Pharaoh (novel) - Themes

Themes

Pharaoh belongs to a Polish literary tradition of political fiction whose roots reach back to the 16th century and Jan Kochanowski's play, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578), and also includes Ignacy Krasicki's Fables and Parables (1779) and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz's The Return of the Deputy (1790). Pharaoh's story covers a two-year period, ending in 1085 BCE with the demise of the Egyptian Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom.

Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Pharaoh:

The daring conception of novel Pharaoh... is matched by its excellent artistic composition. It be as a novel on... mechanism of state power and, as such, is probably unique in world literature of the nineteenth century.... Prus, selecting the reign of 'Pharaoh Ramses XIII' in the eleventh century, sought a perspective that was detached from... pressures of and censorship. Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society, he... suggest an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state. convey certain views the health and illness of civilizations.... Pharaoh... is a work worthy of Prus' intellect and one of the best Polish novels.

The perspective of which Miłosz writes, enables Prus, while formulating an ostensibly objective vision of historic Egypt, simultaneously to create a satire on man and society, much as Jonathan Swift in Britain had done the previous century.

But Pharaoh is par excellence a political novel. Its young protagonist, Prince Ramses (who is 22 years old at the novel's opening), learns that those who would oppose the priesthood are vulnerable to cooptation, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation or assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses as pharaoh, is the importance, to power, of knowledge — of science.

As a political novel, Pharaoh became a favorite of Joseph Stalin's; similarities have been pointed out between it and Sergei Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage. The novel's English translator has recounted wondering, well in advance of the event, whether President John F. Kennedy would meet with a fate like that of the book's protagonist.

Pharaoh is, in a sense, an extended study of the metaphor of society-as-organism that Prus had adopted from English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, and that Prus makes explicit in the introduction to the novel: "the Egyptian nation in its times of greatness formed, as it were, a single person, in which the priesthood was the mind, the pharaoh was the will, the people the body, and obedience the cement." All of society's organ systems must work together harmoniously, if society is to survive and prosper.

Pharaoh is a study of factors that affect the rise and fall of civilizations.

Egypt developed as long as a homogeneous nation, energetic kings and wise priests worked together for the common good. But there came a time when the populace declined in number in the aftermath of wars and lost their vitality under oppression and extortion, while the influx of foreigners undermined their racial unity. When, in addition, the energy of the pharaohs and the wisdom of the priests were dissipated in a flood of Asian profligacy and these two forces began between them a struggle over the monopoly of fleecing the people, Egypt fell under the power of foreigners, and the light of civilization that had burned for several thousand years at the Nile expired.