The seemingly forgotten thousand-year-old vicissitudes of the bloody struggle between German feudal lords and the Baltic Slavs receive new life on the pages of the most famous work of the greatest Polish novelist of the mid-20th century. The personification of this struggle in the novel is the image of the valiant Polish king Boleslav I the Brave, who stopped the advance of German troops to the east at the beginning of the 11th century. The traditions of Slavic liberty then collided with the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German nation”: its spokesman in the novel is Emperor Otto III, who sought to create a world monarchy...