The Outpost (novel) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Outpost was the first of four major novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s by the Polish

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

writer Bolesław Prus. The author sought to bring attention to the plight of rural

Rural

Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...

Poland, which had to contend with poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

, ignorance

Ignorance

Ignorance is a state of being uninformed . The word ignorant is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware and is often used as an insult...

, neglect on the part of the country's upper crust, and colonization by German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck

Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...

's German government.

Publication

Prus began writing The Outpost as early as 1880, initially titling it Nasza placówka (Our Outpost), but soon suspended work on it in favor of close observation of rural life, chiefly around Nałęczów. He resumed work on the novel in 1884.

Written in installments, The Outpost was serial

Serial (literature)

In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...

ized in the illustrated weekly, Wędrowiec (The Wanderer) between March 19, 1885, and May 20, 1886. The first book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

edition

Edition

In printmaking, an edition is a number of prints struck from one plate, usually at the same time. This is the meaning covered by this article...

appeared in 1886.

Plot

The Outpost is a study of rural Poland. Its principal character, a peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

surname

Surname

A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name. In many cases, a surname is a family name. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name"...

d Ślimak ("Snail

Snail

Snail is a common name applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in its most general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. The word snail without any qualifier is however more often...

"), typifies his village's inhabitants, nearly all illiterate; there is no school. Religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

is naively superficial: when a villager happens to buy a painting of Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan is a motif from Greek mythology in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In...

, the community pray before it as they do before two ancient portraits of noblemen who had been benefactors of the local church.

Changes are, however, coming to the area. A railway is being built nearby. The owners of a local manor

Manorialism

Manorialism, an essential element of feudal society, was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the villa system of the Late Roman Empire, was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe, and was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market...

sell their estate to German

Germany

settlers financed by Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck

's German government. Polish landowners, who speak more French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

than Polish

Polish language

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

, are happy to take the money and move to a city or abroad, away from the boring countryside. Ślimak's farm becomes an isolated Polish outpost in an increasingly German-settled neighborhood.

Ślimak suffers a series of adversities as he refuses to sell his plot of land to German setters (who are described not unsympathetically). The stubborn, conservative peasant is not acting from self-interest, since the money he would have gotten could have bought a better farm elsewhere; he is, rather, acting from inertia

Inertia

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. It is proportional to an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to...

and from a principle inculcated in him by his father and grandfather: that when a peasant loses his hereditary plot, he faces the greatest of misfortunes — becoming a mere wage-earner.

Still, Ślimak lacks his wife's strength of will; he hesitates. But on her deathbed she makes him swear that he will never sell their land.

The book's somber picture is relieved by the author's humor and warmth. The local Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

priest, habitué of dinners and hunting parties

Hunting party

*in paleolithic society, a 'natural' clique structure optimized for game hunting, see also bachelor band.*any group of people engaging in sport hunting*Hunting Party *Hunting Party Game...

at local manors, is not entirely devoid of Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

virtues. Two of the village's humbler denizens turn out to be exemplars of selflessness. Ślimak's half-wit farm hand, on finding an abandoned baby, takes it home to care for it. After Mrs. Ślimak dies and the widower's farm burns down, he is befriended by a poor, empathetic Jewish peddler who comes to his aid and, in the manner of a deus ex machina
Deus ex machina
A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...

, saves the day and the farm.

Influences

The Outpost (1886) is not Bolesław Prus' highest achievement as a novelist. It does not show the full psychological depth of The Doll
The Doll (novel)
The Doll is the second of four major novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. It was composed for periodical serialization in 1887-89 and appeared in book form in 1890....

(1889) or the conceptual sweep of Pharaoh
Pharaoh (novel)
Pharaoh is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus . Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history.Pharaoh has been described...

(1895). The Outpost's "happy ending" has a somewhat contrived quality. Still, the book is a respectable achievement in the European tradition of the realistic

Literary realism

Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...

novel

Novel

. Despite Prus' reservations about Émile Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

's naturalism

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

, the Polish writer took some inspirations from the French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

novelist. Prus' Outpost (1885–86) in turn influenced the Polish Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize in Literature

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

-winning novelist Władysław Reymont's treatment, two decades later, of rural life in The Peasants (1904–9).

Film

In 1979, The Outpost was produced as a Polish feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

(Placówka) directed by Zygmunt Skonieczny.

Publication

Plot

Influences

Film

See also