Abstract Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance, political revolt, science, business, and social progress. These notions, traditionally associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters, and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches of individual characters. While critics have increasingly characterized The Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence—and by extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. Recurring appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous quasi-doubles—characters bearing an uncanny resemblance—serve as a key organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive and negative insight into himself. But rather than attempting to reconcile these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and “unfinalized” characters, ever in the process of becoming. In such a reading, not only is Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a “bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.”