The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [4]
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.
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