I remember "The Leper" when it was a cinema hit in 1976. I didn't watch the film on purpose because at that time I had trouble watching or reading classic Polish literature that wouldn't be outdated. Helena Mniszkowna's book is not even a Polish literary classic, but a trashy sentimental novel. But after many years, I became more tolerant and watched "The Leper". However, my impression was that it was simply a waste of so many good actors for such a kitschy story. I live in Lublin and remember visiting as a young man the nearby palace in Kozlowka, which once belonged to the Polish aristocracy. The exterior of this palace imitates several famous examples of French architecture, while the interior is full of trinkets in the form of sculptures, ornaments, portraits of ancestors, and historical paintings. I was then only a student of the Polytechnic of plebeian origin, but I already knew enough about painting to know that within those walls of the palace in Kozlowka hung with trinkets, there was not a single painting valuable enough to hang in the Louvre in Paris or the National Gallery in London. So I think that there is not much that can be defended from what the Polish aristocracy left behind, even from a class A culture, let alone a class B such as the novel "The Leper". Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that during the partitions, the Polish nobility was too preoccupied with religion and the problem of national independence, which they understood as their power over the rest of society. But at the same time, this nobility left behind only a provincial culture of low quality, which clearly showed that in Polish society at that time there was no elite with leadership qualities capable of competing with the elites of neighboring countries. That looked like an unsolvable problem from Polish past. Personally, I don't think that it is a problem nowadays, because such an elite appeared during the Polish People's Republic and those people represented the broad spectrum of the Polish society. So after the fall of communism, Polish society has a full chance to blend in with Western, democratic culture without resorting to questionable native B-class models in the style of Mniszkowna's novels.
