Olga Tokarczuk Research Articles

Emotions in the Discourse of a Literery Essay

The article interprets Olga Tokarczuk’s essay Lalka i Perła about the novel Lalka by Bolesław Prus. An attempt will be made to explain what cognitive value this text has for the reader of Tokarczuk’s prose and for the reader who is interested in Prus’s novel, and to answer the question whether this essay can be considered as a contribution to literary-historical or other literary-scientific knowledge about Prus. The central thesis of the article is that Tokarczuk’s writing about Prus is an example of emotionalized discourse of fictionalized historiographical prose, a hybrid and marginal essayistic genre that appropriates the features of both fictional prose and modern literary scientific writing, compressing some of the traditional essay’s procedures, such as presenting personal viewpoints and intentionally impregnating the discourse with private emotional manifestations. The aim of the paper is the analysis of Tokarczuk’s writing and the assessment of the scope of her essay in the context of knowledge of Prus’s novel.

Corporeality: from the Figure to the Text Structure (O. Tokarczuk's Flights)

Olga Tokarczuk’s fragmented novel Flights (Bieguni, 2007) encompasses various genres and themes that distinguish corporeality. Its analysis reveals how a corporeal isotopy of the content plane explains the expression plane, i.e., the novel’s composition. Therefore, this article contributes to the marginally explored research field in the semiotics of literature – the interaction between content semantics and poetics. In the novel, not only can various forms of the human body be found – such as bodies engaged in different modes of travel, sick bodies, and body specimens – but also contrasting corporeal ideologies that elucidate the connection between different fragments of the book. The article describes the novel‘s characters – pilgrims, runaways, and anatomists – and their relationship with movement and the body, revealing their worldview. Moreover, it solves the problem of matching the opposite conceptions of the body, the phenomenological and the mechanical, and addresses how the opposing characters’ attitudes can be integrated into the text’s semantic universe. The axiology of the protagonists is expressed by the category of integrity/disintegration. This, along with the corporeal relationships that repeat in different stories, discloses that Tokarczuk’s text functions as a particular body. Furthermore, it suggests a specific conception of the literary text.

“Ecological, Feminist, and Monstruous Trends Against Women and Nature’s Oppression in Olga Tokarczuk’s Works

In the last twenty years, the publication of original novels broadly categorized as “ecofiction” signals the emergence of a new sensibility in many cultures. The fil rouge running through these catastrophic scenarios seems to be the annihilation of men persecuted by unexpected predators: women and nature. This paper aims to investigate the trend reflected by these rebellious heroines allied with natural elements that occur systematically in numerous works of the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. Considering as examples some of the Polish author’s novels, like Primeval and Other Times (1996), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), and stories such as The Ugliest Woman in the World (2001) and Transfugium (2018), this article seeks to analyze these transgressive female characters through the theoretical approaches of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and Monster Studies and highlight their challenge to the anthropocentric and androcentric viewpoints, aimed at liberating all minorities from oppression.

Przekład intersemiotyczny. Przypadek znaku drogowego, ekfrazy i adaptacji filmowej


 
 
 The article is an attempt to clarify and refine the ways of understanding two basic types of translation: from one language into another ethnic language (translation proper) – i.e. following the principles of translating homo- geneous systems of signs – and from one system of signs to another, e.g. verbal to iconic, or vice versa, which is sometimes called transmutation. Therefore, the starting point for the discussion is Roman Jakobson’s well-known typology of translation, which also took into account cases of intralingual translation within the same language, called rewording. However, the article mainly focuses on various cases of intersemiotic translation and thus transmutation, meaning situations where a text expressed in one system of signs is translated into a system of a different nature. The primary research question concerns what is actually being translated in such a situation and how this type of translation differs from a typical language-to-language translation. The article is chiefly theoretical, and the examples concern the cases of translating verbal signs into iconic ones, such as the rules governing traffic into a road sign, the translation of an image (a painting, photography) into a literary text (ekphrasis and its varieties), and a film adaptation. The equivalence of codes secures the adequacy of a linguistic translation. In the case of ekphrasis, the image is usually replaced by a verbal narrative, and in a film adaptation, the type and sequence of iconic signs must simply be invented because these sign systems are not directly equivalent, as Benveniste and Lotman believe. Examples that illustrate the main theses of the article are Jacek Kaczmarski’s art-inspired songs, several film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Polański, Kurosawa), and Agnieszka Holland’s film adaptation (Pokot [Spoor]) of one of Olga Tokarczuk’s novels.
 
 

The city as memory in contemporary Polish women's literature

The research is based on the hypothesis that geographical spaces reflect the imprint of social, political, historical and cultural life. Spatial representations of settlements are the projections of social crisis and historical periods. The city has its own vocabulary and language, reflected in its buildings and spaces. These 'speaking' cities are open in space and time, and become theatres of self-writing, as the spaces of the city try to find forms of expression to see unspoken traumas, that is, theories of the city are also theories of the subject.
 The main question of the investigation is: what are the specific possibilities and challenges for Polish contemporary women's literature to mobilise social memory and to create possibilities for confronting the traumatic past? Using examples from Olga Tokarczuk's novels Dom dzienny, dom nocny (Day House, Night House) and Joanna Bator's Piaskowa Góra (Sand Hill), I will present the relationship between memory and coming to terms with the past in the historical context of East-Central Europe in Poland. In particular, I will focus on the ways of reflecting on historical events of the Second World War and the regime change of 1989.
 A further aim of the research is to explore how Polish women's literature after 1989 attempts to come to terms with the great social traumas of the twentieth century. In the following, I intend to examine the fictional representation of the culture of memory of the 1989/90 regime change in the body of contemporary Hungarian and Polish women's literature in order to find a common intersection of Central and Eastern European literatures.

The Tender Narrator In Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha

The main assertion in this paper is that the tender narrator, whom the Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, made the subject of her Nobel Lecture, can convey the author’s perspective in such a way that all readers can find themselves in it. Using the example of Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha, the author of this paper demonstrates how tender narration brings out the titular character’s defenselessness as a quality of the human condition. The author ponders what distinguishes Yakhina’s novel among other examples of camp or historical literature and also addresses Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’écriture feminine, concluding that the perspective of tender narration is coextensive with the feminine narration that is open to voices arriving from a multitude of perspectives. The author also demonstrates that Yakhina’s Zuleikha is an example of literature that highlights and explores the experience of a human being’s internal freedom, which is inalienable, even though its external freedom may be endangered by fate, the laws of history or political machinations.

올가 토카르추크의 『태고의 시간들』에 나타난 신화적 모티브 연구

Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times(1996), the most representative novel from the early period of her work, is widely considered to beautifully embody a mythological imagination. Consisting of eighty-four episodes, the novel is a unique work in that it integrates events which actually occurred in Poland into a fictional story set against the background of an imaginary village called ‘Primeval’. Notably, the word ‘primeval’, which means ‘the earliest time in history’, is used to name a place. Through the imaginary village of Primeval, Tokarczuk has created a new and distinctive world in which reality and supernatural phenomena co-exist, and unfolded mythic time with the characteristics of ‘circularity’ and ‘roundness’ within a special space. Tokarczuk reveals the robustness of the literary archetype originating from universal human sentiment through the various mythical motifs embedded in the novel. As such, Primeval is a microcosm in which reality and myth co-exist. With this novel Tokarczuk sought to emphasize the everlasting presence of myth, proving that all great novels are grounded in some kind of myth.

“Live in Fragments No Longer. Only Connect.”: The Alienation and Self-Restoration of the Subject in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

“Live in Fragments No Longer. Only Connect.”: The Alienation and Self-Restoration of the Subject in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

Tension Between Embodied Structures and the Pursuit of Change: Exploring the Metaphysical Underpinnings of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

ABSTRACT Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece Flights highlights one of the most profound metaphysical, moral and religious conundrums – a tension, but also an intimate bond, between stability and structuredness, on the one hand, and the power of change, movement and transgression on the other. The paper is devoted to unveiling what I dub the paradox of embodied agency. In simple terms, structuredness makes the known world organized and predictable; yet, at the same time, these very structures are vehicles of change, movement, sometimes even destruction. I make the case that this profound aspect of Flights deserves more recognition.

Between Tenderness and Anger. Oscillation in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

ABSTRACT Among various ecological problems, the theme of animals is one of the constantly recurring leitmotifs in Olga Tokarczuk’s work. The issues of the right to kill them and the legitimacy of the custom of hunting are addressed in the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Its protagonist, Janina Duszejko, who shares the writer’s philosophy regarding our attitude toward these beings, defends them in a radical way, oscillating between tenderness and anger. The present analysis focuses on this dichotomy by examining the interactions between these two extreme emotions and the behaviors that these interactions lead to. Reading the novel in the light of the philosophy of deep ecology, close to Tokarczuk’s thinking, but also using the tools of ecopoetics, I attempt to find what the status of creatures other than human beings is in this text, noting how they are represented and named, as well as trying to specify the role they play.

Tender Transgressions: Olga Tokarczuk’s Exercises in Postsecular Imagination

ABSTRACT The article demonstrates how Olga Tokarczuk inscribes diverse religious traditions in her novels and creates new theological ideas to offer readers literary tools for exercising their imagination. In this way, Tokarczuk’s prose exposes the arbitrariness of religiously legitimized worldviews and destabilizes the existing cultural imaginary. An analysis of Tokarczuk’s methods for constructing beliefs, rituals and metaphysical frameworks of the world that consolidate the communities she describes allows us to perceive her writing as postsecular. Each of her published works of fiction is briefly presented in chronological order, providing an insight into both the continuities and transformations of her approach to contemporary fiction. Juxtaposing these analyses with Tokarczuk’s views on the social role of literature presented in her essays and self-commentaries and the concept of the “tender narrator” from her Nobel lecture, allow us to identify the political and ethical motivations for such a creative strategy.

From the Feminist Ethic of Care to Tender Attunement: Olga Tokarczuk’s Tenderness as a New Ethical and Aesthetic Imperative

In her Nobel speech in 2019, Olga Tokarczuk presented the category of tenderness as a new way of narrating the contemporary world. This article is a proposal for the analysis and interpretation of tenderness in ethical and aesthetic terms. (1) From an ethical perspective, tenderness is interpreted as an extension and complement of feminist relational ethics, i.e., the ethics of care. In the proposed approach, tenderness is a broader and more universal quality than care in the feminist understanding. This article opens with a brief discussion of feminist interventions in ethics, with particular emphasis on the ethics of care. Next, the differences between care and tenderness are enumerated and described, in order to show how tenderness can serve as an extension and complement of the feminist ethic of care. These considerations are guided by the question of why tenderness is a better—more appropriate and more responsive to contemporary challenges—moral guidepost than care. (2) From the aesthetic perspective, tenderness is the negation of a contemplative, distanced, impersonal, and rational view of reality. As an aesthetic imperative, tenderness implies engaged experience of the beauty of reality in all of its manifestations. Therefore, in the last part of the article, existential tender attunement is described in aesthetic terms, as a position serving to sensitize others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world.

Draw Me After by Peter Cole

Reviewed by: Draw Me After by Peter Cole Arthur Willemse PETER COLE Draw Me After New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 113 pages. "PERHAPS IT ALSO has to do with the alphabet—that there isn't really one, that there are lots of them: each produces its own kind of thinking. Like bricks, some, fired and smooth, yield cathedrals, while others, of rough clay, become the peasants' shacks." The musings of Father Chmielowski, from Olga Tokarczuk's great novel The Books of Jacob, with its special attention to Jewish history and religion, appear to apply to Peter Cole's latest book of poetry, Draw Me After. Draw Me After has three separate but overlapping concerns: first, like Tokarczuk's character, it attempts to understand the implications of the architecture of language and alphabet, of the letters of the Jewish language as they are drawn. Second, building from a preceding collaboration, On Being Drawn (2020), it wants to pay homage to the drawings of Terry Winters, whose art is included in the book, as it enters into a dialogue with the poetry. Third, it includes translations by Cole from Hebrew (and, in one instance, Persian) poetry—ancient and twentieth century. All three converge as a [End Page 87] kind of writing in the sand, where authorships disappear, intersect, and emerge. The basic structure of this collections is provided by Cole's glossing of the Hebrew alphabet: in twenty-two beautiful poems, these letters are brought out in their very shape and the cultural contemporary resonances that they involve, for instance in the short poem devoted to ('hey'): "Hey you, she whispered / into the morning / the he inside her bare in its longing, there / in the air of soft address, flickering chicory- / black, like a con game-." Earlier, 's ('dalet') concise but undeniable statement of Willem de Kooning's Door to the River (1960) is related. In this way, saying or writing a letter turns into poetry; the letter, perhaps even, is allowed to find a voice of its own. Yet 's sweet voice is nonessential. Instead, Draw Me After concerns a much wider tradition and dialogue, especially regarding Cole's translations, which alternate with poems devoted to artists and critics, and to people only indicated by their initials. Indeed, the composition secures the effect that the difference between dedication and citation disappears. This must be what Draw Me After means: the poetry arrives from one, moves toward another. The coming together created here between the script of the Old Testament, on one hand, with visual art and poetical exchange on the other, then, amounts to an exceptionally subtle and profound Genesis and Bereshit story, wherein the response that follows is co-original with the voice that it answers. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

After the Transitions

After the Transitions Krzysztof Siwczyk (bio) and Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution FRANCIS MESLET, FORGOTTEN LIBRARIES SERIES (2023) / FRANCISMESLET.COM Translator's note: Almost thirty-five years have passed since the democratic awakening of central Europe, yet despite being praised today for its originality, eastern and central European literature is still not fully understood by Western readers. Krzysztof Siwczyk, a major Polish poet and accomplished actor of the post-1989 generation, examines the "disintegration" gunnysack created by a century of totalitarianism in his country. After affirming the death of Polish literature's noble novels of the "heroic past," he affirms the future preeminence of essays. To his reflective text is added a personal confession that combines Gombrowiczian satirical accents with poignancy to tell of innocence, ugliness, and cruelty in a truth-driven stream of consciousness that alone can conjure poetry.–ACC WE CAN CLEARLY SEE today from a cultural perspective that the symbolic year 1989 ushered in a specific kind of prosperity for the literature of this part of the world (see WLT, "After the Wall Fell," Nov. 2014). Interestingly, the traumatological prosperity of Polish literature—the "young" poetry and prose—flourished in Germany, which after the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification contributed with an open heart and mind to the rapidly rising European careers of such writers as Olga Tokarczuk or Andrzej Stasiuk. A relatively fluent transfer into target languages and the critics' significant interest—including the likes of Marcel Reich-Ranicki—led to judgments about the ways in which a specific kind of central European experience could, through its literature, contribute to enrich the spiritual heritage of the old continent, or at least of its postmodern and wealthy part that, through a happy alignment of political conditions, found itself on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Broadly defined, central European literature turned out to be a kind of "accursed share," to use the title of Georges Bataille's 1949 book, that "European literature"—also broadly defined—internalized as its own, hitherto invisible imago. The historical experience of a war waged by two totalitarian regimes—plowing through Europe while contributing to the collapse of Enlightenment myths—found its reward as the "black sun" of the twentieth century began to shine with full brilliance. Writers, many of whom had suffered an unwanted and forced quarantine in the camp of communist states, began to enter the canon of European literature. [End Page 62] The majority of them has already fallen on the trash heap of literary history for having missed the historical reset that is etched in our minds through photographs of meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev or cross-stitched portraits of John Paul II, who called on the Holy Spirit to renew his homeland during his pilgrimage to Poland. The effectiveness and dynamism of the historical process are measured not by individual human beings but by galaxies of interstate interests or blocs of states sharing the same system like the one that happened in 1989. In fact, 1989 turned out to be a postmodern "Orwellian year" for Poland or, more precisely, its beginning. Literature was very much aware of it because it was not swept up in the fever that accompanied the social strengthening of the Solidarity movement. In my opinion, far fewer than the ten million Solidarność members were real democrats and committed citizens. In a country of forty million people, four out of five people were not mentally ready for change. It is precisely to this mute and politically indifferent majority that the most important texts of Polish-language writers who debuted after 1989 were devoted. In fact, to this day, one can hear disgruntled longings for a great contemporary novel that would explain to us who we really were as a society and what changes we have undergone in the last four decades of Polish freedom—a freedom brutally tamed today by small autocrats like Jarosław Kaczyński, a devotee of the new "Smolensk religion," whose cult launched like a supernova after the plane carrying his brother crashed in 2010. One thing is certain: four decades of democracy have not fundamentally altered our Polish tendency...

POSTMODERNIST VISION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND THE HERO AS AN ACT OF TRANSGRESSION

The focus of the author of the article is the solution of the problem of reality in the literature of postmodernism. We are talking about the subjective nature of the perception of space by the characters of two stories. The author of the first of them, “Podmiot”, is the Polish writer and psychologist Olga Tokarczuk. The author of the second, “The Incredible Story of the «Pocket Oracle»”, is Ukrainian writer and literary critic Oleksandr Mikhed. The key event in each of the stories is the destruction of the boundary between literature and reality, between the author and his hero. In the story by Olga Tokarchuk, the character of the autobiographical novel, like a shadow from H. K. Andersen’s fairy tale, tries to capture the living space of his creator, to replace him. In Alexander Mikhed’s story, the real person – the reader – identified himself so much with the hero of the young writer’s novel that he even went to commit the murder of the author in order to save a fictional character, believing that in this way he can protect his own life from the arbitrariness of the one who invented this character. Various motivations for what happens in the stories are offered. The destruction of the boundary between the fictional and real worlds in both stories may be a result of reflection of how the authors see the process of artistic creation; it may be connected with artistic study of the mental state of the characters; the inclusion of fantastic motifs may be an allusion to the famous works of romantic writers. Mainly the author of the article connects this process in both stories with the actual problem of modern philosophy – transgression. It, in turn, is directly related to many questions that we are trying to find an answer to. In particular, are the boundaries between fiction and reality so strong, and is there really such a different space (dimension) in which literary characters are no less real than ourselves.

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

Olga Tokarczuk's Protagonist in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead as a High-Functioning Autistic Woman

The paper sheds light on the psychology of the protagonist of the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, as a high-functioning autistic. The prism of autism explains the intricacies of this extraordinary character, providing a coherent framework for understanding her and the characteristics of the narrative itself, as it is narrated by the protagonist. At the same time, the novel provides us with an extraordinary inner portrait of an autistic psyche that may enrich our understanding of the autistic consciousness.

Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Reviewed by: Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug Lanie Tankard GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG Evil Flowers: Stories Trans. Kari Dickson. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 128 pages. NORWEGIAN WRITER Gunnhild Øyehaug plumbs her psyche in a newly translated work, putting a twenty-first-century spin on nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The compelling result teems with candor, wit, anxious obsession, and the merest touch of schadenfreude—or what Baudelaire might have termed joie malicieuse. As in her earlier collection of stories, Wait, Blink (see WLT, July 2018), Øyehaug again explores inner life. The opening presentation, "Birds," doesn't waste any time. In the very first sentence, a large chunk of an ornithologist's brain falls into the toilet as she's preparing to defend her PhD thesis. Oh, her mind still works, except she's forgotten everything about birds—can't even recognize one. Seeking refuge at her parents' house, memories emerge, coalescing into twenty-four short tales. Øyehaug shakes crumbs out of the pockets of her mind, wringing them for all they're worth to repel their power over her. Pieces range from one to eleven pages, plus two of notes. A wordless one-pager, "A Bit Like This," is a sole black-and-white photo—that of Baudelaire glaring at the preceding title story, "Evil Flowers." Øyehaug stares him down in the succeeding "Protest" by calling on American writer Richard Brautigan. She says Baudelaire's greatest poem is "The Swan" (Le Cygne), whose lines perhaps echo her own theme here: "dear memories … heavier than rocks" by "those who've lost what they cannot recover." Her narrations delve into the loss of a mother as well as past loves. Whereas Baudelaire engaged with Victor Hugo in "Le Cygne" or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in "Le Calumet de Paix," Øyehaug nods to, say, Virginia Woolf or Henrik Ibsen. In one plot, she sets up an imaginative excursion to Monk's House, the Woolf cottage in East Sussex, without ever actually venturing there. "The Nordics Seen from the Outside" ponders the cold blue hues typically used to depict Nordic and Scandinavian countries on maps. The essay becomes a thought-provoking rumination on how those populations see themselves as well as how the rest of the world might view them, based on pictorial color selection alone. Hmm, what if they were portrayed in a warmer pink, she wonders, examining herself in the context of her society. When contemplations occasionally float off-course in various streams of consciousness, she steadfastly recenters her craft, murmuring, "I'll soon get to the point" or "but back to the subject." She's reminiscent there of others who don't always follow a pattern: Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk talking to herself (as in Flights) or Croatian author Daša Drndić (as in Belladonna). In one account, Øyehaug notices a growing tendency to disguise guns as "cell pistols." Such smartphone protection cases appear harmless yet can actually perform as guns. Then she digresses charmingly into ornamental grass, hosta plants, and bocce balls. An older woman in "The Thread" dreams from her hospital bed about her daughter in Denmark, recalling how she took umbrage at her name as a child and its connection to "wicked Queen Gunnhild," lamenting she wasn't named after "a good queen." Gunnhild Øyehaug expects readers to defamiliarize themselves with traditional literary shapes and risk charting new territory with her in Evil Flowers. As Baudelaire wrote in "I" at his journey's end: "We've been around the world; and this is our report." [End Page 75] Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Czuły narrator, czuły czytelnik. Kilka uwag o literackim świecie Olgi Tokarczuk na podstawie „Czułego narratora”

Olga Tokarczuk’s Czuły narrator is composed of twelve essays written at different stages of her life. In one of them she presents her original concept of ognosis. It denotes a striving for a holistic approach to all areas of life. The writer also introduces the category of a tender narrator who tells a story while emphatizing with all living or unliving beings, thus viewing (and presenting) the world from different points of view. Tokarczuk also speaks about the great importance of literary fi ction and her method of writing stories. She tackles important social issues such an animal rights and social exclusion. Her works teach us to be more attentive and tender readers. And in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she presents her own, subjective diagnosis of the contemporary world.

“Infinitely fragile, short-lived, vulnerable…”: Motives of Frailty of the World and Human Resistance to it in Olga Tokarczuk’s Prose

The article is devoted to the analysis of motives of frailty of the world and human resistance to it in Olga Tokarczuk’s prose, based on the narrative of corporeality / materiality. All kinds and levels of the depicted reality are subject to disintegration. We consider reflexions and bodily practices connected with disintegration and death (depiction of a dying, dead, sick, deformed, old body) as well as reflexions and bodily practices which embody resistance to mortality (relic worship, resurrection, dissection, copying, counterfeiting, cloning, etc.). One of the mediated ways of resisting entropy and decay is also the search for harmony and equilibrium between the heavenly and the earthly and the interrelation of their orders, the desire for orderliness as an unattainable goal. In this context the motives of predicting the future, astrology, the place of cosmogonic, theogonic and other theories are analyzed. The way to resist entropy and decay is the word and the narrative, which allows to find a fragile balance in the perishable world. In this connection the ways of resistance to frailty of the world and thanatic fear at the biographic and autopsychotherapeutic level – by means of mythodrama narrative and desensitization narrative are considered.