With Fire and Sword

The First Volume of Sienkiewicz's Legendary Trilogy
A Literary Act of Patriotic Resistance Under the Partitions
Adapted into One of the Greatest Spectacles in Polish Cinema
The Foundation of the Slavic Historical Epic

A nation erased from the map. A novelist who gave it back its soul.

Published in 1884, With Fire and Sword was not merely a historical novel. For the Polish nation living under the partitions, it became something far greater — a literary act of resistance, written to strengthen hearts after the defeat of the January Uprising. Henryk Sienkiewicz took his readers back to the 17th century, to the heart of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, where the steppes of Ukraine burned with Cossack rebellions, Tatar raids, and the wartime chaos of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

What Sienkiewicz constructed was not merely a war story. It was an anatomy of a civilization on the edge of collapse: love and honor struggling to survive amid betrayal, fire, and the death of an old world. Alongside fictional heroes — the noble Jan Skrzetuski, the fierce Cossack Bohun, the wild and unforgettable Zagłoba — walk authentic figures of the era: Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Khan Islam III Giray. And beneath them all, the steppe itself lives its own life: empty, endless, menacing, and almost mystical. It is not merely a backdrop. It is a character.

"Sienkiewicz is powerful precisely because he is Poland's dream about itself." —Witold Gombrowicz, writer

The reverberations of With Fire and Sword have never ceased. At the turn of the 20th century it was among the most widely read Polish novels, translated into most European languages and entered into the school canon. Czesław Miłosz wrote that Sienkiewicz gave Poles a historical imagination. In 1999, director Jerzy Hoffman brought the novel to the screen in a monumental film — one of the greatest spectacles in the history of Polish cinema. In 2011, the game Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword allowed players to traverse the Cossack steppes themselves. Sienkiewicz's Trilogy inspired generations of fantasy creators, historical wargame designers, and adventure writers across Central and Eastern Europe.

With Fire and Sword is a novel about a world dying in flames. It is also about everything that refuses to die with it.