Warsaw Tales: An interview with Olga Tokarczuk

Ever since I first read “Che Guevara” in Olga Tokarczuk’s short story collection Playing Many Drums (2001), I have wanted to translate it. So, when I was asked to compile Warsaw Tales, it was one of the first stories to come to mind—an ideal contribution. The story mentions several easily identifiable places within the city and is set in December 1981, at a specific historical moment when the eyes of the world were on Poland. This was when the comparative freedom of the year in which the free trade union “Solidarity” seemed to have won some political concessions in Poland—and strikes were continuing in an effort to gain more liberty—was abruptly quashed by the imposition of martial law, tanks in the streets, internment, and a dismal period of oppression.

I have always wondered how autobiographical “Che Guevara” is. I knew Olga had studied psychology in Warsaw and originally thought of becoming a psychotherapist, but I’ve heard her jokingly say that when she realized her own mentality was even odder than that of her patients, she decided to be a writer instead! And I was curious about her choice of setting a story in Warsaw, when I know it’s not her favourite place, and she has only ever lived there as a student. So, I was thrilled to be able to ask Olga some questions about it.

ALJ: How much does “Che Guevara” echo your own experience as a student of clinical psychology in Warsaw during the student strikes of 1981? It feels extremely real, as if you lived it to the word, right down to the freezing cold and reading Cortazar.

OT: The whole story is based on my own genuine experience. I didn’t have to exercise my imagination very hard to write it. Nowadays that period in my life seems to me one of the toughest and most futile. It was a time of crisis in Poland, when everything was in deficit, and then the state of martial law that followed the so-called “Summer of Solidarity” crushed all our hopes of change. I also think of the martial law period as a time of collective depression.

In those days I was working as a volunteer at a community psychiatric care centre in the Warsaw district where I was studying clinical psychology. I looked after several patients, including a man whom I called “Che Guevara” in the story, though in reality he had a completely different nickname. I changed it because he was a recognizable figure in the streets of Warsaw and I wanted to make him more anonymous, though I didn’t really succeed.

ALJ: The patients: Che Guevara, Anna, and Igor are each suffering from a condition that isolates them but seems to give them a strange insight that the “healthy” people around them don’t have. Are they based on actual patients, or are they purely metaphors to highlight the strangeness of the reality that the whole country was living through?

OT: I’ve always been curious about other ways of looking at things we regard as obvious, shared experiences. At the time, I was intensely involved with my studies, with clinical cases and actual patients. Almost every day I was busy at the psychiatric hospital, so even my perspective of the political events was rather out of line. Mental illness is a sort of strange mirror that reflects the real world in other dimensions, which are not always realistic. From these different perspectives we can see other truths, other dependencies. I didn’t create these characters to be metaphors, but rather possibilities for alternative worlds that are there, just under our noses. Reality seems to contain other, lesser realities within itself: it’s built like a cluster, budding with possibilities in the same way that mental illness is a different way of perceiving reality.

ALJ: The story was published in 2001 but perhaps written earlier. How does it fit into your work? Would you write it differently now? Has it ever come back to your mind?

OT: As this story is based on my own personal experience and did not require any effort of the imagination, I don’t think it could be written any differently. I sometimes go back to it when I arrive in Warsaw and recognize the places I moved about in then—frozen to the marrow, undernourished, and depressed. This story has become a part of my personal life.

ALJ: As a non-Varsovian, who went to university in the city but apart from that hasn’t lived there, what is your feeling about Warsaw? I know you’re a great fan of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll (set in Warsaw), and a great film-goer—what Warsaw-based literature or cinema would you recommend?

OT: I don’t like Warsaw, maybe because of those unpleasant memories from the martial law period, when I happened to be a student. I come from Lower Silesia, and Warsaw is rather an alien country for me. It’s a throbbing, rushing, wealthy city, full of competitiveness and stress, a business and trade centre, the Hongkong of central Europe. Everything that’s important and significant in Poland happens there—in terms of politics, the arts, business, and so on. But it’s not for me.

I’m very fond of the post-war films about Warsaw, about the reconstruction of the capital, because it was thoroughly destroyed, and I think its rebuilding is a sort of miracle, and the whole resurrected city should be a UNESCO world heritage site.

One could write a whole thesis on the cinematography of Warsaw. In the first place I would recommend Roman Polański’s film The Pianist and also Warsaw 44, directed by Jan Komasa, to understand the history of the city. The prewar history of Warsaw is excellently portrayed by the TV series The King of Warsaw, based on the book by Szczepan Twardoch. I also recommend Mr T.,Reverse, Day of the Wacko, the thriller serial Blinded by the Lights, and all the films of Stanisław Bareja, who had an incredible sense of humour.

– Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize winning Polish writer, her short story “Che Guevara” can be found in the new collection of translated short stories, Warsaw Tales.

_{Featured image by Suicasmo via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]}