Olga Tokarczuk

Freedom / Poland / Humanity / Stories / Athens / Imagination

Author of novels such as “Primeval and Other Times,” “Flights,” and “The Books of Jacob,” Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962) received the news that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize while being on the road, something absolutely fitting for her case. For through her “extremely witty and intelligent” work, the Polish writer “focuses on migration and the experience of cultural transitions” and was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."

The Onassis Stegi audience was granted the opportunity in October 2023, at the beginning of this season, to experience this crossing of boundaries before its very eyes, thanks to the highly inspired adaptation and direction by Simon McBurney and Complicité troupe of Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” a performance-cum-seminar on how literature can be sublimated in dramaturgical terms. The work itself, contemplative like an ontological manifesto and darkly comic like a crime thriller farce, is set in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. Male members of a local hunting club begin to die under mysterious circumstances, and Janina Duszejko—an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, amateur astrologist, and avid translator of William Blake—claims that the murders of her hunting neighbors are indeed performed by the animals themselves, like an act of transcendental revenge on the part of nature.

By virtue of a highly personal, distinct, and instantly recognizable style, Tokarczuk merges reality and fiction within her writing practice and mobilizes folk traditions and history, allowing at the same time her dedication to Carl Jung’s theories to come through in order to emerge as the greatest prose writer in Poland nowadays and equally elevate herself to the echelon of the most eminent European creators worldwide.

An author for our times, Tokarczuk, through her restless, transformative, and enchanting stories that transcend time and space, urges us to contemplate the darkest recesses and the brightest capacities of our time. She remains aware and explicitly vocal about political, social, environmental, and ecological issues, having faced, at times, extreme nationalist voices that have accused her, among others, of being a “traitor.” But what happens instead is that she has become an agitating presence for many with her writings and views precisely because she defies several aspects of the nation’s past and many contemporary, widespread beliefs in her country, Europe, and the world.