Eliza Orzeszkowa wrote about the heroes of her novel Pierwotni (Primitive people, 1881/1884) that “these are all people who, like primitive tribes, stand on the lowest level, sensitive, or rather subject to impressions, unstable, unsighted, […] possessing neither knowledge nor high and broad notions, which are the essential mark of civilised people.” Orzeszkowa relates this metaphor of pierwotnosc (the primitive state) to the diGerent strata of Polish society. The novel culminates in the strange coincidence of ultramontane Catholicism and domestic nihilism, symbolised by the unhappy love between Adolfina Odropolska, the daughter of a devotee-emigrant, and Eugeniusz Skiba, a frustrated man descended from the peasantry. Curiously, literary critics have paid little attention to the fact that Orzeszkowa’s “social study” Patriotyzm i kosmopolityzm
(Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism) from the year before (1880) served to theoretically underpin the metaphor of pierwotnosc. Drawing on the writings of Herbert Spencer and other contemporary social thinkers such as Oscar Peschel, John Lubbock and Alfred Fouillée, Orzeszkowa navigates between the poles of cosmopolitanism and
patriotism and seeks a well-balanced middle way. In her evolutionary thinking about society, the <gure of człowiek pierwotny – Spencer’s “primitive man” – serves as a universal negative model. Thus, the peculiarity of Orzeszkowa’s use of social science lies not only in that she virtually limits it to its metaphorical potential, but also the fact that in Pierwotni, she does not refer to the idealistic propositions contained in Patriotyzm i kosmopolityzm. Rather, she absolutises the dark pierwotnosc (primitivity).