Everything about The Outpost Novel totally explained
The Outpost (
Polish title:
Placówka) was the first of four major
novels by the
Polish writer
Bolesław Prus. The author sought to bring attention to the plight of
rural Poland, which had to contend with
poverty,
ignorance, neglect on the part of the country's upper crust, and
colonization by
German settlers backed by
Otto von Bismarck'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
serialized in
Wędrowiec (The Wanderer) between
March 19,
1885, and
May 20,
1886. The first
book edition appeared in 1886.
Plot summary
The Outpost is a study of rural Poland. Its principal character, a
peasant surnamed
Ślimak ("
Snail"), typifies his village's inhabitants, nearly all illiterate; there's no school.
Religion is naively superficial: when a villager happens to buy a painting of
Leda and the Swan, 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 near by. The owners of a local
manor sell their estate to
German settlers financed by
Bismarck's German government. Polish landowners, who speak more
French than
Polish, 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 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 isn't acting from
self-interest, since the money he'd have gotten could have bought a better farm elsewhere; he is, rather, acting from
inertia 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'll never sell their land.
The book's somber picture is relieved by the author's
humor and warmth. The local
Catholic priest, habitué of dinners and
hunting parties at local manors, isn't entirely devoid of
Christian 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's befriended by a poor, empathetic
Jewish peddler who comes to his aid and, in the manner of a
deus ex machina, saves the day and the farm.
Influences
The Outpost (1886) isn't
Bolesław Prus' highest achievement as a novelist. It doesn't show the full psychological depth of
The Doll (1889) or the conceptual sweep of
Pharaoh (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 novel. Despite Prus' reservations about
Émile Zola's
naturalism, the Polish writer took some inspirations from the
French novelist. Prus'
Outpost (1885-86) in turn influenced the Polish
Nobel Prize-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 (
Placówka) directed by Zygmunt Skonieczny.
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Outpost Novel'.
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