Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote 'Wiry' (The Whirlpools), a political novel of manners in 1910. Contemporary opinion regarded it as the grand old man's response to the sniping from left-leaning intelligentsia. They accused him of glamorization of the Polish nobility of a bygone age and of ignoring or misunderstanding the present. The first shots in that campaign had been fired in 1903 in the Warsaw press by Stanislaw Brzozowski, leading ideologist journalist and author of a book titled 'The Whirlpools' (published in 1904). As if to show his determination to confront Brzozowski's challenge head-on, Sienkiewicz chose an identical title for his book. In it he concerns himself again with the situation of the Polish nobility and denounces all those who became attracted by the ideas of the left. The novel also alludes to the Revolution of 1905, which is the subject of disparate opinions and assessments. Sienkiewicz's own judgment was guided by three sacred touchstones - the family, Catholicism and the Poland's independence. Finally, by writing 'The Whirlpools' Sienkiewicz, who had never been fully accepted by his fellow-writers, wanted to prove that he was neither alienated nor out of touch with contemporary social problems.
The article discusses changes in Warsaw's cultural press using the example of the weekly 'Tygodnik Ilustrowany'. In 1905-1906, periodicals were published irregularly and were busy battling with preventive censorship. Journalists, literary critics and men of culture had to face new social problems resulting from the continuous expansion of socialist ideology. Articles by Jankowski, Prus and Reymont provide evidence of the uncertainties experienced by the Kingdom of Poland's cultural elites in the new reality.
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