Pharaoh (Prus novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"If the gods, instead of making me the youngest son of his holiness, had made me a pharaoh, like Ramses the Great, I would conquer nine nations, of which people in Egypt have never heard mention; I would build a temple larger than all Thebes, and rear for myself a pyramid near which the tomb of Cheops would be like a rosebush at the side of a full-grown palm-tree."--Ramses, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of the priest Amenhotep cited in Pharaoh (1897 ) by Bolesław Prus |
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Pharaoh is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). 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.
Background
The novel is set in the Egypt of 1087–85 BCE as that country experiences internal stresses and external threats that will culminate in the fall of its Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom. The young protagonist Ramses learns that those who would challenge the powers that be are vulnerable to co-option, seduction, subornation, defamation, intimidation, and assassination. Perhaps the chief lesson, belatedly absorbed by Ramses as pharaoh, is the importance, to power, of knowledge. Prus' vision of the fall of an ancient civilization derives some of its power from the author's intimate awareness of the final demise of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, a century before he completed Pharaoh. This is a political awareness that Prus shared with his 10-years-junior novelist compatriot, Joseph Conrad, who was an admirer of Prus' writings. Pharaoh has been translated into 20 languages and adapted as a 1966 Polish feature film.
See also
- "A Legend of Old Egypt"
- "Mold of the Earth"
- Assassinations in fiction
- Egypt in the European imagination
- Political fiction
- Politics in fiction
- Utopian and dystopian fiction
- Bildungsroman
- Solar eclipses in fiction
- Spiritualism in fiction
- Labyrinth
- Wieliczka Salt Mine
- Look-alike
- Hypnosis in fiction
- Anatopism
- Anachronism
- Pharaoh (the film)
