The Doll

  BOLESŁAW PRUS (1847–1912) was born Aleksander Głowacki 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 Puławy 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.

  STANISŁAW BARAŃCZAK 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

  BOLESŁAW PRUS

  Translated from the Polish by

  DAVID WELSH

  Revised by

  DARIUSZ TOŁCZYK and ANNA ZARANKO

  Introduction by

  STANISŁAW BARAŃCZAK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  The Doll

  I The Firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski Seen Through a Bottle

  II The Reign of an Old Clerk

  III The Journal of the Old Clerk

  IV The Return

  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

  VIII Meditations

  IX Footbridges on which People of Various Worlds Meet

  X The Journal of the Old Clerk

  XI Old Dreams and New Acquaintances

  XII Travels on Behalf of Someone Else

  XIII Gentlefolk at Play

  XIV Girlish Dreams

  XV How a Human Soul is Devastated by Passion and by Common Sense

  XVI ‘She’, ‘He’ and the Others

  XVII Germination of Certain Crops—and Illusions

  XVIII Surprises, Delusions and Observations of the Old Clerk

  XIX First Warning

  XX The Journal of the Old Clerk

  XXI The Journal of the Old Clerk

  XXII Grey Days and Baneful Hours

  XXIII An Apparition

  XXIV A Man Happy in Love

  XXV Rural Diversions

  XXVI Under the Same Roof

  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

  XXXI Ladies and Women

  XXXII How Eyes Begin to Open

  XXXIII A Couple Reconciled

  XXXIV Tempus Fugit, Aeternitas Manet

  XXXV The Journal of the Old Clerk

  XXXVI A Soul in Lethargy

  XXXVII The Journal of the Old Clerk

  XXXVIII … ? …

  Appendix: A Censored Passage

  Notes

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE 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 (1847–1912) 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 ‘realistic’ probability by assuming an all-seeing, Olympian view. Prus’s critics at the time accused him of a ‘myopic’ 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. ‘Chaotic 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 ‘humorist’, ‘feuilletonist’,
‘journalist’ and the like stuck so persistently that they affected the first critical reactions to The Doll — 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 — 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 — most of them poets themselves, naturally enough — 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, ‘Konrad Wallenrod’, as shorthand for what happened that November night: ‘The 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 ‘a 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.

  Because all published work in Russian-occupied Poland had to pass the Tsarist censor, Prus tended to avoid any direct mention of the Uprising or his personal involvement. Yet there is no doubt that this was the most powerful formative experience of his youth. Born as Aleksander Głowacki — the pen name Prus was a reference to his family’s coat of arms — in the provincial town of Hrubieszów, he was orphaned early and raised by relatives in Pulawy and Lublin. In the early 1860s he moved to Kielce in the custody of his older brother Leon, who was deeply involved in patriotic conspiracy. When the uprising broke out, young Aleksander fought in it, was wounded, and spent some time in hospital and prison. After he was released he managed to complete his high school education in Lublin, and moved to Warsaw to study — a significant choice — physics and mathematics at the so-called Main School, which was the Russian authorities’ official name for the heavily controlled and downgraded former University of Warsaw.

  Prus never graduated from the Main School, yet his interest in science was much more than just a passing fad of the Positivist era: he retained it, as a personal hobby, throughout his life. (Some traces of this interest, bordering on science fiction, also show in The Doll; in particular, the fictitious invention of a metal lighter than air.) After dropping out of school he tried to make his living at a number of jobs, even as a manual labourer. He made his début in 1866 with a couple of humorous prose pieces published in the Sunday edition of a Warsaw daily. It was, however, only after 1872 that he began writing and publishing more systematically, initially as a frequent contributor to rather disreputable satirical broadsheets. In 1874 he started contributing to more respected periodicals and his writing shifted towards a more serious genre. It was the classic Central European genre of the feuilleton, a half-journalistic, half-essayistic comment on the events of the day. Prus was soon to become a master of it. Columns entitled Kroniki (‘Chronicles’) and published regularly between 1875 and 1887 in the Kurier Warszawski (Warsaw Courier) brought him wide recognition. And it would be fair to say that the enormous popularity of the feuilleton in the literary life of twentieth-century Poland, and the high level of its best examplars, owe a great deal to the standards set by Prus in his ‘Chronicles’.

  In the mid-1870s Prus’s regular writing of feuilletons and other mostly journalistic or essayistic pieces began finally to bring him enough income to live on, and even to get married. In 1872 he nevertheless jumped at the chance to take over, as a new editor-in-chief, one of the periodicals he had contributed to, Nowiny (News). To devote his entire time and energy to this work, he even gave up — as it turned out, for no longer than ten months — his column at the Kurier. One is tempted to say that the failure of his ambitious plans to convert Nowiny, a run-of-the-mill periodical, into a ‘social observatory’ was one of the best things that ever happened to Polish literature. After this monumental flop, Prus never returned to editing, and instead focused on writing again. Even more important, his writing from then on included not just the re-started ‘Chronicles’, but ever more fiction.

  Although Prus had written a couple of novels since the mid-1870s, it was the short story that dominated his early æuvre. Only after trying out a large number of different narrative approaches and scoring a number of artistic successes in the shorter genre did he feel secure enough to attempt a novel again. As a result, the years 1885–97, the most creative and prolific period in his life, produced four major novels, each of which has a secure place in Polish literary history. The Doll was the second of the four, preceded by Placówka (The Outpost, 1885) and followed by Emancypantki (Emancipated Women, 1894) and Faraon (known in English as The Pharaoh and Priest, 1897). Even without taking The Doll into account, it would be hard to imagine three realistic novels more different from each other. Suffice it to say that the chief protagonists of The Outpost, Emancipated Women and The Pharaoh are, respectively, an illiterate peasant in the Prussian part of the partitioned Poland, resisting the efforts of German settlers to force him off his land; a well-educated young woman coping with the contradictory expectations of the contemporary social and professional scene, both in Warsaw and in backwater Russian-occupied Poland; and an Egyptian pharaoh engaged in deadly strife with the powerful caste of priests who block his attempts at reforming the state. (Silly as this condensation of its plot may sound, The Pharaoh, Prus’s only historical novel, is in fact a brilliantly conceived and executed portrayal of the timeless mechanisms of political power; it seems more and more topical, and several critics over the past two or three decades have given this novel even higher marks than The Doll. Add The Doll’s Stanisław Wokulski, a middle-aged businessman and store owner who has already made it from rags to riches but, spurred by his unreciprocated love for an aristocratic girl, tries unsuccessfully to win the aristocracy’s respect as well, and you have a quartet of protagonists truly capable of impressing the reader with their author’s range of interest, scope of vision, and depth of psychological insight.

  After completing the manuscript of The Pharaoh, Prus treated himself — at the age of fifty — to his first longer voyage abroad, to Germany, Switzerland and France. It was to be the only trip of its kind he ever made. His last years were filled mostly with philanthropic and other social work; he helped organise, for instance, a citizens’ committee to
aid workers fired for their participation in the 1905 strikes and lent his support to initiatives aimed at spreading personal hygiene among the poor. His creative powers, on the other hand, were waning. Around the turn of the century he was also quite palpably losing his grip on his younger readers. Since about 1890, the year of the publication of The Doll, the literature of the fin de siècle had been dominated by the new generation of ‘decadents’ and misty symbolists; Prus, a believer in social reform and realistic observer of life, was anomalous. The shock of the revolution of 1905 restored the need for his kind of writing for a while. Prus spent the next two years writing for periodicals, making public appearances, and working on his last completed novel, Dzieci (The Children), which, as its title clearly indicates, was mostly focused on portraying the spiritual dilemmas of the young generation. His work on the next novel, entitled, also tellingly, Przemiany (Changes), was terminated by his death in 1912.

  If Prus’s reaction to the events of 1905 forms the closing bracket of his creative evolution, the opening bracket must be the failed uprising of 1863. Of all the major works of Prus, it is The Doll that most needs to be read with the January Uprising in the back of our minds, even though the novel’s action takes place fifteen to sixteen years after that event and the event itself is seldom mentioned — at least not directly — by the narrator or the characters. In its first published version, the text suffered a great deal from the censor’s cuts.

  The present edition follows the twentieth-century Polish critical editions in restoring all the missing fragments, apart from one which, for reasons explained on p.ix, is included as an appendix. The Doll is not only and not even primarily a political novel. It is, however, a novel about history’s impact on individual lives. It cannot avoid being that since its protagonists are Poles living in the former capital of their country, which for the past eighty-odd years had been engrossed by the Russian Empire and which, in living memory, had experienced two massive and bloodily suppressed revolts. These defeats loom large: the consequences of the 1863 uprising, in particular, directly affect the lives of many of the novel’s characters, including its chief protagonist, Wokulski. But the cause is more than the past ordeal of those wronged. The entire human landscape of The Doll is a landscape after a lost battle: after the defeat of the Polish version of Romantic ideology.