Pan Wołodyjowski

Pan Wołodyjowski is a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, first published in Polish in 1888. It is the third and final volume of his great Trilogy of historical novels about seventeenth century Poland, following With Fire and Sword and The Deluge. The Trilogy is the central work of nineteenth century Polish historical fiction and the basis on which Sienkiewicz’s reputation in Poland still rests, even more than his more internationally famous Quo Vadis.

The novel is set in the 1670s, somewhat later than the period covered in the first two books of the Trilogy. The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth is facing a major Ottoman invasion under Sultan Mehmed IV, which would culminate in the historic battles at the southern frontier fortress of Kamieniec Podolski and at the famous Polish victory at Chocim in 1673. The central character is the small but enormously skilled swordsman Michał Wołodyjowski, the little knight, who has appeared in the earlier volumes of the Trilogy and who is now the commander of a small garrison at one of the southern frontier outposts. The novel works through the long Turkish campaign, the fall of Kamieniec, and Wołodyjowski’s death in the defense of the fortress, an event Sienkiewicz handles with the kind of national mourning that gave the Trilogy its enormous emotional power in Poland.

The romantic plot follows Wołodyjowski’s complicated love life and his eventual marriage to Basia Jeziorkowska, a young woman whose courage and energy make her one of the most beloved characters in the Trilogy. The portrait of their marriage and of Basia’s life at the frontier garrison is one of the most affecting things Sienkiewicz wrote, partly because it is shadowed throughout by the reader’s growing sense of what will happen at the end of the campaign.

The novel runs about six hundred pages and is best read after With Fire and Sword and The Deluge, since many of the characters and the political background are established in the earlier volumes. For readers who have already read those books, Pan Wołodyjowski is the necessary conclusion. The Trilogy as a whole is one of the great achievements of nineteenth century European historical fiction and pairs naturally with the historical novels of Walter Scott and Alessandro Manzoni.