Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
Enough theory! Let us instead turn to the role that the presuppositional background plays in Orzeszkowa’s story world.
Eliza Orzeszkowa’s three-volume novel Pan Graba published in 1872 was her first to meet with critical acclaim. The eponymous protagonist is, like Baron von Münchhausen, a liar and – furthermore – a cheat, cynic and criminal. We could say that he makes a profession of deceit; he grows his wealth, which he immediately wastes, in order to create the impression of having been born into money (he does come from a wealthy family), he seduces women, betrays them, takes over their wealth, causes scandals to break up families, and lays the ground for painful and threatening misunderstanding. He achieves his objectives by employing superficiality, insincere good manners, and false expressions of emotion that he puts on using theatrical staging including makeup, wigs, powder and rehearsed gestures, together with an incredible cheek and shamelessness. His appearance is deceiving: Graba achieves his ‘elegance’ by ‘putting on’ his face, the make-up masking his yellowy face with a healthy-looking, bright skin tone. A minor digression: the ‘yellowy face’ points towards a ‘minor’ presupposition, one that undermines the figure’s moral authority: his pallid appearance is a result of his debauchery, late nights and – in combination with a nervous tick – his excessive sexual desire. His second wife (he left his first one penniless and destroyed) slowly discovers the truth about Kalikst, stripping the mask from his face, despises him, defends herself from him, meaning that his interest in her lasts longer. Pan Graba turns Kamila into a hostage, coercing her with the threat of revealing the whole truth about himself to her mother, an elderly, ill noblewoman whose only joy stems from enjoying her daughter’s apparent happiness.
The novel offers a wide-ranging image of the history of the last generation of nobility before the uprising of 1863. Orzeszkowa presents this generation as a breeding ground for wastrels, prodigiousness and untrammelled decadence that led to a dishonourable, debt-filled final chapter of family history that involved auctioning off the family home, infamy and sometimes even premature deaths. In the early 1870s, just after completing work on Pan Graba, Orzeszkowa also took up the theme of the degeneration of the nobility in her journalism. In her article Znad Niemna [From the banks of the Niemen],[15] she offered a dramatic take on the issue. As always, she expressed her faith in a better future but she placed her hopes in the activism and wisdom of wives and sisters rather than the conscientiousness of husbands and fathers, who were too submissive, too tolerant, too obsessed with the treasures of nobility, and seeing greater potential in these women than in sons and sons-in-law, however fair they might be (Wieczyński from Wieńczyna offers an illustration of a good father, who manages to cover the massive debts of Staś Kloński, his daughter Celina’s beloved husband). The novel puts significant emphasis on the moral and immoral aspects of life, on disappointed feelings, family ties, the generational degeneration of the enlightened stratum, and the disappearance of more refined emotions among this group. But as much attention is given to money, which is counted scrupulously by the Jewish usurer Widger and by Ryta Słabecka, Tozio’s energetic, forthright, sensible and tempestuous sister. Tozio belongs to the “golden youth,” but it is Ryta who possesses knowledge of bills, interest rates and debts, and she is the one who in vain tries to convince her brother of the need to work and of the benefits of studying.
