The Deluge

...Good enough to make me curl up again as soon as I could with this 2,000-page book when the translation's quality was already obvious by the prologue and when, after all, there were more than a few other interesting ways to spend my time...

...Together Kmicic/Babinicz and his nation are reborn...

...Sienkiewicz drew extensively on period documents, and melded their substance and language with his own to create a superb style which makes him still one of the richest voices in the Polish language...

...But these are quibbles...

...With Lithuania feeling the Russian scourge, its Calvinist grand hetman Janusz Radziwill thought it prudent to trade this Catholic Vasa for the Protestant Vasa with his state-of-the-art army...

...In Eastern Europe that same year is just as crucial, but here the opposite tendency took hold in its dominant state, the ever less well-ordered Polish Commonwealth...

...My personal favorites are to be found in the walled city of Zamosc where we meet Jan Zamoyski's descendent, who carries his name but not his greatness, leading the life of a "good ol' boy" seventeenth-century szlachta style...

...Kmicic is seduced into a false redemption by Janusz Radziwill, who is astute enough to see the potential of this fiery soldier, and wins Kmicic over to his grand design under false pretenses...

...We already know our "three musketeers"— Skrzetuski, Wolodyjowski, and Zagloba—well, for their adventures in the struggle to suppress the Cossacks constitute With Fire and Sword, the first portion of the trilogy...

...In a word, terrific...

...His conscience and judgment have been formed in war, but not through the conventional military training which has turned Skrzetuski and Wolodyjowski into models of classical valor...

...For Kmicic embodies all the faults that have made Poland's stunning collapse possible...

...Mark O'Connor It is customary in European history to treat 1648 as a watershed...

...Thank you, Mr...

...My trials and tribulations, fair to say, provide me with a certain perspective on W.S...

...You've given us all a wonderful gift...

...Just how good is it...

...She is every bit as tough...

...With the premier army in Europe, battlehardened in the Thirty Years War and now needing to be kept occupied—preferably on the other side of the Baltic—Charles hardly needed prompting...

...Having this 24: 8 May 1992 Commonweal time betrayed not just himself but his commonwealth, Kmicic in his disgrace becomes a wandering knight...

...In this way our chronicler lets us know where he thinks the character faults of future King Michal Korybut took root...

...Thus the heroes of The Deluge, the centerpiece of Henryk Sienkiewicz's brilliant trilogy, have had the bad luck to be born in, as the Chinese curse goes, interesting times...

...In Western Europe the Peace of Westphalia concluded the most ruinous episode in the wars of religion, allowing the steady consolidation and expansion of power in various countries to form what theorists came to term the "well-ordered" state...

...Princess Gryzelda is the widow of Poland's fiercest warrior in the Cossack wars...

...For such a sinner—and such a sinning nation—real redemption is possible only at the holiest of Poland's shrines, Czestochowa...

...Kuniczak's new translation...

...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 25...

...These images still delight, and often persuade...

...Many of its leading families treated King Jan Kazimierz with open contempt, just as they once had his Swedish father, Sigismund Vasa...

...Instead his immersion in guerrilla warfare has made him a scourge to the Russians and the local populace alike...

...Unable to distinguish "good" from "bad" brigandry, his actions cost him the one thing in life which really matters, the respect of his beloved Olenka...

...Babinicz" (Kmicic's Christian conversion must, of course, be represented in a new name) becomes part of the heroic resistance that ever since has formed the core of Polish national/religious consciousness...

...Once the Swedes had severed Lithuania's connection to Poland and ousted the Russians, Radziwill thought he would be able to oust the Swedes in turn and rule Lithuania independently...

...In Jan Kazimierz's case, his earlier career in the Society of Jesus and as a cardinal did not inspire confidence in these most martial of times...

...To be sure, the historian in me grumbled to see "Kmicic" become "Kmita" in this version, and I do think the translator sells his English-speaking audience short by thinking it necessary to spell all these formidable Slavic names phonetically...

...And then the deluge: Swedish armies swept over the commonwealth in 1655 as the magnates ushered them in like locks opening their gates to the sea...

...Then there are figures such as Zagloba who so perfectly represent the "Sarmatian" spirit of the petty szlachta nobility that they have to be fictional...

...The principal hero of The Deluge, Andrzej Kmicic, is a complex and contradictory d'Artagnan, destined to be tested by the most interesting times of all...

...Nevertheless other voices out of the commonwealth also urged him on...

...From the "bright hill" crowned by Czestochowa will flow forth a second deluge, as all elements of Polish society rise up to sweep the Swedes back across the Baltic...

...He is egotistical, willful, and rash...

...The story's the thing, and Sienkiewicz's verve has been captured wonderfully...

...Sigismund owed his throne to the most powerful of Poland's magnates, Jan Zamoyski, who openly referred to his nominal ruler as "our dumb phantom imported from Sweden...

...While the Cossacks continued their struggle "with fire and sword," Russian armies invaded the commonwealth, ravaging large portions of Lithuania...

...The son, however, is not: Sienkiewicz makes the prince's soft belly quiver at the sight of a banquet table...

...1648 marked the beginning of the Cossack rebellion against the Polonized great magnates of the steppes, and when, six years later, the Cossacks under Khmelnytsky allied themselves with Muscovy in their struggle against the Poles, the balance of power in Eastern Europe was irrevocably altered...

...Sienkiewicz knew the complicated history of this period well, and masterfully weaves together the real players in these intricate games of war and diplomacy with other historical individuals (Kmicic, for example) whom he refashions for his own purposes...

...Quite a rousing story...

...Various other of the magnate families, the Opalinskis and the Lubomirskis especially, nurtured private ambitions of their own...

...That richness has inspired me three times over the years to read Potop and follow the adventures of Kmicic as a way of gauging my progress in comprehending Polish...

...Sobiepan" (king of his castle), as he likes to call himself, lives together with his sister and her son...

...The stage was set for Swedish intervenwith tion and the catastrophe known in Polish history as potop, "the deluge...

...Having fled Sweden in 1652 after plotting against King Jan Kazimierz, Poland's vice-chancellor, Radziejowski, urged Charles X Gustavus to exploit these propitious circumstances...