HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ and ALEXEY KONSTANTINOVICH TOLSTOY: A Case of a Creative Borrowing

Some years ago Julian Krzyzanowski pointed out a paradoxical situation in Sienkiewicz scholarship.1 The tremendous popularity en joyed by this author has never been paralleled by a corresponding thoroughness of studies about him. Until the 1950*5, the major body of works about Sienkiewicz consisted of popular accounts and personal reminiscences. No biography with any claim to definitiveness had been published until 1954, when Kalendarz zycia i twdrczosci2 partly filled this gap. No complete edition of Sienkiewicz's works had been under taken until about the same time. Even the 1948-1955 edition, how ever, was far from being exhaustive; many letters were missing, and the state of libraries in post-war Poland made it impossible to consult the manuscripts of some works. Consequently, a number of novels and stories were reprinted rather than edited on the basis of manuscripts, and newly discovered letters keep appearing in scholarly journals both in Poland and abroad. In addition, Sienkiewicz's works have seldom been subjected to formal study: in critical considerations, the artistic peculiarities of his art always stood second to national problems. This fact made Sienkiewicz extremely vulnerable to the opinions of critics such as Brzozowski or Miiosz,3 who did not care for his "soul uplifting" qualities; they dismissed him as an outdated spokesman for national sentiments without ever bothering to examine his works as products of a powerful artistic imagination. In short, this writer has fared better with his readers than with his critics.