The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [3]
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