The Romance of Teresa Hennert is a masterpiece of psychological
realism and a still-shocking portrait of mixed motives and bad
behavior. It renders a tragicomic vision of what happens when a
society is suddenly deprived of the struggle that had defined it
for more than a century. Written in 1922, just four years after
Poland achieved independence from its neighboring empires, the
novel focuses on a Warsaw community of officers, bureaucrats,
intellectuals, wives, and lovers, all of them adrift in a hell of
their own making-the long-sought freedom to shape their own
destiny. At the center of this milieu is Teresa Hennert, whose
youthful charm, modern habits, and apparent indifference to the
emotional torment of those around her make her an inescapable
object of their fascination and desire. Told in multiple voices and
from numerous perspectives, Zofia Nalkowska's novel is a mosaic of
dysfunction at all levels of the new Polish society, from a
bumbling lieutenant who cannot stand his home life to a young
Communist who believes his forebears have made a mess that only the
next generation can clean up. In this world, ideological battles,
personal animosity, postwar trauma, and infidelity become
inextricably bound together, driving these colorful, increasingly
confused characters toward corruption, suicide, and murder.
Nalkowska (1884-1954), though long neglected in the West, was a
central figure in the literary life of interwar Poland and was an
early pioneer of feminist fiction in Central Europe. Her spare,
witty prose will surprise contemporary readers with its frank
sexuality and stark illustration of dreams gone horribly,
humiliatingly, dramatically awry.
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