Fading Voices

[4] The Colonel has thus participated in campaigns against each of the three imperial powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—that, acting in concert, had in the 18th century wiped his country, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, from the political map of Europe.

[7] 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 [the story's] '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).

[8] On 1 September 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.