Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote Quo Vadis and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905, at a time when there was no Polish state for him to represent. He grew up in a partitioned country under Russian rule, worked as a journalist, and spent two years in the United States in the 1870s sending back letters that are still read in Poland. His reputation at home rests on the Trilogy - With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Fire in the Steppe - three enormous novels of the seventeenth-century wars against Cossacks, Swedes and Ottomans, written, in his own phrase, to lift up the hearts of a nation that had been erased from the map. They did, and they also fixed a heroic and contested version of those wars in the Polish imagination that Ukrainian readers have never accepted. Quo Vadis, published in 1896, is set in Nero's Rome and turns on the persecution of the Christians; it was translated everywhere, sold in millions, was filmed repeatedly, and is much of the reason the popular image of Nero looks the way it does. The Nobel citation named his outstanding merits as an epic writer. He spent the First World War in Switzerland organising relief for Polish victims and died in 1916, two years before the country he had written for existed again. His remains were brought back to Warsaw in 1924 and are in St John's Cathedral. The Trilogy is still on the school curriculum in Poland, and the argument about what it does to Polish memory of the borderlands has been running since the 1880s. He gave much of the Nobel money away, including to Polish schools. Quo Vadis has been filmed at least six times.

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