Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius de Oszyk-Sienkiewicz , born the May 5th 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, small village of Podlasie (Poland), and dead the November 15th 1916 with Vevey (Swiss), is a Polish writer, prize winner of the Nobel Prize of literature in 1905.

Biography

Henryk Sienkiewicz is the son of modest noble, completely impoverished, who has a small field with Wola Okrzejska, small village of Podlasie, in the east of the Poland, area then placed under the Russian administration. It is high under the authority of a tutor, in company of his older brother and his four younger sisters. His/her mother, who writes worms that it publishes in various newspapers, gives him very young person the taste of the literature.

To September 1858, Henryk, twelve years old, is sent to Warsaw, where it enters to the college. Three years later, his/her parents, ruined, join there after having yielded their grounds. In 1864, at the end of not very brilliant studies, Sienkiewicz, without diploma, decides to try to live of its feather. It is made tutor near a rich person family of Plonsk, where it prepares only his baccalaureat, that it obtains in September 1866. This diploma enables him shortly after to enter to the university, in medicine then in right, finally in letters in February 1867.

While continuing its academic works, Sienkiewicz starts a career of journalist, which succeeds to him rather well. It will however wait two years and on April 18th 1869 to see its first article published in the Polish press, a theatrical criticism for the Przegląd Tygodniowy . During the summer 1872, another newspaper, Wieniec , publishes this time one of its accounts, In vain . The same year, whereas it gives up the university, Przegląd Tygodniowy publishes two volumes of its news, headings Humoresques .

Its activities of chronicler for the Gazeta Polska offer some incomes to him, enabling him to undertake a first travels abroad, in Belgium and France in 1874. Then he undertakes in 1876 a voyage to the the United States. Of this two years tour, during which he will live odd jobs and support of the Polish diaspora, in particular in California, he pays its Lettres of America as well as many news. He makes many stays in Italy and France.

In September 1879, Henryk Sienkiewicz is in Venice, where it becomes acquainted with his future wife, Maria Szetkiewicz. Their marriage is celebrated on September 18th 1881. After the birth of two children, Maria contracts the Tuberculose, of which she dies on October 19th 1885, with Francfort-sur-le-Main, in Germany. In 1883 begins the drafting of its large national novels, By iron and fire , the Flood and Lord Wolodyowski . This cycle forms a trilogy in which lives again the past of the Poland of the 17th century and which is worth with its author admiration without terminals of its compatriots, then of the foreign public. Sienkiewicz becomes the largest Polish novelist of its time. He writes then two social novels, Without Dogme and the Family Polaniecki .

It is in March 1895 which it starts to publish in serial the famous Quo vadis? in the Gazeta Polska , newspaper for which he had worked young person as a journalist. Quo vadis? will be worth in Sienkiewicz to receive in 1905 the Nobel Prize of literature.

It returns then to the history of Poland with the Knights Teutoniques , regarded as its last philosopher's stone. During the First World War, Sienkiewicz takes refuge in Suisse, with Vevey. It organizes helps for his Polish brothers there. He dies of an embolism on November 15th 1916, before to have been able to attend the independence of Poland, for which he had fought so much. Its ashes will turn over to free Poland in 1924.

External bonds

Blazon Oszyk (Łabędź odmieniony) Genealogia Dynastyczna
Museum Henryk Sienkiewicz in Oblęgorek.
Speech of presentation of its Nobel Prize.

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