Bolesław Prus’s The Pharaoh and the Priest is a historical novel set in Egypt in the eleventh century before Christ, during the last years of the twentieth dynasty, when the throne of the pharaohs and the power of the priesthood of Amon stood face to face. Its action follows a young heir to the throne, Rameses, from his first military command through his accession and his struggle with the priestly hierarchy that holds the real machinery of the state. Prus builds the story out of the physical world of the Nile—its floods, its mud, its harvests—and out of the political and religious institutions that world supported.
“Enough!” interrupted the prince. “I was neither here nor at the servants’ house.”
The novel rests on a claim about how Egypt was made and how it was undone. The fertile soil of the valley was washed down from Inner Africa and could be farmed only by the coordinated labor of a whole population, directed by priests and pharaohs; from that tillage came grain for Rome, Greece, and Judæa, and the surplus that raised the temples and tombs. Egypt’s greatness, in Prus’s account, lay in ideas and in the perfect control of labor by intellect. When power and physical pleasure became dearer to the priesthood and the pharaohs, foreign bondage and national ruin began. The novel’s action is set precisely at the moment when the guiding intellect of Egypt became dual, with priests and pharaohs in opposition; the ruin of a pharaoh and the fall of his dynasty, followed by the rise of a self-chosen sovereign and a new line of rulers, form its double consummation.
From the Manoeuvres at Pi-Bailos to the Fall of the Dynasty
The Land and Its Order
The book opens by arguing that Egypt’s uniqueness lay in its soil—mud carried down from inner Africa and turned into food, cloth, and brick only through the ceaseless, coordinated labor of a whole people, marshalled by priests and pharaohs. That tillage fed Rome, Greece, and Judæa, and paid for the monuments; in the tombs and temples survive the earliest history of writing and of religion. Egypt’s greatness rested on ideas and on intellect’s perfect control of labor; once power and bodily pleasure grew dearer to priesthood and pharaoh alike, foreign bondage followed. The novel’s action turns on the moment when Egypt’s guiding intellect split in two, priests against pharaohs, ending in the ruin of a pharaoh, the fall of his dynasty, and the rise of a self-chosen sovereign.
The Author and the Setting
Biographical notes sketch Alexander Glovatski, born in 1847 at Mashov in the Government of Lublin, schooled at Lublin and Warsaw, a participant in the 1863 uprising who was captured and later released, drawn to mathematics and science, and the author of works in seventeen volumes, mostly on modern Polish types. Jeremiah Curtin records that the title was changed from “The Pharaoh” to “The Pharaoh and the Priest” at the author’s wish, and that the illustrations come from photographs he took in Egypt in 1899. An introduction then lays out the geography: the rich ravine between the Libyan sands and the Arabian desert, the Nile, the Delta with Cairo at its apex, Egypt like a serpent—blue in October, green in February, golden in March, gray in June. Regulating the flood drove the Egyptians to astronomy, canals, dams, and reservoirs; the priests drew the plans, the pharaohs commanded, the people were the body. The narrative belongs to the eleventh century before Christ, when the twentieth dynasty fell and San-Amen-Herhor, high priest of Amon, forced his way to the throne.
The Heir Appointed
In the thirty-third year of Rameses XII, the god Khonsu returns to Thebes after three years and nine months in Buchten, where he healed the king’s daughter. The pharaoh names as erpatr his twenty-year-old son, Cham-Sem-Merer-Amen-Rameses; the older sons, born of a Hittite princess, were visited by an evil spirit—one could not walk, one opened his veins and died, one believed himself a monkey. The fourth son, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of the priest Amenhôtep, is strong, brave, and wise. The prince begs to command the army corps of Memphis, and a council under Herhor decides that in Mesore he will take ten regiments near Pi-Bailos against General Nitager, victorious if he is not surprised. Rameses organizes scouts, inspects regiments, and orders the warriors’ families sent by canal; the staff marches slowly with litters, chariots, singers, and dancers, and the women weep at the desert until he turns them back. Herhor, a man of forty who speaks rarely, keeps his secretary Pentuer, of low birth but exceptional memory, recording what informers bring.
Pentuer’s Heart and the Soldier’s Song
Pentuer confesses to a bitter companion that he feels pain in his soul because he senses the wretchedness of millions; his heart, he says, is like a valley between mountains that must echo any cry it hears. The other warns him that such thinking is like walking the precipices of the eastern mountains or wandering the western desert among hungry lions and the sudden simoom. Meanwhile the valiant Eunana rides in a vehicle that increases his pain; to prove his valor he eats a dry garlic-rubbed cake and drinks sour beer, begs the driver to beat the flies from his wounded body, and sings the grievous lot of the inferior officer—fists in the belly for breakfast as a boy, fists in the eyes for dinner, a split head for supper, the Syrian campaign carrying food bent like an ass, and beatings for trifles ever after. The narrator marks the song “Authentic” and notes it outlived the Egyptian kingdom.
The Promise to the Army
Near sunset the heir’s suite approaches Memphis; the road descends to fields where continuous ranks work, and in the purple light Rameses seems a divinity. He raises his hand and promises one drachma to every soldier who went east, to the Greek soldiers who opened the passage out of the ravine, and to Nitager’s men who wished to cut off the way; five talents to the lower officers, ten between the minister and the chief leaders. The army shouts, “Be well, our leader!” and Herhor yields his part for the benefit of the army. As the sun touches the western desert, Rameses gallops toward Memphis while Herhor commands his litter to go in advance of the marching divisions.
The Coded Ring and the Priestess’s Warning
Phut of Harran opens the sequence by pressing a gold ring into a priestess’s hand at a sanctuary, trading coded phrases with her. She praises him publicly as wealthy and devout, offers to soothsay, then privately warns that Phoenicians are watching him and tells him to come after sunset to the Street of Tombs, to the house of the Green Star. When the innkeeper Asarhadon grows angry at talk of thieves, she threatens him with an evil prediction until he spits and recites a charm. She then coquets with Phut, who asks Asarhadon to bring her to his chamber; the host refuses, since Egyptian priestesses cannot be received in his house, and instead offers his own fourteen-year-old daughter for a large sum. Phut asks whether the girl would go with him to Harran, and Asarhadon, suspecting him of trading in women, proposes joining the venture. Phut demands a guide after sunset and the return of his bags and casket by morning, threatening court action.
Asarhadon’s Suspicions and the Night Journey
Asarhadon complains to a Phoenician merchant named Kush that Phut is dangerous, perhaps a conspirator or an Assyrian ambassador. Kush dismisses this as greed and anger clouding his reason, advising him to watch Phut and perhaps gain part of his property; Asarhadon resolves to send a spy. Around nine in the evening Phut leaves the inn “Under the Ship” with a negro torchbearer, followed at a distance by a servant feigning drunkenness. The streets are narrow and mostly empty; near the journey’s end houses grow lower and gardens more frequent. On the Street of Tombs the negro stops at a gate, announces “Here is the ‘Green Star,’” and leaves. Phut knocks, exchanges the coded phrases with the gatekeeper, and is admitted.
The Double and the Underground Initiation
Inside, the priestess greets him, and a man disguised as Phut—so similar that Phut is astonished—takes his place to deceive spies, going with her to the first story where flutes and goblets are heard. Two inferior priests conduct Phut to a bath in the garden, curl his hair, and dress him in white robes, then lead him through gardens to an empty space and leave him. He observes the stars, whispers prayers in an unknown tongue, and turns toward the temple. A man follows him from a garden, but a thick fog falls. Phut reaches a high wall, finds a low door covered with bronze nail heads, and manipulates them until it opens. He descends a corridor with confidence, knocks three times at a door, and answers a voice’s challenge: he has done no wrong, eaten no unclean food, taken no property, lied not, betrayed no great secret. Asked whether he is the awaited one, he answers that he is he who was to come from brethren in the East, though the other name is also his. The door opens into a cellar lit by a lamp before a purple curtain embroidered with a winged globe and two serpents. Phut explains the sign—the globe is the world, the wings show it is borne through space, the serpents warn that whoever betrays the great secret dies a double death—and names Hor-set and Horka as the most wonderful stars. The priest prostrates himself, gives Phut a purple scarf and muslin veil, and leaves. Phut lights incense, turns three times, and the smoke surrounds him in a triple ring. The cave trembles, the curtain quivers, little flames appear. He draws a gold medal from his bosom and conjures in mysterious names; trumpets sound, a bird flies past, a crowned cock stands on the table. He conjures again, and a crowned vision with a sceptre, sitting on a lion, appears and asks why Beroes summons it.
Rameses in the Province of Ka
Rameses refrains from questioning the nomarch about the pharaoh’s income, deferring such tasks until his initiation, knowing he would understand nothing. From the pylon of Sebak’s temple he surveys the fertile province of Ka—canals and Nile branches like silver and lapis lazuli, ripening melons and wheat, naked crowds at work, mud huts and flat-roofed white houses scattered like pearls and sapphires among palms. He notices the priests’ lands are the most valuable, counting between ten and twenty temples, but having agreed with Herhor and needing the priesthood’s services, he lets the problem rest.
The Ring of the Pharaoh and the Limits of Power
Prince Rameses presses Mentezufis about when Assyria will pay its arrears of tribute, since the treasury needs it. The priest rises and, in the pharaoh’s name, forbids him to speak of tribute to anyone—above all to Sargon, Istubar, or their suite. When the prince demands to know on what authority a priest addresses him as a superior, Mentezufis displays a chain bearing one of the pharaoh’s rings. Rameses kisses the ring and submits.
Mentezufis explains that Assyria cannot be forced to pay: Egypt has 120,000 soldiers against Assyria’s 300,000. Asked why the war ministry cut the army by 60,000, he says it was to raise the pharaoh’s income by 20,000 talents. He refuses to say why Sargon comes, calling it a state secret unknown even to the pharaoh, since Egypt is the property of Amon and only the highest initiates know Amon’s plans. Rameses argues that without power there is no assurance Assyria will not attack; Mentezufis says a treaty may assure it. The prince answers that there are no treaties for the weak—silver tablets need spears behind them—and that 120,000 must yield to 300,000. The priest retorts that invaders’ bones would never reach home: Egypt would arm nobles, laborer regiments, even quarry convicts, take the temple treasures, and field 500,000 warriors. Delighted, Rameses asks why not attack Babylon, citing Nitager’s pleas and the pharaoh’s alarm. Mentezufis warns of the desert march; the prince says one battle would cure it. The priest challenges whether Rameses knows what battle is, then plays a guessing game with his closed hand—a ring, a bit of papyrus, an amulet of the divine Hator—to show that battle is Fate demanding quick guesses, with ruin for those who fail. He predicts Assyria will be humbled, perhaps by Rameses’ hands, but not immediately.
Alone, Rameses concludes Hiram was right that the priests deceive them, and that a treaty with the Chaldeans will be forced on the pharaoh. He reflects that Mentezufis betrayed that Egypt could field half a million men, and dreams of 200,000 trained troops. Mentezufis, returning, thinks Rameses hot-headed but strong, resembling Rameses the Great, and imagines him crushing Assyria and the one supreme God reigning from Libya to the Ganges; he worries about the prince’s night pilgrimages to the Phoenician priestess and his leanings toward the Phoenician faith.
Sargon’s Embassy and the Insult at the Audience
Sargon officially informs the viceroy of his embassy and requests an escort; the prince delays. Sargon drinks, plays dice with Hiram, and visits Kama, offering her gold, cows, wheat, and a household if she leaves the temple, suggesting she might please King Assar. At the audience Egyptian troops are drawn up; Sargon’s procession includes policemen, runners, trumpeters, a herald proclaiming Sargon’s titles, cavalry, infantry, elephants bearing Sargon and Istubar, and harsh music. Rameses is glad the gifts may pass as tribute but frowns at the herald’s praise of Assar; Mentezufis commands a respectful reception. The envoys enter; Sargon offers gifts, but Rameses sits motionless and tells Mentezufis he does not understand Sargon’s speaking as an equal. Istubar, understanding Egyptian, urges Sargon to fall on his face; Sargon protests but obeys. The interpreter claims they were debating whether to show the pharaoh’s gifts. Sargon complains of wiping dust with his garments; Mentezufis orders benches. Sargon presents two horses, a glass goblet, and a steel sword that bends and cuts a bronze sword. Rameses feels deeper hatred, recalling the circus, Kama, and the sword. The gifts include a gold-and-silver model of Assar’s palace, worth perhaps 150 talents. At the feast Rameses is polite and gives Sargon a woman; asked if Assar has a beautiful palace, he says its ruins on Nineveh’s ashes would be more beautiful. The Assyrians drink little; Istubar and Mentezufis are calm like men who command the future.
Rumors of Peace and the Attack on Sargon
Sargon waits at Pi-Bast for letters from Memphis; reports circulate that the priests forgave Assyria’s unpaid tribute, freed it forever, and made a long peace treaty to facilitate a northern war. The pharaoh is said to have fallen ill; Rameses is grief-stricken; both must yield to priests unsure of nobles and army.
A Child’s Prayer and the Pharaoh’s Vision
At sunset a mother pulls her racing son from play and makes him kneel to pray. The boy thanks “the kind, divine Amon” for keeping his father from misfortune, for wheat to make cakes for his mother, for heaven and earth, for the Nile that brings bread, and for flowers, birds, and sweet dates. He asks nothing—only that all love Amon as he does, pleading that he is little and has not learned wisdom. A cattle scribe mutters that the child honors the god carelessly. Watching through a magic globe, the pharaoh sees the prayer rise like a lark to the throne of the eternal Amon, who sits meditating on his own all-mightiness. As the words reach the god’s head, his eyes open and immense calm descends on earth: pain, fear, and wrong stop; the missile hangs in air, the lion halts in its spring, the raised stick does not fall, the sick forget their pains and the prisoner his chains, the storm ceases, the wave halts, and the sun thrusts up his shining head again.
The pharaoh recovers to find Beroes the Chaldean beside a little table and a black globe. Beroes asks whether he found a person whose prayers reach the footstool of Him who existed before the ages. Rameses says he has: a boy of six who asked Amon for nothing, only thanked him for everything. Asked where the child dwells, the pharaoh refuses to say—he will not steal the virtue of that prayer for his own use. The world, he says, is a gigantic vortex in which people are whirled like sand by misfortune; the child’s prayer gives what he cannot: brief peace and oblivion. Beroes is silent.
The Army Returns and the Heir Rides Ahead
At sunrise on the twenty-first of Hator an order reaches the camp at the Soda Lakes: three regiments march to Libya to garrison towns, the rest return home with Rameses. The army rejoices, for the wilderness stay has annoyed them—scarce provisions, exhausted wells, burning heat, sand wounding lungs and eyeballs, dysentery and malignant inflammation of the eyelids. Rameses sends three native Egyptian regiments to Libya, commanding mild treatment of the people and no solitary wandering, leaves a small garrison at the glass huts and fortress, and turns the army toward Memphis.
Mentezufis approaches the heir, suggesting he reach Memphis earlier with fresh horses half-way. Rameses cries out asking whether his father is very ill; the priest bends his head. The prince orders Mentezufis to change nothing without consulting the lay generals, then takes Pentuer, Tutmosis, and twenty of the best Asiatic horsemen toward Memphis. In five hours they cover half the journey; at the halt fresh horses and a new escort wait, the Asiatics remain behind, and the prince presses on with two companions. Tutmosis laments five days without bathing or rose-perfumed oil and two forced marches in one day, fearing no dancer will look at him; the prince asks whether he is better than they are, and Tutmosis calls himself more fragile, saying the prince rides like a Hyksos and Pentuer might travel on a red-hot sword.
At sunset they see the green valley of Egypt, the pyramids gleaming like ruddy fires and the tops of the Memphis pylons flaming upward in bluish haze. Rameses urges them on; the reddish desert closes around them again and the pyramids dissolve in twilight. At night they reach the immense district of the dead along the left bank, where during the Ancient Kingdom Egyptians were buried—pharaohs in immense pyramids, princes and dignitaries in smaller ones, common men in mud structures, millions of mummies including dogs, cats, and birds. In Rameses’ time burials of kings and great persons have moved to Thebes; near Memphis only common persons and artisans are interred.
Shadows Among the Tombs
They meet people like shadows, who say they are poor servants of the pharaoh returning from their dead, having taken roses, cakes, and beer. Asked whether they looked into strange graves, one cries that only the wicked Thebans—may their hands wither!—disturb the dead to drink away their property in dramshops. Asked about fires to the north, they say the heir is returning with a victorious army tomorrow; he conquered the Libyans in one battle, and thirty thousand people of Memphis have gone out to greet him. The prince whispers to Pentuer that Mentezufis sent him ahead so he might not have a triumphal entry, but says never mind this time.
The horses are tired, so the prince sends horsemen to engage barges and the escort halts under palms between the Sphinx and the pyramids.
The Priests’ Council Turns Against the Pharaoh
Mefres opens by insisting that no sane commander would abandon his army to chase Libyan bandits, and that Rameses XIII has piled up criminal absurdities for no reason. The nomarch of Horti is uneasy; the chief judge warns against injustice. Then Herhor strikes: Mefres has done the pharaoh a kindness by calling him a maniac, since otherwise he must be called a traitor. Herhor lays out the charges—Rameses recruiting spies and robbers to plunder the labyrinth, rejecting the Assyrian treaty Egypt cannot do without, and bargaining with Phoenicians to cut a canal between the Red and Mediterranean seas that would drown temples, fields, six million people, and themselves. The two high priests swear it is true and warn that the king’s schemes advance like a storm.
The nomarch of Emsuch proposes leaving the matter to Herhor and Mefres, with the supreme judge attached if responsibility frightens them. The officials agree. Mentezufis lights a torch and sets a papyrus before the god’s statue: the secret council’s power passes to Herhor, with the judge and Mefres as assistants. The act is signed, sealed in a tube, and hidden beneath the altar. Each of the seven swears to draw ten dignitaries into the conspiracy. Herhor stakes his life and honor, offering the burning of his body if he lies—a pledge no Egyptian would make falsely.
Tutmosis Keeps the Door, Rameses Slips Out
Tutmosis spends his wedding days with Hebron but his evenings with officers and dancers, so his comrades decide he married only for the dowry. After five days he returns to duty, sleeping near the pharaoh’s chamber. One evening Rameses explains that his mother again hears mysterious voices, which ceased in Memphis only when he dismissed the priesthood; he must leave the palace to take counsel safely. He orders Tutmosis to admit no one, not even his mother, and to say he sleeps. Wrapped in a hooded mantle, the pharaoh vanishes through side passages.
In the garden a patrol challenges him; he answers “Nubia,” and the officer Eunana recoils in fright. Rameses instructs him that an officer’s first duty is silence—seize no man in office, be silent even if Herhor were in question. Eunana blurts that he could never kneel to Herhor or Mefres, and that his sword might leap from its scabbard at sight of them. Rameses smiles: the sword is his, and leaves the sheath only on his order.
The Queen’s Night Visitor
Near a secret gate Rameses calls “Hebron!” and a dark figure rushes into his arms. His mantle falls as he carries her to an arbor. Next day Nikotris summons Tutmosis, pale and hollow-eyed, and makes him swear by his father’s shade to tell whom she saw on the tree outside her window—a figure in a white and blue striped coat, laughing wildly, saying wings were growing on him, his hands cold with sweat. Tutmosis declares it was the Greek Lykon, Sarah’s son’s killer, a tool of the high priests. Hope flickers on her face, then dies; she asks how a mother could fail to know her son. Tutmosis falters, and she produces the brown mantle her slave found on that same tree. He remembers the pharaoh returning after midnight without it. Doubt coils in him like a nest of serpents while hope enters the queen’s heart.
The City on the Brink
Rameses calculates that a mob cannot be restrained—it must break or be broken—and he does not want the temples attacked before Hiram returns with proof of treason. Yet the riots spread: near the temple of Isis the pious are slain, near Ptah the holy boat is smashed, and reports of desecration arrive from Sochem, Anu, and Cherau. A weeping delegation of priests begs him to defend the gods. He agrees—provided the regiments enter the temple grounds—and the delegates hesitate, for the army may not cross that threshold without the high priests’ consent. He does not suspect the delegation is Herhor’s trick.
Against Tutmosis’s warnings—no troops assembled, no rams to break gates, provisions for three days—Rameses orders Herhor and Mefres proclaimed traitors and the temples occupied tomorrow. Couriers bring word of foreigners plundered, armed masses converging on Memphis, temple regiments creeping toward the city. At midnight Nikotris, trembling, reports that the statue of Isis has turned its face to the wall and the sacred cistern runs blood-red. He answers that this proves traitors in the palace, and comforts her: he will not harm the priests, only strip the insolent of their power.
Paofi the Twentieth
Memphis wakes as if for a festival.
Rameses and the Two Educations
Rameses is drawn as a young man of contradictory qualities—impetuous as a lion, stubborn as a bullock, but with keen understanding and a deep sense of justice. His education runs on two tracks that never quite meet. From the army he learns the glamour of command: at the manoeuvres near Pi-Bailos he outwits General Nitager, and afterward he distributes drachmas and talents to his soldiers on his own authority, a gesture the soldiers answer with shouts of “Be well, our leader!” but which Herhor immediately reads as the act of a traitor or a frivolous stripling, since only a pharaoh may make presents to the army. From the priests he receives a slower and more humiliating instruction. Pentuer’s demonstrations with beans and painted tableaux show him that Egypt has lost a hundred thousand measures of land and two million people since the nineteenth dynasty, that the pharaoh’s treasury receives seventy-four thousand talents instead of ninety-eight, and that the difference has gone into the pockets of a doubled officialdom. The lesson is designed to disgust him with war, and it works, but not in the way the priests intend: it teaches him that the men who rule Egypt in his father’s name are deceiving the throne.
Around him Prus arranges a set of figures who each embody a way of living under this system. Herhor, the high priest of Amon, is a man of forty who speaks rarely and thinks in decades; he can praise Pentuer’s memory as granite on which history is written and in the same breath set a trap for the heir. Pentuer, the secretary of low birth, is the novel’s conscience—his heart, he says, is like a valley between mountains that must echo any cry it hears, and he cannot look at the wretchedness of millions without pain. The Phoenician prince Hiram represents money and foreign interest, always truthful where his interest lies. Sarah, the Jewess taken into the prince’s villa, gives the novel its most intimate suffering: she loves Rameses but feels the gulf between them in every word and motion, is jealous even of his dog, and dies in hysteric laughter when she learns that a Greek who resembled the prince took her child from its cradle. Kama, the priestess of Astaroth, brings the Phoenician temple into the palace and carries leprosy out of it. And Lykon, the Greek singer whose face is indistinguishable from the heir’s, becomes the priests’ reserved weapon—a double kept for the day when the heir’s private life or a threatened war might make him useful.
The Machinery of a Civilization
The novel’s largest subject is not any of these people but the system that produced them. Prus opens with the geology of the Nile and never lets the reader forget it: the blue serpent of October, the green of February, the golden of March, the gray of June; three harvests a year; the canals, dams, and reservoirs, including Lake Moeris, that turned a ravine between two deserts into the granary of the ancient world. Because the water had to be regulated, the Egyptians were driven to astronomy and hydraulics; because the soil was mud, it could be worked only by masses of men held in place. Hence the classes of earth-tillers and artisans, the use of criminals and prisoners for the hardest labor, the pharaoh’s divine honors, and the extraordinary role of the priests as instructors, soothsayers, judges of the dead, physicians, engineers, and politicians all at once.
Prus is equally concrete about what happens when that machinery is turned to private advantage. The investigation into the attack on Rameses’s villa drags on for a month, snatching earth-workers from their fields and beating them with sticks; the prison Rameses visits holds a man in a plank fetter who must sit a month longer for insolence to a tax gatherer, and a family waiting patiently for the body of a relative to be strangled, their flax still in the field and the river rising. Eunana’s song, which the narrator marks as authentic and which outlived the Egyptian kingdom, catalogues the life of the inferior officer—fists in the belly for breakfast, fists in the eyes for dinner, a head almost split open for supper—and stands as the novel’s judgment on the glory of the army. Against this, Pentuer’s tableaux of the nineteenth dynasty show laborers with full breasts and smiling faces, eating wheaten bread and drinking beer from beautiful plates, and officials living in modest sufficiency. The comparison is the argument: the state declined not through foreign enemies but through the growth of a class that took more and gave less.
A Novel of Institutions
Prus came to the novel from mathematics and science, and from a life that included the 1863 uprising, capture, and months of detention; he published across seventeen volumes, mostly on modern characters drawn from Polish life, and was a retiring, industrious philosopher who wintered in Warsaw and summered in the country. That biography helps explain the patience with which The Pharaoh and the Priest builds its case. It is a historical novel that behaves like an inquiry: the reader is shown the ledger, the bean-counter, the canal, the prison, the temple treasury, and invited to draw the conclusion. The title was changed from The Pharaoh to The Pharaoh and the Priest at the author’s wish, and the change is exact, because the book’s subject is the rivalry of two institutions for the same country. Its relevance to the Poland of Prus’s own century—a nation partitioned, its institutions controlled from outside—was not lost on his first readers, and it does not need to be insisted on here. What remains is the picture: a civilization of immense ingenuity held together by coordinated labor and a guiding intellect, and coming apart when the guides begin to serve themselves.
