With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz (big ebook reader .txt) 📕
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Goodwill in the seventeenth century Polish Commonwealth has been stretched thin due to the nobility’s perceived and real oppression of the less well-off members. When the situation reaches its inevitable breaking point, it sparks the taking up of arms by the Cossacks against the Polish nobility and a spiral of violence that engulfs the entire state. This background provides the canvas for vividly painted narratives of heroism and heartbreak of both the knights and the hetmans swept up in the struggle.
Henryk Sienkiewicz had spent most of his adult life as a journalist and editor, but turned his attention back to historical fiction in an attempt to lift the spirits and imbue a sense of nationalism to the partitioned Poland of the nineteenth century. With Fire and Sword is the first of a trilogy of novels dealing with the events of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, and weaves fictional characters and events in among historical fact. While there is some contention about the fairness of the portrayal of Polish and Ukrainian belligerents, the novel certainly isn’t one-sided: all factions indulge in brutal violence in an attempt to sway the tide of war, and their grievances are clearly depicted.
The initial serialization and later publication of the novel proved hugely popular, and in Poland the Trilogy has remained so ever since. In 1999, the novel was the subject of Poland’s then most expensive film, following the previously filmed later books. This edition is based on the 1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin, who also translated Sienkiewicz’s later (and perhaps more internationally recognized) Quo Vadis.
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- Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz
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“What was the matter?”
“Wait, Pan Michael, wait! I am terribly blown. I came near losing the use of my legs. Uf!”
“But what was the matter?”
“The devil in his own person—the devil or a dragon! If you cut one head off him, another will grow.”
“But speak plainly!”
“I saw Bogun on the market-square.”
“Are you mad?”
“I saw him on the square, as I live, and with him five or six men, for I nearly lost the use of my legs. They held torches for him, and I thought, ‘Some devil is standing in our road.’ I lost all hope of a successful end to our undertaking. Can this imp of hell be immortal, or what? Don’t speak of him to Helena. Oh, for God’s sake, you slew him; Jendzian gave him up! That wasn’t enough; he is alive now, free, and stands in the way. Oh, my God, my God! I tell you, Pan Michael, that I would rather see a ghost in a graveyard than him. And what devilish luck that I am the first to meet him everywhere! It’s luck to cram down a dog’s throat. Are there no other people in the world? Let others meet him. No! always I, and I.”
“But did he see you?”
“If he had seen me, Pan Michael, you wouldn’t be looking at me now. That alone was wanting.”
“It would be important to know whether he is chasing after us, or is going to Valadinka to Horpyna with the intention of seizing us on the road.”
“It seems to me that he is going to Valadinka.”
“It must be so. Then we shall go on in one direction and he in the opposite; now there are five miles and more between us, and soon there will be twenty-five. Before he hears about us on the road, and returns, we shall be not only in Zbaraj, but in Jolkvi.”
“Your speech, Pan Michael, thank God! is like a plaster to me. But tell me how it can be that he is free, when Jendzian gave him into the hands of the commandant of Vlodava?”
“Oh, he simply ran away!”
“The head of a commandant like that should be struck off. Jendzian! Jendzian!”
“What do you wish, my master?” asked the youth, reining in his horse.
“To whom did you deliver Bogun?”
“To Pan Rogovski.”
“And who is this Pan Rogovski?”
“He is a great knight, a colonel of an armored regiment of the king.”
“There it is for you!” said Volodyovski, snapping his fingers. “Don’t you remember what Pan Longin told about Skshetuski’s enmity with Rogovski? He is a relative of Pan Lashch, on account of whose disgrace he has a hatred for Skshetuski.”
“I understand, I understand!” shouted Zagloba. “He is the one who must have let Bogun out through spite. But that is a capital offence, and smells of death. I’ll be the first to report it.”
“If God lets me meet him,” muttered Volodyovski, “we shall be sure not to go to a tribunal.”
Jendzian did not know yet what the trouble was, for after his answer he pushed forward again to the princess.
They were riding slowly. The moon had risen; the mists, which since evening had settled upon the land, fell away, and the night became clear. Volodyovski was sunk in meditation. Zagloba was digesting for some time yet the remnants of his astonishment; at last he said—
“Bogun would have given it to Jendzian now if he had caught him.”
“Tell him the news; let him be afraid too, and I’ll go immediately to the princess,” answered the little knight.
“Here, Jendzian!”
“Well, what is it?” asked the youth, reining in his horse again.
Zagloba came up with him. He was silent for a while, waiting for Volodyovski and the princess to ride far enough away. At last he asked: “Do you know what has happened?”
“No.”
“Pan Rogovski set Bogun at liberty. I saw him in Ploskiri.”
“In Ploskiri? Today?” asked Jendzian.
“Yes. Why don’t you drop from the saddle?”
The rays of the moon fell straight on the round face of the youth, and Zagloba saw on it not terror, but, to his utmost astonishment, that expression of stern, almost brutal stubbornness which Jendzian had when he killed Horpyna.
“Well, are you not afraid of Bogun?”
“My master,” answered the youth, “if Pan Rogovski has let him go, then I must seek revenge on him again myself for the wrong done me and the insult. I do not forgive him, for I took an oath; and if we were not conducting the lady, I should turn back on the road at once. Let what belongs to me be mine.”
“I am glad not to have offended this young fellow.”
They spurred their horses, and soon came up with the princess and Volodyovski. In an hour they turned through the Medvedovka and entered a forest extending from the very bank of the river in two black walls along the road.
“I know the neighborhood well,” said Zagloba. “There will soon be an end to this forest; after it is about a mile and a quarter of level land, and then another forest still larger extending to Matchin. God grant us to find Polish squadrons there!”
“It is high time that rescue came,” muttered Volodyovski.
They rode awhile in silence over a road clearly lighted by the rays of the moon.
“Two wolves have run across,” said Helena, suddenly.
“Yes,” said Volodyovski, “and here is a third.”
The gray shadow shot across a little more than a hundred rods in front of the horses.
“There is a fourth,” said the princess.
“No, that is a deer. Look—two, three!”
“What the devil!” cried Zagloba. “Deer chasing wolves! The world, I see, is overturned.”
“Let us go a little faster,” cried Volodyovski, with a voice of alarm. “Jendzian, come this way and go ahead with the lady!”
They shot on; but Zagloba bent forward as they rode to Volodyovski’s ear, and inquired:
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