I'm looking for an equivalent for an abyss that precedes language.
Charles Simic
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarčuk received the International Literary Flame Award for 2023, according to the decision of the jury whose president is Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, the first winner of this award. The jury included the owner of the New Book and co-founder of the award Predrag Uljarević, academician Siniša Jelušić, prof. Sonja Tomović-Šundić and professor Dr. Aleksandar Jerkov. The literary flame continues to bring the most important European and world writers to Montenegro, so Olga Tokarčuk will also visit Montenegro.
Olga Tokarczuk (1962) is one of the five Polish Nobel laureates, besides V. Šimborske, Č. Milos, VS Rajmont, H. Sjenkijevic, the first Polish booker, double winner of Poland's highest Nike award, undoubtedly the most translated contemporary Polish writer.
She graduated in psychology, although as a passionate reader she could have studied Polish studies, which she talks about in the brilliant essay "A finger of salt or a short history of my reading". She gave up on that idea because she was afraid that this study would take away her "reader's innocence" and the authenticity of literary magic - reading and writing.
She made her debut as an author back in 1979, and has been writing professionally since 1989. She published her first novel "When people went to get a book" in 1993, followed by the novels "Remembrance and other times", "Ana In silazi u Underground svet", "Run away", "Traj svoje ralo po kostima deadm" (or in the Croatian translation "Drive your plow over the dead bones"), "The Book of Jacob", and the last "Empuzion". Two collections of short stories "Bizarne priče" (Official Gazette, Belgrade, 2021) and "The Ugliest Woman in the World" (Fraktura, Zagreb, 2022) have been translated into the languages known to us, and the Official Gazette also published a collection of exceptional essays by Olga Tokarčuk, "The Gentle Narrator ”, 2022.
Her works served as inspiration for other arts as well. They are the template for numerous theater plays, and according to the novel "Pull your plow on the bones of the dead" Agnieszka Holland she shot the film "Trofejna divljač" ("Pokot" - Catch), for which Tokarčukova wrote the screenplay, which won the Silver Lion at the Berlin Festival in 2017.
An opera was written based on the novel "Ana In silazi u Podzemni svet" (the libretto was written by Olga herself) and the comic book "I, Nina Šubur".
In the explanation of the Nobel committee for the 2018 prize, it is pointed out that Olga Tokarčuk possesses a "narrative imagination that represents crossing borders as a form of life with encyclopedic passion." She used the monetary part of the award to start an endowment that supports the development of Polish culture, writers and translators, literary theorists, supports the fight for human rights, the fight against all kinds of discrimination and the protection of the environment.
"You write for mental countrymen"
Reading requires intense intellectual engagement, the real one is always interactive and dialectical. Today, it is not easy to demonstrate the layers of in-depth reading, which is characterized by the complexity of insight, reflection and critical analysis. Distractions even more skillful, dedicated readers drag in different directions chained new and superficial information, in the imperative updating and upgrading of our brains. The irresistible ease of the general commercialization of the literary market turns once attentive literary readers into hurdlers, breathlessly following publishing productions, and the constant need to "keep up to date". The problem is often created precisely by the abundance of information, because it distances opinion (public!) from opinion (individual).
When those who read - beware those who read literary works - because today, contrary to categorical claims, people read more than ever, it's just a matter of what types of texts - after, say, a month of reading a book, they try to remember some detail , character names, or complete plots, get stuck, and are often uncertain about the author's name as well.
In that hurdle race, the phenomenon of Olga Tokarčuk can happen to us - an author who reads her readers because, as she says in the essay Trout with almonds, "You write for mental countrymen". In looking at the world in the form of ex-centricity, she asks: “Could there be a story that would go beyond the non-communicative prison of a person's inner self, reveal a larger scope of reality and show interconnections? Which could keep a distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal center of common opinions..."
Recognized theorists of literature warn that contemporary prose is turning into a human document and that everything is welcome for the creation of a text, in accordance with the modern ideology of openness and individualism (Pierre Jourde). And then comes Tokarčukova's recognition that the problem of this age "is the fact that we don't have stories ready yet, not only for the future, but also for the concrete present, for the super-fast transformation of today's world." We don't have a language, we don't have views from different perspectives, we don't have metaphors, myths, or new fables. But we see frequent attempts to cobble together rusty, anachronistic narratives that don't fit with the future as imagined, no doubt on the assumption that something old is better than nothing new, or in an attempt to cope in this way with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we have no new ways to tell the story of the world… How do we write, how do we structure our story so that it can elevate this great constellation of the world?” (essay Gentle narrator).
It is she who is worried about the fate of new stories and their possibilities, who opens an original space, because "he who does not see details, sees nothing", advocating for integrated perception against perceptive laziness, requires "pure vision" and the need to advance the writer's, but and the reader's head above the sphere of agreed order. Her thoughtfulness, aesthetics and faith in the power of language negate dualism - the world is a whole made of many manifestations of life. From the frequent limitation and tightness in the language of contemporary literature, we discover Olga's constant "vigilance in the matrix of language". Her works are read in silence, preferably with a good dictionary. Tokarčuk's new way of creating a story about the world, and the reader, whom she reads, enables, in addition to the endless enjoyment of that intellectual activity, the (in)memorability of the novelistic space that she creates with special literary registers. Thus, the game of transgression (transgression, displacement) forms the structured foundation of the swirling literary universe of Olga Tokarčuk.
Dialogue with the reader
Entering the very center of the world in a radically different way, with completely new artistic procedures, ignoring the canonical, unequivocal and unquestionable, Tokarčuk creates a literary reality of daring counterfactual scenarios. She opens a dialogue with the reader, respecting him and preparing him to be renewed, awake and open, ready for new possibilities of the genre and to enter into literary observations of the world of old people, women, children, the sick, trees, animals, plants, things... In the dispersion of narrative conventions and playing with genres between the novels "Escape", "Traj svoe ralo po kostima morti" (ecological thriller), "Ana In descends into the Underworld", the collection of short stories "Bizarne piče" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World", grandiose epics , a novel whose unusual full title we quote here: "The Books of Jacob, or a long journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the small ones, which they tell from the beginning, and which the author supplemented by the method of conjecture, drawn from many kinds of books, pride supported, by imagination, the greatest natural gift of man, wise for reminding, compatriots for reasoning, laymen for learning, melancholic for leisure", and in the latest novel "Epuzion" (a neuropathic horror) we get the truth about the writers as "anarchists of universals, born relativists".
Olga is read by anyone who overcomes her novel with reading tension Books of Jacob (762 pages). Have you ever read a book that has reverse pagination? You read and at every moment you know, without counting, how many pages you have left until the finish line. However, the secret of that procedure, which is never easy for readers because every order is a matter of habit, is revealed only at the very end of the novel. Tokarchuk likes puzzles and challenges for mental countrymen. It tests their reading fitness, knowledge of literature, memory and immersion in the language. In this epic, Olga offers as a challenge the fruit of her six years of dealing with the history of religions of the 18th century in the areas of former Poland, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Old Continent and/or the Ottoman Empire. In carefully and thoughtfully organized more or less connected stories, in which the main character Jakov Frank dominates, and cardinal gamblers appear, rabbis casting curses on followers who renounce their faith under pressure from difficult social contexts, ordinary people in search of a better tomorrow. Above all of them hovers the image of a mythical creature - Jenta - which provides the reader with a panoptic perspective. Many intrigues and political entanglements in the courts of the then rulers are told and described, wisely and in a universal idiom. Tokarčukova's language is full of elements and expressions characteristic of the time in which the story is set, but it is not laborious, on the contrary, it is crystal clear. The novel was published in Poland in 2015 and the author experienced attacks and even death threats because of it. The reason for this is that she shrewdly destroyed the romantic experiences of Polish history with literary means. Olga Tokarčuk as a writer bravely portrays the bloody 18th century in which the Poles proved to be colonizers, killers of Jews and slave owners.
Her new novel "Empuzion" also experienced strong reactions from the public, which, unusually, now come from the camp of Olga's ideological like-minded people. The novel depicts life in the former sanatorium Gerberdsdorf (now Sokolovsko), the first European sanatorium for the treatment of patients suffering from tuberculosis. In addition to the obvious metatextual framework and conversation - polemics with the book that had a formative effect for the author - Manov's "Magic Hill", the time of the action in the twentieth year of the twentieth century serves to express the misogynistic attitudes of the protagonist. The author's note at the end of the book contains a list of the names of famous men throughout history, from Aurelija do Yeats, whose quotes, cryptquotes and paraphrases expressing negative attitudes about women are used in the novel. The explanation of the title, in accordance with the difficulties of the author, can be found on page 91 of the novel, but even before the explanation itself, the careful reader recognizes the omniscient narrator Empusa among the narrative voices. It is interesting that the author, who once stated: "A good book does not have to declare itself in terms of genre", deliberately oxymoronically defined the novel as a naturopathic horror (naturopathy, healing by nature and horror, horror, horror).
About the business of Hermes
Olga Tokarčuk's penchant for metatextuality is also evident in the novel "Pull your plow on the bones of the dead". The title itself is a paraphrase of the verse V. Blake, whose poetry plays an important role in the mentioned literary work. Blake's poetry, in addition to the verses that begin each chapter of the novel, is also reminiscent of the effect achieved by the game of graphemes - the use of capital letters in the middle of a sentence for tokens where they do not belong according to spelling. One of the important motives is the process of translating Blake's poetry, the painstaking penmanship of translating verses. By parodying the convention of thrillers, on the one hand, and messages about the necessity of cooperation between man and nature, on the other, the author realizes an extraordinary energy potential in the narratological sense. The eccentric protagonist Janjina Dušejko, as already noted, is one of the most impressive literary characters of contemporary literature.
An exceptional part of Olga Tokarčuk's oeuvre so far are her essays. Twelve essays and lectures were selected in the book "The Gentle Storyteller", published by the Belgrade Official Gazette, which were created after the author received the Nobel Prize. This exceptional selection, in addition to revealing the autistic secrets of the famous Nobel laureate, talks about necessary exercises from abroad, about the work of Hermes or how translators save the world every day, about the search for a gentle storyteller, about the importance of reading in life, and from each of them emerges the awareness of the necessary the fluidity of dichotomies, against the existing harshness and boundaries of the world.
Olga Tokarčuk was lucky with the translators at the EX YU premises. Her works are in the spirit of essays The work of Hermes or how translators save the world every day brilliantly translated into the Croatian language Mladen Martic i Đurđica Čilić, and exceptional in the Serbian language Milica Markić, who is also an excellent promoter and interpreter of Olga's work.
More and more people are writing about Olga Tokarčuk all over the world. Expert papers are being written on topics from her oeuvre, and this text is a reader's debt to one of the greatest. So let's end with her words: "Literature should constantly remind us of only one thing: people are closer to each other and more similar to each other than some singers of fear want to admit." While we read and write - we are together". And to add in the spirit of Olga's optimism and faith - in the alert reader, who possesses reader strategies and constantly reviews and develops them, is the future of literature.
(The author is a professor of literature)
Bonus video:
