Sienkiewiczowskie opisywanie świata
Sienkiewicz’s Description of the World

The Case of “Listy z Afryki” (“Letters from Africa”)

Summary/Abstract: Henryk Sienkiewicz’s „Listy z Afryki” („Letters from Africa”) are made subject of the paper, which is analysed from the autobiographical perspective and also reconstructed as based on the writer’s private correspondence and his letters to family authored by count Jan Tyszkiewicz, Sienkiewicz’s fellow traveller. The material serves to present the writer’s travelling self-image—a rare reverse of his image from the times of his American travel. The biographical-artistic project, that combined commercial and artistic purposes, proved to be only partially successful. The greatest hindrance of both the travel and the relation from it was that Sienkiewicz too blindly trusted the image of Africa that he knew from books before he started the journey. The certainty that to describe this continent one needs to “translate” it into the conventions required by the expectations of the then audience is decisive in the attitude to the letters from America that record Sienkiewicz’s real cognitional adventure

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