The Outpost
Bolesław Prus
 The Outpost is a study of rural Poland. Its principal character, a peasant surnamed Ślimak ("Snail"), typifies his village's inhabitants, nearly all illiterate; there is no school. Religion is naively superficial: when a villager happens to buy a painting of Leda and the Swan, the community pray before it as they do before two ancient portraits of noblemen who had been benefactors of the local church. Changes are, however, coming to the area. A railway is being built nearby. The owners of a local manor sell their estate to German settlers financed by Bismarck's German government. Polish landowners, who speak more French than Polish, are happy to take the money and move to a city or abroad, away from the boring countryside. Ślimak's farm becomes an isolated Polish outpost in an increasingly German-settled neighborhood. Ślimak suffers a series of adversities as he refuses to sell his plot of land to German setters (who are described not unsympathetically). The stubborn, conservative peasant is not acting from self-interest, since the money he would have gotten could have bought a better farm elsewhere; he is, rather, acting from inertia and from a principle inculcated in him by his father and grandfather: that when a peasant loses his hereditary plot, he faces the greatest of misfortunes — becoming a mere wage-earner. Still, Ślimak lacks his wife's strength of will; he hesitates. But on her deathbed she makes him swear that he will never sell their land. The book's somber picture is relieved by the author's humor and warmth. The local Catholic priest, habitué of dinners and hunting parties at local manors, is not entirely devoid of Christian virtues. Two of the village's humbler denizens turn out to be exemplars of selflessness. Ślimak's half-wit farm hand, on finding an abandoned baby, takes it home to care for it. After Mrs. Ślimak dies and the widower's farm burns down, he is befriended by a poor, empathetic Jewish peddler who comes to his aid and, in the manner of a deus ex machina, saves the day and the farm.