Sienkiewicz, Henryk

Sienkiewicz, Henryk, b 5 May 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, Podlachia, d 15 November 1916 in Vevey, Switzerland. Polish writer. His first novel, Na marne (In Vain, 1872), was set in Kyiv. In Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword, 1884), the first part of his famous historical trilogy, he depicted in a crude, chauvinistic manner the Cossack-Polish War, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and the Ukrainian Cossacks. His approach was condemned by both Ukrainian (Ivan Franko) and Polish (Z. Kaczkowski, A. Świętochowski, Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa) contemporary writers, and the novel's historical distortions have been criticized in books by the Polish historians O. Górka (1934) and Zbigniew Wójcik (1960), and in an essay by Volodymyr Antonovych.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]