A WORTHY NOBEL:

I always tried to read with the greatest possible detachment - the objectivity which I felt befitted a Marxist. I even made it a rule to stop reading any novel the minute I felt I was being carried away by it.

That night I did not try to curb my wish for escapism. On the contrary, I was delighted to be able, for a few hours, to exchange the drabness of my own life for the lives of other people.

By the time I at last finished the book and laid it down, it was midday. My eyes were filled with tears. I was hardly conscious of feeling tired, after a whole night without sleep. It was not until I had finished the book that I looked at its title - Quo Vadis?, by a certain Sienkiewicz. The Petit Larousse informed that he was a Polish novelist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1905. I had never heard of him.

I expect that most of my readers know Quo Vadis?, so that it will not be necessary for me to describe its plot at any length. It is a historical novel, very much in the style of the late nineteenth century, and set in the age of Nero, when a savage persecution of Christians was raging in the imperial capital. The followers of Christ, one after another, were flung to the lions in the circus, or set on fire and left to blaze like torches, to light up the festivities in the Emperor's gardens. Some, like their Master, were crucified. The apostle Paul was put to death, and Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, began, as once before, to waver. He let himself be persuaded that he would be serving the best interests of the Church if he fled. But, when he had left the city walls behind him, he met Christ, walking towards Rome. "Where art Thou going, Lord?" he asked in consternation: "Quo vadis, Domine?" Christ's reply was uncompromising: "As you, Peter, are deserting My flock, I am going to Rome, to be crucified for the second time." No more was needed to make the apostle repent of his cowardice. He turned back, took his place once more at the head of the community, and, not long after, was crucified. On his own plea, as a mark of humility, he was fastened to the cross head downwards.

If I had not been so totally ignorant of everything connected with Christianity, it is quite likely that Sienkiewicz's novel would have made less impression on me. Even as it was, there were many things in it which I did not understand. Why, for instance, was it so important that Peter should die in Rome? Again, I did not see the true significance of his meeting with Christ. These were matters I was as yet unable to understand, for they belonged to the supernatural order whose very existence was a closed book to me. What I found so enthralling in Quo Vadis? was the picture it gave of the life of Christian communities in the first century. I felt suddenly as if everything for which I had been confusedly longing ever since I was fifteen, and had vainly sought in Communism, was not, at all, to be found only in some imaginary utopia. The early Christians had made it come true.

The fact that the book was a novel, not a work of strict historical accuracy, did not at once strike me. As soon as I did realize that it was, after all, a work of the imagination, I made up my mind to find out at all costs whether, and to what extent, Sienkiewicz had respected the truth of history, or whether this was just another bit of propaganda writing on the pattern of the books meekly turned out by Communists at the orders of the Politburo. I knew, for instance, how very little resemblance there was between the kolkhoz of the Russian novel and the kolkhoz of real life. Had the Polish novelist also been turning out clever propaganda with only a very flimsy basis of reality?

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