One opens with events of 1878 and recounts the career of the protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, a man in early middle age. The Doll, covering one and a half years of present time, comprises two parallel narratives. The Doll has been translated into twenty-eight languages, and has been produced in several film versions and as a television miniseries.

Prus had originally intended to name the book Three Generations. While The Doll takes its fortuitous title from a minor episode involving a stolen toy, readers commonly assume that it refers to the principal female character, the young aristocrat Izabela Łęcka. According to Prus biographer Zygmunt Szweykowski, it may be unique in 19th-century world literature as a comprehensive, compelling picture of an entire society. The Doll has been regarded by some, including Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, as the greatest Polish novel. It was composed for periodical serialization in 1887–1889 and appeared in book form in 1890. We hear Wokulski's story through all of Warsaw's gossip, in the drawing rooms of the elite, in the restaurants and taverns of the middle class, at the races and the theater, and in the streets.The Doll ( Polish: Lalka) is the second of four acclaimed novels by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (real name Aleksander Głowacki). Boleslaw Prus's great gift is to see this panorama on an intimate human scale, in the details of what people wear, what they eat, and, above all, what they say. Each is constrained by his or her social status in this story of money, love, and class at the end of the age of duels and the beginning of the age of electricity. The rich cast includes the old clerk Rzecki, nostalgic for the revolutions of 1848 the young scientist Ochocki, dreaming of flying machines the deranged and manipulative Baroness Krzeszowska the angelic widow Stawska the wise dowager duchess and many more. As the novel opens in Warsaw in 1878, our hero, Wokulski, having risen from rags to riches now seeks the respect of the aristocracy and, in particular, the love of the cold and scheming Izabela Lecka. Yet it is less a novel of ideas than a novel of people who have ideas, characters as vivid and memorable as any in Dickens.

The Doll is a classic of Polish literature, a novel that takes in the whole nineteenth century and looks ahead to modern questions of empire, revolution, anti-Semitism, and socialism.

Doll boleslaw prus