The canon of twelve stories translated into English by Bill Johnston includes works from different periods of Prus’s creative activity; as many as nine stem from the first half of the 1880s and form part — in the agreed opinion of literary historians — of the most accomplished period of his short-story writing.

Reading these stories in chronological order, we may be prompted to enquire both about Prus’s particular qualities as a short-story writer and about the internal evolution of his so-called "short prose".