A review by korrick
Quo Vadis by W.S. Kuniczak, Henryk Sienkiewicz

2.0

For a rich man can permit himself everything, even virtue.

[a:Leo Tolstoy|128382|Leo Tolstoy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1617138673p2/128382.jpg], [a:Eliza Orzeszkowa|867310|Eliza Orzeszkowa|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1213934763p2/867310.jpg], [a:Selma Lagerlöf|38266|Selma Lagerlöf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1237932710p2/38266.jpg], [a:Giosuè Carducci|570804|Giosuè Carducci|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1292347400p2/570804.jpg], [a:Albert Sorel|2004105|Albert Sorel|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1488123413p2/2004105.jpg], [a:Lewis Morris|14935479|Lewis Morris|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], [a:John Morley|5816264|John Morley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1356613000p2/5816264.jpg], [a:Rudyard Kipling|6989|Rudyard Kipling|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1550677494p2/6989.jpg], [a:Algernon Charles Swinburne|38634|Algernon Charles Swinburne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1236354754p2/38634.jpg], [a:Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo|18908749|Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], [a:Georg Morris Cohen Brandes|18809056|Georg Morris Cohen Brandes Olo Brandes|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], [a:Jaroslav Vrchlický|3270481|Jaroslav Vrchlický|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1297848984p2/3270481.jpg], Demitrios Bernardakis, and [a:Godfrey Sweven|19033070|Godfrey Sweven|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. These are the fellow nominees of Henryk Sienkiewicz for the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature. Tolstoy received five nominations, Lagerlöf four, Kipling one, while Orzeszkowa garnered the most at eight, so long as nominations of various boards and committees are counted collectively. How many did Sienkiewicz receive, you ask? One, and it makes one think of the kerfuffle surrounding Steinbeck's win, as well as the general severe underrepresentation of women laureates, despite substantive evidence of numerous nominations that continue to reveal themselves every time the Nobel chooses to raise its half-century ban on each year's proceedings. Now, this is hardly the only author who has survived as well as they have this long after their heyday due to Eurocentric ivory tower lauding, but Sienkiewicz just happened to be especially lucky in coming in to my reading trajectory under the right circumstances for me to be especially aware of the fanfiction that capitalist Christianity has bolstered itself with for at least a millennium and a half, and the fact that this is a work that got the grandiose (if extremely poorly received) Golden Age Hollywood treatment just further strengthens my ideas. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but one still wishes history had been a tad less pathetic in its machinations behind the curtain.

Deities do not like to repeat themselves.

Despite this work's heavy bloat and this edition's extremely poorly chosen typeface, had it stuck to its guns of the pure rise and fall of logos and pathos, it would have been a rather stirring drama, a few choice events near the conclusion even going as far to bring a tear to my eye and a stir to my heart. Unfortunately, it is the status quo propaganda, composed of a mélange of wildly fanciful history (look up what firsthand accounts are actually available on Nero and think about how much incentive the rich and educated composers of history must have had when it came to an emperor with some unorthodox ideas about taxation and equity of the classes) and fervid assumptions of its ethos (unlike as is the case with Isis and Judaism and the Roman/Grecian pantheon, people just know that Christianity is the real deal in a manner that makes one think more of the side effects of certain psychoactive plants than anything else), that largely draw its readers today and likely won it its esteemed prize way back when. This, along with some particularly vituperative stances (historical precedents for antisemitism, historical precedents for hatred of "the impoverished masses," historical precedents for antiblackness, slaves that literally sing while they work in blissful Christian households) that smacks more of the author's day than the chronological setting of this composition makes certain longwinded sections expounding on the goodness and greatness of one particular religious cult exceedingly tedious. As such, my favorite parts were whenever Petronius took the stage, as that at least meant that the narrative would stop its entitled whining for two seconds and delve into the lush culture and physicality of a Roman patrician that Sienkiewicz's Tyrian purple prose was far more suitable for. Those were few and far between, but at least I can say with some satisfaction that, as was befitting, Petronius got the last laugh.

Prometheus also sacrificed himself for man; but, alas! Prometheus is an invention of the poets apparently, while people worthy of credit have told me that they saw Christ with their own eyes.

I'm aware that my review as a whole condemns me as a godless heathen. More importantly, it also whets my appetite for certain breeds of ancient texts written in a certain Mediterranean part of the world in the time before certain descendants of theirs declared themselves to be "white" and largely lost a great deal of their powers of rhetoric and overall credibility as a result. 2021 still has a quarter of its lungs to let out in one final gasp of boiling frogs and bloodless politickings of countries that can easily be compared to even the more grotesque of Sienkiewicz's characterizations of the Roman Empire, but I'll be devoting part of that time to drawing up reading schemes for its successor, and there's a good half dozen Ancient Greek/Latin texts of the pre-200 CE era that have been calling my name for some time. This all may seem like a disappointing conclusion to a Nobel laureate work that waited on my shelves for around a decade till I finally got around to it, but honestly, my stance towards going into reads of this sort have been of the 'now that I've read it/them, I never need read it/them again', so any time I come out actually liking the piece makes for extra gratification ('Les Liaisons Dangereuses', 'Dead Souls', and 'Metamorphoses' are a few recent examples of such). So, if you yourself are wondering whether, for all my griping, this is worth powering through for the reading cred, just remain aware that if this text were printed at an average of 250-350 words per page, it'd be around 700-1000 pages, at least. Expanding one's reading horizons is all well and good, but one should always be aware going in of the potential sacrifice of one's eyesight.

And he began to think that a society resting on superior force, on cruelty of which even barbarians had no conception, on crimes and mad profligacy, could not endure.