Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy still defines Polish historical fiction
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), pen names including Litwos, rose from impoverished Polish nobility under Russian rule to international fame. Poland remembers his seventeenth-century Trilogy—With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Sir Michael—while abroad Quo Vadis sealed his renown. He began publishing in the late 1860s.
Born on 5 May 1846 at Wola Okrzejska in the Lublin Governorate, he took work at nineteen as tutor to the Weyher family in Płońsk, where he probably wrote a first novel, Ofiara, and later destroyed it. A rhymed poem was turned down in 1867; journalism followed in 1869 and fiction in 1872 with the short novel Na Marne. After a broken 1874 engagement to Maria Keller he sailed for the United States in 1876.
His American travel essays made him popular at home, and there he also wrote Charcoal Sketches and a play later staged in Lviv and Warsaw. He left in March 1878, lingering in London and Paris because of rumours he might be drafted into the Russian army. In late 1881 he became editor-in-chief of the new Warsaw paper Słowo, which steadied his finances, though literature soon mattered more to him than editing.
From 1883 he turned to historical novels serialised in that paper: With Fire and Sword from May 1883 to March 1884, The Deluge from December 1884 to September 1886, and Sir Michael from 1887. An anonymous admirer signing himself after the hero Michał Wołodyjowski sent 15,000 rubles, which Sienkiewicz used for a fund helping artists threatened by tuberculosis, named after his first wife, Maria, whom he had nursed through sanatorium stays until her death. Travels to Constantinople, Spain and Africa produced Letters from Africa.
His private life stayed turbulent: a bride married in Kraków in November 1893 left him two weeks later, and papal consent dissolved the union in 1895. Translations brought world fame, culminating in the 1905 Nobel Prize. Quo Vadis, set in Nero’s Rome, has been filmed several times, most famously by Hollywood in 1951.
Source: Henryk Sienkiewicz
