Henryk Sienkiewicz, an early Nobel laureate, wrote historical novels set mostly in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that, like Shakespeare’s history plays, have a resonance well beyond their initial audiences and historical settings. Sienkiewicz lived and wrote at a time when Poland’s imperial neighbors had erased it from the map of Europe, and yet Poland stubbornly refused to disappear. Polish rebellions, particularly against the Russian Empire, kept the hope of independence alive. Polish Legions, under banners that read Za naszą i waszą wolność (“For our freedom and yours”) fought across Europe in places where revolutionary freedom struggled against old empires, establishing a tradition that has continued down through the centuries. Poles cracked the Enigma machine, enabling the World War II Allies to read German communications; Polish airmen formed 16 squadrons in the RAF, including one that shot down the most enemy aircraft during the Battle of Britain. It’s no coincidence that during Russia’s current aggressive war against Ukraine, Poland has been called the world’s largest humanitarian NGO.

Sienkiewicz’s books both draw on and contribute to these traditions. His second-most famous work is a trilogy of novels — With Sword and Fire, The Deluge, Fire on the Steppe — set around the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s wars with Sweden. (His most famous is Quo Vadis, which I have not read.) The trilogy was written, as many editions say on the frontispiece, “to lift up the hearts.” He wrote to bolster Polish patriotism, but the exact content of that patriotism was very much up for grabs. One of the protagonists of the trilogy is Lithuanian. Other key characters came from the Commonwealth’s eastern border regions and would probably be Ukrainian today; still other characters have Tartar ancestry, as in fact numerous Polish nobles did.

I gather that within modern Polish literary circles, liking Sienkiewicz is a rather retrograde position: he is a writer who was old-fashioned before 1900, his characters loudly proclaim their Catholic faith, he writes sympathetically of the glory of battle. That’s all true, but I think it’s a bit like criticizing Shakespeare for being a Tudor partisan who cast other dynasties in a negative light. Siekiewicz also writes movingly about the pity of war, his main characters are unforgettable, and the sweep of his epic puts much of modern fantasy to shame. In this case, I am glad to be a foreigner and not have to worry that liking Sienkiewicz puts me at odds with my peers.

On the Field of Glory was published in 1906, Sienkiewicz’s third-to-last book, written when he was nearly 60. It is set in 1682–83, when Poland is on the verge of going to war with the Ottoman Empire to lift the siege of Vienna, a turning point in European history. I had expected that the book would be mostly set during the campaign, but nearly all of the action happens before the Polish army has begun to gather, and Vienna itself is only mentioned in an epilogue that the translator put together from contemporary Polish sources. (Sienkiewicz did not write the other two parts of a planned trilogy that would presumably have carried the tale through to the great battle.) This expectation threw me a little bit, and I spent a fair part of the novel’s early chapters wondering when Sienkiewicz would get on with it.

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