Pan Michael

Through two vast novels Pan Michael Volodyovski had stood a little apart—the small, modest, almost shy colonel of dragoons whose unremarkable person hid the finest blade in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this third and final volume of Henryk Sienkiewicz's “Trilogy,” the little knight comes at last to the center of the stage—and to his end.

The book opens in grief: the woman the little knight was to marry has died, and he means to renounce the world for the cloister. It is the old rogue Zagłoba—coward, braggart, and the comic heart of the whole saga—who storms after him and drags him back among the living, arguing that the Commonwealth has more need of its first soldier than any monastery does. What follows is by turns a love story, courted against the wars of the steppe, as Volodyovski is drawn to the fierce, boyish, fearless Basia, the “little haiduk,” one of Sienkiewicz's freshest heroines.

But the frontier darkens. Beyond the Dniester the whole power of the Ottoman Empire is gathering, and in 1672 the Turkish flood breaks over Podolia and closes on the great fortress of Kamenyets. Having sworn never to surrender it, the little knight keeps his word in the only way left him—dying in the explosion of the citadel rather than yield the wall. His funeral, and the priest's oration over “the Hector of Kamenyets, the first soldier of the Commonwealth,” form one of the most famous passages in all of Polish literature.

Written “to strengthen the hearts” of a Poland that had been partitioned off the map, Pan Michael is the elegiac close of Sienkiewicz's historical “Trilogy”—a book about duty carried to its furthest point, and the twilight of a doomed and glorious age. The saga that helped win its author the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature, here in the complete public-domain English translation by Jeremiah Curtin.