Pan Michal

Pan Michal, a secondary if delightful character in With Fire and Sword, and one of the main characters in Deluge, is now the protagonist of this, the final novel of Sienkiewicz's trilogy. Apparently Sienkiewicz was affected by the criticism of his earlier novels as being too (now unfashionably) romantic (in other words having happy endings) and so he wrote Pan Michael to be a much darker novel, with a not so happy ending. But he would only go so far to satisfy the critics--he added a chapter-long postscript describing the historic battle of Chochim, in which we get a happy ending after all. (But if you're reading Kuniczak's newer translation, beware, he leaves this postscript out. I didn't realize this until I finished the book, and had to go and buy another copy, with Jeremiah's older translation, to get the postscript).