Syrian refugees in Bulgaria. Demotix/Katya Yordanova. All rights reserved.The panic-driven political and media reactions to Europe's current refugee crisis carry an echo of the doom and perdition omnipresent in Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel Potop / The Deluge, published in 1886. This, the second of a trilogy that would help earn Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) the Nobel prize for literature two decades later, depicted the Swedish invasion of Poland in 1626-29 under Gustavus Adophus; its related works portrayed epic struggles in central Europe against Tatar and Ottoman would-be conquerors.
Today's refugee and migratory inflow from the Middle East and north Africa are very distant from these events, both in time and character. But the atmosphere of turmoil is near enough to provoke an imaginative leap across centuries.
By recalling these conflicts for a contemporary Polish audience, Sienkiewicz's purpose was also to underline the importance of the great Polish-Commonwealth Commonwealth of 1569-1795 (retrospectively viewed as the first Polish “republic”) to the history of law, freedom and constitutional governance in Europe. For the Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów (or "Commonwealth of Both Nations" as it was later called) had enlightened features whose memory would persist long after it was in stages partitioned by surrounding empires in the late 18th century.
