studies in ancient art and civilization

Jagiellonian University

Studies in ancient art and Civilization

16 Edited by Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka

Krakow 2012

Studies in Ancient Art and Civilization 16 Kraków 2012

Leszek Zinkow Kraków

Pharaonic disguise.

Contemporary politics in Egyptian camouflage

Abstract: This paper presents a few insights into certain aspects of Egyptian themes in Polish literature in two short stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namely ‘From the Legends of Ancient Egypt’ by B. Prus and ‘The Judgment of Osiris’ by H. Sienkiewicz, which both utilized the tool of Egyptianization in political commentary of the time. Keywords: Egyptian influences; Egyptomania; Polish literature – 19th century; Bolesław Prus; Henryk Sienkiewicz One area of study of Egyptian inspiration in contemporary culture is the search for the identification and the analysis of various elements taken from ancient Egypt when used as the material for literary creation. I am neither referring to travel writing nor the consideration of these questions within the obvious context of the sightseeing of various sites or individual monuments, but to literary works of fictional character: novels, stories, novellas, and furthermore drama, librettos, and even poetry. What is interesting here is not solely the study of the reasons behind the Egyptian inspiration of individual writers and the search for the possible sources which they drew upon, but also, or perhaps even more so, the recreation the subtle ways in which they adopted and reinterpreted Egyptian legacy as well as the influence of patterns, stereotypes, false assumptions, deformations etc. The Polish writer, Mikołaj Rey (1505-1569), narrating the story of Joseph in his Renaissance Biblical-apocryphal drama Żywot Józefa

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(1545) [The Life of Joseph] (which possibly partly imitated the Comedia sacra cui titulus Joseph of 1535 by the Dutch playwright Cornelius Crocus), used the phrase ‘the city of Egypt’ several times, presumably regarding the state of the pharaohs as one possessing a structure similar to the Greek polis and made his characters speak with phrases directly copied from the reality of the courtly etiquette of his time. Two centuries later, the aristocrat and second-rate writer Urszula Franciszka Radziwiłł (1705-1753) made use of ancient Egypt (or rather, her impression of it) as the background for her theatrical work (which she termed a ‘pastoral ballet’) entitled Igrzysko Fortuny [The Playground of Fortune]. The play was probably staged only twice and this was exclusively on a private palace stage in the mid-18th century. The plot of this (rather graphomaniac) play, complicated and trivial at the same time, concerns the romantic and political tribulations of Prince Sesostrix and his lover Timaret and takes place in Memphis and on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt. The plot suggests that the author had a superficial knowledge of Herodotus or of Diodorus Siculus (shown by the motif of Amasis and Apries, here called by the author ‘Amadys’ and ‘Apriusz’ respectively), the French romance by Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène ou Le Grand Cyrus (1653; from whence the Sesostrix and Timaret theme probably emerged) and possibly also the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. She was probably also fascinated by the antique, oriental and pastoral themes so characteristic of the time, which betrayed a tendency towards exotic fancy. The print attached in this edition depicts the staging or rehearsal of a scene with a killed crocodile which dispels any doubt as to the author’s lack of ‘Egyptological’ competence (Fig. 1). Let us add here, that one cannot exclude the possibility that the motivation for taking an interest in Egypt could have come from the memory of an ancestor, Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł (Kalfatovic 1992, 21; Dawson et al. 1995, 346-347), who from 1582 to 1584 travelled to the Holy Land and Egypt, leaving an extensive, enthralling account and also brought back some Egyptian antiquities to the family palace in Nesvizh (now Нясвіж, Belarus). Of course, one could identify several more or less accurate interpretations of Egyptian themes in Polish literature as is the case with other European literature. However, I would like to focus on a phenomenon of a different nature, namely the usage of Egyptian staffage, a ‘costume’ in which works were constructed as parables. One can point out at least two interesting examples of this kind; both are very short stories written by authors who normally produced full-length novels. The two works share another

Pharaonic disguise. Contemporary politics...

Fig. 1. Igrzysko Fortuny. Reproduced from Biblioteka Czartoryskich, 39028. Drawing by M. Żukowski, 1750

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similarity. Due to the political situation of Poland at the turn of the 20th century (partitions and formal dependency on neighboring superpowers), an ‘Egyptian costume’ hides the very concrete and quite easily recognizable characters and situations of the political scene of the time. The first is a short story by Bolesław Prus (born Aleksander Głowacki 1847-1912; Milosz 1983, 291-303; Czerwiński 1994, 326-330) entitled Z legend dawnego Egiptu [From the Legends of Ancient Egypt]1 published for the first time in the special New Year sections of the popular magazines Kurier Codzienny and Tygodnik Ilustrowany in January 1888. Prus is, of course, incomparably better known as the author of another Egyptian themed work – his world famous novel, Pharaoh (1895). For historians of literature, both works remain quite puzzling. Bolesław Prus never took any particular interest in ancient Egypt, as he never travelled there (he suffered from agoraphobia) and in all probability drew the knowledge he needed to write Pharaoh from surprisingly few sources (primarily from Gaston Maspero’s Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient and L’Archéologie égyptienne). Moreover, he always declared his reluctance towards writing historical novels – in fact, as the author of tens of novels, novellas, stories and journalististic works, he took recourse to history only twice, both times to ancient Egypt. His motives are unknown; perhaps he decided that the Egyptian camouflage was abstract enough to make practically anyone read the content allegorically. His narratives surely cannot be placed in the quite popular literary trend of the time of the ‘archaeological novel’ (Théophile Gautier, Georg Moritz Ebers) without reservation; Prus transcended the formula, preserving only several of its elements. Undoubtedly, Egypt is not a mere exotic decoration for the romance, as, in Pharaoh, an epic political conflict is taking place. As was the case with the novella, From the Legends of Ancient Egypt, seven years previously, the message is to contrast hopes and desires, to demonstrate the irrational logic of life and also to present a direct portrait of a historical episode, namely the breakthrough moment of conflict between the aged German Emperor, Wilhelm I (‘Ramses’), and his successor, Friedrich (‘Horus’), also including the crucial role of a third person, the influential politician, Otto von Bismarck (Fig. 2). The dispute between the ‘good’ Horus and ‘evil’ Ramses is, as most scholars would see it, a commentary made by Prus, who took a lively interest in German politics. The secondary title from From the Legends of Ancient Egypt provided the author with the possibility Published in English in The sins of childhood & other stories, (European Classics) transl. B. Johnston, 221-228. Evanston 1996. 1


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Fig. 2. From the Legends of Ancient Egypt. Reproduced from Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1897, 51,1001. Drawing by A. Kamieński

to add a political punch line (The Killing of Horus), and a historiosophical generalization. Prus, as I have mentioned above, was not particularly interested in ancient Egypt. Undoubtedly, he did have a generalized, and in fact stereotypical, idea of ancient Egypt – he imagined the land of the pharaohs as a perfectly organized and hierarchical society, and Egypt itself as ‘the first civilization’, an archetype and source of all developmental laws and stimuli. Egypt probably was, for Prus, a place where all social, political, intellectual, and emotional processes took place in an archetypal manner, and were model ones in structural terms. All this fitted into the realistic spirit of the epoch. However, many scholars argue that the ‘Egyptian’ narratives are filled with metaphysics and the logical sequence of events is interfered with by transcendence. They point out that Bolesław Prus was irrationally fascinated by the peculiarities of breathtaking natural phenomena (for example, the solar eclipse which he used to create the twist in Pharaoh’s plot). Prus was a very close and enduring friend of Julian Ochorowicz (1850-1917), a psychologist, philosopher, and inventor, who was strongly involved with matters of so-called mediumism, and studied the applications of non-conventional methods of psychotherapy (hypnosis). Ochorowicz was also interested

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in Egypt and it was most probably he who recommended (and even imported) literature on Egypt for Prus. In his book, Wiedza tajemna w Egipcie (1898) [Egyptian secret knowledge] which was published after Prus had written both From the legends… and Pharaoh, but had existed before both works in the form of public lectures, Ochorowicz considered the psychology of creating religious doctrines, the application of persuasive methods, the connection of magic with technology, the Egyptian priests’ practice of creating natural phenomena and mechanical devices as well as ‘divine acts’ and the divine indication of priests as the sole agents and executors of divine will. The title Secret Knowledge was ironic; a monopoly on knowledge and astronomical, mathematical, natural and anatomical skills was the ‘secret’ tool of ruthless power. Prus noticed that similar mechanisms also governed the world of politics. Twenty years later, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916, literary Nobel Prize winner; Milosz 1983, 308-314; Czerwiński 1994, 376-382) published a humorous sketch, Sąd Ozyrysa (1908) [The Judgment of Osiris], which was supposed to be, according to the author’s claim, his ‘translation of an ancient Egyptian papyrus’. Sienkiewicz plays with the convention of the Medieval morality play – a deceased, wicked state official, Psunabudes (this name, imitating Egyptian ones, is in fact a distorted idiomatic phrase taken from Polish with a meaning comparable to the English ‘down the drain’), faces the throne of Osiris. Here, the ‘goddesses’ Niegodziwość [Wickedness] and Głupota [Stupidity] engage in a fight over his soul (Fig. 3). Mądrość [Wisdom] interferes, attempting to remember some episodes from Psunabudes’ youth, which prove that he had not been so much of a villain at that time. However, in the end, the scales come to an exact balance and Osiris decrees that the deceased return to Earth, to prove whether he is more of a fool or a villain. For the contemporary reader, this satire was clearly about Konstantin Petrovich Pobyedonostsyev (Константин Петрович Победоносцев, 1827-1907), a doctrinaire of the Tsars’ absolutism and an apologist for the Russification of the Poles, who claimed to have had a significant influence on decisions made by the Tsars, especially Alexander III and Nicholas II (Romanov) and who had died several months earlier. The Egyptian costume plays an obvious secondary role, and the very ‘procedure’, of course, has nothing to do with our scientific knowledge of Egyptian eschatology, except perhaps for the ‘weighing of deeds’. Sienkiewicz introduced no Egyptian decoration here, apart from perhaps humorous ones (Osiris’ words: ‘I’ll be an ibis’ uncle or On Apis’ holy tail!’).


Fig. 3. The Judgment of Osiris. Reproduced from Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1908, 2, front cover. Drawing by J. Holewiński

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This was surely not evidence of the author’s ignorance concerning ancient Egypt, but a consciously adopted literary stylization. Sienkiewicz did, in fact, go to Egypt (1891) and expressed a certain, if brief, interest in its antiques and civilization;2 it is, however, by no means proof that this was his inspiration for The Judgment of Osiris.

References Czerwiński E. J. (ed.) 1994. Dictionary of Polish Literature. Westport CT, London. Dawson W. R., Uphill E. P. and Bierbrier M. L. 1995. Who Was Who in Egyptology. London. Kalfatovic M. R. 1992. Nile Notes of a Howadji: a Bibliography of Travelers’ Tales from Egypt, from the Earliest Time to 1918. Metuchen NJ, London. Kasparek C. 1994. Prus’ Pharaoh: the Creation of a Historical Novel. The Polish Review 1, 45-50. New York. Milosz C. 1983. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London (2nd ed.). Leszek Zinkow Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow [email protected]

2

Listy z Afryki [Letters from Africa] published as book in 1893 (two volumes).