Novelist and journalist Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1917) became Poland’s first Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1905. He spent time in the United States, recounted in his Letters from America, in part living on a communal farm with a group of utopians who included the great actress, Helena Modrzejewska (“Modjeska” in the U.S.). His most well-known work in his own time was the historical novel, Quo Vadis? (1896) describing the persecution of early Christians in Nero’s Rome and turned into a very successful Hollywood film in 1951.
In this episode, we look at With Fire and Sword, the first novel in Sienkiewicz’s historical Trilogy, recounting Poland’s conflicts with the Cossacks, the Swedes, and with the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. With Fire and Sword brings us to a difficult time in Poland’s relations with the lands that are today Ukraine, during Khmelnytsky’s peasant uprising in 1648 against Polish landowners and their Jewish agents. We ask how the relationship between Poles and the people who lived East of the Dnieper compares to colonialism in countries like England, Belgium, Germany, and France, and how Ruthenians and Cossacks are represented in Sienkiewicz’s novel. We try to gain some insight into what this history meant in the seventeenth century when it happened, in the nineteenth century when the novel was written, and how we can read it today as Ukraine fights for its existence at a time of great solidarity between Poland and Ukraine.
Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website:
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Access the Playlist of the entire series:
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4 окт 2024
