Fading Voices - Themes

Themes

In his never-to-be-finished 1885 novel Sława (Fame), Prus excoriates his countrymen:

"You are backward, and what is worse: sunk in mental lethargy. The great ideas of civilization, if they ever existed in you, have perished, leaving behind shells and scraps... All around you has moved ahead, West and East. In the world's soil there have grown up and matured new ideas, scientific, philosophical, artistic and social, there have arisen new questions and new heroes. You know nothing of this; when something reaches you like contraband, you receive it with mockery or anger and, to occupy your sterile minds with something, you retreat into dreams of the Middle Ages."

Fame's hero, Julian, will characterize Warsaw's upper classes succinctly: "he ladies are dolls, the parlors—mortuaries, and all the intelligentsia—putrefaction."

This, observes Zygmunt Szweykowski, is close to the atmosphere that will imbue Prus' later novel, The Doll (written and published in newspaper serialization in 1887–89). There appears here a motif that will loom large in Prus' subsequent works: flight from this decaying society. Julian flees it; the old Colonel in "Fading Voices" contemplates fleeing it.

Prus, disappointed with the upper reaches of Polish society, seeks recompense elsewhere, and discovers it in the past and in the common people. He finds within himself an affinity for the recent past—a past that is condemned by contemporary Polish Positivist doctrine—the Romanticism whose human representatives are gradually dying off. "Full of elegiac, soft tones," writes Szweykowski, "are 'fading voices' which bring echoes of heroic feats of arms, of self-sacrifice for the idea of "For your freedom and ours," and of a fervent, noble faith in the regeneration of mankind." Prus senses a kindred idealism in the common people, and portrays it in his stories, "On Vacation" ("Na wakacjach," 1884), "An Old Tale" ("Stara bajka," 1884) and here in "Fading Voices" (1883).

On September 1, 1863, Prus, then a 16-year-old volunteer in the Polish 1863-65 Uprising against Imperial Russia, had been captured during a battle at the village of Białka, four kilometers south of Siedlce. Thus "Fading Voices" resonates for Prus at a deeply emotional level: not only had the youngster suffered serious physical traumata and probably the beginnings of his lifelong agoraphobia, and subsequently also imprisonment at Lublin, but after the Uprising he had found himself ostracized by many of his compatriots, whom he had sought to restore to national independence.

"Fading Voices" thus combines two of Prus' interests during this period: the common people, and the legacy of the Romantic past—the past out of which Prus had himself grown, as a teenaged participant in the 1863–65 Uprising.