Embers in the Steppe

Finished Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe Wednesday and feel only slightly more Polish—a little tired, a little defeated, a little melancholy—as if one had actually campaigned against the Turks but seen little action: it’s a long, fairly flat read of the epic sort. One book jacket reviewer claims that “If you are going to read only one literary work in your life about Poland, read Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy.” Perhaps, but if you are that reader, I recommend you read it when you are a boy. Parts of this third volume would make a reasonably salable video game, that is to say, a ripping good bloodbath, but the book as a whole and the love story dominating it are less satisfactory.


One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.

But it was too late for realizations and regrets. Lusnia stooped down, grasped Azia by the hips so that he’d be able to move them back and forth, in much the way that a seamstress moved the eye of a needle she is about to thread, and barked an order at the men who held the waiting horses.

“Move out! Slowly and together!”

The horses started forward. The ropes tightened and pulled on Azia’s legs. His body slid along the ground for barely a moment before it struck the crudely sharpened point of the young, felled tree. [It gets rather graphic here, page 602-3 for the less squeamish among you.]

“Slowly!” the sergeant growled.

[The stake is raised and imbedded in the ground.]

Azia looked down upon all this from his dreadful height. He was fully conscious. This form of execution, which came to the Commonwealth from Valachia a long time before, was all the more dreadful because an impaled victim sometimes lived as long as three days.

[Then it gets worse before Sienkiewicz finally ignites him.]

Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.

Fire in the Steppe

Looking for a beach read in a second-hand bookstore, I found instead Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe, the third fat volume (700 pages) in his heavy trilogy of the Polish national experience in the mid 1600s. While never actually cracking it on the beach (too much sand, too much sun, too much wind, too much surf—how do people actually manage to read on the beach?) I did make it through the first 200 pages in the air-conditioned beach house. On page 199 you can read, “A foreigner is always just a stepson in any other country, but our good Motherland [Poland] will stretch her arms to him and hug him to her breast from the start.”




These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.



But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.

Beginning Polish

This afternoon I enrolled in Beginning Polish at the university. While not usually the first step to becoming Polish, learning the language is without doubt the longest, hardest, and most important of slogs. Language bears and impresses more culture per unit effort than any other ethnomorphic activity. At the very least, if you can talk the talk, you’ve walked a good deal of the walk.


Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.