The American reception of Henryk Sienkiewicz's 'Quo Vadis'? (Poland)

Returning to Europe after two years in the United States (1876-78), Henryk Sienkiewicz wanted to confront Europe's cultural elites with an alternative social vision which he associated with the social democracy he encountered in the United States. In Quo Vadis? he used the literary device of primitive Christian community to model that social vision.; Quo Vadis? was published in the United States in the fall of 1896. The American 1890s represented the culmination of a quarter century of intense industrialization and urbanization, unsettling the traditional (rural) American way of life. The symbol of that revolution was the urban-industrial city. Because of its deeply religious collective consciousness, America's effort to assess the urban-industrial city turned on two different notions of Christian Commonwealth. The first notion, which I term the Traditionalist mindset, was represented by evangelicals like Josiah Strong. To them the American republic had reached a moment of crisis not unlike that facing ancient Rome, and so they rallied to re-assert the traditional values of the Puritan Commonwealth. Traditionalist Americans read Quo Vadis? as a conflict of civilizations in which the novel's Christian story-line assured the victory of order over chaos.; The alternate American response to the urban-industrial city was the Social Gospel, whose practitioners saw the urban scene as an opportunity to realize Jesus' original plan to build a just society. These Americans perceived an unredeemed paganism behind the facade of America's capitalist wealth. Social Gospelers read Quo Vadis?'s Christianity as a representation of their efforts to establish within the American city the true Christian Commonwealth envisioned by Jesus.; By reading American critical reviews of Quo Vadis? in light of these differing mindsets, I not only show how the novel was read here in the late 1890s, but I also explain why it reached such a wide audience. Although Sienkiewicz had intended Quo Vadis? to engage European elites over issues of social equality, his choice of primitive Christianity as a modeling device for his democratic social vision evoked a negative reaction among European intellectuals while unintentionally assuring the novel an enthusiastic reception in America.