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By Root 3466 0

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