1410 at the Battle of Greenwold. This novel bears the title The Knights of the Cross. Most Polish critics consider it to be superior to Quo Vadis in terms of literary merit, and a few even go as far as to prefer it to the trilogy itself. In 1905, Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he took the occasion to thank the members of the Swedish Academy for recognizing the fact that Poland, though physically enslaved, lived on in spiritual freedom. The abiding popularity of his works in present-day Poland is ample testimony that Sienkiewicz is still capable of strengthening the hearts of his countrymen, as he did during his own lifetime.
Biography
Henryk Adam Alexander Pius Sienkiewicz’s paternal ancestors were Lithuanian Tatars who had traditionally followed a military vocation. His great-grandfather, Michael, was baptized in 1740 and subsequently admitted to the ranks of the gentry (Szlachta) in 1775 through an act of the national diet by way of recognition of the family’s military service on behalf of the Polish Commonwealth. Despite this honor, he and his descendants continued to remain impoverished. His own father, Józef, managed to advance himself both socially and financially in 1843 by marrying Stefania Cieciszowska, a young woman from a well-established household of landowners who were generally conceded to be members of the aristocracy. Sienkiewicz was born on May 5, 1846, on an estate that belonged to his mother’s parents. This estate (as well as the nearby village) was named Wola Okrzejska and was located near Siedlice, a city in Russian-occupied Poland approximately fifty miles to the east of Warsaw. Sienkiewicz had one brother and four sisters, and when he was nine years old, his parents purchased an estate of their own in the province of Mazovia. A few years later, they sold the estate and bought an apartment house in the Warsaw suburb of Praga in order to supplement their modest financial resources from rental payments made by the tenants. They also hoped to give their children the educational advantage of attending schools in the city that had once been the nation’s capital.
Sienkiewicz became an avid reader quite early in life. While still at Wola Okrzejska, he immersed himself in popular Romantic poetry extolling the virtues of gallant knights and fair ladies and thus acquired an abiding affection for the institution of chivalry. He also developed an intense desire to travel through reading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) and even dreamed of settling on an uninhabited island when he grew up. During the time that he attended secondary school in Warsaw, he frequently neglected his studies to read the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, père. Except for the areas of literature and history, Sienkiewicz’s scholastic achievements were relatively modest. Despite his aptitude for literary and historical studies, however, he never seriously considered becoming a writer during his adolescent years.
When the time arrived for him to matriculate at the newly founded University of Warsaw, then called Szkoła Glówna (Central Academy), he readily acceded to his mother’s wishes and entered the Faculty of Law in 1866. Soon after, he switched to medicine and finally to history and literature. Students at the University of Warsaw in those years were imbued with a philosophy known as positivism, which was based on the ideas espoused by the French thinker Auguste Comte (1789-1857), and Sienkiewicz himself soon became a confirmed, if only transient, adherent of this social doctrine. Unable to obtain much financial assistance from his parents, Sienkiewicz was obliged to earn funds through employment as a private tutor while still working toward a degree. For reasons that are still unclear, Sienkiewicz terminated his studies at the University of Warsaw in 1871 without bothering to take the final examinations and abruptly embarked on a career as a freelance writer and journalist.
Within a year, Sienkiewicz was finding success in his new career. His first novel, In Vain, dealt with student life and was serialized in a biweekly periodical. At about the same time, he became a feature writer for a newspaper named Gazeta Połska and contributed numerous sketches, literary essays, and reviews to its feuilleton section. On assignment for Gazeta Połska, he went to Vienna in 1873. In the following year, he undertook longer trips abroad, to Obstend and Paris, for personal motives. Upon returning to Warsaw in 1875, Sienkiewicz became acquainted with the famous Polish actor Helena Modjeska and her circle of friends. It was within this circle that the utopian idea of founding a Polish Socialist community in California was first proposed. Both Sienkiewicz and Modjeska had personal reasons for wishing to leave Poland—an unhappy love affair on his part and a weariness with the backstage intrigues of the theater world on hers. The worsening political situation in Poland, moreover, made the prospect of leaving the country doubly attractive. When their plan was made public, the Gazeta Połska commissioned Sienkiewicz to write a series of articles devoted to his impressions of the New World. He therefore set out in advance of the main party, which was to include Modjeska and her husband as well as her teenage son from a previous marriage.
Less than a month after he left Liverpool for New York, Sienkiewicz had crossed the continent and arrived in San Francisco on March 16, 1876. After a brief stay, he moved on to Southern California and eventually chose a site near Anaheim as the best location for the colony. Modjeska and her small party arrived in September, 1876. The project ran into difficulties almost immediately, owing largely to the group’s collective inexperience with the methods of farming, and was abandoned after only a few months. Modjeska thereupon decided to resume her former vocation. Unlike Sienkiewicz, she chose to remain abroad and managed to have a successful stage career in the United States as well as in Great Britain, where she fulfilled her lifelong ambition to play Shakespearean roles in English in the bard’s own country. Her son, Ralph Modjeski, went on to become one of the foremost bridge engineers in the United States, by serving as the chairman of the board of consulting engineers for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which was completed in 1936.
After a lengthy sojourn in France and Italy, Sienkiewicz returned to Poland in April, 1879, and gradually assumed his activities as a journalist. The two years spent in the United States were by no means unproductive with respect to his literary development. His impressions of the United States were published in Gazeta Połska on a regular basis from 1876 to 1877. In addition, the American experience provided Sienkiewicz with the material for a number of short stories whose locale is the American West—most of which, however, were written after his return to Europe. While still in California, he also wrote a group of satiric sketches about rural life in Poland that was originally published in installments by the Gazeta Połska and that now constitutes the novel titled Szkice wåglem (charcoal sketches). Inspired by the tenets of positivism, this work depicts events in a benighted Polish village, the plight of which, the author intimates, stems ultimately from the indifference of the local gentry toward the welfare of the peasants, whose recent emancipation has left them totally unprepared to cope with the ensuing changes in their way of life. A clear signal that Sienkiewicz was already turning away from the doctrines of positivism may, however, be seen in the short story called “Niewola Tatarska” (1880; “Tartar Captivity,” 1897). Here he offers his readers a chivalric account of life in the Old Polish Commonwealth that ran counter to the negative assessments of the positivist historians and their allies in the literary establishment. Critical disapproval notwithstanding, the general public was delighted.
On August 18, 1881, Sienkiewicz married an attractive young lady named Maria Szetkiewicz who was known to have a tubercular condition. Despite the chronic illness of his wife, he was to find great happiness in this brief marriage. A son, Henryk Józef, was born in July, 1882; a daughter, Jadwiga, in December, 1883. Maria’s health took a sudden turn for the worse shortly thereafter, and she died on October 19, 1885. Throughout this entire period, so full of joy and sorrow, Sienkiewicz somehow managed to maintain a productive professional life both as a journalist and as a writer of fiction. Not long after his marriage, he accepted an appointment as editor of a newly founded Warsaw daily called Słowo. At the same time, he engaged in extensive historical research in preparation for writing a series of three novels based on the military upheavals in seventeenth century Poland. The project was to take him six years to complete.
With Fire and Sword, the first volume in the trilogy, was published in installments in Słowo as well as in the Kraków newspaper Czas. Sienkiewicz was thus able to reach readers in both the Russian and the Austrian occupied areas of Poland. The next two volumes, The Deluge and Pan Michael, were serialized simultaneously, not only in Warsaw and Kraków but also in Poznań—the largest city in the Polish territories annexed by Germany. There it was published by Dziennik Pozna ski. This arrangement had the advantage of allowing the author to receive three separate royalty payments. When subsequently published in book form, each of these works became a best seller. Now that he had become the most popular writer in Poland, Sienkiewicz resigned the post of editor for Słowo in 1887.
In his next two novels, Sienkiewicz returned to the contemporary scene. The first, Without Dogma, constitutes an attack on fin de siècle decadence. The novel is written in diary form, and its hero is a highly cultivated aristocrat who is completely unproductive and purposeless, owing to his intellectual incapacity to believe in anything whatsoever. The second novel, Children of the Soil, is considerably more positive in tone. Itsprotagonist, a member of a family named Polaniecki, is a philistine businessman of noble ancestry who, despite his numerous shortcomings, manages to advance the welfare of his own family as well as that of his countrymen.
Both of these novels were received more warmly abroad than in Poland. Polish readers apparently desired additional historical romances from the undisputed master of this genre, and Sienkiewicz duly responded to the public’s wishes with his next novel. Its topic, however, caught his readers by surprise. Instead of another work based on Polish history, Sienkiewicz chose to re-create the events surrounding the persecution of Christians in Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero. He did, however, return to the realm of Polish history in his succeeding novel, a work published in 1900 whose title has been variously translated as The Knights of the Cross and The Teutonic Knights. Like the trilogy itself, each of these historical novels proved to be enormously successful with the readership in Poland. Quo Vadis, moreover, went on to become an unprecedented international favorite and was eventually translated into more than thirty different languages.
Sienkiewicz’s devoted admirers looked forward to honoring him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary debut. Strictly speaking, this commemoration should have taken place in 1898, but Sienkiewicz himself requested that it be postponed until 1900 so that it would not interfere with the centennial celebrations to be held in homage of the poet Adam Mickiewicz, who was born in 1798. On the occasion of his own jubilee, Sienkiewicz was presented with a small estate that was purchased from donations made by the public at large. The estate, called Oblegorek, was situated approximately one hundred miles due south of Warsaw near the city of Kielce.
On May 5, 1904, Sienkiewicz married a distant relative named Maria Babska, who was herself a writer. The marriage seems to have been contracted in a spirit of deep friendship rather than one of passionate love, but the arrangement provided Sienkiewicz with a comfortable domestic environment. In the following year, the Swedish Academy selected him to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is, however, ironic that at the time he became a Nobel laureate, his creative powers were already on the wane. Although he continued to write, his only true success thereafter was a work of children’s literature titled In Desert and Wilderness, in which an English girl and a Polish boy, having been abducted from their parents, undergo an unending chain of adventures in Egypt and the Sudan.
The outbreak of World War I interrupted Sienkiewicz’s work on a novel dealing with the fate of the Polish legions that formed an important part of the Grande Armée of Napoleon during the ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. Moving from Oblegorek to Vevey in neutral Switzerland, Sienkiewicz abandoned his literary activities in order to serve as chairman of the Central Swiss Committee for Victims of War in Poland. This organization, whose chief sponsor was the Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, succeeded in raising large sums of money to alleviate the suffering of their compatriots back in war-torn Poland. On November 15, 1916, Sienkiewicz died of arteriosclerosis and thus was denied the privilege of witnessing the restoration of Polish independence in the aftermath of the Allied victory over the Central Powers in 1918. In the fall of 1924, however, his ashes were transferred from Switzerland to Poland and interred in the crypt of Saint John’s Cathedral in Warsaw. This church, although subsequently rebuilt, was totally destroyed by the Germans in the fall of 1944 as part of their punitive demolition of the city of Warsaw after the failure of the uprising of the Polish Home Army. Even during the period 1945-1989, when Poland was under Communist domination, Sienkiewicz continued to remain one of the official cultural heroes of his nation, and the dissemination of his writings is actively promoted today throughout the Republic of Poland.
Analysis
Some degree of familiarity with Polish history is essential for an appreciation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s The Knights of the Cross and the three novels that form the trilogy. Most translators of these works have, accordingly, provided extensive historical introductions for the benefit of the uninitiated reader. With respect to The Knights of the Cross, the most useful introduction is surely the one written by Alicia Tyszkiewicz to accompany the translation she published in 1943 under the title The Teutonic Knights. Those about to embark on a reading of this work in any one of its various translations can also find an exceptionally clear survey of medieval Polish history in the third chapter of James Michener’s best-selling novel Poland (1983).
The Knights of the Cross
Because of the wedge-shaped black crosses embroidered on their white mantles, the members of the Order of Teutonic Knights were always referred to by the Poles as krzyżacy, or Knights of the Cross. (The term krzyżacy is derived from krzyż, the Polish word for “cross,” and its literal meaning is “those of the cross.”) This order was founded in Palestine around 1190, during the Third Crusade. Thirty-five years after its founding, it was formally invited by Duke Conrad of Mazovia, in an act of utter folly, to settle along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. Its official mission was to subdue a heathen people called the Prussians, who were closely related to the Lithuanians both culturally and linguistically. The Teutonic Knights succeeded in subduing the Prussian tribes within fifty years, chiefly by following a policy of extermination, and then sought to expand their realm at the expense of the Lithuanians under the pretext of spreading Christianity to this still-pagan people. They also turned on their Polish hosts, despite the fact that Poland had already converted to Christianity in the tenth century. An alliance between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was clearly in the interests of both countries, and in 1386 the Polish Queen Jadwiga and the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jagiełło were wed. Both nations were thus joined in a personal union. As one of the conditions for his elevation to the Polish throne, Jagiełło agreed to abandon paganism and to impose Christianity on his Lithuanian subjects.
The inevitable confrontation with the Teutonic Knights occurred on the morning of July 15, 1410, when a combined force of 46,000 Poles, Lithuanians, and assorted allies joined battle with 32,000 of the enemy on the fields near the little village of Grunwald in East Prussia. By day’s end, half of the Teutonic Knights lay dead and the other half were in captivity. Although the Order continued to exist until it was secularized in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, its power to expand had been effectively checked. The victory of Poland and Lithuania at Grunwald was the subject of one of the most famous historical paintings by the Polish artist Jan Matejko (1838-1893). How deeply the crushing defeat of the Teutonic Order continued to rankle the sensitivity of the Germans over the succeeding centuries may be inferred from the concerted effort made by the Nazis to locate the whereabouts of this huge canvas after their conquest of Poland in September, 1939.
Prior to this date, Matejko’s painting had been the centerpiece of the collection housed in the Polish National Art Museum in Warsaw. Fearing for its destruction at the hands of the Germans, the curator had the canvas removed from its frame and rolled up so that it could fit into a crate made of solid oak. This crate was then placed in a concrete vault five feet underground at a secret location in eastern Poland. The German authorities offered a reward of two million Reichsmarks (a sum equivalent to $750,000 in terms of the currency exchange rates in effect at that time) as well as safe passage out of Poland to a neutral country to anyone who would reveal the location of Matejko’s painting. Today the Grunwald picture is on permanent display in the fortified medieval castle at Marienburg that was built by the Teutonic Knights to serve as their central administrative headquarters. Marienburg, moreover, reverted to its previous Polish name of Malbork at the end of World War II.
Sienkiewicz’s The Knights of the Cross has the Battle of Grunwald as itsclimax and may be considered the literary counterpart of Matejko’s renowned historical canvas. Parts of the book were, in fact, read publicly by Sienkiewicz himself while standing beside the painting that had been his constant inspiration in the course of writing the novel. In addition to presenting a graphic description of the battle itself, Sienkiewicz offers his readers a brilliant pageant of medieval society as it existed in northeastern Europe around 1400. The cast of characters is predominantly fictive, but there are a few historical figures in the novel. King Jagiełło and Queen Jadwiga, however, play relatively minor roles. The historical figures and the fictive characters, it should be noted, function independent of each other for the most part. Neither of these groups plays a significant role in determining the fortunes of the other.
The fictive plot that runs parallel to the historical events described in the novel centers on a young Polish knight, Zbyszko, and his relationship with two women. He falls in love with a delicate beauty named Danusia and marries her. At the same time, he maintains a strong friendship with Jagienka, a warrior maiden who is very much like him in terms of robust health and vivacious demeanor. Danusia, who happens to be the daughter of the powerful Polish magnate Jurand, is kidnapped by members of the Teutonic Order shortly after her marriage to Zbyszki in an attempt to wrest political concessions from her father. While in captivity, Danusia is mistreated to such a degree that she dies directly following her rescue by Zbyszko. After a long period of mourning, Zbyszko decides to marry Jagienka, who really should have been his first choice in matrimony from the outset. As for Jurand himself, he, too, falls into the clutches of the Teutonic Knights and is subjected to bestial treatment. Sometime after his release, his erstwhile tormentors become his prisoners. Instead of avenging himself by retaliating in kind, Jurand chooses to pardon them. In this way, Sienkiewicz is underscoring his belief that the Polish gentry had more affinity with the ideals of Christianity than did the monks belonging to the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The degree of haughtiness, cruelty, and lust for power attributed to the Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz might once have appeared somewhat excessive, but the traumatic events that occurred in Poland and in much of Eastern Europe in the course of World War II have done much to enhance the plausibility of his portrayal.
The alliance between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that made the victory at the Battle of Grunwald possible was to continue over the next two centuries, despite many periods of acute political tension. In 1569, moreover, the two countries agreed to a charter, known as the Union of Lublin, that united them in a single political entity called the Polish Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was a multinational state whose territories extended from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. In addition to incorporating the Poles and the Lithuanians within its borders, the Commonwealth comprised large numbers of Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and Tatars. The viability of such an oddly constituted state was put to the test in the seventeenth century through a series of domestic insurrections and foreign invasions, and it is these trials that furnish the historical background for the works that form Sienkiewicz’s trilogy.
The central event in each of these three novels involves the heroic defense of a Polish city that is under siege by the enemy. The historical incidents depicted in the trilogy span a period of approximately twenty-five years. Each novel covers a different war and takes place in a different part of the Commonwealth. The first volume, With Fire and Sword, deals with the Cossack rebellion in the Ukraine between the years 1647 and 1649. The second volume, The Deluge, tells the story of the Swedish attempt to add Poland to the personal domain of the Swedish king, Charles Gustavus, in the mid-1660’s. The third volume, Pan Michael, although beginning with the year 1669, focuses on the struggles with the Turks and the Tatars during the years 1672 and 1673. Many of the characters that are introduced in With Fire and Sword reappear in the successive novels of the trilogy. Some personages that make their first appearance in The Deluge are, likewise, carried over into the plot of Pan Michael. A major character in one novel may be demoted to playing a minor role in another, and the reverse may also occur. The fictive and the historical figures in the trilogy, it should be noted, interact far more than is the case in The Knights of the Cross.
With Fire and Sword
The historical events that constitute thenarrative framework of Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword occurred in the course of the Polish-Cossack wars that were waged on the steppes of the Ukraine. Under the inspired leadership of Bohdan Chmielnicki, the Cossacks initially scored a number of impressive victories over Polish forces. The long-suffering Ukrainian peasants, sensing an opportunity to throw off the yoke of foreign oppression, joined the Cossacks and began a savage massacre of Polish landowners and Catholic clergy. Jews also perished by the tens of thousands, because they usually served as administrators and overseers on the Polish estates.
Retribution on the part of Poland came in the person of a powerful prince named Jarema Wiśniowiecki, whose army checked the advances of the Cossacks and restored Polish authority over large sections of the Ukraine. Both Chmielnicki and Prince Jarema play major roles in the plot of With Fire and Sword. As portrayed in the novel, the Polish commander is a man of noble character whose courage and patriotism are largely responsible for his nation’s triumph over the Cossacks and their Tatar auxiliaries. Sienkiewicz does, however, permit this hero’s virtue to be tested. As a result of his military successes in the Ukraine, Prince Jarema soon found himself in a position to make the entire region subservient to his personal rule and was sorely tempted to sacrifice his country’s interests for the sake of his own private ambitions. Midway through the novel, Prince Jarema engages in a debate with his conscience that takes the form of a lengthy monologue, which he delivers while kneeling beneath a crucifix during a nocturnal prayer vigil. As dawn breaks, he resolves to remain loyal to the Commonwealth, even though he disapproves of many of its policies pertaining to the suppression of the insurrection in the Ukraine.
Despite the prominence of the historical figures in With Fire and Sword, they do not overshadow the fictive characters and their private adventures. The most memorable fictive personality in the novel is an old warrior named Zagloba, whose droll appearance and ribald speech have led critics to categorize him as the Polish Falstaff. Zagloba’s antics provide much welcome comic relief in a novel filled with grim scenes. The chief nonfactual narrative involves a love triangle. Jan Skrzetuski, an adjutant of Prince Jarema, falls in love with an orphaned princess named Helena. The two soon agree to marry, but a Cossack officer named Bogun abducts Helena in the hope of persuading her to become his own bride. She is eventually rescued by Jan’s loyal retainer Jendzian. Before the two lovers can be reunited, however, the city of Zbaraż is besieged by thousands of Cossacks and Tatars. Prince Jarema is in charge of the small Polish garrison within the city and finally decides to let Jan make an attempt to slip through enemy lines in order to summon aid from the Polish king, Jan Kazimierz. The royal army is duly dispatched, and the heroic defenders of Zbaraż are at last relieved after having withstood the determined attacks of Chmielnicki’s troops for more than six weeks.
The decisive victory over the Cossacks did not occur until two years later, at the Battle of Beresteczko (1651), and Sienkiewicz skips over the intervening period to give his readers an account of this crucial confrontation in the final chapter of the novel. Bogun is among the Cossack prisoners who are taken at Beresteczko, and Prince Jarema turns him over to Jan for punishment. Jan, who married Helena after the siege of Zbaraż had been lifted, chooses to be magnanimous in victory and pardons the Cossack officer.
The Deluge
The next two novels in the trilogy have a narrative structure similar to that employed in With Fire and Sword. Both feature fictive love triangles in which the heroine is first abducted and then rescued. The chief historical figure in The Deluge is a Polish hetman named Stefan Czarniecki, whose tireless energy and soldierly talent contributed greatly to the ultimate expulsion of the Swedish invaders from the territory of the Commonwealth. He did not, however, participate in the key military engagement of the Swedish-Polish conflict: namely, the defense of the fortified Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra (Bright Hill). Jasna Góra, which is located within the city of Czestochowa, was founded in 1382. Two years later, it came into possession of an icon depicting the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus that is reputed to have been painted by Saint Luke the Evangelist. (This work is now referred to as the Black Madonna because of the dark hue that distinguishes the face and hands of each subject.) When the Polish garrison within the monastery put up a heroic defense and finally forced the Swedes to lift the siege and depart, the credit for this signal victory was assigned to the miraculous powers of the icon itself. Believing themselves to be under the special protection of the Virgin Mary, the Polish people took heart and rallied to the nation’s cause.
Pan Michael
In contrast, the siege of Kamieniec that is depicted in the closing chapters of Pan Michael ends in a defeat for the Polish defenders and a triumph for the Turkish invaders. The eponymous hero of the novel is a fictive personage named Pan Michael Wołodyjowski. (The designation “Pan” is a polite form of address in Polish that is analogous to the use of “Mister” and “Sir” in English.) Rather than surrender to the Turks, he chooses to perish in the ruins of the city when it is finally overrun. The novel, nevertheless, ends on a positive note, because among those who attend the ceremony accompanying Pan Michael’s interment in a nearby monastery church is the hetman Jan Sobieski, the future king of Poland who was destined to lead a contingent of twenty thousand Polish soldiers to fight against the Turkish forces that were besieging the city of Vienna in the summer of 1683. Sienkiewicz himself was later to write a novel with Jan Sobieski as its protagonist, On the Field of Glory. This novel proved to be a great disappointment to almost everyone, for Sienkiewicz inexplicably failed to depict the victory at Vienna and chose to restrict himself to relating events that occurred during the winter of 1682-1683.
Quo Vadis
Quo Vadis, like the other historical novels by Sienkiewicz, has a cast of fictive and historical personages. This time, however, the non-Polish reader is on familiar ground with respect to the historical background, because the work is set in ancient Rome circa 64 c.e. Among the well-known figures are the Apostles Peter and Paul as well as Nero and Petronius. Petronius was the author of the Satyricon (first century c.e.) and enjoyed the reputation of being the arbiter of elegance throughout Rome. He was also a great favorite of the Emperor Nero, who made him the director of entertainment at his court. It is his fictive nephew, Vinicius, who falls in love with a foreign princess named Lygia. (Her name indicates that she belongs to the tribe known as the Lygians, who inhabited the heartland of Poland in ancient times.) Lygia, it soon becomes known, is a member of the clandestine Christian community in Rome. Vinicius makes several attempts to obtain Lygia’s sexual favors by force, but he is foiled each time by Christians who take it upon themselves to watch out for Lygia’s welfare. As he gets to know the Christians and their doctrines better, Vinicius finds himself gradually transformed into an adherent of the teachings of Jesus. Now that they share a common faith, Lygia agrees to marry Vinicius. The couple’s plans, however, are interrupted by the persecution of Christians that began in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed Rome.
Nero decides to put Rome to the torch in the hope that this personal experience with catastrophe will enable him to compose an immortal epic poem celebrating the city’s destruction. In order to divert suspicion from himself, he subsequently accuses the Christians of having set the fires and has them hunted down all over Rome. Petronius does his best to dissuade the emperor, but to no avail. Both Saint Peter and Saint Paul are to become martyrs on the same day. At first, Saint Peter attempts to escape the persecutions that are decimating his followers by fleeing from Rome along the Appian Way. Before long, he sees a radiant figure coming toward him whom he recognizes as Jesus and asks, “Quo vadis, Domine?” (“Where are you going, Master?”). Jesus replies, “If you desert my people, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.” Thoroughly ashamed of his moral weakness, Saint Peter turns about and retraces his steps. Back in Rome, he himself is crucified. Lygia, for her part, narrowly escapes martyrdom. After being arrested and imprisoned, she is stripped of her clothing and tied to the back of a huge bull that is released into the arena. Her faithful servant, a giant named Ursus, manages to break the bull’s neck with his bare hands. The spectators are so overwhelmed by the feat that they insist on freedom for both Lygia and Ursus. Lygia then joins Vinicius in an escape to Sicily. Having lost the favor of Nero for his defense of the Christians, Petronius is obliged to commit suicide at the request of Nero—an act that he performs with great style at a banquet held in his home. Sienkiewicz concludes the novel with a brief epilogue in which Nero’s own suicide is depicted in a manner that underscores the cowardly nature of the emperor.
All of Sienkiewicz’s historical novels are primarily works in which action is stressed at the expense of psychological development of character. The fact that each of them was first serialized in a periodical greatly influenced the structure of the narrative, for Sienkiewicz felt obliged to conclude every installment with an episode that kept the reader in suspense. The historical accuracy of these works has been the subject of considerable debate. Some historians defend their accuracy; others find fault with it. No one, however, has ever accused Sienkiewicz of failing to research his topic thoroughly or of neglecting to include sufficient data within the novels themselves. More important is the fact that Sienkiewicz possessed the narrative skills and the stylistic gifts needed to create works that quicken the spirit and comfort the heart.
