By Tracy Lee Simmons
This column is slightly adapted from the introduction to the new Mount Titano Media republication of the classic novel.
Zealously celebrated and thoroughly thumbed by the literarily inclined up until, say, 1960, Quo Vadis held pride of place on living room bookshelves, back when living rooms still had bookshelves. Now the book is more likely to be found in second-hand bookshops than in corporate-owned chain bookstores. In other words, nowadays the book sits snugly out of sight, out of mind, and certainly out of fashion, but perhaps in part for that very reason, Quo Vadis makes a fair and fresh claim in our day on the consideration of educated people – and of people who would wish to be so. It is due for reclamation in an age of thinning literacy and little faith.
The source of the book's popularity over nearly 70 years, though, requires no explanation, particularly when we reflect upon the leisurely, readerly, tobacco-tinctured, and elocuted Victorian period out of which it arose, a time when attention spans were longer and more reliably mature. It's a well-paced – if not fast-paced – character-driven story, set in the thickets of a distant time and mixing, in equal parts, faith, history, and romance.
And during those earlier decades of the 20th century, when people knew more about both faith and history than we do now, enmeshing oneself in this novel must have been akin to binge-watching a mini-series online today. It's a page-turner. But for many Christians, and for many Catholics especially, familiarity with this book was also de rigueur. Not bad for a novel originally published in Polish.
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was born into a noble but penurious Polish family, schooled in the severe manner of the time and, on reaching his majority and feeling the itch to write, he set out as a journalist and travel writer with an eye for the picturesque and politically dramatic, trekking over Europe and as far as America to pen dispatches on all he saw.
And although later he would try his hand as a newspaper editor, in the end it was the art of fiction that drew out and harnessed his greater talents. It was also fiction that eventually brought him the financial security to practice his skills and fulfill his vocation full time. For this was the century of Dickens and the serialized novel, when readers the world over would wait with finger-biting anxiety for the next installment of epics to appear in popular journals and magazines, making the better novelists of that time something like celebrity filmmakers today.
They told the tales that people talked about. This was a vibrant literary culture. As entertainers, novelists tapped into the public taste, but as artists, they also sought to form that taste, both diverting and enlightening that public by the deft and expansive handling of words. In just this way did the intelligent amusement of one generation become the respected literature of the next.
Quo Vadis stands as one of Sienkiewicz's mature (originally) serialized works. Written in Polish and published in full book form in 1896, it achieved immediate success and was translated liberally into scores of languages as its fame grew. And grow it did. The novel spawned stage productions and, later, several film and television adaptations, making the story familiar even to generations who had never read the book. It is the author's crowning feat. In recognition of his long line of distinguished literary work for a larger public, Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.
While this book may be a work of fiction, not all contained herein is purely fictive. Sienkiewicz takes us back to the ancient Rome of the 60s A.D., days, weeks, and months when the Emperor Nero reigned. Rome was choked in debased corruption, the Great Fire destroyed large swaths of the city, and a small sect that had arisen in provincial Judea from Jewish roots called 'Christians' was slowly infiltrating the debauched cap...
