The Deluge

In 1655 the armies of Sweden pour into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and a state that had been a great power is overrun almost overnight—its king in flight, its magnates going over to the invader, its fortresses falling one after another. Polish memory calls that ruin the “Deluge,” a flood that covered the whole land.

Into that catastrophe rides Andrei Kmita, a young Lithuanian banneret of fierce courage and almost no self-government—a brawler whose own violence wrecks his betrothal to the grave and high-minded Olenka Billevich, and whose soldier's oath binds him to a magnate who is secretly betraying the country to Sweden. Disgraced and bound to traitors, Kmita must remake himself in secret, under a borrowed name, by deeds no one will know are his, until the hidden patriot has done more for Poland than any man who kept his honor easily.

His redemption is sealed at Częstochowa, where the monks and defenders of the hilltop monastery of Jasna Góra hold out against a Swedish siege that becomes the spark to rally a beaten nation. Around Kmita returns the company readers have loved for generations—above all Onufry Zagłoba, the fat, boastful, endlessly resourceful old rogue whose lies somehow save everyone, the figure who gives the grim Trilogy its laughter.

Written “to strengthen the hearts” of a Poland that had been partitioned off the map, The Deluge is the central movement of Sienkiewicz's historical “Trilogy” and one of the great redemption stories in European fiction. The novel that helped win its author the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature, here in the complete public-domain English translation by Jeremiah Curtin.