Studies on The Doll by Bolesław Prus are so extensive that you could build a considerable library from them. Most works, however, feature similar topics: stories about people living in the times of great changes, collapse of the world or communities, “games of illusions and delusions, admiration, and disappointments”, “enthusiasm and indifference”, the times of escape from helplessness related to social roles, masks, conventions.
The Doll is the world of decaying categories and illusions which obscure the reality. You could say that all protagonists have one thing in common: they feel this is not where they belong, which results in the imagination of utopian worlds and idealised versions of themselves. They all find it problematic to get accustomed the their environment, anticipating at the same time the arrival of a new, unknown order. They feel that the current world order in the world needs to be changed, but at the same time they lack a strong imperative that could introduce this change. Unfulfillment, sense of failure, disappointment – it turns out that while sticking to the 19th century realities and carefully reading the Doll, we will get very close to our modern dilemmas and questions.
“Human life. What a strange labyrinth” – says Wokulski at the end of the story. The creators of the play wanted to keep an eye on this labyrinth and refrain from bringing the complexity of the story and its protagonists to pre-assumed hypotheses and simplifications.