With spring semester over and time on my hands, I’ve been reading, or rereading actually, but reading, too, so I guess both rereading and reading. I’ve been rereading Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword; I’ve been reading Keith Richards’s Life: With Ax and Smack. (Well okay, I added the subtitle.) No slouch with an R&B lick, yet Keef can’t narrate to save his Life—no story line, no pace, almost pure hedonistic sequence—though aside from that, his book is not without interest, and a good understatement or two, “Land is always the dangerous thing for a boat.” (301) It won’t bear rereading, however.
My second tour of duty in the Ukrainian Steppe, the “Wildlands,” the Sietch, has proved much like the first: nasty, brutish, and almost interminable. Eleven hundred pages, and while not a constantly galloping account of slaughter on an epic scale or sabering on an intimate, the blood of the Poles and Cossacks gushes freely and apace, and, much more to the point on this encore reading, from a common artery. In Sienkiewicz’s eyes, the Poles and the Cossacks were brothers; this was civil war—with, admittedly, little civil about it. “This is a war between brothers!” laments the Voyevode of Kiev, “The blood that flows on both sides is our own!” (441) Well, all men are brothers, more or less; all wars are civil, mostly less. Brotherhood never stopped us from killing one another. Just ask Cain. Brothers, apparently, have to forge their bands against other bands of brothers, and most convincingly, to the death or in the face of it. Wojna! Wojna! gives outlet and the ultimate expression to high-spirited brotherhood: the boys make terrible meaning together, they make war.
And subtler, more sublime meanings, too. After battle, when the wojna slows and quiets, pauses at the funeral of Pan Podbipyenta, Sienkiewicz introduces that rare lyrical and elegiac note on the passing of time, the passing of worlds, and the loss of meaning, of which war might only be a symptom: “Their time was passing. A storm of changes was sweeping through their world. The qualities of knighthood would soon have no meaning. And many of them knew as they mourned Longinus Podbipyenta that they were also weeping for their nations and themselves.” (1066) Sienkiewicz claimed to have written to “uplift [Polish] hearts,” but this brother discovers, perhaps even more, counterpoints of despondency and langor, langor and resignation, futility unto eternal rest. For uplift, I think, I prefer the Stones. Start me up.
