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.

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.

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 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.

This text is an attempt to analyse the ways of existence of heroes “living differently” – ghosts, phantoms, those invisible in the works of Elena Dolgopyat. In her works, the line between life and death becomes blurred: a hero who rose from the grave may turn out to be more alive than a man who did not die but exists in a sense of nonsense. He may also not notice his own death. The impure force functions in the world and is presented on a par with living characters, which is a characteristic feature of magical realism. The writer presents the non‑living, drawing on Slavic folklore tradition, as I try to show. I also juxtapose Dolgopyat’s stories with Alexander Etkind’s research on memory and trauma in Russian culture, considering them to be their exemplification.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, is one of the most interesting contemporary Swedish and European writers with a Tunisian immigrant background. His second novel Montecore: en unik tiger ( Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger), published in 2006, has got an epistolary form deducted from the exchange of letters between Kadir and Jonas. However, the main character of the novel is Abbas Khemiri – the disappearing, estranged father of Jonas – a figure close to the real writer. Khemiri’s book has got an innovative linguistic form and contains many erudite references to the phenomena of popular culture. It is also a complex portrayal of the different generations of (mainly Arab-based) immigrant and post-immigrant communities in Sweden coupled with a nuanced look on bright and dark sides of the Swedish state, model of identity and integration. This material is enriched by the examples taken from Khemiri’s novel Everything I Don’t Remember and short story As You Would Have Told It To Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.