In the face of the Polish government’s rightist dogma, the country’s preeminent writer explores its history of ethnic intermingling.
Olga Tokarczuk is fascinated by Poland’s long history of ethnic intermingling.
The Warsaw Book Fair takes place each May in the National Stadium, a basketlike structure flecked with the red and white of the Polish flag. On a bright Saturday morning, hundreds of orange balloons given out by an audiobook company bobbed from children’s hands, and crowds of readers browsed the booths of publishers from across Europe. The National Fryderyk Chopin Institute had a grand piano at its booth, and a young woman played “Bohemian Rhapsody.” At a pop-up bookstore, a clerk with long brown hair and hipster glasses obligingly showed a customer a copy of “Forever Butt,” a queer-magazine anthology (“pocket-sized, pink and super gay”). A long line of people snaked out of the booth of the venerable publishing house Wydawnictwo Literackie and around several of the other displays. They were waiting for a signing by Olga Tokarczuk, who in recent years has established herself as Poland’s preëminent novelist and is frequently mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tokarczuk herself was outside: crowds make her anxious, and she was steeling herself. After staying out late the night before, she had had trouble sleeping. Tokarczuk, who is fifty-seven, is petite and striking, with the focussed energy of a yoga teacher. She favors artfully draped clothing and layered bracelets. Her long brown hair was twisted into dreadlocks, threaded with blue beads and piled on top of her head. Her mouth is often pursed in a wry smile.
I stood with her as she smoked a chopstick-thin Vogue cigarette under the stadium’s basketwork. The building opened in 2012, and has lately become the focal point of an annual March of Independence, in November, at which members of far-right and nationalist groups have carried banners with slogans such as “Poland for the Poles” and “Stop Islamization.” It replaced a Communist-era stadium, which had become thoroughly dilapidated by the mid-nineties, when I spent most of a year in the country, learning Polish before going to graduate school. As Poland shifted to a capitalist economy, the site turned into an open-air market for counterfeit and secondhand goods, infamous for its garbage and crime. I was warned never to set foot there.
Tokarczuk finished her cigarette. Small balls of gray catkin fluff blew on the wind, seedpods from poplars, which bloom all over Warsaw in the spring. She brushed them off her smocklike black dress and headed inside.
A buzz travelled down the signing line as a publicist whisked Tokarczuk past into a greenroom. Her dreadlocks make her instantly recognizable. She adopted them on a whim more than a decade ago, when an airport strike left her with some time to kill in Bangkok. Since then, she has heard that a kind of dreadlock was common among tribes living in Poland during pre-Christian times. “There’s an expression in Latin for this: plica polonica,” she told me later. “It’s a pejorative description, suggesting a lack of hygiene.” She laughed.
Excavating something forgotten from Polish history and reframing it in a contemporary context has become Tokarczuk’s signature. She is best known internationally for “Flights,” her sixth novel, which was published in the United States last year, more than a decade after it appeared in Polish, and won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Tokarczuk calls the book—a genre-crossing agglomeration of fiction, history, memoir, and essay—a “constellation novel.” Its over-all preoccupation is with the idea of journeying, but its sections are often linked by just a word or an image, allowing readers to discover their own connections. “When I first submitted it to my publishing house, they called me back and asked if perhaps I mixed up the files in my computer, because this is not a novel,” she said.
A form based on fragments is particularly suitable for a novel by an author from Poland, where national borders have changed over and over through the centuries, and where multiple ethnic groups—Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews—have lived side by side in a cacophony of languages and experience. Central European literature generally, Tokarczuk believes, “questions reality more. It’s more distrustful of stable, permanent things.” In “Flights,” a character says, “Constellation, not sequencing, carries the truth.”
In Poland, a narrative of history that embraces fragmentation, diversity, and intermingling is unavoidably political, disrupting a long-standing mythology of the country as a homogeneous Catholic nation. This national mythology has been ascendant in recent years, especially since 2015, when the socially conservative party Law and Justice came to power, on an anti-immigration “national unity” platform. Since then, the government has refused to accept refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, resisted instituting equal rights for same-sex couples, and passed a law forbidding discussion of Polish collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War.
In a recent Op-Ed that appeared in the Times, Tokarczuk deplored her country’s political climate: “State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.” Her work often addresses issues on which she has strong views. A longtime vegetarian who says that she loses sleep over the suffering of animals in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, she published, in 2009, an unconventional murder mystery with an environmentalist and animal-rights slant. The book, “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” comes out here in August from Riverhead, in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the translator of two previous novels by Tokarczuk.
Poland, not unlike the United States, is politically split down the middle. Law and Justice’s supporters are balanced by progressives—often younger, city-dwelling, and living in the western half of the country—who seek tolerance, multiculturalism, and a truthful reckoning with Poland’s past. These are Tokarczuk’s readers. “Even my friends who don’t read a lot, who don’t follow the latest young poets or writers, they’re reading Olga Tokarczuk,” Zofia Król, the editor of the online literary magazine Dwutygodnik, told me.
When Tokarczuk emerged to greet her readers, all traces of anxiety were gone from her face, and she chatted animatedly and posed for selfies at the signing table. One fan had brought her a book of drawings of “phantom architecture”—designs that were never built—hoping that it might be a source of inspiration. A librarian from Pruszków, just outside Warsaw, presented her with a recently published Polish translation of a memory book chronicling the life of the town’s Jewish community, which was eradicated in 1941, during the Nazi occupation.
The signing lasted nearly two hours. Stepping away from the table afterward, Tokarczuk groaned and pretended to collapse. But her eyes were alert. “To know that people are waiting for the next book—it gives me energy,” she said.
Tokarczuk is based in Wrocław, in the southwest of Poland. She was in Warsaw not only for the book fair but also for a literary festival, called Apostrof, which took place at the Universal Theatre, a headquarters of sorts for intellectuals and artists. This year Tokarczuk was a guest curator, organizing a weeklong series of symposiums featuring leading Polish writers and intellectuals. She attended nearly every panel, jotting things down in a small black notebook and occasionally calling out suggestions if the speakers seemed at a loss for ideas. The theme she had chosen was “This Is Not the Only Possible World.” One discussion focussed on what a post-religious Poland might look like. Another was about climate change and other ecological issues. In lieu of the traditional bouquet of cut flowers, each panelist was given a beech sapling as a token of appreciation.
One night, a group of educators debated the future of the Polish school system. Piotr Laskowski, a teacher in his early forties, professed disgust at the way business had co-opted words like “creativity” and “innovation.” Until recently, he’d been the head of a high school at which most decisions are made jointly by a vote of students and faculty. Schools, he said, should aim to free students from thinking about the labor market and prepare them instead to shape the world. Wearing a navy hoodie, he rocked back and forth with barely contained energy as he spoke. Tokarczuk beamed up at him from her customary seat in the middle of the front row.
After the event, at a gathering in the theatre’s garden, Tokarczuk introduced Laskowski to me as the man who ran “the most anarchist school in the system.”
“It’s not that anarchist, I’m afraid,” he said.
Tokarczuk took a sip of a diet Fritz-Kola, a German brand with an intense caffeine kick. “How free are you to determine what you tell your pupils?” she asked.
Law and Justice has introduced a state-mandated curriculum: history classes are limited to Polish history, narrated from a distinctly nationalist perspective; literature classes emphasize classics of Polish literature, such as the historical novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz, rather than its great nonconformists, such as Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz.
Laskowski shrugged. A teacher who diverges from the official line “won’t get arrested,” he said, just “intimidated,” perhaps with a threat of forced retirement. Although this probably wouldn’t happen in Warsaw, he added, “if you are a teacher in a very small town or village, with a very conservative population, with a priest who teaches religion in the school, then your position changes radically.” He chuckled grimly.
Among left-leaning people I spoke to, such talk was common: you could get away with whatever you were doing, until one day you couldn’t. Most cultural institutions depend on public money, which makes them vulnerable to political pressure. Last December, after Król, the Dwutygodnik editor, resisted attempts to censor the magazine, the government pulled its funding; it ceased publication for several months, until Król secured backing from Warsaw’s relatively liberal city government.
In the media, finding a way to work without state support is becoming an attractive option. When a crowdfunded documentary about child molestation by Catholic priests was released on YouTube recently, it was viewed more than twenty million times—equivalent to more than half of Poland’s population—in a few days. “I can’t listen to official radio,” Monika Platek, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Warsaw, told me, as she hunted on her phone for an episode of WNYC’s “Radiolab” that she wanted to share with Tokarczuk. Platek was running for a seat in the European Parliamentary Elections, as a candidate for Wiosna, a new progressive party. The elections were a day and a half away.
At the end of the evening, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk, backed by a Ukrainian rock band called Haydamaky, performed musical settings of poems by Adam Mickiewicz. Born in 1798, just after Poland was divided in three by Prussia and the Russian and Austrian Empires, Mickiewicz was involved in Poland’s unsuccessful struggle for independence and spent most of his life in exile. His work is fervently patriotic—he is regarded as Poland’s national poet—but, as Stasiuk’s adaptations emphasized, the land Mickiewicz extolled included large parts of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Stasiuk, a tall, slender man in his late fifties, began by reciting in Polish the opening lines of “The Akkerman Steppes,” a romantic sonnet that describes the Crimean landscape. As horns riffing on a folk tune came in behind him and the drums picked up, Stasiuk switched languages, half shouting, half rapping the same verses in Ukrainian. Tokarczuk swayed to the music. “I get goosebumps when I hear this,” she said, rubbing her arms. “Can you see the logo on his shirt?”
We were some distance from the stage and the logo was hard to make out. It seemed to involve the eagle from Poland’s coat of arms, but there was also something else. I moved forward through the crowd until I was standing directly below Stasiuk. The design looked like a stylized bird, with two symmetrical wings on either side of something shaped like a wooden spoon. I took a picture and made my way back to Tokarczuk.
“Ah,” she said, zooming in. “That’s the Ukrainian Tryzub crest.” She interlaced her fingers, shaking her hands for emphasis. “The two cultures—they’re like this. They can’t be separated.”
The relationship between Poles and Ukrainians forms the core of the novel that Tokarczuk is currently working on, which will draw on her family history. Her ancestors on her father’s side included Poles, Ukrainians, and Ruthenians, and came from a village in the province of Galicia. “Some of them were much more aware of their national identity, and for some of them it was not so important,” she told me over tea the next afternoon, as we sat in the lobby of a new boutique hotel in central Warsaw. (Tokarczuk speaks English extremely well, but her Polish has an uncommon elegance and clarity; our conversations took place in both languages.)
During the Second World War, there was a massacre of Poles in the village, part of a wave of killings by Ukrainian nationalists that claimed tens of thousands of lives in the region. Tokarczuk’s grandfather, who was Polish but had married a Ukrainian woman, survived. After the war, Galicia was divvied up between the Soviet Union and Poland, and the village became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The family, along with nearly a million other inhabitants of the area, immigrated to Lower Silesia, a region of southwestern Poland bordering what is now Germany and the Czech Republic. Poles were encouraged to settle there, in part to replace ethnic Germans, who had fled to Germany as the Red Army advanced or who were expelled by Poland once the war was over. “You cannot speak about this area without Ukrainians, because three million Polish people living there still have roots in Ukraine,” Tokarczuk said. “This distinction—who is Polish and who is Ukrainian—is for me very artificial.”
Tokarczuk was born in 1962, the first of two daughters, in a village just north of Lower Silesia. A small German minority had remained there: some claimed they were Polish in order to stay, while others married Poles. As a child, Tokarczuk had a German nanny. Her parents taught at a folk high school, part of a movement founded to bring education to the peasant classes, and the family lived on the school grounds, a period Tokarczuk remembers happily. Her father was the school librarian, and she spent most of her time there with him, reading whatever she could get her hands on—poetry, Apuleius, Jules Verne, the encyclopedia.
In her teens, Tokarczuk became aware that much of the world was closed to her. “Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland,” she said. “Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.”
In the fall of 1980, she went to the University of Warsaw, to study psychology. The campus had been a German barracks during the war, her dormitory was near the ruins of the Jewish ghetto, and there were still gaps along the streets from the Nazis’ systematic destruction of the city, in 1944. In her second year, in response to the spread of demonstrations across the country, the government declared martial law. Even now, in the comfort of the hotel lobby, Tokarczuk suppressed a shudder at the memory. “For a young girl from the provinces, it was very harsh,” she said. “There was nothing to buy in the shops, only vinegar and mustard on the shelves. And despair in the air. People really were very pessimistic. I didn’t believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.”
After graduating, in 1985, Tokarczuk married a fellow psychology student, and they moved to a town not far from Wrocław. Tokarczuk specialized in clinical psychology, including work with drug addicts and alcoholics. After a few years, she was burned out. “I’m too neurotic to be a therapist,” she says.
She managed to get a passport to travel to London for a few months, where she studied English, worked odd jobs—assembling antennas in a factory, cleaning rooms in a posh hotel—and spent time in bookstores, reading feminist theory, which she hadn’t encountered in Poland. An early story, “The Hotel Capital,” is written from the perspective of a chambermaid who creates stories about the people whose rooms she cleans, based on their personal effects. “Every time I’m in a hotel,” Tokarczuk told me, looking self-consciously around the lobby, “I remember maids are people like me, that they can also write about me and about my mess in the hotel room.”
After Tokarczuk returned to Poland, she and her husband had a son, and she began to write in earnest. She credits her training in psychology with giving her the awareness that multiple realities can coexist. One of her first clinical experiences involved two brothers who had completely different emotional narratives about their family dynamic. “That was my first step to writing,” she later recalled. “To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.”
Tokarczuk’s first novel, published in 1993, was a philosophical parable set in seventeenth-century France; the next told the story of a psychic in Wrocław in the nineteen-twenties. Her first major success came with her third, “Primeval and Other Times” (1996), in which she drew on stories that her maternal grandmother told her as a child. With a touch of magic realism—four guardian angels watch over the proceedings—the novel chronicles the lives of two families in a fictional Polish village through the twentieth century. Much of it revolves around interactions between Poles and Jews. Poles visit Jewish doctors and shop in Jewish stores, but the passionate love of a Polish woman and a Jewish man is thwarted. For its combination of mythical elements and a long view of history, the novel was hailed as an innovation.
Around the same time, Tokarczuk fell in love with the Kłodzko Valley, a picturesque corner of Lower Silesia, by the Czech border. She and her husband bought a simple wood-frame house and set about fixing it up. Tokarczuk became fascinated by the history and culture of the region. Passing a church shortly after the move, she noticed a statue of a saint, St. Wilgefortis, an experience that formed the backbone of her next novel, “House of Day, House of Night,” which was published in 1998. She writes of coming across a booklet in the church’s souvenir shop which contained a medieval life of the saint, written by someone identified only as “Paschalis, monk.” According to legend, Wilgefortis wanted to become a nun, but her father kidnapped her from a convent and tried to force her to marry. She prayed to Jesus to make her repellent to the would-be groom and was rewarded with masculine features and a beard that resembled Christ’s—at the sight of which her father had her put to death.
Photograph by Tomasz Lazar for The New YorkerAdidas