Mold of the Earth
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"Mold of the Earth" (Polish: "Pleśń świata") is one of the shortest micro-stories by the Polish journalist and novelist Bolesław Prus.
Written in 1884, the story comes from a several years' period of pessimism in the author's life caused by the 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 for less than a year.[1]
[edit] Theme
The story is set adjacent to the Temple of the Sibyl on the grounds of the old Czartoryski estate in Puławy. Next to the Temple is a boulder, overgrown with molds, which at a certain moment magically becomes transformed into a globe.
In his 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 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 major 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, encouraged by their government's policy of expansion into ethnically-Polish territories controlled by Germany.
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, who exerted the greatest influence on Prus' thinking.[2]
The story's setting carries a patriotic subtext, since Izabela and Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski had turned their estate into a leading private center of Polish history and culture. They had particularly dedicated the Temple of the Sibyl as a memorial to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was in their lifetimes, in the 18th century, partitioned out of political existence by its neighbors.
[edit] Inspirations
In 1869, then-22-year-old Bolesław Prus had briefly studied at the Agricultural and Forestry Institute that had been established on the old Czartoryski estate.
"Mold of the Earth" is one of several micro-stories by Bolesław Prus that were partly inspired by 19th-century French prose poetry.[3]
[edit] See also
- Izabela Czartoryska
- Royal Casket
- Czartoryski Museum
- "The Living Telegraph" (a micro-story by Bolesław Prus).
- "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).
- Historic recurrence.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Christopher Kasparek, "Two Micro-Stories by Bolesław Prus," The Polish Review, 1995, no. 1, p. 99.
- ^ Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa, pp. 21-22.
- ^ Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa, p. 99.
[edit] References
- Christopher Kasparek, "Two Micro-Stories by Bolesław Prus," The Polish Review, 1995, no. 1, pp. 99-103.
- Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972.
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