Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer and the 1905 Nobel Prize laureate.

He came from impoverished nobility. The writer’s father descended from Tatars who settled in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the reign of Vytautas. Only in the 18th century did they convert from Islam to Catholicism. His mother came from a Belarusian noble family. He graduated from gymnasium in Warsaw and, from 1866 to 1870, studied in the medical and historical-philological faculties of the Main School (from 1869, the Warsaw University). He made his debut in print as a student in the weekly Przegląd Tygodniowy (1869). From 1873, he was a regular columnist for Gazeta Polska. From 1874 he headed the literary department of the weekly Niwa, and from 1882 he was editor of the conservative newspaper Słowo.

In 1881 he married Maria Szetkiewicz, who died of tuberculosis in 1885, leaving him two children. In 1888, an anonymous admirer gave him 15,000 rubles, with which Sienkiewicz created a foundation named after his late wife that paid scholarships to cultural figures suffering from tuberculosis (the foundation’s scholarships were used, in particular, by Maria Konopnicka, Stanisław Wyspiański, and Kazimierz Tetmajer). His second marriage, to Maria Wołodkowicz from Odessa (1893), ended in divorce at his wife’s initiative (1895). In 1904 he married Maria Babska.

After visiting the United States (1876–1879), he published Letters from a Journey (1876–1878). After returning to Europe, he lived for some time in Paris; in 1879 he was in Lviv, and later visited Venice and Rome. Since then he traveled extensively, repeatedly changing his place of residence (Austria, England, Italy, Lithuania, France, Switzerland; in 1886 — Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece; in 1891 — Egypt, Zanzibar, and so on). In 1900, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his literary career, Sienkiewicz was presented with the estate of Oblęgorek in