Mold of the Earth

[1] The story comes from a period of pessimism in the author's life caused by Poland's political situation (nine decades earlier, upon the completion of the Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Poland had ceased to exist as an independent country) and by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that Prus had been editing for less than a year.

In his one-and-a-half-page micro-story, Prus identifies human societies with colonies of molds that contest the surface of the globe.

[3] The story's setting carries a patriotic subtext, since Izabela and Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski had in the 18th century turned their estate into a leading private center of Polish history and culture.

They had particularly dedicated the Temple of the Sibyl as a museum and memorial to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth which had been, in their lifetime, partitioned out of political existence by the neighboring Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires.

"Mold of the Earth" is one of several micro-stories by Bolesław Prus that were partly inspired by 19th-century French prose poetry.