Polish · 1847–1912
Aleksander Głowacki fought in the January Uprising of 1863 at fifteen, was wounded, jailed, and came out of it convinced that Polish insurrections were suicide and that the country should build itself instead — the doctrine called Positivism. He wrote under a pen name because he thought journalism beneath his family's dignity, and produced a weekly Warsaw column for forty years, over a thousand of them, on sewers, tram routes, philanthropy, science and municipal incompetence. He suffered from agoraphobia and could not cross open squares. The Doll grew out of that journalism into the greatest Polish novel of the nineteenth century, a book about a self-made merchant destroyed by love for an aristocrat and by a society with no use for what he can do. Pharaoh, his last major novel, is a study of political power in ancient Egypt that Stalin is said to have kept by his bed.