Manuscript of "In Desert and Wilderness" by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Fragment of the beginning of chapter 10 of "W pustyni i w puszczy" (eng. In Desert and Wilderness", the most popular youth adventure novel of the early 20th century, written by Polish Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz. It was acclaimed both among Polish readers and translated into several languages. The story of Staś and Nel, who are kidnapped for ransom and later travel on their own through the dangerous lands of north-eastern Africa, is Sienkiewicz’s last novel, greatly inspired by his own journey to Africa which he made in 1890. The Ossolineum owns a nearly 200-page autograph of this novel, purchased in the early 1950s. The single leaf presented here comes from a family collection that was unknown until 2018. The manuscript contains a dialogue part that differs from the one known from print, although its general tone remains similar. It is the beginning of Chapter X, when Staś observes the sleeping kidnappers and wonders how to free Nel and himself. The drawings of African animals made by Sienkiewicz’s hand at the bottom of the page are an interesting titbit here. These are images of a lying cheetah with its back turned, a buffalo’s head and two images of baboons; the fifth is a sketch – a lion's head – which was defaced by the author. Text in Polish.