The Doll by Bolesław Prus
Published 1890 · 290,000 words · about 25 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature, Realism
How hard is The Doll to read?
The Doll scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Nineteenth-century Warsaw Polish with commercial, scientific and aristocratic registers, plus Russian and French phrases used as class markers.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Clear realist prose with substantial variation between the narrator, the diary sections and reported speech.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete in its commerce and streets, while sustaining an explicit argument about positivism, idealism and social usefulness.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Warsaw's entire social and economic structure, a large cast, two narrative voices and a subplot about aeronautics, across a very long novel.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- Rzecki's diary tells the reader things the third-person narrative withholds and misunderstands much of what it reports.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The mechanical dolls in the shop window, the metal lighter than air and the doll of the title work as a coherent scheme about people moved by forces they do not control.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- A rational positivist hero destroys himself for a woman with nothing to recommend her, and the novel refuses to endorse either the passion or the ideology that condemns it.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Wokulski disappears at the end and the novel offers several incompatible accounts of what became of him, choosing none.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Two interleaved narratives — third-person chronicle and Rzecki's retrospective diary — running on different timelines.
How The Doll is regarded
The Doll holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.