The Doll
Authors: Boleslaw Prus
BOLESÅAW PRUS (1847â1912) was born Aleksander GÅowacki in the provincial town of Hrubieszów, Poland. His mother died in 1850; his father, an estate steward of noble birth (the author's pen name is a reference to the family's origin near the Prussian border), died six years later, leaving him in the care of relatives in PuÅawy and Lublin. In 1862, he moved to Kielce with his older brother Leon, a Polish patriot. The next year, the teenaged Aleksander joined in the January 1863 uprising against Russian rule. Wounded in battle, he was imprisoned in Lublin Castle, but released when he was discovered to be underage. He then finished high school and enrolled in university, but lacked the funds to graduate. Instead, he worked several odd jobs, including a stint in a metallurgical factory, before taking up journalism. Prus eventually made a name for himself as a writer of feuilletons, publishing his much-admired
Kroniki
in the
Kurier Warszawski
between 1875 and 1887 and also achieving some success with his short stories.
The Outpost
, published in 1885, was the first of four novels that secured his literary reputation. It was followed by
The Doll
(1890),
Emancipated Women
(1894), and
The Pharaoh
(1897). A respected but no longer fashionable writer, Prus dedicated his last years to social reform and philanthropic work.
STANISÅAW BARAÅCZAK is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He won the 2007 Nike Award for the best work of Polish literature published in the previous year and the 2009 Silesius Poetry Award for lifetime achievement. He is a professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard University.
THE DOLL
BOLESÅAW PRUS
Translated from the Polish by
DAVID WELSH
Revised by
DARIUSZ TOÅCZYK
and
ANNA ZARANKO
Introduction by
STANISÅAW BARAÅCZAK
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
I
The Firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski Seen Through a Bottle
III
The Journal of the Old Clerk
V
The Democratisation of a Gentleman and Dreams of a Society Lady
VI
How New People Appear on the Old Horizon
VII
The Dove Goes Out to Encounter the Serpent
IX
Footbridges on which People of Various Worlds Meet
XI
Old Dreams and New Acquaintances
XII
Travels on Behalf of Someone Else
XV
How a Human Soul is Devastated by Passion and by Common Sense
XVI â
She', âHe' and the Others
XVII
Germination of Certain Cropsâand Illusions
XVIII
Surprises, Delusions and Observations of the Old Clerk
XX
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXI
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXII
Grey Days and Baneful Hours
XXVII
Woods, Ruins, Enchantments
XXVIII
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXIX
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXX
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXXIV
Tempus Fugit, Aeternitas Manet
XXXV
The Journal of the Old Clerk
XXXVII
The Journal of the Old Clerk
Copyright and More Information
T
HE GREATEST
realist in the history of the Polish novel suffered all his life from acute agoraphobia. Not that this curious piece of trivia will unlock any mystery about his writing. At first glance, it may even seem that the reader who enters the novelistic world of Boleslaw Prus (1847â1912) is in no need of any special key at all, and most certainly not of a psychopathological one. This is the work of a supremely sane mind, produced in an epoch which, while in reality as much affected by human aberration as any other period in recorded history, at least put the principle of sanity relatively high on its list of priorities.
Still, the fact of Prus's agoraphobia
is
curious. The typical narrator in the realistic novel of the nineteenth century was, as a rule, one who blithely defied all the laws of ârealistic' probability by assuming an all-seeing, Olympian view. Prus's critics at the time accused him of a âmyopic' preference to focus on detail rather than seeing the large picture. While not true of his writing, this was true of his life. Venturing into any space broader than his Warsaw apartment or a couple of familiar streets in the neighbourhood made him dizzy. His worst attack of agoraphobia came upon him when, as a thirty-four-year-old man, he took, for the first time in his life, the risk of visiting a fashionable mountain spa. So much for the Olympian viewpoint. And yet, amazingly, if there is any novelist who has succeeded in unfolding a broad and richly detailed panorama of nineteenth-century Polish life while also bringing this picture alive with genuine human drama, it is Boleslaw Prus in his
Lalka, The Doll
.
Serialised in a newspaper, starting in 1887, and published in book form in 1890, this novel had to weather a cold reception before it became what it is today, one of the few most loved and continually reread classics of Polish literature. On its first appearance, it had the double disadvantage of being too extraordinary for its critics and too ordinary for its readers. In the eyes of the former, it strayed too much off the beaten path of the genre. âChaotic composition' was the most frequently reiterated charge, which particularly infuriated Prus, who thought it his most meticulously planned work of fiction to date. In the eyes of the reader, its appearance was overshadowed and its significance dwarfed by the almost simultaneous serialised publication of two novels by two extremely popular and respected authors for whom Prus at that point seemed to be no competition at all: Henryk Sienkiewicz with the final part of his
Trilogy
and the leading Polish woman writer of that epoch, Eliza Orzeszkowa, with her major work,
On the Banks of the Niemen
. Yet it was not Sienkiewicz, for all the tremendous popular appeal of his historical fables, and not Orzeszkowa, with her respected and influential if overly didactic contemporary novels, but Prus who left behind a work worthy of being called
the
Polish novel of the nineteenth century.
The Doll's
initial cold reception resulted from both the critics' and the reading public's confusion about the nature of the work. In fact, the whole course of Prus's career up to 1890 was handicapped by a few popular misconceptions about himself and the nature of his writing. When Polish critics today attempt to give a Western audience some idea of Prus's place in Polish literature, they resort almost unavoidably to portraying him as the Chekhov of Poland. Even though such a comparison usually makes little sense, in this particular case the critics may be on to something. As well as their professional training in medicine or science rather than the humanities, perhaps the most striking analogy between the lives, if not the works, of Chekhov and Prus is that each of them had to struggle for a very long time to convince the public that he was a serious writer rather than a cheap humorist. Ironically, the exquisite sense of humour that these two writers shared was, at the outset of their respective careers, both their greatest asset and their curse. It gave each of them his first foothold in the writing business only to turn into a major obstacle on his creative path. In Prus's case, the condescending labels of âhumorist', â
feuilletonist
', âjournalist' and the like stuck so persistently that they affected the first critical reactions to
The Doll
â which saw the light of day when he was, after all, the forty-year-old author of at least one critically acclaimed and definitely serious novel and a large number of equally serious short stories.
His was an epoch that valued seriousness above all things. The so-called Positivists of his sober-minded, moderate, commonsensical and conciliatory generation resisted Romantic stereotypes of national martyrdom, urged involvement with social reform and generally inclined away from the visionary to the realistic and pragmatic. The typical Positivist critic or writer deplored the literature of the immediately preceding period of Romanticism as foolish flights of fancy. The seeds of the controversy had been sown in 1795, when Poland's territory was ultimately divided and swallowed up by the three neighbouring empires â Russia, Prussia and Austria. An atmosphere of profound spiritual crisis, caused by the Final Partition (an event almost unanimously perceived by Poles as history's, and perhaps even divine providence's act of supreme injustice) meant it took a quarter of a century for the first Romantic poets to emerge. But when Adam Mickiewicz published his first collection in 1822, the avalanche of Romantic poetry began. Eight years later, a motley band of soldiers and civilians â most of them poets themselves, naturally enough â triggered the so-called November Uprising by staging a legendary assault on the Belweder, the Warsaw residence of the Russian governor of Poland. This band used the title of one of Mickiewicz's most celebrated poems, âKonrad Wallenrod', as shorthand for what happened that November night: âThe word has become flesh, and Wallenrod has become the Belweder.'
The November Uprising was soon crushed, yet in Polish literature the three decades that followed saw the triumph of the greatest Romantic poets. Since the insurrection's defeat in 1831 all of them, including Mickiewicz, had lived in exile but that did not prevent them from exerting a tremendous influence on the minds of their Polish readers everywhere. Such was Romantic poetry's soul-stirring as well as its lethal potential and, more generally, the prevalence of the Romantic value system, that a few independent minds issued warnings against possible consequences. Cyprian Norwid, one of the greatest Polish poets but already a post-Romantic, lamented the fate that would await Poland if it continued to be âa nation where every action is taken too early, and every book comes out too late'. This aphorism, one referring obviously to the Romantic antinomy of the Word versus the Deed, and reversing its usual order of priority, could not, however, slow down the momentum. In January 1863, another uprising against Tsarist oppression started in the Russian-occupied part of Poland. The future author of
The Doll
was then fifteen and a half years of age.
