Mold of the Earth

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"Mold of the Earth" (Polish: "Pleśń świata") is one of Bolesław Prus' shortest micro-stories. Written in 1884, it comes from a several years' period of pessimism in the author's life caused by the lamentable situation of Poland (which nine decades earlier had ceased to exist as an independent country) and by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that he had been editing for less than a year.

In his haunting one-and-a-half-page micro-story, Prus identifies human societies with molds that, over the ages, blindly and impassively contest the surface of the globe. He thus provides a striking metaphor for the competitive struggle for existence that goes on among human societies.

This theme resonates with Prus' last major — and only historical — novel, Pharaoh (1895), and still more with his first novel, The Outpost (1886). The latter novel depicts the struggle of the stolid Polish peasant Ślimak ("Snail"), in the German-ruled part of Poland, to hang onto his farmstead against the encroachments of German settlers who are buying up adjacent land.

Prus' metaphor of society-as-organism, which he uses implicitly in "Mold of the Earth" and explicitly in the introduction to his novel Pharaoh, was borrowed from the sociological writings of Herbert Spencer.