Narcyza Zmichowska (1819-76) was the most accomplished female
writer to come out of Poland in the mid-nineteenth century. In
terms of influence and popularity, she was the George Eliot of East
European letters, but her fiction was written less in the realist
style than in the Romantic one. Her novel The Heathen, rendered
here in a crystalline English translation by Ursula Phillips, is
the tale of a doomed love affair between Benjamin, a young man from
a poor but patriotic rural family, and Aspasia, a femme fatale who
is older, beautiful, worldlier, and more sexually liberated. As the
story unfolds, Benjamin falls in love with Aspasia, accompanies her
to Warsaw, and under her influence achieves incredible intellectual
and professional heights-until she tires of him and takes another
lover. Jealous, Benjamin murders Aspasia's new paramour and flees
to his mother in the countryside-where he realizes the full extent
of what he has lost and betrayed. Hence the fundamental tension in
this work, represented by the two women who compete for Benjamin's
affection: the mother, who represents self-abnegation and
redemption from sin, and Aspasia, who represents self-indulgence
and sin itself. In the end, The Heathen embodies a profound
meditation on the limits of these typecasts: the novel not only
explores the restrictions they placed on women during the
nineteenth century, but on human happiness, and Poland's then
tenuous impulse toward modernity.
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