A Legend of Old Egypt - Inspiration

Inspiration

The inspiration for the short story was investigated in a 1962 paper by the foremost Prus scholar, Zygmunt Szweykowski.

What prompted Prus, erstwhile foe of historical fiction, to take time in December 1887, in the midst of writing ongoing newspaper instalments of his second novel, The Doll (1887–89), to pen his first historical story? What could have moved him so powerfully?

Szweykowski follows several earlier commentators in concluding that it was contemporary German dynastic events. In late October 1887, Germany's first modern emperor, the warlike Kaiser Wilhelm I, had taken cold during a hunt and soon appeared to be at death's door; by November 2 a rumor spread that he had died. He rallied, however. Meanwhile his son and successor, the reform-minded Crown Prince Friedrich (in English, "Frederick"), an inveterate smoker, had for several months been undergoing treatment for a throat ailment; the foreign press had written of a dire situation, but only on November 12 did the official German press announce that he in fact had throat cancer.

Prince Frederick had been an object of lively interest among progressive Europeans, who hoped that his eventual reign would bring a broad-based parliamentary system, democratic freedoms, peace, and equal rights for non-German nationalities, including Poles, within the German Empire.

Szweykowski points out that the "Legend's" contrast between the despotic centenarian Pharaoh Ramses and his humane grandson and successor Horus was, in its historic German prototypes, doubled, with Prince Frederick actually facing two antagonists: his father, Kaiser Wilhelm I, and the "Iron Chancellor", Otto von Bismarck. In a curious further parallel, a month after Kaiser Wilhelm's illness, Bismarck suffered a stroke.

Bolesław Prus, who in his "Weekly Chronicles" frequently touched on political events in Germany, devoted much of his December 4, 1887, column to Prince Frederick and his illness. The latest news from Germany and from San Remo, Italy, where the Prince was undergoing treatment, had been encouraging. Prus wrote with relief that "the Successor to the German Throne reportedly does not have cancer." By mid-December, however, the politically-inspired optimism in the Berlin press had again yielded to a sense of despair.

"It was then that Prus wrote 'A Legend of Old Egypt,' shifting a contemporary subject into the past. Prus must have found this maneuver necessary in order to bring to completion what had not yet been completed, avoid sensationalism, and gain perspectives that generalized a particular fact to all human life; the atmosphere of legend was particularly favorable to this.

"In putting Horus to death while Prince Frederick still lived, Prus anticipated events, but he erred only in details, not in the essence of the matter, which was meant to document the idea that 'human hopes are vain before the order of the world.' Frederick, to be sure, did mount the throne (as Frederick III) in March the following year (Kaiser Wilhelm I died on March 9, 1888) and for a brief time it seemed that a new era would begin for Germany, and indirectly for Europe."

But it was not to be. Frederick III survived his father by only 99 days, dying at Potsdam on June 15, 1888, and leaving the German throne to his bellicose son Wilhelm II, who a quarter-century later would help launch World War I.

The connection between the German dynastic events and the genesis of Prus' "Legend of Old Egypt" was recognized in the Polish press already in 1888, even before Frederick's accession to short-lived impotent power, by a pseudonymous writer who styled himself "Logarithmus."

As Szweykowski observes, "the direct connection between the short story and political events in contemporaneous Germany doubtless opens new suggestions for the genesis of Pharaoh."