REVIEW: "With Fire and Sword" from the historical perspective (05/23/99)

REVIEW: "With Fire and Sword" from the historical perspective

by Dr. Frank Sysyn

NEW YORK - I have just endured three hours of Jerzy Hoffman's film rendition of Henryk Sienkiewicz's famous (or infamous) novel "With Fire and Sword," the first volume of his trilogy. As the biographer of Adam Kysil, a specialist on the Khmelnytsky era, and the editor of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukraine-Rus', I admit I am not the average viewer. I also should point out that before the film appeared, I wrote a piece in Gazeta Wyborcza with my Lviv colleague Iaroslav Hrytsak outlining how much damage the novel, published in 1883, had done to Polish-Ukrainian relations and voicing concern at what would be the impact of the film.

After having viewed the film, I am much less concerned, though not for the obvious attempts to introduce political correctness in the film. Rather I believe that the modern viewer is so far removed from the taste of Sienkiewicz and that the cinematic sketch so highlights the juvenile aspects of the novel that the film is little likely to shape any world views.

For end-of-the-20th-century Ukrainian and Poles, and still more for their diasporas, it may be worthwhile to recount what all the fuss surrounding this film is about. Sienkiewicz wrote his trilogy in the latter part of the 19th century at a time after the failure of Polish insurrections of 1831 and 1863 had created an atmosphere of despair. He chose another period of great trial for Poland, the middle of the 17th century, to recount in his Walter Scott-like novels. Incorporating pieces of documents just then being published as well as the work of Polish historians, he created a historical epic and a cast of characters that lived on in the minds of generations of Poles. His trilogy imbued patriotism in Polish youth, particularly in the period before the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918, but also during World War II and Communist rule.

Whatever subsequent historians wrote did little to change the potency of Sienkiewicz's image. An attack on the historical accuracy of Sienkiewicz was seen as an attack on Polish nationhood. Thus, when the Polish historian Olgierd Gorka argued in the 1930s that since Polish statehood was now restored it would be advisable to unmask the historical legends and false heroes of Sienkiewicz (above all Jeremi Wisniowiecki-Iarema Vyshnevetsky), he unleashed a storm of controversy in which many eminent Polish historians still defended Sienkiewicz as an authority on Polish history.

In turn, generations of Ukrainians viewed Sienkiewicz as a purveyor of hatred and falsehood. The trilogy deals with the Polish struggle against Swedes, Russians, Tatars and others as well, but only for Polish-Ukrainian relations is Sienkiewicz an apple of discord. The Khmelnytsky uprising, which Hrushevsky described as comparable in significance for the Ukrainians to the Reformation for the Germans or the French Revolution for all Europe, was a touchstone of Ukrainian identity from the hetman's panegyrists of the 17th century to writers and historians of the 20th.

By refocusing Polish national mythology on this period, Sienkiewicz inevitably put it in conflict with Ukrainian national mythology. Ignoring Polish social and religious oppression of the Ukrainians, Sienkiewicz portrayed the rebels as a primitive riffraff and saw no positive consequences of the great revolt. As the dominant Poles of Galicia in the Austrian period and interwar-Poland rammed Sienkiewicz down the throats of captive Ukrainian students, they in fact inculcated the deepest disdain for the writer.

In Communist Poland the first of two parts of the trilogy - "Pan Wolodojowski" and "The Deluge" (Potop) - appeared as films and now in the age of independent Ukraine and independent Poland, part one of the trilogy, that even Ukrainophobic Communist Poland did not permit, has been filmed. Reflecting the new relations between the peoples and the policy of the director, great care has been taken in casting and text to assuage Ukrainian sensitivities. Bohdan Stupka plays Khmelnytsky and Ruslana Pysanka appears as Horpyna. Much Ukrainian is spoken in the film and Ukrainian music pervades the score, though of standard folkloric rather than an authentic bardic duma type. Wisniowiecki emerges as the only figure who analyzes events and situations, even discussing social questions. Barbarity on the Polish side is illustrated.

Yet with all this, many Ukrainians will be troubled by the film. With the exception of Khmelnytsky, the Kozaks emerge as the stereotypical primitives of Polish legend. The film revels in this aspect of the popular uprising rather than the sophisticated Kozak elite of men like Mykhailo Krychevsky and Ivan Vyhovsky who assisted Khmelnytsky in setting up the Kozak Hetmanate. Religious persecution of Orthodoxy is not shown. The answer is simple. These aspects like other political, cultural, religious and national liberating aspects of the revolt are not in Sienkiewicz. But in replacing Sienkiewicz with political correctness and new sensitivities, the director retains the traditional Polish vision of the war as a senseless struggle among brothers.

The final comments at the end of the film on the abolition of the Crimean Khanate (by the way, Crimean Tatars will have much to protest over their depiction), the Zaporozhian Sich, and the commonwealth by Catherine II at the end of the 18th century as the consequence of senseless war. Indeed the passage seems to be echoing Shevchenko. Yet history is never so simple. While bad for the commonwealth, the revolt engendered the Kozak Hetmanate, Ukrainian baroque and the Ukrainian rebirth of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

While I doubt those not steeped in Sienkiewicz will care much about whether Bohun or Skrzetuski gets the girl (indeed Helena is a cardboard figure as she is in Sienkiewicz) the film should renew interest in historical events. The battle scenes alone are worth the price of the ticket, above all to see the huliai-horod, a mobile siege tower.

In general, the film will help reform Polish historical consciousness and even implant Ukrainian historical consciousness in Ukraine.

These two peoples are ready to look at their past in a way that Russians are not ready to do with Ukrainians. This is highlighted by the one failure in political correctness, the casting of the Russian actor Aleksandr Domogarov as Bohun. I do not criticize his acting, merely his political views on the website for the film (in Polish, http://ogniem-i-mieczem.comart.com.pl/obsada.htm). When one clicks on his picture one finds him describing his role: "The action takes place in the time of a bloody war, the breaking apart of Ukraine. For you Poles that is history, for me the present. I myself feel what the breaking apart of lands once united means. In 1955 [sic] Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakstan and Russia were divided by borders." He then describes how a visiting friend of his from Kyiv complains about visas and borders.

For some reason, Bohdan Stupka does not get a spot on the cast photos. He might have a different view about the significance of breaking apart for Ukraine, both in the past and the present.

Dr. Frank Sysyn is Visiting Peter Jacyk Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Columbia University in New York and director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Edmonton.

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