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Updated: May 8, 2025
This story gave the first indubitable proof of its author's genius, and to-day in the world's fiction it holds an unassailable place in the front rank. The book is so short that it can be read through in less than two hours; but it gives the same impression of vastness and immensity as the huge volumes of Sienkiewicz.
I doubt whether all those teachers did for Christianity as much as an artist Sienkiewicz did with his charming story, "Quo Vadis?" He aroused so much interest, and so many sympathies even among the unbelievers; I am sure he converted to Christianity many more than any propaganda fides working on a half-political, half-scientific foundation.
In its particular class of fiction, "Taras Bulba" has no equal except the Polish trilogy of Sienkiewicz; and Gogol produces the same effect in a small fraction of the space required by the other. This is of course Romanticism rampant, which is one reason why it has not been highly appreciated by the French critics.
Both of these extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of Immensity we feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of snow, and the long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is the same.
Some critic has said righteously about Sienkiewicz, speaking of his "Deluge," that he is "the first of Polish novelists, past or present, and second to none now living in England, France, or Germany." Historical novels began in England, or rather in Scotland, by the genius of Walter Scott, followed in France by Alexandre Dumas père.
Sienkiewicz has evidently not read Tolstoy, and does not know Nietzsche, he talks about hypnotism like a shopman; on the other hand every page is positively sprinkled with Rubens, Borghesi, Correggio, Botticelli and that is done to show off his culture to the bourgeois reader and make a long nose on the sly at materialism.
I have no money, but I live in the country: there are no restaurants and no cabmen, and money does not seem to be needed. MELIHOVO, April 13, 1895. I am sick of Sienkiewicz's "The Family of the Polonetskys." It's the Polish Easter cake with saffron. Add Potapenko to Paul Bourget, sprinkle with Warsaw eau-de-Cologne, divide in two, and you get Sienkiewicz.
Sienkiewicz considers the Christian faith as the principal and even the only help which humanity needs to bear cheerfully the burden and struggle of every-day life. Equally his personal experience as well as his studies made him worship Christ. He is not one of those who say that religion is good for the people at large.
It is true that he has done it in a masterly manner it is true that he could not have done otherwise, but at the same time there is a fault in the conception, and although Sienkiewicz has covered the precipice with flowers, nevertheless the precipice exists.
It is a favourite question. It is, indeed, the title of two Russian books. The description of the Slavonic temperament given by Sienkiewicz tallies exactly with many prominent characters in Russian novels.
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