The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [6]
Lastly, the Polish stalemate is scrutinised in historical time. First and foremost a contemporary novel, focused on the present moment in history, The Doll is also to some extent a historical novel — a novel whose contemporary plot depends on the backdrop of the historical past. The narrative structure of The Doll is affected by the almost compulsive retrospection of at least some of the characters. They either idealise the past or abhor it as the source of present troubles. The most significant of these characters is Ignacy Rzecki. Prus had the brilliant idea of inserting entries from the ‘Journal of the Old Clerk’ into his narrative. This hybrid — third-person narration with pockets of first-person diaristic narration — crucially affected the novel’s narrative and earned the writer much critical abuse. Yet it pays off in more ways than one. It allows him, first of all, to let Rzecki draw his own self-portrait — engaging and sympathetic because expressed in his idiosyncratic style. Second, Rzecki’s diary releases a multitude of subtle ironies: the old clerk’s naive interpretations of Wokulski’s actions diverge from the actual motivations, revealed to the reader in the third-person narrative. But Rzecki’s habit of reminiscing, turning back towards the distant historical past at every opportunity, seems to be the chief benefit. It gives the novel a new dimension by demonstrating the extent — one unknown in nations blessed with more peaceful and less absurd histories — to which the burden of the past can mould an individual’s as well as an entire society’s attitude to the present and vision of the future.
A vision of the future derived from an interpretation of society’s past and a critical assessment of its present state — this is actually what Prus’s The Doll is all about. This is the minimum that this novel demands from successive generations of its readers. It is also an old-fashioned yet still fascinating love story, a historically determined yet still topical diagnosis of society’s ills, and a forceful yet subtle portrayal of a tragically doomed man. The Doll is all this; but what is most enduring about it has been hinted at already by Prus himself.
In our age of shattered utopias, amidst the overwhelming odour of ‘decay’, perhaps the most persistent question is the one that this agoraphobic, myopic, yet bold and far-sighted nineteenth-century realist felt compelled to ask: how, without being blindly naive, can one remain an ‘idealist’ in a ‘decayed’ world? Or, to put it another way, how to continue in the belief that we can become something better than we are, while almost all available evidence seems to point to the contrary?
Stanisław Barańczak
The Doll
I
The Firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski Seen Through a Bottle
EARLY in 1878, when the political world was concerned with the treaty of San Stefano, the election of a new Pope, and the chances of a European war, Warsaw businessmen and the intelligentsia who frequented a certain spot in the Krakowskie Przedmieście were no less keenly interested in the future of the haberdashery firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski.
In a celebrated restaurant where the proprietors of linen stores or wine shops, carriage- and hat-makers, solemn paterfamilias living on their incomes, and the owners of apartment houses with no fixed occupation met to partake of refreshments in the evenings, as much was said of the arming of England as of the firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski. Surrounded by clouds of cigar smoke, and sitting over dark bottles, some of the citizens of this neighbourhood bet that England would win — or lose; others bet on Wokulski’s likely bankruptcy; some called Bismarck a genius, others declared Wokulski an irresponsible adventurer; some criticised