I had to read several books by Stefan Zeromski during my school years and always had mixed feelings about them. I am not a literary critic, but I agree with Czeslaw Milosz that he was a writer of uneven quality. You can see his literary talent right away (Zeromski was even nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature), but to me everything I read was flawed with naive utopianism and obsession with the theme of independence of Poland. Even in his novel "Dzieje grzechu" (The History of Sin), which in some way (by showing the situations that went beyond the norms of that time) echoed earlier "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy and "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy and caused much uproar not only in Warsaw but also Moscow and St. Petersburg (Zeromski was at that time a Russian citizen), he added some totally unrelated, utopian, and naive subplot about a small Polish community living in a harmonious and classless society. I haven't read "The Faithful River", but I decided to give it a chance by watching this film adaptation. The plot is set during the insurgency of 1863, and the story focuses on a failed relationship between a poor gentlewoman and a rebel aristocrat. When watching historical films, I usually try to understand what happened without taking any sides. I enjoyed watching "The Faithful River" and think that the story was balanced and without any Black characters. So Malgorzata Pieczynska was playing a young woman deserving our sympathy, and Olgierd Lukaszewicz a pretty, pampered, and weak young aristocrat. But to me it was the figure of the Russian captain Wiesnicyn (played by Wojciech Wysocki) that stole the show. Compared to the somewhat anemic Polish main characters, Wiesnicyn was a picturesque and full-blooded character that was truly worthy of Prince Andrei Bolkonski from Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace". So to summarize: under the skillful direction of Tadeusz Chmielewski we have a good show where nobody gets offended. And the analysis of the reasons for the downfall of the January Uprising from 1863? Well, there is a memorable scene in the film "Popioly" ("The Ashes") by Andrzej Wajda, which is also the adaptation of Zeromski's novel with the same name. In this scene, a Polish landlord puts in chains a Polish peasant, and the Austrian official tells the landlord to free the man, because the Austrian law doesn't allow for such humiliating treatment of another human being. I suspect that if we were magically transported to the XIX century Poland, many of us would look at things from the point of view of that chained peasant.
