Primeval and Other Times

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In addition to her literary works, Tokarczuk cowrote the script for the feature film Pokot (2017; Spoor), which was based on Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. She also inaugurated an annual literary festival in 2015, held in the summer near her home in Silesia, southern Poland. Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe we are told at the beginning of the book. Primeval is a quasi-mythical village in Poland. It exists geographically. We even know where it is, as Tokarczuk describes where it is in relation to actual villages. It is around fifty miles from where Tokarczuk now lives. I have also been close to where it is located. It does not, of course, exist in the real world. Tokarczuk has said of the novel: "I always wanted to write a book such as this. One that creates and describes a world. It is the story of a world that, like all things living, is People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.” more refined. Perhaps we would do well to recall that wonderful Polish tradition of "mythmaking," as found in the works of Bruno Schulz and Boleslaw Lesmian, where the mythical perception of the world

in Russian). Translated by Изотова, Татьяна. Moscow: Новое литературное обозрение. 2004. ISBN 5867933067. When I was in my teens I became my History teacher’s worse nightmare. Not because I didn’t like to dwell on the past but because I could never quite believe things were as straightforward as I was expected to think they were. Basically, I was (and still am) obsessed with questioning everything (past, present and future!). People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable. They imagine you go mad for some reason. . . People also think madness strikes suddenly, all at once, in unusual circumstances, and that insanity falls on a person like a net, fettering the mind and muddling the emotions. Imagining is essentially creative; it is a bridge reconciling matter and spirit. Especially when it is done intensely and often. Then the image turns into drop of matter, and joins the currents of life. Sometimes along the way something in its gets distorted and changes. Therefore, if they are strong enough, all human desires come true- but not always entirely as expected.The character Cornspike, for instance, who reminded me of a female version of the Green Man. And there's a Bad Man from the woods, too. But he's nothing compared to your garden-variety men, specifically those related to the war when first the Germans and then the Russians invade Poland's soil. War takes the challenges of life and amplifies them one hundred fold.

Tokarczuk's generational peers who share a similar poetic vision: it eschews Andrzej Stasiuk's zeal in Tales of Galicia for replacing older myths with the modern myth of consumerism, nor does it have any of Overlooking all is a vain selfish God who has become thoroughly bored with mankind and who must play second fiddle in Ms Tokarczuk’s pantheistic world to It is here, amongst these dense forests, that the sphere of the sacred blends with the profane, as mystical phenomena, Catholicism, holiness and half-blind cat. Olga Takorczuk has created a multi-layered, imperfect, brutal and whimsical world to take apart and put together again. There is so much beauty within: fermenting

In fact, one of the more intriguing ideas of the book is that Primeval is actually a self-contained entity, with the outide world, unseen, unexperienced, merely a dream, just a kind of computer-generated supplement to the ‘real’ world. During their childhood, Ruta, who has grown up in the forest, takes Izydor to what she claims to be the boundary of Primeval, the point beyond which it’s impossible to go. Naturally, he has his doubts and decides to prove her wrong: preacher, his words have no more authority than any of the other characters we meet. Furthermore, since the philosophy we encounter in the book arises 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.)