Elucidating the blurred lines of the national historical imagination. The narrative allure of Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword in 1933–1934 Poland

The novel With Fire and Sword by Henry Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) is an example of the interweaving of fiction, historiography and national collective imagination. It was written at the end of the period of Polish partition (1882–1888) and deals with events that marked the history and the collective imaginations of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews: the history of the Khmel’nyts’kyy Uprising (1648–1657). The epic nature of these historical events already carried the seeds of a powerful and emotional narrative that lends itself to mythicization. However, the reading of this book in a later situation, the Second Polish Republic (1921–1939), led the Polish Sanacja government to withdraw it from the compulsory reading in Polish schools in 1932. This aspect of the Jędrzejewicz school reform sparked a lively debate in the Polish press, whereby historians, literature scholars and journalists discussed the function that this book should have in the patriotic education of young Polish citizens, against the backdrop of tensions between the state and the political opposition on the issue of minorities, namely the Ukrainian minority. This discussion discloses the central place that Sienkiewicz has been given in Polish culture. At the same time, it examines the position that Polish intellectuals attribute to the Ukrainian minority in the Polish state and culture.