Stories by Foreign Authors

Stories by Foreign Authors is an anthology of short fiction in English translation, drawn from various continental European writers of the nineteenth century. The volume catalogued under Henryk Sienkiewicz’s name typically belongs to a multi volume series of such anthologies that publishers issued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to give English readers a wider sense of European short fiction beyond the well known French and Russian masters. Sienkiewicz himself is usually represented in the volume by one or two of his short stories or novellas, alongside work by other continental writers.

Sienkiewicz was at the height of his international fame in the years around 1900, when Quo Vadis had become a global bestseller and when his earlier historical novels were being read in dozens of languages. His short fiction is less well known than the novels but was substantial in its own right. The Polish stories deal mostly with peasant life, with the long Polish history of partition and resistance, and with the experience of Poles living abroad in places like the United States and Australia. The American stories, written after Sienkiewicz’s own travels in California in the 1870s, are some of the more unusual pieces in his catalogue and include several about the experience of Polish settlers in the western states.

The value of an anthology volume of this kind is that it lets a reader find European writers they might not otherwise have come across, in a single comparative format. Sienkiewicz reads differently next to the French realists or the Italian regional writers who typically appear alongside him in such collections, and the comparison gives a clearer sense of what is distinctively Polish about his voice. The anthologies were also a standard way for late Victorian and Edwardian readers to discover writers like Verga, Pérez Galdós, Storm, and other continental figures whose individual collected works were less easy to find in English.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read a story or two at a time. For readers who want more Sienkiewicz, the natural next steps are Quo Vadis for the famous historical novel set in Nero’s Rome, and the Trilogy beginning with With Fire and Sword for the long Polish national epic.