Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz was born in 1846 at Wola Okrzejska, in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland, into an impoverished noble family. He grew up on a succession of family estates, studied philology and history at the university in Warsaw, and began publishing journalism in 1869, often under the pen name Litwos. In 1876 he travelled to the United States with the actress Helena Modjeska, and the letters he sent home from California first made him widely known to Polish readers.

His early stories, such as Janko the Musician and The Lighthouse-Keeper of Aspinwall, gave voice to peasants, emigrants and the powerless. From 1883 he turned to the historical novel: the Trilogy, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Fire in the Steppe, set amid the wars of the seventeenth-century Commonwealth, was read as a consolation for a nation without a state and remains among the most beloved fiction in Polish. Quo Vadis (1896), a tale of early Christians in Nero’s Rome, carried an allegory of spiritual endurance that readers everywhere understood and became an international best-seller. The Knights of the Cross (1900) returned to Poland’s medieval struggle with the Teutonic Order.

The Nobel Prize of 1905 honoured his merits as an epic writer rather than any single book; in accepting it he spoke of Poland as a country pronounced dead that nevertheless lived. Fame turned him toward public causes: he denounced Germanisation, supported relief and educational work, and in 1900 received the estate of Oblęgorek as a national gift. During the First World War he organised Polish war relief from Switzerland, and he died at Vevey in November 1916; in 1924 his remains were brought to St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw.