An excerpt from the booklet essay by Michael Brooke

Originally born Aleksander Głowacki in 1847, Pharaoh’s source novelist Bolesław Prus first made his mark on Polish history in 1863, when at the age of just fifteen he joined the pro-independence January Uprising against Russian occupation of the largest part of pre-1795 Poland. After being wounded and subsequently imprisoned, he decided that Polish independence would be more achievable via written polemic than force of arms, and from 1872 for the next forty years he became a prolific journalist. He also turned to fiction, initially as a short-story sideline and then as a far more ambitious novelist, with The Outpost (Placówka, 1886), The Doll (Lalka, 1890) and The New Woman (Emancypantki, 1894) all addressing social issues in then-contemporary Polish society. The dates refer to their initial publication in book form but, like his great English counterpart Charles Dickens, Prus had already serialised them in newspapers, garnering a substantial following in the process. His final major novel, Pharaoh (serialised from 1895-6, separately published in 1897), was his only one with a historical setting, but he was acutely aware that its analysis of the various mechanisms of power had a relevance far beyond its ancient Egyptian setting. Except during wartime, it has never been out of print in its native Poland, and was first published in English as The Pharaoh and the Priest as early as 1902, although the original, overly literal and often inaccurate translation by Jeremiah Curtin has since been superseded by Christopher Kasparek’s far more thorough and idiomatic 1991 version.

In sharp contrast to the extensive field research that would be conducted by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and his team, Prus relied wholly on second-hand sources, as described by Lidija Rezoničnik:

“Prus prepared for writing a novel based on Egyptian history by studying the available literature, but he had never actually seen Egypt with his own eyes. In her analysis of the novelistic construction of the Egyptian chronotope, Janina Kulczycka-Saloni (1947) notes that the narrator rarely describes the natural environment, and when he does, it is a schematic description from a distant perspective without going into detail. Nor is there any detail in the descriptions of buildings – pyramids, sanctuaries, the Pharaoh’s palace, the palaces of the dignitaries – and other construction achievements. Instead, the narrator especially emphasises the monumentality of the buildings, which he paints with information and comparisons of measurements. (For example: “The dam was as high as a two-storey house, about a hundred paces wide at the base, and over twenty-five miles long.”) There are even fewer descriptions of detail in the images of interiors, which serve merely as a backdrop.”

Given the novel’s literary pre-eminence, it’s unsurprising that it had been considered for filming long before its eventual realisation, and the historian Paweł Stroiński has researched its genesis. The first adaptation was written in 1949 in the form of a novella by Tadeusz Borowski, which incorporated more of Prus’s historical background than would eventually be included in Kawalerowicz’s film, and also dwelt more on the role of the priests while eliminating the part of Sarah altogether. Two further adaptations, also written as novellas, were produced in 1950 by Zbigniew Mitzner and Anatol Potemkowski, with Mitzner’s being the most immediately faithful to Prus, while Potemkowski offered a more radical reworking, much more focused on the central conspiracy, and with Ramses appearing much later. Potemkowski’s novella was then reworked by a five-strong team that included Potemkowski himself, Tadeusz Kański, the man initially proposed as director of the resulting film, and the young Jerzy Kawalerowicz. However, the project was then shelved, very likely because the Polish film industry of the time lacked the resources to mount something on the necessary scale.

Michael Brooke's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.