Wokulski, Stanisław

Józef Bachórz

In The Doll, there are 156 fictional characters that have been given second or just first names (and more than 100 that are nameless apart from those); among them, Stanisław Wokulski is statistically the most significant. His surname appears more than 2,100 times in the text, and apart from that he is referred to dozens of times by his first name (Stach, Staś, Stanisław). Invoked over 700 times, Izabela Łęcka comes second in this ranking (about 650 times as “Miss Izabela” and about 60 times with her surname). Ignacy Rzecki ranks third and is mentioned 650 times (360 times as Rzecki and 280 as Ignacy). The name “Wokulski” belongs to the existent Polish names that are rarely used. According to The Dictionary of Contemporary Polish Names (Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych, vol. 10), it was borne only by 13 people (in contrast e.g. to “Wysocki,” the name of a carter in The Doll, which was carried by 24,919 people). It is possible that Prus was familiar with the Wokulskis as they belonged to the gentry that borne the same coat of arms – “Prus I” – as the Głowacki family, and he might have heard about a Henryk Wokulski in particular when he was young, although there is no evidence to prove this. Henryk Wokulski was a son of a landlord, born in 1825 in the village of Olszewnica near Radzyń in the east of Poland. He went to schools in Łuków, Szczebrzeszyn, and Lublin, and later moved to Warsaw. In 1844, he was sent to forced labour in Siberia for participation in a conspiracy. First, he served his sentence in Nerchinsk, east of Lake Baikal, in 1856 he was allowed to move to Irkutsk, and he came back to Poland in 1857. In 1876, he most likely purchased an estate near Stoczek Łukowski, east of Warsaw, and in 1891, as a landowner, he became a member of the regional directorate of the Towarzystwo Kredytowe Ziemskie (Land Credit Association) in Warsaw. He died in 1901 and was buried in Siedlce. Stanisław Wokulski, in his conversation with Julian Ochocki, admits that he is in his 46^th year of life, so he was most likely born in 1832. The reader learns about his life before the year 1878 from his memories, from other characters’ utterances but above all from the journal of his friend Ignacy Rzecki. From these fragments, we know that he worked in the Hopfer’s food and drink shop, in 1862 entered the university (Szkoła Główna Warszawska, today’s University of Warsaw), took part in political conspiracies and the January Rising in 1863, and was sent to Irkutsk in Siberia. When he returns in 1870, he has difficulty finding a job, marries the widow Małgorzata Mincel, a shop owner who is looking for a husband, and after her death is profoundly dejected for six months. He suddenly falls in love at first sight with Izabela Łęcka, an aristocrat he sees in the Wielki Theatre in early 1877, and leaves for Bulgaria in June to make a fortune by providing military supplies for the Russian army. In March 1878, he returns to Warsaw with the capital of 300,000 roubles and eagerly begins to court both the high society and Izabela. His endeavours, rich in dramatic twists, come very close to a happy ending, yet they end tragically. He discovers Izabela’s infidelity and makes a suicide attempt, after which he never regains full mental stability. In the early autumn of 1879, he mysteriously disappears from Warsaw.

Although Wokulski was later to be appreciated by literary historians as an incredibly mature and modern protagonist, the majority of realist critics regarded him as a failed character, who flaunts the rules of plausibility, when measured against other characters in early positivist fiction. According to Prus’s contemporaries, he was an unconvincing figure composed of incompatible parts: he was supposed to be wise, energetic, and insightful, and he turned out to be a failure and a wimp that lets himself be led by the nose by a woman that disdains him. To the objection of the lack of consistency, Prus replied that Wokulski is a complex character that represents the transitional epoch: he was raised in the era that began with poetry and ended with science, began with women’s poverty and ended with calculated prostitution, began with chivalry and ended with capitalism, began with sacrifice and ended with self-interest and the search for profit. To the objection that Wokulski is just a bitty cluster of incongruities, the writer replied that he is not a ‘cluster,’ but a very common type in Poland. Mickiewicz was a poet, but he also had military, political and reform inclinations, and he would passionately fall in love. […] Kaczkowski was a poet and a financier, someone else was a soldier, a poet, and a geographer. Wokulski’s complexity is visible in the novel in a number of ways. He is surprised himself at his own complex character, and even the inimical Izabela notices, to her astonishment, that she cannot compare him to any of her friends, who can be defined in one sentence: It was impossible to define him in a single word, or even in several hundred words. He was unlike everyone else, and if it was at all possible to compare him to anything, then perhaps it was to a place through which one travels all day, and where valleys and mountains, woods and lakes, water and desert, villages and towns are to be found. And where too, beyond the mists of the horizon, some vague landscapes appear, unlike anything known before. This time Izabela Łęcka is right. Realist tenets and common-sense psychology, although indispensable, do not suffice to account for the character of Wokulski, whose personality requires the knowledge of neurosis and psychopathology as well as, according to more recent studies, psychoanalysis. Wokulski is interested in hypnosis (Palmieri’s performances in Paris); he experiences states and feelings that go beyond the regular realist standard, such as illusions, daydreams, and the extraordinary recognition of his double in a mirror reflection, the suicide attempt, and traumatic experiences that follow. Another rich area of his experiences is related to erotics and love, which lead him to a discovery of his own vulnerability in the face of the mysteries of his heart and the tragic nature of existence. He also experiences metaphysical longing. Thus Wokulski is a character that needs to be perceived as a construct of many possibilities for self-fulfilment. He can be regarded as a merchant, entrepreneur, reform activist, scientist, thinker, politician, lover, friend, philanthropist etc. His presence in the novel is only indistinctly shaped through third-person narration and predominantly emerges from statements uttered by different characters. Before he appears in the novel, the patrons of a celebrated restaurant talk about him as a reckless adventurer and a lunatic, who cannot decide what he wants. This is the story told by jealous simpletons and is in stark contrast to the version written down by Rzecki in his journal, where Wokulski emerges as the brilliant mind of a romantic idealist and a heroic patriot. An interesting version of Wokulski can be deduced from Doctor Szuman’s statements. An understandably different version is shaped by Izabela, who, at first, sees him as the villain in a mystery romance, who cunningly tries to beset an innocent beauty, and later, resorting to another literary convention, a sluggish and henpecked husband. Her version is at odds with Kazimiera Wąsowska’s opinion of Wokulski as well as with the perspective of Helena Stawska, who is in love with him. Other versions can be produced from the beliefs and utterances of Tomasz Łęcki, the Prince, Baron Krzeszowski, his wife and a dozen other characters. All these versions – which visibly echo different stereotypes – clash with, as well as correct and complement, one another but are never conclusively commented on in the third-person narration. The reader who wants to know the final truth about Wokulski does not find satisfactory answers, just as there are no answers regarding the end of his fictional life. Prus did not intend to reassure us that everything was going to be fine but wanted to disrupt the reader’s consoling sleep and arouse anxiety regarding our knowledge of others and our own fate and that of our society.

→ Women and Love; → Suicide; → Poles in Siberia;