The article examines Olga Tokarczuk's view of weakness and the weak – with regard to her characters, identities, ontologies, and various notions of spirituality – and tries to make out the ways in which her approach to this problem is shaped by the philosophical idea of 'traces'. Tokarczuk's thought, as we find it embodied in her work, shows a remarkable similarity to the idea of 'weak thought' ( pensiero debole) and the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Instead of striving for generalizations and unification, it pursues individual uniqueness; it prefers to concentrate on the exception rather than the rule. It focuses on the ontological underdog – a weak, flawed, vulnerable human being. It is precisely because of these deficiencies, and not despite them, that the individual is more interesting than everlasting matter or the God's eternity. Moreover, transcendence, when it does manifest itself in her work, usually takes the form of a trace, faint and feeble (as, for example, in Lurianic Kabbalah). The aim of this article is to draw attention to an important dimension of Tokarczuk's fiction and to identify a handful of clues for further study.

This article analyzes the key characteristics of Olga Tokarczuk's fiction, whose structure appears to embody the epistemological metaphor of a network of fungal threads (mycelium). The article attempts to demonstrate that throughout her fictional world this non-binary principle integrates the whole and the fragment, identity politics and the politics of becoming, life and death, the personal and the impersonal, words and actions. The roots of the approach must be sought in the posthuman(ist) imagination, the influence of which in Tokarczuk's writing can be traced back to the 1990s, rather than her indebtedness to the aesthetic theories of postmodernism.

This article deals with the role of empathy in the work of Olga Tokarczuk. It begins with an examination of the autocritical reflections in her essays, most notably her view of literature and its functions. This is followed by a discussion of the range of emotional involvement presented in her fiction and the role of empathy in her narrative strategy. The article argues that empathy is at the heart of her creativity and her understanding of literature.

In her fiction Olga Tokarczuk evokes a spectrum of belief systems rooted in diverse religious traditions and entrenched in their literary‑theological redoubts. This article is an attempt of presenting an overview of the belief systems and worldviews that can be found in all of Tokarczuk's novels. It also examines her view of religion, including her opinions and reactions that belong primarily to the narrower context of the Polish hic and nunc, and the religious entanglements of literature. The fact that Olga Tokarczuk, herself a graduate of psychology, has done of lot reading in neighbouring fields such as anthropology may explain her persistent preoccupation with the soul. It holds the key both to her religious imaginarium and to her fictions. The empathic soul represents the potential transgressiveness of existence. It is also, in her own words, "the most tender narrator", a story‑telling 'persona' endowed with the faculty of fostering engagement and a sense of responsibility for the state of the world. The article argues that Tokarczuk's aim is to conjure up and activate its 'persona', or soul, and while making it interact with the reader's soul, initiate a chain reaction that breaks barriers between human beings, and reaches out beyond the confines of the human world. That process begins with her playing around with multiple religious traditions to demonstrate that their borders and defences are anything but impregnable.

This article deals with the function of proper names in Olga Tokarczuk's novel Anna In w grobowcach świata [ Anna In in the Tombs of the World] and the short story collection Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories]. In either case we are confronted with a stunning diversity of imaginary worlds described with erudite care and, by implication, a high level of strategic control. While drawing on a vast pool of well attested names from both Western cultural history and non-European mythologies, she also creates apellatives based on attributes highlighted in the storytelling (the stories themselves are often the product of her magical imagination). Invented or real, all proper names in Tokarczuk's narratives are handled in such a way as to display to the full their semantic, pragmatic and aesthetic qualities. Also, it seems, their placement in the text and their effect on the reader's reactions during the process of reading are carefully planned. what this article tries to demonstrate is that in Tokarczuk's art of fiction the creative transformation of proper names, their reinterpretation and contextualization functions as a complement to the imaginary worlds, rooted in bizarre, meta/genre creativity.

This article explores the significance of James Hillman's archetypal psychology for the autothematic reflection and the fiction of Olga Tokarczuk. An analysis of her 2020 collection of essays Czuły narrator ( The Tender Narrator), and the psychological dimension of two novels, Ostatnie historie ( Final Stories) and Bieguni ( Flights) published in 2004 and 2007 respectively, shows that she abandoned her former intellectual master Carl Gustav Jung for Jungian revisionists, most notably James Hillman. His ideas helped her to clarify her own philosophical approach, and, for her critics, they offer a useful interpretative key to the works in which she moved beyond the bounds of orthodox Jungianism.

This article discusses Olga Tokarczuk's idea of the historical novel formulated in her metacritical reflections. It focuses on the concept of conjecture which she herself finds crucial to her writing practice. Tokarczuk stresses the cognitive value of this method which allows her to bring in voices that have been drowned out with their stories and to recover the material, sensual experience of a bygone world. This reading of the Books of Jacob draws on her double-track definition of conjecture to analyze her writing strategy aimed at method this makes use of this double he with stories that have been left out in the past and to fill in the gaps and revise the distortions of the standard, 'written' historical narrative. The affirmation of the value of historical knowledge, tempered by the awareness of its limitations, situates Tokarczuk's fiction within the aesthetic of contemporary neo-historical novel.

Olga Tokarczuk jest jedną z pionierek i orędowniczek zwrotu ku emocjom, ku twórczości przedkładającej odczuwanie nad myślenie.

Olga Tokarczuk is among the pioneers exploring a certain turn towards emotions, artistic efforts that value sensation over thought.

The paper aims at analyzing the practice on the borderline of retranslation and revision carried out by translators who rework their own previous translations. The comparison between the three Italian editions (1999, 2013, 2020) of Olga Tokarczuk’s Prawiek i inne czasy shows how the same translator gradually moved towards a more foreignizing approach, fixings errors and modernizing the language, though not eschewing a domesticating strategy. These re-editions seem to be linked with the growing symbolic capital and contractual power of the writer on the international arena, which arouse the need of more accurate translations and reinterpretations of her works.

This article draws on the refined techniques of literary interpretation brought to the Cervantes studies by John J. Allen's Don Quixote: Hero or Fool (1969), but refocuses its attention from the problem of Quixote's character to ‘bizarreness’ – an aesthetic category that can be found at the root of the confused, incongruous perception of reality in the fictions of Cervantes and the contemporary Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. In Chapter 18 of Part Two of Don Quixote Don Lorenzo calls the knight errant ‘ loco bizarro’. The translations of this phrase reveal a striking polyvalence of the Spanish adjective bizarro when compared to bizzarro (in Italian) and bizarre (in both French and English). A close analysis of the following chapter shows that the author contextualizes the preceding events within a narrative perspective marked by empathy and understanding rather than authoritative categorization, i.e. a type of narration discussed by Olga Tokarczuk in her 2019 Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” and identified as ‘bizarreness’ in her Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories].

This article analyzes the subconscious fears and anxieties connected with loneliness, low self-esteem, all kinds of frustrations, a sense of being trapped in a bizarre reality or being pushed to transgress (i.e. to cross the border between life and death, between the human and the animal, or getting exposed to new technologies or forms of religion) in Olga Tokarczuk's Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories]. The resulting emotional volatility gives rise to questions about one own's identity and one's place in a world beyond control. At the same time the manifold fears and anxieties impose on one a Manichean, dualistic perception of an incurably weird (bizarre) reality. So in Opowiadania bizarne we are constantly reminded of man's arrogance in his relations with the earth's ecosystem, the destructive nature of his subconscious mind, the dangers of new technologies and the corrosive effects of postsecularism.