Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846 - 1916) was a Polish novelist, journalist and philanthropist, the leading historical novelist of his country in the nineteenth century. [1] He wrote at a time when Poland did not exist as a state, and described his purpose as writing "to uplift the hearts" of a divided nation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his achievement as an epic writer. [2]
Early life and journalism
Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz was born on 5 May 1846 at Wola Okrzejska, in the part of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire, into an impoverished gentry family. [1] He studied at the Main School in Warsaw, later the University of Warsaw, moving from law and medicine to philology and history before leaving without a degree. He supported himself by writing for the Warsaw press, publishing reviews, sketches and serialised fiction under the pen name Litwos.
Between 1876 and 1878 Sienkiewicz travelled in the United States as a correspondent for the Gazeta Polska, crossing the country to California and reporting on immigrant life, the frontier and American institutions. The dispatches, collected as Letters from a Journey to America, were widely read at home and established his reputation as a prose stylist. [3] He returned to Europe by way of Paris and Italy.
The Trilogy
From 1883 Sienkiewicz began publishing in serial form the three novels that made him a national figure. With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Fire in the Steppe follow the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century against Cossack, Swedish and Ottoman forces, combining documented episodes with invented characters in a manner derived from Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. [1] Their heroic treatment of the national past spoke directly to readers living under partition, and characters such as the diminutive swordsman Michał Wołodyjowski and the boastful Zagłoba entered Polish popular culture permanently.
Quo Vadis and later work
In 1896 Sienkiewicz published Quo Vadis, set in Rome under Nero and centred on the persecution of the early Christians. Translated into more than forty languages, it became one of the international bestsellers of its era and the basis of repeated stage and film adaptations, including the Hollywood production of 1951. [3] It was the work most cited abroad when the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. [2]
He followed it with The Knights of the Cross, a novel of the medieval conflict between Poland and the Teutonic Order, published in 1900 at the height of Prussian pressure on Polish language and property. In 1912 he produced In Desert and Wilderness, an adventure story for young readers set in Sudan and Africa that has remained a standard Polish school text. [1]
Later life and legacy
On the outbreak of the First World War Sienkiewicz settled in Switzerland, where with the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski he organised relief committees for Polish civilian victims of the fighting. He died at Vevey on 15 November 1916, two years before Poland regained independence; his remains were returned to Warsaw in 1924 and interred in St John's Cathedral. [1]
Sienkiewicz remains one of the most widely read authors in the Polish language, and his novels have shaped popular understanding of Polish history for more than a century. [2] Critical opinion has long been divided between admiration for his narrative power and objection to the idealised national vision his historical fiction presents. [3]
