"The Waistcoat"[1] ("Kamizelka"[2]) is an 1882 short story by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, and is considered a masterpiece of short-story writing. It is a sketch of everyday life of impoverished Warsaw residents. The narrator, the title waistcoat's current owner, reconstructs its history, based on his observations of the lives of its original owner and his wife. The story has been translated into Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, and Slovak.[3]