Powrót do Lalki i perły. O wartości eseju Olgi Tokarczuk w ujęciu komparatystycznym

Abstract

The Doll and The Pearl by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2002, is an essay on reading The Doll by Bolesław Prus. The author of the article investigates how and for what purpose the writer connected two literary works vastly distant in time and genetically unrelated: the novel written in nineteenth-century Warsaw and The Hymn of the Pearl (translated by Czesław Miłosz) – the song written in a Gnostic environment in Syria not later than in the first half of the 3rd century. In the course of the analysis, the following were revealed: Tokarczuk’s creative assumption, the sense of the selection of the Gnostic key to interpret Prus’s masterpiece; the method of combining various plots with the plot of this novel; the technique of deepening Prus’s characters; and the purposefulness of reading the main plot. On this basis, the author defined the type of cognition of Prus’s masterpiece presented in The Doll and the Pearl, and recognized reading The Doll by Tokarczuk was prompted by her fascination with Carl Gustav Jung’s depth psychology. The study of Tokarczuk’s essay is accompanied by general reflections on the tasks of comparative literary studies.