SIENKIEWICZ! Does anyone know if Ayn Read read the greatest novel sequence in the Romantic Movement: "The Trilogy," by the Polish Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz? She was aware, of course, of Sienkiewicz's (Sin-KAY-vitch) best-known novel (outside Poland), "Quo Vadis," which had a successful movie version. But I raise the question about "The Trilogy," Sienkiewicz's epic of of the astounding battles against invasion that Poland fought starting about 1648 and continued for decades, because it never had anything like a complete and readable English translation until 1991. My father was brought up speaking Polish and used to say he could understand some Russian, so perhaps it works the other way, but I doubt it applies to a literary work approaching 2900 pages in length (I am just finishing it). Sienkiewicz completed the work in 1887 and believe it or not it was serialized in Polish newspapers even as he wrote it. He wrote it during a period when Poland had lost its independent nationhood, partitioned by the German, Austrian, and Russian empires. It was written, he said, to "uplift the hearts" of his countrymen and keep alive hope and desire for the nation. It has done this for more than a century through trials that Sienkiewicz scarcely could have imagined. "With Fire and Sword," "The Deluge," and "Fire in The Steppe" all describe the wars and internal struggles of Poland, then part of the "Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth," to repel invasion. The insurmountable problems, of course, were not military; the problems were factions struggling to wrest advantage from government, the inability to extend genuine freedom to all classes, and a loss of reverence for the values that motivated the country in earlier times. For example, unlike its monarchist neighbors, where the divine right of kings determined succession, in Poland the king was elected. There were extensive (for that time) guarantees of freedom, property, religious toleration--though not extended equally to all groups. The great themes of "The Trilogy" are that no nation survives loss of its founding ideas and values; and that salvation of the nation ultimately lies in the mind of each citizen. Although I hope to write much more about "The Trilogy," for which Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1895, notable glories of the book are the portrayal of courage, comradeship, and glorious valor in the wars; the achingly intense and beautiful romance in each of the three books; the depth of analysis of the moral corruption that brings a great country down; and the blazingly colorful, complex characters and their moral grandeur. A few interesting notes about "The Trilogy" are that young Sienkiewicz traveled to America and fell lastingly in love with it, writing about it in dispatches that captured the attention of his countrymen; that he translated Victor Hugo's "Ninety-Three" into Polish; and that the translation, at last, of the trilogy into English required eight years of dedicated work by a team of translators and the financial and moral support of dozens of Polish-American organizations. Three percent of Americans, today, identify themselves as of Polish heritage.