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, upon the completion of the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had ceased to exist as an independent country) and by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that Prus had been editing less than a year.
[edit] Theme
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 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.
[edit] Formal inspiration
"Mold of the Earth" is one of several micro-stories by Bolesław Prus that were partly inspired by 19th-century French prose poetry.
[edit] See also
- "Shades" (a micro-story by Bolesław Prus).
- Prose poetry
- "A Legend of Old Egypt" (Prus' first historical short story).
- Pharaoh (historical novel by Bolesław Prus)
[edit] References
- Christopher Kasparek, "Two Micro-Stories by Bolesław Prus," The Polish Review, vol. XL, no. 1, 1995, pp. 99-103.
