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The Development of the Polish Novel: Functions and Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Zdzislaw Najder
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The novel is the only major literary genre whose origins and development we have been able to watch in detail. It also seems to be the only genre whose development depended more on the customers than on the makers. Richardson, who wrote Pamela because he noticed how popular a continuous story in the form of letters could be; Fielding, who exploited Richardson's success in his parodistic Joseph Andrews; Scott, who produced innumerable historical romances, gamely trying to match demand with supply; Dickens, who accidentally struck a gold mine with the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers; Dostoevsky, who made extensive use of the conventions of popular, sensational novels—all are typical of the way the novel evolved. In other literary forms the discrepancy between merits and rewards, creativeness and popular expectations, and originality and response has been so frequent as to become proverbial. But this is not true of the nineteenth-century novel, where it is unusual to find a writer like Stendhal, who gained his reputation only after his death.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , December 1970 , pp. 651 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1970

References

1. See Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932)Google Scholar

2. It contains, by the way, the first portrait of an American in Polish literature—a Pennsylvania Quaker, simple, straightforward, fabulously rich, generous, goodhearted, but modest and reserved.

3. Julian, Krzyżanowski, W śoiecie romantycsnym (Kraków, 1961), p. 46.Google Scholar

4. Konstanty, Wojciechowski, Historia powieści w Polsce (Lwów, 1925), pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

5. Niemcewicz, J. U., Jan s Tęczyna, ed. Dihm, Jan (Wrocław, 1954), pp. liv, lxix.Google Scholar

6. Contrasting the gentry (simple, idealistic, patriotic, and devout) and the aristocracy (power-hungry, haughty, cosmopolitan, and libertine) was a staple motif in old Polish literature and in the nineteenth-century Polish political thinking. See, for example, Seweryn Goszczyński's Król zamczyska and his memorandum for Centralizacja Towarzystwa Demokratycznego Polskiego of 1838.

7. The editors of an extensive “outline” of his bibliography write that “a full bibliography of this writer, perhaps the most prolific in the world, will for a long time yet remain in the sphere of wishes and dreams—if not of Utopias.” Kraszewski, J. I., Zarys bibliograficzny (Kraków, 1966), p. 6.Google Scholar

8. Eliza Orzeszkowa, Drugie dziesieciolecie Kraszewskiego (1840-50, first published in 1880), reprinted in Pisma krytycznoliterackie (Wroclaw, 1959), p. 196.

9. Zygmunt, Szweykowski, “Rozwój powieści w Polsce : III. Powieść w latach 1776- 1930,” in Umiejętności, Polska Akademia, Dzieje literatury pięknej w Polsce (Kraków, 1936), 2 : 567.Google Scholar

10. Cf. Maria Czartoryska's Malmna (1816) or Klementyna Hoffmanowa's Dziemtik Franciszki Krasińskiej (1825).

11. See Andrzej, Zajączkowski, Główne elementy kultury sslacheckiej w Polsce (Wrocław, 1961).Google Scholar

12. Orzeszkowa offers here a particularly striking example. Cf. Nad Niemnem, 1 : 72 (collected ed., Warsaw, 1947) : “honor itself depends sometimes on the state of our business affairs” (i.e., honor demands that we keep our business affairs in order).

13. Cf. Werner, Jaeger, Paideia : The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Highet, Gilbert, 3 vols. (New York, 1945), 1 : 4–32.Google Scholar

14. He followed here the example set by Tasso's Gernsalemme liberata, this dazzling exercise in heroic pageantry, immensely popular in Poland in the seventeenth century, when the action of Sienkiewicz's Trilogy takes place.

15. Zygmunt, Szweykowski, Twórczość Boleslawa Prusa (Poznań, 1947), 1 : 225.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 229.

17. Cf. Jaeger, Paideia, 1 : 23.

18. See, for example, Henryk Rzewuski, Pamiątki Soplicy (1839), chapter 4.

19. Malcolm, Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File (New York, 1966), p. 115.Google Scholar Cowley dates the letter November 1, 1948. The quotation from Sienkiewicz is correct almost to a word, but it comes not from the—nonexisting—preface, but from the postword to Pan Michael.

20. Hoffman, Frederick J. and Vickery, Olga W., eds., William Faulkner : Three Decades of Criticism (East Lansing, 1960), p. 348.Google Scholar