The article is an attempt to describe the literary genealogy of the cultural
transformations of the role of a father and the relation father-son in the 19th century.
The key role of literature in the modern liberal education allows us to see in this
discourse the power which has conserved, violated and transformed this group of
stereotypes of masculinity. The writer who exerted the greatest influence on the
building of the attractive models of a man and a boy in the Polish culture was Henryk
Sienkiewicz. The reading of these issues in his work brings the observations which
immensely complicate the conventional images of masculinity or the relation fatherson
in the 19th century culture
