„Kopciuszek” Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego – najbardziej warszawska powieść przed „Lalką”
Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s “Kopciuszek” (“Cinderella”) as the Most Warsaw Novel before “Lalka” (“The Doll”)

Summary/Abstract: The article refers to Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s “Kopciuszek” (“Cinderella”, 1862), pre-textually based on a fairy tale thread, though realising the pattern of the realist novel about a big city. Monographism, physiologism and thrilling motives link it to the achievements of such Western writers as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, but in its minute reproduction of the 19th c. Warsaw topography and space anthropology the novel portends Bolesław Prus’ “The Doll.” In his “Cinderella,” written in the blink of the Polish January Insurrection, Kraszewski portraits Warsaw bustling with life and easily entering into modernity, while Prus in his novel shows Warsaw constrained by the Russian occupier’s police close surveillance, as if “hypnotised,” easily losing it good pace of the civilizational changes that that have already started. Even if “Cinderella” can by no means match the mastery of “The Doll,” it may be viewed as a contribution to its origin and as an interesting stage in the development of 19th c. Polish novel.

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