Between semesters, I’ve finished the first volume of The Deluge, or Potop, the middle blockbuster of Sienkiewicz’s trilogy. The story of an intrepid, wayward, and none too bright Polish brigand, Pan Kmita, Sienkiewicz returns him to the paths of righteousness and true patriotism by means of his devotion to the beautiful and virtuous Olenka. Cloyingly conventional as its plot and plot devices, Potop’s eight hundred pages do rouse the Polish blood of this belle-lettrist, currently in the throes of grammar-induced anemia. (Use the instrumental case of gramatyka here.) At the halfway point in the novel, in Czestochowa, on the walls of the monastery at Jasna Gora, we’re holding off the damn Swedes with artillery, chorale music, and divine intervention—or witchcraft, depending on your denominational point of view.
Less bloody than Ogniem i mieczim, Sienkiewicz pays that much more attention to Polish moustaches, full, heavy, dangling even to the chest, which are tugged upon, chewed, bit down upon, twirled—but not twisted upward, which is a “sly vanity” and a foreign affectation. (84) Invading are the damned Swedes with their “upturned yellow mustache combed out at the ends into a pair of stiff outspread military brushes” (214, 284) or their “flared Reiter” (725) and their pointed chin whiskers; committing treason, the nietszchean dandy Prince Boguslav Radziwill with his “soft, pouting mouth seem[ing] particularly childish under the delicate little mustache” (514), thin and penciled “like a silken fringe.” (696) Or the German Ganhof, with whose “ragged, upswept mustache [he] looked the embodiment of darkness.” (697) The raised wings of moustache betoken an imperial court, not a noble republic.
Not that a single moustache type defines true Poles or Polishness. Pan Sapyeha, the faithful Hetman of this volume, “wore his greying mustache clipped short above his lip which, along with his pointed little beard, made him look somewhat like a foreigner, but he dressed in the robes and costume of a Polish noble.” (678) Rather, the “Polish” wasy are a distinctive national, but not a rigidly uniform, style: natural and abundant, but not wildly shaggy; cultivated and groomed, but not to the point of effeminacy; falling, draping elegantly down, like a bow, like honest defeat, nobly won. Mine begins to approach that ideal, inch by inch.
