On Spiritual Crossroads: A “Non-Dualist” Approach to Spiritual Issues in the Prose of Olga Tokarczuk Cover Image

Na duchowych rozdrożach. „Nie-dualistyczne” podejście do zagadnień duchowych w prozie Olgi Tokarczuk
On Spiritual Crossroads: A “Non-Dualist” Approach to Spiritual Issues in the Prose of Olga Tokarczuk

Author(s): Zbigniew Mikołejko
Subject(s): Philosophy, Studies of Literature, Theology and Religion, Polish Literature, Philosophy of Religion
Published by: Instytut Slawistyki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Olga Tokarczuk; dualism; antinomies; civilization; crisis; spirituality; Enlightenment; rationalism; mysticism; messianism; magic; Podolia

Summary/Abstract: The author attempts to reconstruct the spiritual structure that emerges from the literary work of Olga Tokarczuk. In his opinion, the direct context of this structure is a sense of a crisis or even the twilight of contemporary Western culture. For this reason, Tokarczuk seeks a paradoxical synthesis of antinomies which are tearing the modern world apart and which grow out of radically different intellectual, religious and civilisational traditions. Above all, she aims to combine the rational and empirical tradition of the European Enlightenment with prophetic and messianic currents, as well as elements of folk magic. For Tokarczuk, what has become a model of such a fusion is eighteenth-century Podolia, a region in the eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where numerous forms of Jewish and Christian mysticism and messianism were born in stormy historical circumstances.

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 20
  • Page Range: 1-31
  • Page Count: 31
  • Language: Polish