Profesor Dębicki w Borkach. (Wiktor Gomulicki i Bolesław Prus)
Professor Dębicki in Borki (Wiktor Gomulicki and Bolesław Prus)

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author juxtaposes two novels by esteemed Polish writers: Bolesław Prus’ The Suffragists (Emancypantki) and Wiktor Gomulicki’s Golden Links (Złote ogniwa), associated through their common Warsaw settings, as well as two important themes: women’s emancipation and the end of the nineteenth century ideological crisis. The initial pretext for his comparison was the fact of almost concurrent publishing of the above-mentioned novels in two popular Warsaw newspapers. Still during the serial publications of The Suffragists in “Kurier Codzienny,” Golden Links began to appear in women’s magazine “Bluszcz,” Barbara Bobrowska considers Gomulicki’s novel an intentional reference to Prus’ The Suffragists. According to her, the intertextual character of the comparison of these texts is further confirmed by the appearance of a common hero named Dębicki in both of them: a philosopher, erudite, a character, who seems to be transferred by Gomulicki from Prus’ The Suffragists to become a pretext for the rethinking of the epoch’s perennial problems: the women’s rights movement and the widespread philosophy of materialist pessimism.

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