The Doll Read Free

Romantic ideology.
    In the most revealing of his self-commentaries written after
The Doll
, an extensive letter to the editor published in 1897 in
Kurier Warszawski
, Prus succinctly defined his intention as the desire ‘to present our Polish idealists against the background of society’s decay’. (The Polish word for ‘decay’, ‘
rozkład
’, actually has a number of English possible counterparts in this context, from ‘breakdown’ and ‘disintegration’ to ‘decay’ and ‘decomposition’.) He also offered an alternative title that he considered in 1897, with the benefit of hindsight, much better than the unintentionally misleading
Lalka
. After the novel’s publication, most critics took its title either for a one-word summary of the author’s opinion about the chief heroine, the spoiled aristocratic girl and object of Wokulski’s unrequited love, Izabela Łęcka, or an expression of Prus’s more general conviction about our helplessness in the hands of overpowering Fate: ‘
lalka
’ means both ‘doll’ and ‘puppet’. The truth, according to Prus, was that he had chosen his title more or less ‘accidentally’. It was supposed to highlight one of the novel’s episodes, in which the alleged theft of a real doll leads to a curious court trial. The subplot around that event was modelled on a newspaper story, which was for Prus the moment of ‘crystallisation’ of his general thematic design.
    The less ‘accidental’ title that he came up with later was
Trzy pokolenia, Three Generations
. Such a title would certainly have helped Prus’s contemporary reviewers avoid many misreadings and misunderstandings. In particular, the identification of ‘the doll’ with Izabela can only result in a considerably flattened, one-dimensional image of the novel. It
is
, of course, among other things, also a great novel about a middle-aged man’s ill-fated love for a pampered and affected young woman. But Wokulski’s infatuation is just part of his psychological profile and is not the only force animating the plot. Wokulski, while
The Doll’s
dominant figure, is flanked by two other characters vital to the novel: the old store-clerk Rzecki and the young scientist Ochocki. These three serve as representatives of the ‘three generations’ of ‘our Polish idealists’. The thoroughly honest and humane but also disarmingly naive Rzecki is a late child of the Napoleonic era, able to think only in outdated, Romantic categories of sacrifice, conspiracy, and Messianic mission. Wokulski is an ‘idealist’ of the transitional phase in history: from the years he spent in Siberia as a punishment for his involvement in the January Uprising until his current position as a highly successful Warsaw businessman, his life connects the end of the Romantic era with the beginning of the new, Positivist one. (His commercial success actually stems from trade with Russia — one of the novel’s many pregnant ironies.) His ‘idealism’ is incomparably more concrete, active and rational than that of his elderly subordinate and confidant. Wokulski’s own Utopia can be built, or so he claims, through wise investment and sound economic policy, for only a nation with economic independence has a right to political independence. Finally, Ochocki is a new type of ‘idealist’, one of those who, buoyed up by their faith in scientific and technological progress, pin all their hopes on society’s intellectual maturation.
    Prus’s entire novel would be an insufferably uplifting Sunday sermon had any member of this triumvirate triumphed. In fact, all three are, at least in the short run, losers. ‘The decay’ which, in Prus’s own words, forms a background for their dreams and deeds, is not just the decay of the obsolete Romantic ideology. It is also, and