Bolesław Prus (pronounced: [bɔ'lεswaf 'prus]; Hrubieszów, 20 August 1847 – 19 May 1912, Warsaw), whose actual name was Aleksander Głowacki, is the foremost figure in Polish literature of the late 19th century, and a distinctive voice in world literature. He adopted the pen name "Prus" from his family coat-of-arms. An indelible mark was left on him by his experiences as a 15-year-old soldier in the Polish 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, in which he suffered severe injuries and imprisonment. These early experiences may have precipitated the panic disorder and agoraphobia that were to dog him through life. (This was the same uprising whose preparations impinged tragically on fellow future novelist Joseph Conrad.) In 1872 at age 25, in Warsaw, Prus settled into a 40-year journalistic career that highlighted education, science, technology and economic and cultural development—enterprises vital to the survival of a country that remained partitioned by three empires. As a sideline, in an effort to appeal to readers' aesthetic sensibilities, Prus wrote short stories. Achieving success with these, he went on to employ a broader canvas; between 1886 and 1895, he completed four major novels on "great questions of our age." Of Prus' novels, perennial favorites are The Doll and Pharaoh. The Doll describes the romantic infatuation of a merchant and man of action who is frustrated by his country's backwardness. Pharaoh, Prus' only historical novel, is a study of political power and of the fates of nations; it is set in ancient Egypt at the fall of the 20th Dynasty and New Kingdom. Aleksander Głowacki was born on 20 August 1847 in Hrubieszów, Poland, very near the present-day border with Ukraine. He 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 given into the care of his maternal grandmother, Marcjanna Trembińska of Puławy, and, four years later, into that of his aunt, Domicela Olszewska of Lublin. In 1856 Prus was orphaned by his father's death. In 1862 his brother Leon, a teacher who was thirteen years his elder, took him to Siedlce, then to Kielce.[1] 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, who subsequently became one of the insurrection's leaders. During the Uprising, Leon developed a mental illness that he would suffer from until 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.[2] This experience may have caused his subsequent lifelong agoraphobia.[3] Five months later, in early February 1864, for his role in the Uprising Prus was arrested and imprisoned at Lublin Castle. 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' 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.[4] Prus enrolled at a Lublin gymnasium (where he was a student of Józef Skłodowski, grandfather of Maria Skłodowska-Curie).[5] Graduating on 30 June 1866, he matriculated in the Warsaw University Department of Mathematics and Physics.[6] In 1868 his University studies were cut short by financial difficulties. In 1869 he enrolled at the Agricultural and Forestry Institute in Puławy, a historic town where he had spent part of his childhood and which would be the setting for his striking 1884 micro-story, "Mold of the Earth." Soon, however, he was expelled after a classroom confrontation with a professor of Russian language.[6] 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 Logic. In 1872 he embarked on a career in journalism, while working for several months at the Evans, Lilpop and Rau Machine and Agricultural Implement Works in Warsaw.[7] Journalism would become his school of writing. In 1873 Prus delivered two public lectures whose subjects illustrate the breadth of his scientific interests: "On the Structure of the Universe," and "On Discoveries and Inventions.".[8] As a newspaper columnist, Prus commented on the achievements of scientists and scholars such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and Henry Thomas Buckle;[9] 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;[a] and extolled man-made and natural wonders such as the Wieliczka Salt Mine,[10] the town of Nałęczów, and an 1887 solar eclipse that he witnessed at Mława.[11] His "Weekly Chronicles" spanned forty years (they have since been reprinted in twenty volumes) and would help prepare the ground for the 20th-century blossoming of Polish science and especially mathematics.[b] "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."[12] The social importance of science and technology would recur as a theme in his novels The Doll (1889) and Pharaoh (1895). Of contemporary thinkers, the one who most greatly 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 would call Spencer "the Aristotle of the 19th century" and would write: "I grew up under the influence of Spencerian evolutionary philosophy and heeded its counsels, not those of Idealist or Comtean philosophy."[13] 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.[14] He would use 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 January 14, 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 his release from prison, for two years in 1864–66 while completing secondary school.[15] The couple never had children of their own. They adopted a boy, Emil Trembiński (born September 11, 1886, the son of Prus' wife's brother Michał Trembiński, who had died on November 10, 1888).[16] Emil would be the model for "Rascal" in chapter 48 of Prus' 1895 novel, Pharaoh.[17] On February 18, 1904, at age seventeen, Emil would fatally shoot himself in the chest on the doorstep of an unrequited love.[18][19] It has been alleged that in 1906, at age fifty-nine, 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, Homeless People—a character resembling Dr. Stockman in Ibsen's play, Enemy of the People.[20] Prus, known for his affection for children generally, took a lively interest in little Jan, as attested by a prolific correspondence with Jan's mother (whom Prus attempted to interest in becoming a writer). Jan Sacewicz would become one of Prus' major legatees and an engineer, and would die in a German camp after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944.[21] Though Prus was a gifted writer, initially best known for his humorist work, early on he thought little of his journalistic and literary productions. Hence at the inception of his career in 1872, at age 25, he adopted for his newspaper columns and fiction the pen name "Prus"—"Prus I" being his family coat-of-arms—while reserving his actual name, Aleksander Głowacki, for "serious" writings.[22] In 1878 an incident occurred that illustrated the strong feelings that could be aroused in susceptible readers of newspaper columns. In one of his columns, Prus had criticized the loud and, in his view, inappropriate behavior of some youths at a lecture about the poet Wincenty Pol. The University of Warsaw students in question demanded that Prus retract what he had written. After he refused, on 26 March 1878 several of them surrounded him outside his home, to which he had just returned in the company of two fellow-writers, and one of the students, Jan Sawicki, slapped Prus in the face.[23] Prus summoned police, but subsequently declined to press charges against the students.[24] He remembered the incident, however; and seventeen years later, during his 1895 visit to Paris, he refused, by some accounts, to meet with one of his erstwhile assailants, whom he blamed for having "ruined [his] life," perhaps by having caused or exacerbated his agoraphobia.[25] 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.[26] [27] 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.