The Deluge is a historical novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, published in 1886. It is the second volume of a three-volume series known to Poles as "The Trilogy," having been preceded by With Fire and Sword (1884) and followed by Fire in the Steppe (1888).
Sienkiewicz combines the adventure novel with the historical love story, setting the action in the huge territory from Silesia to easternmost Ukraine, mostly in military camps, but also at the royal court, in the manors of the nobility, and in local parliaments.
The novel tells a story of a fictional Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth soldier and noble Andrzej Kmicic and shows a panorama of the Commonwealth during its historical period of the Deluge, which was a part of the Northern Wars.
The novel describes the Swedish invasion of Poland known as The Deluge.
The novel was adapted for the screen by Polish director Jerzy Hoffman in 1974, as The Deluge.
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was a Polish journalist and Nobel Prize-winning novelist. A Polish noble, he was one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer."
Many of his novels remain in print. In Poland he is best known for his "Trilogy" of historical novels - With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe - set in the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; internationally he is best known for Quo Vadis, set in Nero's Rome.