The Doll

Prus's panorama of Warsaw at the end of the 1870s follows the self-made merchant Stanisław Wokulski, torn between a rational, ambitious life and a consuming, hopeless love for the cold aristocrat Izabela Łęcka. The city is mapped in detail: Wokulski's shop on the grand boulevard of Krakowskie Przedmieście, the royal park of Łazienki where he watches Izabela, the salons of the Aleje Ujazdowskie, and the riverside poverty of Powiśle from which he rose.

Stanisław Wokulski

Wokulski's shop, Krakowskie Przedmieście

Chapter 1

From his expanding haberdashery on Warsaw's most elegant street, Wokulski builds a fortune out of trade and a risky war-supply venture, all of it secretly bent toward one end: to make himself worthy of Izabela. The shop is the base of the rational, energetic self he is steadily sacrificing to an impossible love.

Chapter 1

inferred Wokulski's fashionable store stands on Krakowskie Przedmieście, the real grand boulevard of central Warsaw; the specific premises are invented and sited on that street of shops and palaces.

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