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By Root 3450 0

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honest and humane but also disarmingly naive Rzecki is a late child of the Napoleonic era, able to think only in outdated, Romantic categories of sacrifice, conspiracy, and Messianic mission.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 perhaps even more so, the decay of Positivist beliefs. The fundamental idea of both Western and Polish Positivists — their concept of society as a gigantic organism, whose parts function harmoniously for the benefit of the whole — could not sound more ridiculous than it does here, when confronted with a starkly realistic picture of contemporary Polish society, chronicled so accurately by Prus the journalist. If this society is a living organism at all, it is the organism of a Colossus with clay feet and a very little brain. It has a disenfranchised, hopelessly vegetating lower class at the base and aristocratic nincompoops, like Izabela’s father, at the top. For a former enthusiast of Positivism such as Prus, who had placed so much hope in the enterprising spirit of the middle class, it must have been painful that between the workers and the aristocracy there was little more than isolated figures like Wokulski, whose every effort at lasting social improvement (not merely philanthropic improvisation) is doomed to fail. Why? Because each of Wokulski’s specific actions is bound to be misinterpreted. His generosity is taken for a nouveau-riche’s wish to impress; his sound economic reasoning, for greed; his energy, for pushiness; his caution, for pettymindedness. In a total standstill, every step forward treads on a corn or two. Prus’s ‘social decay’ is a mire of stagnation. Every effort that carries some weight has to sink sooner or later. Only the operations of small-time crooks stay afloat.

This diagnosis sounds even more well-founded since Prus makes it work ingeniously in many dimensions of his novelistic world simultaneously. His keen observation dissects society not merely along its vertical axis. It also moves horizontally, revealing, for instance, the immobilising, destructive results of ethnic animosity. Polish-Russian and Polish-Jewish conflict can find, in the eyes of Prus, neither a rational explanation nor an easy solution. It tears the fabric of society even