Olga Tokarczuk and the Edge of Poland
Confronted by a confusing and complex national history, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk decided to embrace myth rather than debunk it.
The village of Krajanów, where Olga Tokarczuk has lived for almost 30 years, is an out-of-the-way place. Tucked away in Lower Silesia, in the far southwestern corner of Poland, it is less than a kilometre from the Czech border, and a long way from anything else. Apart from the church, there isn’t much: just a handful of houses along a single, narrow road. A few ‘hippies and artists’ live there, attracted by the warm climate and isolation, but most people are farmers. They keep to themselves. And if it weren’t for the literary festival Tokarczuk organises every year, they probably wouldn’t have many visitors passing through, either.
Krajanów has a curious history, though. About an hour’s drive away, in Henryków, there is a 13th-century manuscript containing the oldest known sentence in the Polish language. But the area only became part of Poland after the Second World War. Before that, it had been ruled by the king of Bohemia, conquered by Prussia, claimed (unsuccessfully) by Czechoslovakia, and oppressed by the Nazis.
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