Grażyna Borkowska (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Sienkiewicz’s Theatre of Cruelty

In a slightly meandering fashion, my text examines the problems of violence and physical suffering present in Sienkiewicz’s prose. What is their origin? I am unable to formulate one strong hypothesis. Sienkiewicz’s “theatre of cruelty” had various sources. It came from the mystic-messianic atmosphere that permeated Polish romanticism, from the popular auto-definition of a Pole as a victim – the key figure in our 19^th century culture, perhaps from the baroque imagination, which harmonized with the historical realities of Sienkiewicz’s works, and also from the recognition of a universal code that organizes the order of world (a pre-Socrates code, which was rescued from oblivion by modernism) – the world where war and love, death and love are the forces that establish the common rules of the game. Perhaps, it came also from Sienkiewicz’s own physical condition, considered as unsatisfactory by the writer, painful, connected with some indisposition, physical debilitas, causing the kind of torment that he projected in his novels.