Bolesław Prus | |
|---|---|
.jpg) | |
| Born | Aleksander Głowacki (1847-08-20)20 August 1847 |
| Died | 19 May 1912(1912-05-19) (aged 64) Warsaw, Congress Poland |
| Pen name | Bolesław Prus |
| Occupation | Novelist, journalist, short-story writer |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Period | 1872–1912 |
| Genre | |
| Literary movement | Positivism |
| Spouse | Oktawia Głowacka,née Trembińska |
| Children | Emil Trembiński (adopted) |
| Signature | |
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Aleksander Głowacki (20 August 1847 – 19 May 1912), better known by hispen nameBolesław Prus (Polish:[bɔˈlεswafˈprus]ⓘ), was a Polish journalist, novelist, a leading figure in the history ofPolish literature andphilosophy, and a distinctive voice inworld literature.[1][2]
Aged 15, Aleksander Głowacki joined the Polish1863 Uprising againstImperial Russia. Shortly after his 16th birthday, he suffered severe battle injuries. Five months later, he was imprisoned. These early experiences may have precipitated thepanic disorder andagoraphobia that dogged him through life, and shaped his opposition to seeking Poland's independence by force of arms.
In 1872, inWarsaw, 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 beenpartitioned out of political existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Głowacki took thepen name for his popular writings, "Prus", from the appellation of his family'scoat-of-arms.
As a sideline, he wrote short stories. Achieving success, he proceeded to a larger canvas: between 1884 and 1895, he completed four major novels:The Outpost,The Doll,The New Woman, andPharaoh.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 ofpolitics, set inancient Egypt at the fall of its20th Dynasty andNew Kingdom.
Aleksander Głowacki was born 20 August 1847 inHrubieszów, now in southeastern Poland, very near the present-day border withUkraine. 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 ofŻabcze, inHrubieszów County, and Apolonia Głowacka (née Trembińska).[3]
In 1850, when the futureBolesław Prus was three years old, his mother died; the child was placed in the care of his maternal grandmother, Marcjanna Trembińska ofPuławy, and, four years later, in the care of his aunt, Domicela Olszewska ofLublin. In 1856 Prus wasorphaned by his father's death and, aged 9, began attending a Lublin primary school whose principal, Józef Skłodowski, grandfather of the future doubleNobel laureateMaria Skłodowska-Curie,[4] administered canings (a customary mode of disciplining) to wayward pupils, including the spirited Aleksander.[5]
In 1862, Prus's brother, Leon, a teacher thirteen years his senior, took him toSiedlce, then toKielce.[6]
Soon after the outbreak of the PolishJanuary 1863 Uprising againstImperial Russia, 15-year-old Prus ran away from school to join the insurgents.[7] He may have been influenced by his brother Leon, one of the Uprising's leaders. Leon, during a June 1863 mission to Wilno (nowVilnius) inLithuania for the Polish insurgent government, developed a debilitating mental illness that would end only with his death in 1907.[8]
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 ofSiedlce. He sufferedcontusions to the neck andgunpowder injuries to his eyes, and was captured unconscious on the battlefield and taken to hospital in Siedlce.[9] This experience may have caused his subsequent lifelongagoraphobia.[10]
Five months later, in early February 1864, Prus was arrested and imprisoned atLublin 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.[11]
Prus enrolled at aLublingymnasium (secondary school), the still functioning prestigiousStanisław Staszic School, founded in 1586. Graduating on 30 June 1866, at nineteen he matriculated in theWarsaw University Department of Mathematics and Physics.[12] In 1868, poverty forced him to break off his university studies.[7]
In 1869, he enrolled in the Forestry Department at the newly opened Agriculture and Forestry Institute inPuławy, a historic town where he had spent some of his childhood and which, 15 years later, was the setting for his striking 1884micro-story, "Mold of the Earth", comparinghuman history with the mutual aggressions of blind, mindless colonies of molds that cover a boulder adjacent to theTemple 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.[12]
Henceforth he studied on his own while supporting himself mainly as a tutor. As part of his program of self-education, he translated and summarizedJohn Stuart Mill'sA System of Logic.
In 1872, he embarked on a career as a newspapercolumnist, while working several months at theEvans, Lilpop and Rau Machine and Agricultural Implement Works in Warsaw.[13] 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."[14]
As a newspapercolumnist, Prus commented on the achievements of scholars and scientists such asJohn Stuart Mill,Charles Darwin,Alexander Bain,Herbert Spencer andHenry Thomas Buckle;[15] urged Poles to study science and technology and to develop industry and commerce;[16] encouraged the establishment ofcharitable institutions to benefit the underprivileged;[16] described the fiction and nonfiction works of fellow writers such asH. G. Wells;[17] and extolled man-made and natural wonders such as theWieliczka Salt Mine,[18] an 1887solar eclipse that he witnessed atMława,[19] planned building of theEiffel Tower for the1889 Paris Exposition,[20] andNałęczów, where he vacationed for 30 years.[21]
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 Polishscience and especiallymathematics.[a] "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."[23] The social importance of science and technology recurred as a theme in his novelsThe Doll (1889)[24] andPharaoh (1895).[25]
Of contemporary thinkers, the one who most influenced Prus and other writers of the Polish "Positivist" period (roughly 1864–1900) wasHerbert Spencer, the Englishsociologist who coined the phrase, "survival of the fittest." Prus called Spencer "theAristotle of the 19th century" and wrote: "I grew up under the influence of Spencerianevolutionaryphilosophy and heeded its counsels, not those ofIdealist orComteanphilosophy."[26] Prus interpreted "survival of the fittest," in the societal sphere, as involving not only competition but also cooperation; and he adopted Spencer's metaphor ofsociety as organism.[27] He used this metaphor to striking effect in his 1884micro-story "Mold of the Earth", and in the introduction to his 1895historical novel,Pharaoh.[28]
After Prus began writing regular weekly newspaper columns, his finances stabilized, permitting him on 14 January 1875 to marry adistant 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.[29] 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).[30] Emil was the model for Rascal in chapter 48 of Prus's 1895 novel,Pharaoh.[31] On 18 February 1904, aged seventeen, Emil fatally shot himself in the chest on the doorstep of an unrequited love.[32][33]
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 forStefan Żeromski's Dr. Judym in the novel,Ludzie bezdomni (Homeless People)—a character resembling Dr. Stockman inHenrik Ibsen's play,An Enemy of the People.[34] 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 majorlegatees and an engineer, and died in a German camp after the suppression of theWarsaw Uprising of August–October 1944.[35]
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 thepen name "Prus" ("Prus I" was his familycoat-of-arms), reserving his actual name, Aleksander Głowacki, for "serious" writing.[36]
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 poetWincenty 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.[37] Police were summoned, but Prus declined to press charges.[38]
Seventeen years later, during his 1895 visit toParis, 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 wifeBronisława Dłuska (Marie Skłodowska Curie's sister who 19 years later, in 1914, scoldedJoseph Conrad for writing his novels and stories in English, rather than inPolish for the benefit of Polish culture[39]).[40] 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 ofPolish Positivism,Aleksander Świętochowski, Prus succeeded to the editorship of theWarsaw dailyNowiny (News). The newspaper had been bought in June 1882 by financierStanisław Kronenberg. Prus resolved, in the bestPositivist 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 writingcolumns.[41][42] 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.[43]
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."[44]
In a January 1909 column, Prus discussedH. G. Wells's 1901 book,Anticipations, including Wells's prediction that by the year 2000, following the defeat of Germanimperialism "on land and at sea," there would be aEuropean Union that would reach eastward to include thewestern Slavs—thePoles,Czechs andSlovaks. The latter peoples, along with theHungarians and six other countries, did in fact join theEuropean Union in 2004.[17]
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In time, Prus adopted the French Positivist criticHippolyte Taine's concept of the arts, including literature, as a second means, alongside the sciences, of studying reality,[45][46] and he devoted more attention to his sideline ofshort-story writer. Prus's stories, which met with great acclaim, owed much to the literary influence of Polish novelistJózef Ignacy Kraszewski and, among English-language writers, toCharles Dickens andMark Twain.[47] His fiction was also influenced by French writersVictor Hugo,Gustave Flaubert,Alphonse Daudet andÉmile Zola.[48]
Prus wrote several dozen stories, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length frommicro-story tonovella. 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.[49] The prevalence of themes from everyday life is consistent with the Polish Positivist artistic program, which sought to portray the circumstances of thepopulace rather than those of theRomantic heroes of an earlier generation. The literary period in which Prus wrote was ostensibly aprosaic one, by contrast with thepoetry of the Romantics; but Prus's prose is often apoetic prose. His stories also often contain elements offantasy or whimsy. A fair number originally appeared inNew Year's issues of newspapers.[50]
Prus long eschewed writinghistorical fiction, arguing that it must inevitably distorthistory. He criticized contemporaryhistorical novelists for their lapses in historical accuracy, includingHenryk Sienkiewicz's failure, in the military scenes in hisTrilogy portraying 17th-century Polish history, to describe thelogistics 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).[51][52]
Eventually Prus composed fournovels on what he had referred to in an 1884 letter as "great questions of our age":[53]The Outpost (Placówka, 1886) on the Polish peasant;The Doll (Lalka, 1889) on thearistocracy andtownspeople and onidealists struggling to bring aboutsocial reforms;The New Woman (Emancypantki, 1893) onfeminist concerns; and his onlyhistorical novel,Pharaoh (Faraon, 1895), on mechanisms ofpolitical power. The work of greatest sweep and most universal appeal isPharaoh.[54] Prus's novels, like his stories, were originally published in newspaperserialization.[55]
After having soldPharaoh to the publishing firm of Gebethner and Wolff, Prus embarked, on 16 May 1895, on a four-month journey abroad. He visitedBerlin,Dresden,Karlsbad,Nuremberg,Stuttgart andRapperswil. At the latter Swiss town he stayed two months (July–August), nursing hisagoraphobia and spending much time with his friends, the promising young writerStefan Żeromski and his wife Oktawia. The couple sought Prus's help for thePolish National Museum, housed in the Rapperswil Castle, where Żeromski was librarian.[56]
The final stage of Prus's journey took him toParis, where he was prevented by his agoraphobia from crossing theSeine River to visit the city's southernLeft Bank.[56] He was nevertheless pleased to find that his descriptions of Paris inThe Doll had been on the mark (he had based them mainly on French-language publications).[57] From Paris, he hurried home to recuperate atNałęczów from his journey, the last that he made abroad.[58]
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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'stsar duringNicholas II's 1897 visit to Warsaw.[59] As a rule, Prus did not affiliate himself withpolitical 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.[60]
The disastrousJanuary 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, whenImperial Russia experienced defeat in theRusso-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 byAdam Mickiewicz. Prus wrote, in reference to his earlier position on revolution and strikes: "with the greatest pleasure, I admit it—I was wrong!"[61]
In 1908, Prus serialized, in the WarsawTygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly), his novelDzieci (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, likeThe Doll, a panorama of society and its vital concerns. However, in 1911 and 1912, the novel had barely begun serialization in theIllustrated Weekly when its composition was cut short by Prus's death.[62]
Neither of the two late novels,Children orChanges, is generally regarded as part of the essential Prus canon, andCzesław Miłosz has calledChildren one of Prus's weakest works.[63]
Prus's last novel to meet with popular acclaim wasPharaoh, completed in 1895. Depicting the demise ofancient Egypt'sTwentieth Dynasty andNew Kingdom three thousand years earlier,Pharaoh had also reflected Poland's loss of independence a century before in 1795[64]—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), nearTriple Cross Square, his forty-year journalistic and literary career came to an end when the 64-year-old author died.[65]
The belovedagoraphobic writer was mourned by the nation that he had striven, as soldier, thinker, and writer, to rescue from oblivion.[66] Thousands attended his 22 May 1912 funeral service atSt. Alexander's Church on nearbyTriple Cross Square (Plac Trzech Krzyży) and his interment atPowązki Cemetery.[67]
Prus's tomb was designed by his nephew, the noted sculptorStanisław Jackowski. On three sides it bears, respectively, the novelist's name,Aleksander Głowacki, his years of birth and death, and hispen name,Bolesław Prus. Theepitaph 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 inRome'sProtestant Cemetery.[68][69] 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.[70][71]
Prus's widow, Oktawia Głowacka, survived him by twenty-four years, dying on 25 October 1936.[72]
In 1902 the editor of the WarsawKurier Codzienny (Daily Courier) had opined that, if Prus's writings had been well known abroad, he should have received one of the recently createdNobel Prizes.[73]
On 3 December 1961, nearly half a century after Prus's death, a museum devoted to him was opened in the 18th-century Małachowski Palace atNałęczów, nearLublin in eastern Poland. Outside the palace is a sculpture of Prus seated on a bench. Another statuary monument to Prus at Nałęczów, sculpted by Alina Ślesińska, was unveiled on 8 May 1966.[74] It was at Nałęczów that Prus vacationed for thirty years from 1882 until his death, and that he met the youngStefan Żeromski. Prus stood witness at Żeromski's 1892 wedding and generously helped foster the younger man's literary career.[75]
While Prus espoused apositivist andrealist outlook, much in his fiction shows qualities compatible with pre-1863-Uprising PolishRomantic literature. Indeed, he held the PolishRomantic poetAdam Mickiewicz in high regard.[76] Prus's novels in turn, especiallyThe Doll andPharaoh, with their innovative composition techniques, blazed the way for the 20th-century Polish novel.[77]
Prus' novelThe Doll, with its rich realistic detail and simple, functional language, was considered byCzesław Miłosz to be the great Polish novel.[78]
Joseph Conrad, during his 1914 visit to Poland just asWorld War I was breaking out, "delighted in his beloved Prus" and read everything by the ten-years-older, recently deceased author that he could get his hands on.[79] He pronouncedThe New Woman (the first novel by Prus that he read) "better thanDickens"—Dickens being a favorite author of Conrad's.[80]Miłosz, however, thoughtThe New Woman "as a whole... an artistic failure..."[81]Zygmunt Szweykowski similarly faultedThe New Woman's loose, tangential construction; but this, in his view, was partly redeemed by Prus's humor and by some superb episodes, while "The tragedy of Mrs. Latter and the picture of [the town of] Iksinów are among the peak achievements of [Polish] novel-writing."[82]
Pharaoh, a study ofpolitical power, became the favorite novel of Soviet dictatorJoseph Stalin, prefigured the fate of U.S. PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, and continues to point analogies to more recent times.[83]Pharaoh is often described as Prus's "best-composed novel"[84]—indeed, "one of the best-composed [of all] Polish novels."[85] This was due in part toPharaoh having been composed complete prior to newspaper serialization, rather than being written in installments just before printing, as was the case with Prus's earlier major novels.[86]
The Doll andPharaoh are available in English versions.[87]The Doll has been translated into twenty-eight languages, andPharaoh into twenty-three. In addition,The Doll has been filmed several times (including a1968 film directed byWojciech Jerzy Has) and been produced as a 1977television miniseries (Lalka, directed byRyszard Ber).Pharaoh was adapted into a1966 feature film.
Between 1897 and 1899 Prusserialized in the WarsawDaily Courier (Kurier Codzienny) amonograph onThe Most General Life Ideals (Najogólniejsze ideały życiowe), which systematized ethical ideas that he had developed over his career regardinghappiness,utility andperfection in the lives of individuals and societies.[88] As the monograph's epitome, he wrote: "Perfect your Will, Mind, and Feeling, their corporal organs, and their material tools; be useful to yourselves, to your own ones, and to others, and Happiness, insofar as it exists on this earth, will come of itself."[89] In the monograph, he returned to the society-organizing (i.e., political) interests that had been frustrated during hisNowiny editorship fifteen years earlier. A book edition appeared in 1901 (2nd, revised edition, 1905). This work, rooted inJeremy Bentham'sUtilitarian philosophy andHerbert Spencer's view of society-as-organism, retains interest especially forphilosophers andsocial scientists.[90]
Another of Prus's learned projects remained incomplete at his death. He had sought, over his writing career, to develop a coherent theory of literary composition. Notes of his from 1886 to 1912 were never put together into a finished book as he had intended.[91][b] His precepts included the maxim, "Nouns, nouns and more nouns." Some particularly intriguing fragments describe Prus'scombinatorialcalculations of the millions of potential "individual types" of humancharacters, given a stated number of "individualtraits."[93]
A curiouscomparative-literature aspect has been noted to Prus's career, which paralleled that of his American contemporary,Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914). Each was born and reared in a rural area and had a "Polish" connection (Bierce, born five years before Prus, was reared inKosciusko County, Indiana, and attendedhigh school at thecounty seat,Warsaw, Indiana). Each became awarcasualty withcombathead trauma—Prus in 1863 in the Polish1863–65 Uprising; Bierce in 1864 in theAmerican Civil War. Each experienced false starts in other occupations, and at twenty-five became a journalist for the next forty years; failed to sustain a career as editor-in-chief; achieved celebrity as a short-story writer; lost a son in tragic circumstances (Prus, an adopted son; Bierce, both his sons); attained superb humorous effects by portraying human egoism (Prus especially inPharaoh, Bierce inThe Devil's Dictionary); was dogged from early adulthood by a health problem (Prus,agoraphobia; Bierce,asthma); and died within two years of the other (Prus in 1912; Bierce presumably in 1914). Prus, however, unlike Bierce, went on from short stories to write novels.[94]
In Prus' lifetime and since, his contributions to Polish literature and culture have been memorialized without regard to the nature of the political system prevailing at the time. His 50th birthday, in 1897, was marked by special newspaper issues celebrating his 25 years as a journalist and fiction writer, and a portrait of him was commissioned from artistAntoni Kamieński.[95]
The town where Prus was born,Hrubieszów, near the present Polish–Ukrainian border, is graced by an outdoor sculpture of him.
A 1982 plaque onWarsaw University's administration building, the historicKazimierz Palace, commemorates Prus' years at the university in 1866–68. Across the street (Krakowskie Przedmieście) from the university, inHoly Cross Church, adjacent to the pillar that holdsChopin's heart, a 1936 plaque by Prus' nephewStanisław Jackowski, featuring Prus' profile, is dedicated to the memory of the "great writer and teacher of the nation."[96]
On the front of Warsaw's present-dayulica Wilcza 12 (12 Wolf Street), the site of Prus' last home, is a plaque commemorating the earlier, now-nonexistent building's most famous resident. A few hundred meters from there,ulica Bolesława Prusa (Bolesław Prus Street) debouches into the southeast corner of Warsaw'sTriple Cross Square. In this square stands St. Alexander's Church, where Prus' funeral was held.[97]
In 1937, plaques were installed at Warsaw'sKrakowskie Przedmieście4 and7, where the two chief characters of Prus' novelThe Doll, Stanisław Wokulski and Ignacy Rzecki, respectively, were deduced to have resided.[98] On the same street, in a park adjacent to theHotel Bristol, near the site of a newspaper for which Prus wrote, stands theBolesław Prus Monument, a twice-life-size statue of Prus, sculpted in 1977 byAnna Kamieńska-Łapińska;[99] it is some 12 feet tall, on a minimal pedestal as befits an author who walked the same ground with his fellow men.
Consonant with Prus' interest in commerce and technology, a Polish Ocean Linesfreighter has been named for him.[100]
For 10 years, from 1975 to 1984, Poles honored Prus' memory with a 10-zloty coin featuring his profile. In 2012, to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, the Polish mint produced three coins with individual designs: in gold, silver, and an aluminum-zinc alloy.[101]
Prus' fiction and nonfiction writings continue relevant in our time.[102]
Following is a chronological list of notable works by Bolesław Prus. Translated titles are given, followed by original titles and dates of publication.
Prus' writings have been translated into many languages – hishistorical novelPharaoh, into twenty-four; his contemporary novelThe Doll, into twenty-eight.
Works by Prus have been rendered intoCroatian by a member of theCroatian Academy of Sciences and Arts,Stjepan Musulin.
Undoubtedly the most important novelist ofthe period was Bolesław Prus...
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