∎ Libro Free The Doll Central European Classics Boleslaw Prus David Welsh Darius Tolczyk Anna Zaranko Stanislaw Baranczak 9781858660653 Books

The Doll Central European Classics Boleslaw Prus David Welsh Darius Tolczyk Anna Zaranko Stanislaw Baranczak 9781858660653 Books

Download As PDF : The Doll Central European Classics Boleslaw Prus David Welsh Darius Tolczyk Anna Zaranko Stanislaw Baranczak 9781858660653 Books

The Doll Central European Classics Boleslaw Prus David Welsh Darius Tolczyk Anna Zaranko Stanislaw Baranczak 9781858660653 Books

The inability to easily navigate in this format made the read a real slog through mud and much less enjoyable that it may have been. I'd so looked forward to reading this Polish classic in a good English translation, so the disappointment was great. It was difficult to keep the characters and time frame straight in what would otherwise have been a wonderful experience.


Tags : The Doll (Central European Classics) [Boleslaw Prus, David Welsh, Darius Tolczyk, Anna Zaranko, Stanislaw Baranczak] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. About the <em>Central European Classics</em> series: Half a continent's worth of forgotten genius. --<em>The Guardian</em> The new <em>Central European Classics</em> series was born some ten years ago in the dim cafes of Budapest and Prague when General Editor Timothy Garton Ash began jotting down titles recommended to him by local writers. Its aim is to take these works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classic fiction out of the ghetto,Boleslaw Prus, David Welsh, Darius Tolczyk, Anna Zaranko, Stanislaw Baranczak,The Doll (Central European Classics),Oxford University Press,1858660653,Literary,CentralEastern Europe,FICTION General,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction-Literary,General,Historical romance,Literature - Classics Criticism,Modern fiction,Other,ScholarlyUndergraduate,UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Doll Central European Classics Boleslaw Prus David Welsh Darius Tolczyk Anna Zaranko Stanislaw Baranczak 9781858660653 Books Reviews

I was interested to note that another reviewer describes this as a work of "peripheral realism", as I made a similar point when I recently reviewed the Portuguese writer Eca de Queiroz's "The Maias", namely that from an Anglo-American perspective "19th century European literature" generally means "19th century French and Russian literature", and works by writers from other European countries tend to be neglected. This has little to do with the difference between "big" and "small" languages, as this neglect extends to countries as important as Italy, Spain and Germany, whereas one of the few exceptions is Ibsen, a citizen of a nation of only some five million people. Poland is another major European country with whose literature English-speaking readers, myself included, tend to be unfamiliar.

"The Doll" was written in the late 1880s and the action takes place some ten years earlier in 1878-79, mostly in and around Warsaw. Bolesław Prus originally intended to name it "Three Generations", a title referring to three characters of different ages, the elderly clerk Ignacy Rzecki, the middle-aged businessman Stanisław Wokulski, Rzecki's employer and close friend, and the youthful scientist Julian Ochocki. This original title refers to one of Prus's major themes, the way in which Polish society and Polish intellectual life were changing in the late nineteenth century. Part of the novel is told in the third person, while other parts take the form of a diary kept by Rzecki.

Prus was writing at a time when Poland was not an independent country but had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria ever since the late eighteenth century; Prus lived in the Russian zone, as do all the characters in the novel. The elderly Rzecki represents the political romanticism which had dominated Polish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by the example of Napoleon and the writings of the great Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, as a young man Rzecki took part in the European revolutionary movement of 1848, going to Hungary to fight for that country's freedom from Austrian rule. Despite the failure of the Hungarian uprising, Rzecki retains his revolutionary ideals, which remain centred upon the Bonaparte family despite Napoleon III's fall from power in 1870. (It comes as something of a surprise for an Englishman to realise that there were parts of Europe- and not only in France- where Napoleon was regarded as a liberator rather than a tyrannical warmonger).

In his youth Wokulski was also a Romantic idealist, taking part in the failed 1863 Uprising against Russian rule, for which he served a prison term in Siberia. Since those days, however, he has, despite his friendship with Rzecki, abandoned Romanticism for a world-view which Stanislaw Baranczak describes in his introduction as "Positivism"- essentially a cautious, pragmatic ideology based upon enlightened capitalism, secular philanthropy and moderate social reform. The one-time rebel against Tsarist oppression has now become a businessman whose fortune is derived from trade with Russia, even supplying the Russian army in its war with Turkey.

Ochocki's outlook is based on the idea of reforming society by way of scientific advances rather than by way of political change; his great dream is to invent a flying machine. He, however, is a relatively unimportant figure in the story when compared to Wokulski and Rzecki, and this may be why Prus eventually abandoned his original title in favour of "The Doll" (derived from a minor episode in which one character is accused of stealing a toy).

Besides comparing the generations, Prus also uses the book to contrast the different classes of Polish society. The main driving force behind the plot is Wokulski's obsessive love for the beautiful young aristocrat Izabela Łęcka. Prus seems to have taken a jaundiced view of Poland's aristocracy, whom he saw as effete and decadent and in a state of financial decline. Izabela's father Tomasz serves as a good example, desperately trying to shore up his family's declining fortunes and forever lamenting the state of his unhappy country while failing to do anything about it. Izabela herself is a heartless flirt who reluctantly accepts Wokulski's attentions while secretly despising him. This does not, however, mean that she is in love with any of the other men who pay court to her, because Izabela's greatest passion is for herself. She quite literally believes herself, because of her aristocratic birth and upbringing, to be a member of a superior race of human beings, and is unable to accept that her family are no longer as wealthy or as influential as they once were. (Some have wrongly assumed that she is the "doll" of the title; others, because the Polish word "lalka" can mean both "doll" and "puppet", have taken it to refer to Wokulski, a puppet in the hands of Izabela or of fate).

Prus may have been critical of his country's upper classes, but he also extended his criticisms to the rising middle class. It seemed to me that he was using Wokulski's obsession with Izabela as a metaphor for the bourgeoisie's love affair with aristocratic values and lifestyles. Many of Wokulski's actions are undertaken with the express intention of impressing Izabela. He emphasises his own family's (somewhat dubious) claims to be gentlefolk, engages in rather ostentatious philanthropy in order to demonstrate that he can be as charitable and generous as any nobleman and even fights a ridiculous duel under the impression that, by doing so, he is acting like a gentleman.

Another important theme in the novel is that of the anti-Semitism which was endemic in Polish society at this time. There are several Jewish characters in the plot, and at times Prus contrasts Jewish energy and business acumen with the inertia and inefficiency of Poland's gentiles. Yet in common with the other reviewer whom I quoted earlier I found it difficult to determine exactly how far Prus shared the anti-Semitic attitudes expressed by a number of his characters. When Jews appear it is often as ruthless businessmen or grasping financiers, and this can make uncomfortable reading from a twenty-first century perspective.

Like most Victorian social-realist novelists Prus had a good eye for social detail, but "The Doll" lacks some of the other qualities found in some of his great contemporaries, not only the "establishment" of world literature but also other "peripheral realists" such as Eca de Queiroz and the German Theodor Fontane. Prus seems to me to lack the gift for characterisation, or the humour, of a Dickens, the vitality and energy of a Balzac, the epic grandeur of a Tolstoy or the tragic power of a Hardy. "The Doll" has certain similarities with Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge". Both novels tell of the rise and fall of an ambitious businessman, but Wokulski never engages our sympathies in the same way as Hardy's hero Michael Henchard. Another weakness of the novel is that it is overlong and seems to drag in many places as it becomes bogged down in too many lengthy conversations and not enough action. I was not surprised to learn that it originally appeared in serial form, a method of publishing which may have made economic sense in the nineteenth century, and indeed may have acted as an impetus to the production of many works of literature, but which made many of those works rather tedious reading for later generations. Prus is not widely known in the English-speaking world, but I feel that there may well be reasons for this which go beyond his nationality.
Fantastic book. Love reading it again. This is a great novel depicting life in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, in the XIX century. All the characters are vividly portrayed.
Think of Tolstoy set in Warsaw with a dash of Trollope and a pinch of Dickens thrown in for good measure.
I immensely enjoyed the story; the characters (especially Stas); the details of life in Warsaw, the Polish countryside and Paris; the overall quality of the writing; etc.

Two other observations. Firstly, a very strong undercurrent of anti-semitism runs throughout the book, which was a bit uncomfortable to read at times. I was struck by how prevalent these sentiments seemed to be in Poland at the time. I guess I had heard this was the case, but to see it present in such a matter of fact way, albeit in a novel, was still unsettling.Tied to that was some of the commentary from the Jewish characters that times would get even tougher for them as they were experiencing increasing levels of prejudice a grim foreshadowing of future events.

Secondly, I could not help from thinking how awful things would become in Warsaw in some 40-50 years after this book was published. Prus describes much of Warsaw life in loving detail, complete with vivid descriptions of buildings, streets, parks, etc all to be turned into indescribable rubble and chaos by the Nazis, with no little help from the Soviets. Very sad, indeed.
Cannot type much on this little gizmo. Suffice to say the passages on Paris alone make this a masterpiece. If I had to choose between reaching The Doll again or War and Peace, I'd grab The Doll.
Just like Zeromski, Prus is concerned with the nation identity of Poland before WWI. The central character is the "tradsman," or the capitalist with a heart whose obsession to win legitimacy in the eyes of a crumbling Polish aristocracy, and the heart of a young woman raised to flirt and tease her way into marriage to uphold the integrity and property of her class. The novel is at once a comedy of manners which then shifts to more serious matters of fading entitlement and self-actualization.
The inability to easily navigate in this format made the read a real slog through mud and much less enjoyable that it may have been. I'd so looked forward to reading this Polish classic in a good English translation, so the disappointment was great. It was difficult to keep the characters and time frame straight in what would otherwise have been a wonderful experience.