The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [1]
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.