of its power from the author's intimate awareness of the final demise of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, a century before he completed Pharaoh. This is a political awareness that Prus shared with his 10-years-junior novelist compatriot, Joseph Conrad, who was an admirer of Prus' writings. Pharaoh has been translated into 20 languages and adapted as a 1966 Polish feature film. It is also known to have been Joseph Stalin's favourite book. 20th-century novel Joseph Conrad wrote several novels with political themes: Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Nostromo (1904) is set amid political upheaval in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, where a trusted Italian-descended longshoreman, Giovanni Battista Fidanza—the novel's eponymous "Nostromo" (Italian for "our man")—is instructed by English-descended silver-mine owner Charles Gould to take Gould's silver abroad so that it will not fall into the hands of revolutionaries. The role of politics is paramount in The Secret Agent, as the main character, Verloc, works for a quasi-political organisation. The plot to destroy Greenwich Observatory is in itself anarchistic. Vladimir asserts that the bombing "must be purely destructive" and that the anarchists who will be implicated as the architects of the explosion "should make it clear that [they] are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation." However, the political form of anarchism is ultimately controlled in the novel: the only supposed politically motivated act is orchestrated by a secret government agency. Conrad's third political novel, Under Western Eyes, is connected to Russian history. Its first audience read it against the backdrop of the failed Revolution of 1905 and in the shadow of the movements and impulses that would take shape as the revolutions of 1917. Conrad's earlier novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), also had political implications, in its depiction of European colonial depredations in Africa, which Conrad witnessed during his employ in the Belgian Congo. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a depiction of the plight of the poor. However, some Steinbeck's contemporaries attacked his social and political views. Bryan Cordyack writes: "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book