"Mold of the Earth" (Polish: "Pleśń świata") is one of the shortest micro-stories by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus.
The story was published on 1 January 1884 in the New Year's Day issue of the Warsaw Courier (Kurier Warszawski).[1] The story comes from a period of pessimism in the author's life caused by Poland's political situation (in which 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.[2]
