Novel
The Doll
Lalka
Bolesław Prus · 1890
Opening lines
W początkach roku 1878, kiedy świat polityczny zajmował się pokojem san-stefańskim, wyborem nowego papieża albo szansami europejskiej wojny, warszawscy kupcy tudzież inteligencja pewnej okolicy Krakowskiego Przedmieścia niemniej gorąco interesowała się przyszłością galanteryjnego sklepu pod firmą J. Mincel i S. Wokulski.
At the beginning of 1878, when the political world was taken up with the Peace of San Stefano, the election of a new pope or the chances of a European war, the merchants of Warsaw and the intelligentsia of a certain part of Krakowskie Przedmieście took no less keen an interest in the future of a fancy-goods shop trading as J. Mincel and S. Wokulski.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from wolnelektury.pl
Synopsis
Warsaw, 1878. Stanisław Wokulski, a former insurgent and deportee turned merchant, has grown rich supplying the Russian army during the war against Turkey. Smitten with Izabela Łęcka, the daughter of a ruined aristocrat, he puts his fortune at the service of this passion, buys the family's building and frequents an aristocracy that keeps him at a distance. Around him the city works and speculates, and his old clerk Rzecki keeps the diary of it all.
Context
The book appeared as a serial in the Kurier Codzienny from November 1887 to May 1889, before being collected in volume form in 1890; the author had at first thought of calling it Trois générations. He poured into it everything he observed of Warsaw: prices, trades, streets, business dealings, the decline of the nobility. The narrative alternates between the narrator and the old clerk's diary. The title comes from a secondary episode, a trial over a doll allegedly stolen, which the author says he took from a real case read in the press.
Who it is for
A long novel with many characters; its picture of Warsaw has the value of a document, and the love plot is only one thread among others. French translation in three volumes.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the great Polish realist novel, nineteenth-century realism at its best according to Miłosz, and adapted for the cinema by Wojciech Has in 1968.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.