"Shades" is one of Bolesław Prus' shortest micro-stories. Written in 1885, it comes from a period of pessimism in his life caused partly by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that he had been editing for less than a year. Prus, the "lamplighter" who had striven to dispel darkness and its attendant "fear, madness, and mischief," had failed to sufficiently interest the public in Nowiny, his Positivist "observatory of societal facts,".