The Nobel Prize winners in literature

The prize of 1905 has been awarded:

Sienkiewicz, Henryk, born 1846, died November 16, 1916: “because of his splendid merits as an author of historical novels.”⁠[163]

As has been noted in previous chapters, in the Nobel prizes in literature, exponents of the same kind of writing in a country have been honored in successive generations. Björnson and Knut Hamsun, Heyse and Hauptmann, Echegaray and Benavente, Anatole France and Rolland, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Ladislaw Reymont are examples of such awards. Another inference from the lists of winners is that the adjudicators wish to recognize the aspirations and achievements of small countries that are too often overlooked upon the map of world literature. Thus Denmark and Switzerland, Ireland and Belgium have shared with the so-called “great nations” of Europe. Twice has Poland been selected for recognition. The very name suggests struggle and oppression on one hand, hope and faith in ultimate right on the other. In spite of tragic sadness, the messages of Poland in art and literature have been vital and lofty in idealism. Some of the melancholy and passionate yearning of later Poland has been expressed in the poets Michievicz and Slowacki, who are allied in their moods with Chopin; the “Funeral March” was described by Liszt as “the murmuring plaint of a whole nation following the bier of its dearest hopes.”⁠[164] In his book, Poland Reborn, with keen analysis of advance in education and literary opportunities, Roy Devereux says, “Henceforward there will not be need for Polish men of letters like Henryk Sienkiewicz, who belongs as much to Western Europe as to Poland, to seek the protection of a foreign flag for their literary labours.”⁠[165] To Sienkiewicz came the Nobel award in 1905, a surprise to European critics and a blow to Russian aspirants for the honor.

Born in Lithuania, at Wola Okrzejska, in 1846, he was sixty when he received the prize; he was already known by translation to international readers. He belonged to a patrician family and was educated at the University of Warsaw until political conditions, following the revolution of 1863, caused him to leave Poland for Russia, where he edited a journal at St. Petersburg. He wanted to know more of the world so he traveled, in gypsy or Bohemian fashion, in Southern Europe; in 1876 he came to America, to Los Angeles, seeking to found there a Polish Commonwealth of Utopian type. He had written tales and travel sketches under the pseudonym of “Litwos”—Nobody is a Prophet in his own Country and From the Notebook of a Posen. He wrote impressions of America for a Warsaw newspaper; among these earlier sketches were “Janko, the Musician,” “Across the Prairies,” and “In Tartar Captivity.” A later tale, “The Old Bell-Ringer,” was patriotic and wistful.

In 1880 he returned to Poland where he faced sadness in the death of his wife with the panacea of work upon his trilogy of historical romances of Poland. For eight years he worked winters in Warsaw at libraries and in his study, in summers in the Carpathian mountains. The results were the long, imaginative but strictly historical tales of With Fire and Sword, relating events from 1647 to 1651, The Deluge, from 1652 to 1657, and Pan Michael, dealing with the Turkish invasion and incidents from 1670 to 1674. This cycle of romances showed scholarship and dramatic ability, especially in the first and third stories of the trilogy. The background is panoramic; the dialogue is natural in most places. The author visualized individuals and the Polish people, under sentiments of distress, fear, love, conflict, and aspiration. The qualities of honor, patriotism, and faith are emphasized in these portrayals of Poland, under successive invasions of Cossacks, Swedes, and Turks. He idealized Poland and gave hope to his people.

Modern Poland was the setting for his next series of tales, Without Dogma and Children of the Soil. The former is pathological and tragic, the diary of Leon Ploszowski, aristocrat and bore, and his love for his cousin, Aneila. The vices of modern society and self-indulgent forces are in sharp contrast with the heroes of the trilogy. For many years he had studied early Christianity with its opposing force, Paganism. In 1896 he wrote his masterpiece, Quo Vadis, which has been called “an epochal book.” In many translations it was familiar to readers before the Nobel prize was given to its author. Of somewhat similar trend was the later brief message, Let Us Follow Him, which appeared in a single book and is included in the collection of stories and sketches, Hania, in translations by C. W. Dynicwicz, Jeremiah Curtin, and Casimir Gonski.⁠[166]

The confessed purpose of Quo Vadis was to show “how God’s truth, because it is the only Truth, conquered pagan might.” The sustained interest in this religio-historical novel is not gained by melodrama or sensational intrigues. It has breadth and dignity. The characters vary in vividness but among the outstanding photographs are Paul and Petronius, Ursus and Chilo, and the girl captive, Ligeia. He called the tale “A Narrative of the Time of Nero.” The background was convincing but Nero was not successfully drawn; even such a master of characterization as Sienkiewicz could not make the Roman emperor vitally real to modern readers but he introduced several dramatic situations that center about his baffling personality. The question of the title, “Whither goest thou?” was asked of the modern world of unrest and discord, even as it was asked in the days of the apostles; the author felt the need of guides of to-day to hold up the banner of faith and service.

Sympathy and spirituality were qualities found, not alone in Quo Vadis but in many other works in fiction by this Polish writer. Knights of the Cross, recounting the struggle between the Poles and Lithuanians against the Teutons, is a favorite with many readers. After Bread: a Story of Polish Emigrant Life in America (also entitled, For Daily Bread and Peasants in Exile) is typical of his tales of emigration. On the Field of Glory celebrates Sobieski’s rescue of Vienna. Few authors have been so fortunate in English translators as this Polish novelist. Jeremiah Curtin, S. A. Binion, and S. C. de Soissons are among the best known; they have given fine interpretations to his historical trilogy, his religious novel, and such other stories as On the Field of Glory, On the Bright Shore, In Desert and Wilderness, That Third Woman, and In Vain. Sienkiewicz lived until 1916, alert and productive, ever exemplifying the word that he used in a criticism of Zola, “The novel should strengthen life, not undermine it; ennoble it, not defile it; bring good tidings, not evil.”

Ladislaw Stanislaw Reymont

The prize of 1924 has been awarded:

To Reymont, Ladislaw, born 1868: “For his great epic, The Peasants.”⁠[167]

Again, a new generation has come “to hold the candle to light the dark corners of the earth” in Poland, since Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote his novels of historical and religious potency. A new group of authors had come forward, many of them scarcely known outside their racial confines. Among the better known of the representatives of “Young Poland” is Ladislaw Reymont to whom the Nobel prize was given in 1924. A few weeks before this award was made public there appeared a translation of the first part of the four-volume novel, The Peasants by Reymont, with the title, Autumn (Knopf, New York, 1925). The translator was Michael H. Dziewicki, Professor of English Literature at the University of Cracow. The book attracted meager attention until the Nobel prize was announced; then a furor of interest was aroused in this first volume and those to appear since then—Winter, Spring, and Summer. Reymont had visited America twice but escaped much publicity. He had been translated into English as author of The Comedienne (1920), the tale of a girl who sought to be beautiful and famous on the stage but ended in “philisticism.” Some of his short stories had been included in a collection of Polish tales, in the Oxford University series of World Classics (1921). An extract from his industrial novel, The Promised Land, was used in the Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature, edited by Paul Selver, in 1921. He has written more than a score of novels, and is well known and commended in Germany. Comparisons to Sienkiewicz reveal more pictorial skill, more dramatic vigor like that of Dumas, in the older writer, but a realistic force of surpassing effects in Reymont.

His family was of the lower middle class. His father was a windmill owner in Kobiala Wielka, then in Russian Poland, where the author was born in 1868. He went to the village school and attended to the cattle and farm work. One of the interpreters of Reymont to Americans has been Rupert Hughes; in the translation of his Preface to the German edition of The Peasants we read,⁠[168] “Reymont was born to be the epic poet of the Polish village. He is, in spite of his foreign name, a child of that strange, uncouth world where he began his life among goose boys and cowherders, where he drove the herds of his father, the village organist, and whence he has climbed to the rank of a beloved and recognized poet, spending a large part of his life in Paris, the centre of modern culture.” Reymont attended some of the gymnasiums, or High Schools, but he was defiant to the Russian demand not to speak in Polish; sometimes he was expelled.⁠[169]

Several trades and occupations gave Reymont experiences which he has used in some of his fiction. He was a clerk in a store, railway employee, telegraph operator, and longed to travel like the hero of The Dreamer. For a time he was actor in a small company whose reflections are found in The Comedienne and Lilly. He was, also, a novitiate with the Paulist Fathers for a time at Czenstochowa. The Promised Land, with scenes laid at Lotz and indications of revolt against the capitalists and landowners (on the part of the proletariat) was a forerunner of his agrarian novel, The Peasants. The earlier book has been compared with Zola’s Germinal in intense naturalism. In this long story, The Peasants, Reymont became the “mouthpiece of the peasant and rural elements.” Combined with Reymont’s devotion to the peasant village as “protagonist,” is his passion for Nature in her varied aspects; hence he made his divisions of the book to show the four seasons. Like Thomas Hardy and George Meredith he uses Nature as a vital personality in his story, aiding or restraining the development of his leading characters, especially Yagna, who has been called “a Polish Tess.” The English author is superior in condensation and dramatic sympathy.

To use the Polish peasant as literary material is no exclusive trait of Reymont; he has been portrayed by other writers like Ladislaw Orkan, Jan Kasprowicz, and Stanislaw Prybyszewsski. In The Peasants the slow movement is varied by scenes of intense emotion, like the marriage festival in Autumn, or the death of Kuba, like the passionate quest of Yagna and Antek in Winter, and the bitter fight between father and son, husband and lover of Yagna, or the tragic, gruesome scene of the death of the father, old Boryna, in the last pages of Spring. The mob-attack upon Yagna, at the close of Summer, grips the reader and makes a strong climax to the epical story. In addition to specific, haunting situations, there are interwoven customs and legends and a wonderful collection of Polish proverbs (a mine of literature!). Passions of love and hate and revenge, the constant excess of vodka and clouded minds, fear of landlord and slumbering revolt against the loss of forest lands and oncoming industrial domination—such are significant factors in this panoramic novel. In the background is the dull color of the soil, the rank smells and fragrant odors of farmyards and woods, sunsets of splendor, and terrifying storms. One of the most poetic, idealistic passages is the last chapter in Autumn, the passing of the soul of faithful Kuba, after his long years of service and keen suffering:

And higher yet it flew, and higher, yet higher, higher—yea, till it set its feet—

Where man can hear no longer the voice of lamentation, nor the mournful discords of all things that breathe—

Where only fragrant lilies exhale balmy odours, where fields of flowers in bloom waft honey-sweet scents athwart the air; where starry rivers roll over beds of a million hues; where night comes never at all—⁠[170]

Many passages in this novel are repugnant to Anglo-Saxon æsthetic tastes, if one is unable to assimilate the raw sordidness of many modern stories of the soil, with the passages of emotional vigor and poetic beauties. Reymont has revealed, in panoramic form, the life of the Polish peasant, typified in the family and associates of Boryna; he has treated his big theme with psychological insight, realistic photography, and robust idealism. The first and second volumes seem more spontaneous and dramatic than the later. He lacks condensation and incisiveness. An excellent review of the four volumes by Vida Scudder is in The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1925.

Reymont knows America far better than Americans know him or his books, but the discrepancy is being remedied. He enjoys friendship with many men of affairs and letters here, including Rupert Hughes, whose story, What Will People Say? has been translated by Mme. Reymont, a fine linguist, and published serially in the Warsaw Gazeta. Many critics have noted the sincerity of Reymont as man and artist.

In Chapter III, “Naturalism and Nationalism,” of the collected lectures, on Modern Polish Literature, by Roman Dyboski, Professor at Cracow University,⁠[171] there are interesting comments upon Reymont’s earlier work and his tendencies. His attempt at historical fiction, following the lead of Sienkiewicz, was recorded in The Year 1794 but it was, says Professor Dyboski, a failure, the “bewildering mass of details obscured the outlines of the historical picture.” More adapted to his analytical skill are the earlier novels, Ferments and The Dreamer (largely autobiographical in background), and the later, more impersonal tales that deal with anarchists and political conditions, The Vampire and Opium Smokers. Like other critics Professor Dyboski ranks Stephen Zeromski as “supreme in the Polish novel today.” He compares him to Sienkiewicz; he has the dramatic power and concentration which Reymont lacks. Zeromski is “a social pessimist”; like Sienkiewicz he was a short-story writer at first, then turned to history for fictional themes, like Lay of the Leader and has written more recently of contemporaneous conditions. With his faults of diffuseness and unevenness of structure, Reymont is gifted in depicting the small and large interests of the Polish peasant, in revealing their aspirations and dormant passion for freedom.

As an example of “the novel of the soil,” so close to earth that the reader often finds his senses are keen and that other faculties are almost dormant, this epic by Reymont proclaims him a masterful interpreter of peasant life. In every volume there are lapses of interest and diffuseness. In retrospect, however, the many monotonous pages will be forgotten and the outstanding scenes of passionate love, hatred, suffering, and primitive ecstasy will remain in memory as tributes to this second Polish novelist who is listed among the Nobel prize winners in literature.