TOP 10 Books on the Ecstatic Pessimism of the Polish Soul

Primeval and Other Times, Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk’s third novel, PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES was awarded the Polityka Passport Prize in 1996 and the Koscielski Prize in 1997, which established the author as a leading voice in Polish letters. It is set in the mythical village of Primeval in the heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypal characters. The village, a microcosm of the world, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Primeval’s inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century. In prose that is forceful and direct, the narrative follows Poland’s tortured political history from 1914 to the present and the episodic violence that is visited on ordinary village life. Yet this is also a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial. A stylized fable as well as epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time, the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), it has been hailed across Europe as a contemporary classic.

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz’s uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family’s life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable – and most chilling – is the portrait of the author’s father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds’ eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors’ dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

Black Square, Tadeusz Dabrowski