Bolesław Prus

Five months later, he was imprisoned. These early experiences may have precipitated the panic disorder and agoraphobia that dogged him through life, and shaped his opposition to seeking Poland's independence by force of arms. In 1872, in Warsaw, aged 25, he settled into a 40-year journalistic career that focused on science, technology, education, and economic and cultural development – societal enterprises essential to the perseverance of a people who in the 18th century had been partitioned out of political existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Głowacki took the pen name for his popular writings, "Prus", from the appellation of his family's coat-of-arms. Achieving success, he proceeded to a larger canvas: between 1884 and 1895, he completed four major novels: The Outpost, The Doll, The New Woman, and Pharaoh. The Doll depicts the romantic infatuation of a man of action who is frustrated by his country's backwardness. Pharaoh, his only historical novel, is a study of politics, set in ancient Egypt at the fall of its 20th Dynasty and New Kingdom.

Bolesław Prus studied at University of Warsaw. The recorded working language is Polish. The field of work recorded is fiction. Charles Dickens, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Herbert Spencer are recorded as an influence. Works named in the authority record are The Doll. Distinctions recorded are Cross of Independence with Swords.

Aleksander Głowacki was born 20 August 1847 in Hrubieszów, now in southeastern Poland, very near the present-day border with Ukraine. The town was then in the Russian-controlled sector of partitioned Poland, known as the "Congress Kingdom". Aleksander was the younger son of Antoni Głowacki, an estate steward at the village of Żabcze, in Hrubieszów County, and Apolonia Głowacka (née Trembińska). In 1850, when the future Bolesław Prus was three years old, his mother died; the child was placed in the care of his maternal grandmother, Marcjanna Trembińska of Puławy, and, four years later, in the care of his aunt, Domicela Olszewska of Lublin. In 1856 Prus was orphaned by his father's death and, aged 9, began attending a Lublin primary school whose principal, Józef Skłodowski, grandfather of the future double Nobel laureate Maria Skłodowska-Curie, administered canings (a customary mode of disciplining) to wayward pupils, including the spirited Aleksander. In 1862, Prus's brother, Leon, a teacher thirteen years his senior, took him to Siedlce, then to Kielce. Soon after the outbreak of the Polish January 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, 15-year-old Prus ran away from school to join the insurgents. He may have been influenced by his brother Leon, one of the Uprising's leaders. Leon, during a June 1863 mission to Wilno (now Vilnius) in Lithuania for the Polish insurgent government, developed a debilitating mental illness that would end only with his death in 1907. On 1 September 1863, twelve days after his sixteenth birthday, Prus took part in a battle against Russian forces at a village called Białka, four kilometers south of Siedlce. He suffered contusions to the neck and gunpowder injuries to his eyes, and was captured unconscious on the battlefield and taken to hospital in Siedlce. This experience may have caused his subsequent lifelong agoraphobia. Five months later, in early February 1864, Prus was arrested and imprisoned at Lublin Castle for his role in the Uprising. In early April a military court sentenced him to forfeiture of his nobleman's status and resettlement on imperial lands. On 30 April, however, the Lublin District military head credited Prus's time spent under arrest and, on account of the 16-year-old's youth, decided to place him in the custody of his uncle Klemens Olszewski. On 7 May, Prus was released and entered the household of Katarzyna Trembińska, a relative and the mother of his future wife, Oktawia Trembińska. Prus enrolled at a Lublin gymnasium (secondary school), the still functioning prestigious Stanisław Staszic School, founded in 1586. Graduating on 30 June 1866, at nineteen he matriculated in the Warsaw University Department of Mathematics and Physics. In 1868, poverty forced him to break off his university studies. In 1869, he enrolled in the Forestry Department at the newly opened Agriculture and Forestry Institute in Puławy, a historic town where he had spent some of his childhood and which, 15 years later, was the setting for his striking 1884 micro-story, "Mold of the Earth", comparing human history with the mutual aggressions of blind, mindless colonies of molds that cover a boulder adjacent to the Temple of the Sibyl. In January 1870, after only three months at the institute, Prus was expelled for his insufficient deference toward the martinet Russian-language instructor. Henceforth he studied on his own while supporting himself mainly as a tutor. As part of his program of self-education, he translated and summarized John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic. In 1872, he embarked on a career as a newspaper columnist, while working several months at the Evans, Lilpop and Rau Machine and Agricultural Implement Works in Warsaw. In 1873, Prus delivered two public lectures which illustrate the breadth of his scientific interests: "On the Structure of the Universe", and "On Discoveries and Inventions."

As a newspaper columnist, Prus commented on the achievements of scholars and scientists such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and Henry Thomas Buckle; urged Poles to study science and technology and to develop industry and commerce; encouraged the establishment of charitable institutions to benefit the underprivileged; described the fiction and nonfiction works of fellow writers such as H. G. Wells; and extolled man-made and natural wonders such as the Wieliczka Salt Mine, an 1887 solar eclipse that he witnessed at Mława, planned building of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and Nałęczów, where he vacationed for 30 years. His "Weekly Chronicles" spanned forty years (they have since been reprinted in twenty volumes) and helped prepare the ground for the 20th-century blossoming of Polish science and especially mathematics. "Our national life," wrote Prus, "will take a normal course only when we have become a useful, indispensable element of civilization, when we have become able to give nothing for free and to demand nothing for free." The social importance of science and technology recurred as a theme in his novels The Doll (1889) and Pharaoh (1895). Of contemporary thinkers, the one who most influenced Prus and other writers of the Polish "Positivist" period (roughly 1864–1900) was Herbert Spencer, the English sociologist who coined the phrase, "survival of the fittest." Prus called Spencer "the Aristotle of the 19th century" and wrote: "I grew up under the influence of Spencerian evolutionary philosophy and heeded its counsels, not those of Idealist or Comtean philosophy." Prus interpreted "survival of the fittest," in the societal sphere, as involving not only competition but also cooperation; and he adopted Spencer's metaphor of society as organism. He used this metaphor to striking effect in his 1884 micro-story "Mold of the Earth", and in the introduction to his 1895 historical novel, Pharaoh. After Prus began writing regular weekly newspaper columns, his finances stabilized, permitting him on 14 January 1875 to marry a distant cousin on his mother's side, Oktawia Trembińska. She was the daughter of Katarzyna Trembińska, in whose home he had lived, after release from prison, for two years from 1864 to 1866 while completing secondary school. The couple adopted a boy, Emil Trembiński (born 11 September 1886, the son of Prus's brother-in-law Michał Trembiński, who had died on 10 November 1888). Emil was the model for Rascal in chapter 48 of Prus's 1895 novel, Pharaoh. On 18 February 1904, aged seventeen, Emil fatally shot himself in the chest on the doorstep of an unrequited love. It has been alleged that in 1906, aged 59, Prus had a son, Jan Bogusz Sacewicz. The boy's mother was Alina Sacewicz, widow of Dr. Kazimierz Sacewicz, a socially conscious physician whom Prus had known at Nałęczów. Dr. Sacewicz may have been the model for Stefan Żeromski's Dr. Judym in the novel, Ludzie bezdomni (Homeless People)—a character resembling Dr. Stockman in Henrik Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People. Prus, known for his affection for children, took a lively interest in little Jan, as attested by a prolific correspondence with Jan's mother (whom Prus attempted to interest in writing). Jan Sacewicz became one of Prus's major legatees and an engineer, and died in a German camp after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944. Though Prus was a gifted writer, initially best known as a humorist, he early on thought little of his journalistic and literary work. Hence at the inception of his career in 1872, at the age of 25, he adopted for his newspaper columns and fiction the pen name "Prus" ("Prus I" was his family coat-of-arms), reserving his actual name, Aleksander Głowacki, for "serious" writing. An 1878 incident illustrates the strong feelings that can be aroused in susceptible readers of newspaper columns. Prus had criticized the rowdy behavior of some Warsaw university students at a lecture about the poet Wincenty Pol. The students demanded that Prus retract what he had written. He refused, and, on 26 March 1878, several of them surrounded him outside his home, where he had returned shortly before in the company (for his safety) of two fellow writers; one of the students, Jan Sawicki, slapped Prus's face. Police were summoned, but Prus declined to press charges. Seventeen years later, during his 1895 visit to Paris, Prus's memory of the incident was still so painful that he may have refused (accounts vary) to meet with one of his assailants, Kazimierz Dłuski, and his wife Bronisława Dłuska (Marie Skłodowska Curie's sister who 19 years later, in 1914, scolded Joseph Conrad for writing his novels and stories in English, rather than in Polish for the benefit of Polish culture). These curiously interlinked incidents involving the Dłuskis and the two authors perhaps illustrate the contemporary intensity of aggrieved Polish national pride. In 1882, on the recommendation of an earlier editor-in-chief, the prophet of Polish Positivism, Aleksander Świętochowski, Prus succeeded to the editorship of the Warsaw daily Nowiny (News). The newspaper had been bought in June 1882 by financier Stanisław Kronenberg. Prus resolved, in the best Positivist fashion, to make it "an observatory of societal facts"—an instrument for advancing the development of his country. After less than a year, however, Nowiny—which had had a history of financial instability since changing in July 1878 from a Sunday paper to a daily—folded, and Prus resumed writing columns. He continued working as a journalist to the end of his life, well after he had achieved success as an author of short stories and novels. In an 1884 newspaper column, published two decades before the Wright brothers flew, Prus anticipated that powered flight would not bring humanity closer to universal comity: "Are there among flying creatures only doves, and no hawks? Will tomorrow's flying machine obey only the honest and the wise, and not fools and knaves?... The expected societal changes may come down to a new form of chase and combat in which the man who is vanquished on high will fall and smash the skull of the peaceable man down below." In a January 1909 column, Prus discussed H. G. Wells's 1901 book, Anticipations, including Wells's prediction that by the year 2000, following the defeat of German imperialism "on land and at sea," there would be a European Union that would reach eastward to include the western Slavs—the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks. The latter peoples, along with the Hungarians and six other countries, did in fact join the European Union in 2004.

In time, Prus adopted the French Positivist critic Hippolyte Taine's concept of the arts, including literature, as a second means, alongside the sciences, of studying reality, and he devoted more attention to his sideline of short-story writer. Prus's stories, which met with great acclaim, owed much to the literary influence of Polish novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and, among English-language writers, to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. His fiction was also influenced by French writers Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet and Émile Zola. Prus wrote several dozen stories, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length from micro-story to novella. Characteristic of them are Prus's keen observation of everyday life and sense of humor, which he had early honed as a contributor to humor magazines. The prevalence of themes from everyday life is consistent with the Polish Positivist artistic program, which sought to portray the circumstances of the populace rather than those of the Romantic heroes of an earlier generation. The literary period in which Prus wrote was ostensibly a prosaic one, by contrast with the poetry of the Romantics; but Prus's prose is often a poetic prose. His stories also often contain elements of fantasy or whimsy. A fair number originally appeared in New Year's issues of newspapers. Prus long eschewed writing historical fiction, arguing that it must inevitably distort history. He criticized contemporary historical novelists for their lapses in historical accuracy, including Henryk Sienkiewicz's failure, in the military scenes in his Trilogy portraying 17th-century Polish history, to describe the logistics of warfare. It was only in 1888, when Prus was forty, that he wrote his first historical fiction, the stunning short story, "A Legend of Old Egypt." This story, a few years later, served as a preliminary sketch for his only historical novel, Pharaoh (1895). Eventually Prus composed four novels on what he had referred to in an 1884 letter as "great questions of our age": The Outpost (Placówka, 1886) on the Polish peasant; The Doll (Lalka, 1889) on the aristocracy and townspeople and on idealists struggling to bring about social reforms; The New Woman (Emancypantki, 1893) on feminist concerns; and his only historical novel, Pharaoh (Faraon, 1895), on mechanisms of political power. The work of greatest sweep and most universal appeal is Pharaoh. Prus's novels, like his stories, were originally published in newspaper serialization. After having sold Pharaoh to the publishing firm of Gebethner and Wolff, Prus embarked, on 16 May 1895, on a four-month journey abroad. He visited Berlin, Dresden, Karlsbad, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Rapperswil. At the latter Swiss town he stayed two months (July–August), nursing his agoraphobia and spending much time with his friends, the promising young writer Stefan Żeromski and his wife Oktawia. The couple sought Prus's help for the Polish National Museum, housed in the Rapperswil Castle, where Żeromski was librarian. The final stage of Prus's journey took him to Paris, where he was prevented by his agoraphobia from crossing the Seine River to visit the city's southern Left Bank. He was nevertheless pleased to find that his descriptions of Paris in The Doll had been on the mark (he had based them mainly on French-language publications). From Paris, he hurried home to recuperate at Nałęczów from his journey, the last that he made abroad.

Over the years, Prus lent his support to many charitable and social causes, but there was one event he came to rue for the broad criticism it brought him: his participation in welcoming Russia's tsar during Nicholas II's 1897 visit to Warsaw. As a rule, Prus did not affiliate himself with political parties, as this might compromise his journalistic objectivity. His associations, by design and temperament, were with individuals and select worthy causes rather than with large groups. The disastrous January 1863 Uprising had persuaded Prus that society must advance through learning, work and commerce rather than through risky social upheavals. He departed from this stance, however, in 1905, when Imperial Russia experienced defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and Poles demanded autonomy and reforms. On 20 December 1905, in the first issue of a short-lived periodical, Młodość (Youth), he published an article, "Oda do młodości" ("Ode to Youth"), whose title harked back to an 1820 poem by Adam Mickiewicz. Prus wrote, in reference to his earlier position on revolution and strikes: "with the greatest pleasure, I admit it—I was wrong!" In 1908, Prus serialized, in the Warsaw Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly), his novel Dzieci (Children), depicting the young revolutionaries, terrorists and anarchists of the day – an uncharacteristically humorless work. Three years later a final novel, Przemiany (Changes), was to have been, like The Doll, a panorama of society and its vital concerns. However, in 1911 and 1912, the novel had barely begun serialization in the Illustrated Weekly when its composition was cut short by Prus's death. Neither of the two late novels, Children or Changes, is generally regarded as part of the essential Prus canon, and Czesław Miłosz has called Children one of Prus's weakest works. Prus's last novel to meet with popular acclaim was Pharaoh, completed in 1895. Depicting the demise of ancient Egypt's Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom three thousand years earlier, Pharaoh had also reflected Poland's loss of independence a century before in 1795—an independence whose post-World War I restoration Prus did not live to see. On 19 May 1912, in his Warsaw apartment at 12 Wolf Street (ulica Wilcza 12), near Triple Cross Square, his forty-year journalistic and literary career came to an end when the 64-year-old author died. The beloved agoraphobic writer was mourned by the nation that he had striven, as soldier, thinker, and writer, to rescue from oblivion. Thousands attended his 22 May 1912 funeral service at St. Alexander's Church on nearby Triple Cross Square (Plac Trzech Krzyży) and his interment at Powązki Cemetery. Prus's tomb was designed by his nephew, the noted sculptor Stanisław Jackowski. On three sides it bears, respectively, the novelist's name, Aleksander Głowacki, his years of birth and death, and his pen name, Bolesław Prus. The epitaph on the fourth side, "Serce Serc" ("Heart of Hearts"), was deliberately borrowed from the Latin "Cor Cordium" on the grave of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Below the epitaph stands the figure of a little girl embracing the tomb – a figure emblematic of Prus's well-known empathy and affection for children. Prus's widow, Oktawia Głowacka, survived him by twenty-four years, dying on 25 October 1936. In 1902 the editor of the Warsaw Kurier Codzienny (Daily Courier) had opined that, if Prus's writings had been well known abroad, he should have received one of the recently created Nobel Prizes.

Souls in Bondage (Dusze w niewoli, written 1876, serialized 1877) Fame (Sława, begun 1885, never finished) The Outpost (Placówka, 1885–86) The Doll (Lalka, 1887–89) The New Woman (Emancypantki, 1890–93) Pharaoh (Faraon, written 1894–95; serialized 1895–96; published in book form 1897) Children (Dzieci, 1908; approximately the first nine chapters had originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, in 1907 as Dawn [Świt]) Changes (Przemiany, begun 1911–12; unfinished)

"Granny's Troubles" ("Kłopoty babuni", 1874) "The Palace and the Hovel" ("Pałac i rudera", 1875) "The Ball Gown" ("Sukienka balowa", 1876) "An Orphan's Lot" ("Sieroca dola", 1876) "Eddy's Adventures" ("Przygody Edzia", 1876) "Damnable Happiness" ("Przeklęte szczęście", 1876) "The Honeymoon" ("Miesiąc nektarowy", 1876) "In the Struggle with Life" ("W walce z życiem", 1877) "Christmas Eve" ("Na gwiazdkę", 1877) "Grandmother's Box" ("Szkatułka babki", 1878) "Little Stan's Adventure" ("Przygoda Stasia", 1879) "New Year" ("Nowy rok", 1880) "The Returning Wave" ("Powracająca fala", 1880) "Michałko" (1880) "Antek" (1880) "The Convert" ("Nawrócony", 1880) "The Barrel Organ" ("Katarynka", 1880) "One of Many" ("Jeden z wielu", 1882) "The Waistcoat" ("Kamizelka", 1882) "Him" ("On", 1882) "Fading Voices" ("Milknące głosy", 1883) "Sins of Childhood" ("Grzechy dzieciństwa", 1883) "Mold of the Earth" ("Pleśń świata", 1884: a brilliant micro-story portraying human history as an endless series of conflicts among mold colonies inhabiting a common boulder) "The Living Telegraph" ("Żywy telegraf", 1884) "Orestes and Pylades" ("Orestes i Pylades", 1884) "She Loves Me?... She Loves Me Not?..." ("Kocha—nie kocha?...", a micro-story, 1884) "The Mirror" ("Zwierciadło", 1884) "On Vacation" ("Na wakacjach", 1884) "An Old Tale" ("Stara bajka", 1884) "In the Light of the Moon" ("Przy księżycu", 1884) "A Mistake" ("Omyłka," 1884) "Mr. Dutkowski and His Farm" ("Pan Dutkowski i jego folwark", 1884) "Musical Echoes" ("Echa muzyczne", 1884) "In the Mountains" ("W górach", 1885) "Shades" ("Ciene", 1885: an evocative micro-story on existential themes) "Anielka" (1885) "A Strange Story" ("Dziwna historia," 1887) "A Legend of Old Egypt" ("Z legend dawnego Egiptu", 1888: Prus's stunning first piece of historical fiction; a preliminary sketch for his only historical novel, Pharaoh, which he wrote in 1894–95) "The Dream" ("Sen", 1890) "Lives of Saints" ("Z żywotów świętych", 1891–92) "Reconciled" ("Pojednani", 1892) "A Composition by Little Frank: About Mercy" ("Z wypracowań małego Frania. O miłosierdziu", 1898) "The Doctor's Story" ("Opowiadanie lekarza", 1902) "Memoirs of a Cyclist" ("Ze wspomnień cyklisty", 1903) "Revenge" ("Zemsta", 1908) "Phantoms" ("Widziadła", 1911, first published 1936)

"Letters from the Old Camp" ("Listy ze starego obozu"), 1872: Prus's first composition signed with the pseudonym Bolesław Prus. "On the Structure of the Universe" ("O budowie wszechświata"), public lecture, 23 February 1873. "On Discoveries and Inventions" ("O odkryciach i wynalazkach"): A Public Lecture Delivered on 23 March 1873 by Aleksander Głowacki [Bolesław Prus], Passed by the [Russian] Censor (Warsaw, 21 April 1873), Warsaw, Printed by F. Krokoszyńska, 1873. Translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek. [1] [2] "Travel Notes (Wieliczka)" Kartki z podróży (Wieliczka),1878—Prus's impressions of the Wieliczka Salt Mine; these helped inform the conception of the Egyptian Labyrinth in Prus's 1895 novel, Pharaoh] "A Word to the Public" ("Słówko do publiczności," 11 June 1882 – Prus's inaugural address to readers as the new editor-in-chief of the daily, Nowiny [News], famously proposing to make it "an observatory of societal facts, just as there are observatories that study the movements of heavenly bodies, or—climatic changes.") "Sketch for a Program under the Conditions of the Present Development of Society" ("Szkic programu w warunkach obecnego rozwoju społeczeństwa," 23–30 March 1883—swan song of Prus's editorship of Nowiny) "With Sword and Fire—Henryk Sienkiewicz's Novel of Olden Times" ("Ogniem i mieczem—powieść z dawnych lat Henryka Sienkiewicza," 1884—Prus's review of Sienkiewicz's historical novel, and essay on historical novels) "The Paris Tower" ("Wieża paryska," 1887—whimsical divagations involving the Eiffel Tower, the world's tallest structure, then yet to be constructed for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle) "Travels on Earth and in Heaven" ("Wędrówka po ziemi i niebie," 1887—Prus's impressions of a solar eclipse that he observed at Mława; these helped inspire the solar-eclipse scenes in his 1895 novel, Pharaoh) "A Word about Positive Criticism" ("Słówko o krytyce pozytywnej," 1890—Prus's part of a polemic with Positivist guru Aleksander Świętochowski) "Eusapia Palladino" (1893—a newspaper column about mediumistic séances held in Warsaw by the Italian Spiritualist, Eusapia Palladino; these helped inspire similar scenes in Prus's 1895 novel, Pharaoh) "From Nałęczów" ("Z Nałęczowa," 1894—Prus's paean to the salubrious waters and natural and social environment of his favorite vacation spot, Nałęczów) The Most General Life Ideals (Najogólniejsze ideały życiowe, 1905—Prus's system of pragmatic ethics) "Ode to Youth" ("Oda do młodości," 1905—Prus's admission that, before the Russian Empire's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, he had held too cautious a view of the chances for an improvement in Poland's political situation) "Visions of the Future" ("Wizje przyszłości," 1909—a discussion of H. G. Wells' 1901 futurological book, Anticipations, which predicted, among other things, the defeat of German imperialism, the ascendancy of the English language, and the existence, by the year 2000, of a "European Union" that included the Slavic peoples of Central Europe) "The Poet, Educator of the Nation" ("Poeta wychowawca narodu," 1910—a discussion of the cultural and political principles imparted by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz) "What We... Never Learned from the History of Napoleon" ("Czego nas... nie nauczyły dzieje Napoleona"—Prus's contribution to 16 December 1911 issue of the Warsaw Illustrated Weekly, devoted entirely to Napoleon)

Prus' writings have been translated into many languages – his historical novel Pharaoh, into twenty-four; his contemporary novel The Doll, into twenty-eight.