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 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honest and humane but also disarmingly naive Rzecki is a late child of the Napoleonic era, able to think only in outdated, Romantic categories of sacrifice, conspiracy, and Messianic mission.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 more irreparably than the class distinctions. Yet another concern is the perennial problem of Poland’s place among the civilised nations of the West. Wokulski’s trip to Paris makes him — and the reader — realise the enormous distance separating Poland from France, which it claims to have emulated for centuries.
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?
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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 the behaviour of President MacMahon, while others declared that Wokulski was certainly a lunatic, if not something worse…
Mr Deklewski, the carriage-manufacturer, who owed all his fortune and position to steady work in one and the same trade, and Councillor Węgrowicz, a lawyer who had for twenty years been member and patron of one and the same charitable institution, had known Wokulski longest and it was they who most vociferously predicted his ruin. ‘Ruin and insolvency’, said Mr Deklewski, ‘must finish off a man who never sticks to a trade and doesn’t know how to respect the gifts of Fortune.’ Whereas Councillor Węgrowicz added to each of his friend’s aphorisms: ‘A lunatic … a lunatic … an adventurer! Joe, another beer there! How many does that make?’
‘’Tis the sixth, sir … Coming!’ replied Joe.
‘The sixth already … How time flies, to be sure. He’s a lunatic, that’s what,’ Councillor Węgrowicz muttered.
To those who ate in the same restaurant as the lawyer, to its proprietor, the clerks and the waiters, the reasons for the disasters about to fall upon Wokulski and his haberdashery store were as clear as the gas-lights that illuminated the establishment. These reasons were rooted in his restless nature, in his adventurous life, not to mention the latest act of this man who — though he had an assured living in his grasp and the opportunity to frequent this respectable restaurant — had nevertheless quit the restaurant of his own free will, left his shop to the care of Providence and gone off with all the cash inherited from his late wife to make a fortune in the Russo-Turkish war.
‘Maybe he’ll do it … Army supplies is good business,’ said Szprot the travelling salesman, who was an infrequent visitor here.
‘He’ll do nothing!’ Deklewski retorted, ‘and in the meantime a reputable shop is going to the dogs. Only the Germans and the Jews get rich from Army trade; we Poles haven’t the brains for it.’
‘Maybe Wokulski has.’
‘He’s a lunatic, a lunatic …’ the lawyer muttered. ‘Here, Joe — another beer! How many does that make?’
‘The seventh, sir … Coming!’
‘The seventh already? … How time flies, to be sure …’
The travelling salesman, who needed extensive and exhaustive information about trade on account of his calling, carried his bottle and glass over to the lawyer’s table and gazed sweetly into the latter’s watery eyes as he asked in a low voice: ‘Excuse me, I beg … why call Wokulski a lunatic? Pray allow me to offer you a cigar … I know Wokulski slightly. He always strikes me as a secretive man, a proud man. And in business, secrecy is a great virtue, pride a fault. But I’ve never seen Wokulski show symptoms of lunacy.’
The lawyer accepted the cigar with no overt signs of gratitude. His red face, with clumps of grey hair on his temples, chin and cheeks, looked like a marrow framed in silver.
‘I call him a lunatic,’ he replied, as he slowly bit off the end of the cigar and lit up, ‘I call him a lunatic because I’ve known him for — let’s see, fifteen, seventeen, eighteen years. That was in 1860 … We used to eat at Hopfer’s then. Did you know Hopfer, sir?’
‘Hm …’
‘In those days, Wokulski was a waiter in Hopfer’s restaurant, and yet he was already over twenty.’
‘In the food and drink trade, eh?’
‘Just so. And like Joe here, he used to serve me my Beef Nelson and beer …’
‘Then he transferred from that line of business to the haberdashery trade?’ asked the travelling salesman.
‘Not so fast, if you please,’ the lawyer interrupted. ‘He transferred, certainly, but not to haberdashery. Instead he went to the Preparatory College and then to the City College — he wanted to become a scholar, d’you see?’
The commercial traveller nodded to express his surprise.
‘Just think of that!’ he said. ‘What put that into his head?’
‘Well, it was the same old business — he knew people at the Medical Academy and the School of Fine Arts … In those days everyone was crazy with ideas, and he didn’t want to be behind the rest of ’em. So by day he waited on customers in the restaurant, and did the accounts, and nights he studied.’
‘The service must have gone to the devil?’
‘No more than anywhere else,’ the lawyer replied, with a deprecatory gesture. ‘Except that when he was waiting on you, he was a holy terror: he’d scowl like thunder at the most innocent word … It stands to reason we amused ourselves at his expense, and what vexed him most was to be called “Doctor”. One fine day he went for a customer and they very nearly tore one another to pieces.’
‘Business suffered, of course?’
‘Not at all! When the news got around that Hopfer’s waiter wanted to go to the Preparatory College, crowds would go there for dinner. It was crowded out with students in particular.’
‘And did he get into the College?’
‘He did, and he even passed his exam for the City College. Yes, but now,’ the lawyer went on, tapping the travelling salesman’s knee, ‘instead of sticking to his studies till he finished, he left the College in less than a year.’
‘What did he do that for?’
‘Ah … He and the rest of ’em sowed the harvest we’re still reaping to this day, and in the end Wokulski finished up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk.’
‘Oh my,’ sighed the travelling salesman.
‘That wasn’t all, though … In 1870 he came back to Warsaw with what he’d saved. He spent six months looking for work, avoiding the wine and food trade which he hates, until finally the patronage of his present managing clerk Rzecki got him into Mrs Mincel’s shop. She’d just become a widow and a year later he married the old girl, who was much older than he.’
‘A good move,’ the travelling salesman interposed.
‘Oh, quite so. At one stroke he acquired a living and a trade he could stick to calmly for the rest of his days. But he had the devil’s own work with the old lady.’
‘That’s often the way.’
‘Too true,’ said the lawyer. ‘But just think of the luck he had! Eighteen months ago the old lady ate too much and died, and Wokulski’s hard labour was over, he was free as air, he’d a well-stocked store and 30,000 roubles in cash, for which two generations of the Mincels had toiled.’
‘He’s a lucky fellow all right.’
‘He was,’ the lawyer amended, ‘but he didn’t appreciate it. Another fellow in his place would have married a nice girl and settled down; just think what a shop with a good name means these days — and one in a good location too! But this lunatic threw it all away and went off to do business in the war. It was millions he wanted, that’s what.’
‘Maybe he’ll do it, too,’ the commercial traveller remarked.
‘Hm …’ the lawyer grunted. ‘Joe, another beer … Do you think, my dear sir, that he’ll find a richer old lady in Turkey than the late Mrs Mincel? Joe!’
‘Comi
ng, sir! The eighth coming up …’
‘The eighth?’ the lawyer echoed. ‘It can’t be! Just a minute there … ’Twas the sixth just now, then the seventh … ‘and he grunted, covering his face with one hand. ‘Maybe it’s the eighth after all. How time flies, to be sure …’
Despite the mournful prognostications of sober people, the haberdashery store of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski did not collapse into ruin, but even profited. The public was intrigued by the rumours of bankruptcy and visited the store in increasing numbers, and since Wokulski’s departure, Russian merchants were coming to his store to order merchandise. Orders increased, credit was available, bills were paid regularly, and the shop was thronged with so many customers that the three clerks could barely cope: of these three, one was a lanky fair youth who looked as if he might become consumptive and die any minute; the second, a dark youth with a philosopher’s beard and princely gestures; while the third was a young dandy who wore moustaches the fair sex found fatal and which were perfumed like a chemical laboratory into the bargain.
However, the curiosity of the public, the physical and moral graces of the three clerks, and even the solid reputation of the shop could not have saved it from rack and ruin, had it not been for an employee of the firm for the last forty years, Wokulski’s old friend and managing clerk, Ignacy Rzecki.
II
The Reign of an Old Clerk
FOR twenty-five years, Ignacy Rzecki had lived in a little room behind the store. During all this time the shop had changed owners and its floor, its cupboards and the window glass, not to mention the scope of its business and its clerks; but Rzecki’s room stayed just the same as ever. It still had one dismal window overlooking a dismal yard, with the same bars across it and the same spider-web that had been suspended there perhaps a quarter of a century ago, and the same old curtain, once green, but now faded by the sun.