Sienkiewicz w lustrze biografii

Relying on post-war biographies of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the article provides an insight into how his life as a writer was modelled through recurring similarities and differences of representation. Both factual and methodological portrayals seem uniform. In 1954 the biographical calendar presented by Julian Krzyżanowski became a point of reference for all following profiles of Sienkiewicz. Moreover, the biographers seem to utilize personal documents in a similar manner – they are to validate their stories. The resulting life writing appears to hold peculiar control over the protagonist’s life, suggesting that special-temporal distance allows us to see more than Sienkiewicz did himself.