Warsaw Fictions

Our de facto Warsaw correspondent Robert recently sent these photos relating to Lalka (The Doll) by Bolesław Prus, which we read in 2021, along with this commentary:

“No doubt most of you will remember when we read the classic book ‘Lalka’. 
 
“This morning we came across the 2 carved information plaques in the attached photographs. Each one is about a main character from the book. Curiously, the text assumes that these fictional characters DID live in the premises with attached plaques.”
 
Wokulski is the main protagonist, who owns the shop in which Rzecki works – and while said shop plays a central role there’s a lot more to the book than shopkeeping.
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Lalka covers

Lalka (The Doll) by Bolesław Prus has appeared in many editions since its first appearance in 1890. Below is a gallery of cover designs found on the web, reflecting changing interpretations of the book and changing fashions over the years.

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Everyone should read ‘The Doll’!

Krzysztof Varga wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza 5.10.2020
 
“I have read The Doll by Bolesław Prus for the fourth time, and I am not writing this to brag, but to share my feelings of shame, as this novel should be read, not less than every three years. As far as most current and hot news, we are celebrating 130 years of the first book edition of The Doll. It is an anniversary which can’t be ignored; we should celebrate it the same way as the anniversaries of the national uprisings, and perhaps with even more fanfare, as this super-novel was one of the last flights of the Polish mind, bewildering glimmer of sobriety in a drunken national dance which is happening here since centuries.” (The whole article – in Polish – can be accessed here.)
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Olga Tokarczuk reading ‘The Doll’

Tomasz Miłkowski (Trybuna 03.01.2020) refers to Olga Tokarczuk’s sketch The Pearl and The Doll (Wydawnictwo Literackie 2011), and quotes Tokarczuk: “Time treats literature differently then people. Time had no effect on The Doll. Literature can operate in its magical duality, but only if it is a masterpice. It tells us, on one hand, in great detail about the historic and defined time at the end of the XIX century, and the stories the living people. It tells us <how it was>, or rather <how it could have been>. The novel tells us about an inner experience, but not about the recorded facts.  On the other hand it tells us <how it is> referring to the basic psychological laws, which age slower then the external world. Actually, everything what is essential in The Doll could be happening now>.” 

Miłkowski writes: ‘She is makes a surprising comparison between Wokulski’s situation and that of the hero of Hymn of the Pearl by Czesław Miłosz, a free reworking of an apocryphal  story of Thomas. The main comparing event of the Hymn is the awakening of the Prince, who inspired by the letter from his parents, returns to his earlier goal (of finding of the Pearl). The choice of this comparison, between the path of Wokulski and that of the Hymn, Tokarczuk explains by the presence of “the metaphors of dreaming and waking up, path and goal, descending and lifting up – the same signs which moved me so much in Lalka.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP85iBra8yY

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