A short story by the Polish writer, preserved in his own corrected manuscript and in a separate printed redaction
A Short Story in Two Versions
Dziwni ludzie — “Strange People” — is a short story (opowiadanie) in Polish by Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). What distinguishes the work in the documentary record is the state of its text: it survives in more than one form. An autograph manuscript corrected in the author’s own hand is extant, while a different version of the story was printed separately. The work was also issued as a book in Warsaw in 1914 by the publishing house Gebethner i Wolff.
The Author’s Corrected Autograph
The surviving holograph is a working manuscript: Prus made corrections to it himself, and he numbered its pages by hand from 1 to 37. The document runs to twenty leaves of roughly 21 by 17 centimetres, the last of which is blank. Cataloguing of the manuscript gives its date as prior to 1897. It is held by the Warsaw Public Library (Biblioteka Publiczna m.st. Warszawy — Biblioteka Główna Województwa Mazowieckiego) under the shelf mark 163.II, as part of the Prus papers, and has been digitised by the Mazowiecka Biblioteka Cyfrowa. The library acquired it as a gift from Oktawia Głowacka in 1923–1924.
The Printed Redaction
The version that reached print differs from the manuscript, and the two are catalogued as distinct redactions of the same story. This other redaction appeared in the illustrated weekly Tygodnik Ilustrowany in 1913, in numbers 1 through 3, and was subsequently included in volume 25 of the Pisma — the collected writings of Prus — published in Warsaw in 1936. The manuscript version, by contrast, was first made public from the holograph itself, edited by E. Pieścikowski and published in Archiwum Literackie, volume 19, in 1974. Readers of Dziwni ludzie are therefore reading one of two related but non-identical texts, whose differences reflect the story’s passage from Prus’s corrected draft into print.
The catalogue record includes the phrase Nakład i własność wydawców and gives a physical description of 266, [1] pages; it classifies the item as a book. The digital record for the autograph specifies image/x.djvu as the format and Polish as the language, and it carries a public-domain statement (“Domena publiczna”) with the note “Dla wszystkich bez ograniczeń.” The same record assigns the manuscript to the subject headings Literatura polska XIX w. and Opowiadania.
