to political pressure. Last December,
after Król, the Dwutygodnik editor, re
sisted attempts to censor the magazine,
the government pulled its funding; it
ceased publication for several months,
until Król secured backing from War
saw’s relatively liberal city government.
In the media, finding a way to work
without state support is becoming an
attractive option. When a crowdfunded
documentary about child molestation
by Catholic priests was released on You
Tube recently, it was viewed more than
twenty million times—equivalent to
more than half of Poland’s population—
in a few days. “I can’t listen to official
radio,” Monika Platek, a professor of law
and criminology at the University of
Warsaw, told me, as she hunted on her
phone for an episode of WNYC’s “Ra
diolab” that she wanted to share with
Tokarczuk. Platek was running for a seat
in the European Parliamentary Elec
tions, as a candidate for Wiosna, a new
progressive party. The elections were a
day and a half away.
At the end of the evening, the Pol
ish writer Andrzej Stasiuk, backed by a
Ukrainian rock band called Haydamaky,
performed musical settings of poems by
Adam Mickiewicz. Born in 1798, just
after Poland was divided in three by
Prussia and the Russian and Austrian
Empires, Mickiewicz was involved in
Poland’s unsuccessful struggle for inde
pendence and spent most of his life in
exile. His work is fervently patriotic—
he is regarded as Poland’s national poet—
but, as Stasiuk’s adaptations emphasized,
the land Mickiewicz extolled included
large parts of Ukraine, Lithuania, and
Belarus. Stasiuk, a tall, slender man in
his late fifties, began by reciting in Pol
ish the opening lines of “The Akker
man Steppes,” a romantic sonnet that
describes the Crimean landscape. As
horns riffing on a folk tune came in be
hind him and the drums picked up, Sta
siuk switched languages, half shouting,
half rapping the same verses in Ukrainian.
Tokarczuk swayed to the music. “I get
goosebumps when I hear this,” she said,
rubbing her arms.“Can you see the logo
on his shirt?”
We were some distance from the stage
and the logo was hard to make out. It
seemed to involve the eagle from Po
land’s coat of arms, but there was also
something else. I moved forward through
the crowd until I was standing directly
below Stasiuk. The design looked like a
stylized bird, with two symmetrical wings
on either side of something shaped like
a wooden spoon. I took a picture and
made my way back to Tokarczuk.
“Ah,” she said, zooming in. “That’sthe Ukrainian Tryzub crest.” She inter
laced her fingers, shaking her hands for
emphasis. “The two cultures—they’re
like this. They can’t be separated.”T
he relationship between Poles and
Ukrainians forms the core of the
novel that Tokarczuk is currently work
ing on, which will draw on her family
history. Her ancestors on her father’s
side included Poles, Ukrainians, and Ru
thenians, and came from a village in the
province of Galicia. “Some of them were
much more aware of their national iden
tity, and for some of them it was not so
important,” she told me over tea the next
afternoon, as we sat in the lobby of a
new boutique hotel in central Warsaw.
(Tokarczuk speaks English extremely
well, but her Polish has an uncommon
elegance and clarity; our conversations
took place in both languages.)
During the Second World War, there
was a massacre of Poles in the village,
part of a wave of killings by Ukrainian
nationalists that claimed tens of thou
sands of lives in the region. Tokarczuk’s
grandfather, who was Polish but had
married a Ukrainian woman, survived.
After the war, Galicia was divvied up
between the Soviet Union and Poland,
and the village became part of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The family, along with nearly a million
other inhabitants of the area, immi
grated to Lower Silesia, a region of
southwestern Poland bordering what is
now Germany and the Czech Repub
lic. Poles were encouraged to settle there,
in part to replace ethnic Germans, who
had fled to Germany as the Red Army
advanced or who were expelled by Po
land once the war was over. “You can
not speak about this area without Ukrai
nians, because three million Polish
people living there still have roots in
Ukraine,” Tokarczuk said. “This dis
tinction—who is Polish and who is
Ukrainian—is for me very artificial.”
Tokarczuk was born in 1962, the first
of two daughters, in a village just north
of Lower Silesia. A small German mi
nority had remained there: some claimed
they were Polish in order to stay, while
others married Poles. As a child, Tokar
czuk had a German nanny. Her par
ents taught at a folk high school, part
of a movement founded to bring edu
“Polly needs some time alone.” cation to the peasant classes, and the