Images of nudity in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s works

The paper focuses on the previously unexplored topic of various forms of nudity in Sienkiewicz’s writing. The writer’s entire literary output is reviewed here, with special reference to novels (Quo vadis in particular is notorious for a plethora of sadistic erotic scenes). Given the writer’s extraordinary talent for seduction and his creative capabilities, the paper looks into images that could have been considered indecent at that time andwere prudently hushed up. The following modules: Collective nudity and mutilated nudity, Separate naked bodies, Diana at a water fountain, Human statues, and Naked manhood look at Sienkiewicz’s depiction of corporeality, eroticism, and sexuality, which, combined with cruelty, recur to reveal the writer’s intimate fantasies. The figures commonly used by Sienkiewicz in his works making recourse to mythology and other cultural texts include animalisation, reification, hyperbole, and synecdoche; they are particularly refined when it comes to nudity