It explores different social contexts and the ways in which literature shapes and interrogates men’s social roles and codes of behavior. The study of nineteenth-century Polish novels offers an exploration of cultural constructions of masculinities within the upper class and evolving middle-classes towards the end of century. In such a reading, not only is Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a “bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.” But rather than attempting to reconcile these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and “unfinalized” characters, ever in the process of becoming. Recurring appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous quasi-doubles-characters bearing an uncanny resemblance-serve as a key organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive and negative insight into himself.

While critics have increasingly characterized The Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence-and by extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. These notions, traditionally associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters, and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches of individual characters. Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance, political revolt, science, business, and social progress.

Lalka by Bolesław Prus