MADNESS AND DEATH OF THINGS IN THE SHORT STORY "PRESERVES" BY OLGA TOKARCHUK

Abstract

The paper examines the material world of the short story by Olga Tokarczuk, a contemporary Polish writer and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. The writer's work is often attributed to the tradition of "magical realism," but in fact, Olga Tokarczuk's narrative strategies are based on a mixture of postmodern and baroque features, techniques of science fiction, philosophical and humanistic fantastic fiction. The paper is devoted to an important component of Olha Tokarchuk's artistic world, that is the material world of the story "Preserves" from the collected works «Bizarre Stories» (2020). The title of the book characterizes its content extremely accurately, because the 11 stories in the collection can hardly be called ordinary or realistic. They generate a strange, bizarre impression of open endings, incomplete events, and elusive meanings. One of the most distinctive features of Olga Tokarchuk's work is her sensitivity, that is a subtle sense of the world, its movements and changes. Moreover, critics have also noted the anthropological nature of her writing – above all, she seeks to understand the human being. It is interesting (and somewhat paradoxical) that in order to get closer to a person and the secrets of his or her personality, the writer often uses the technique of alienation. The meeting with the Stranger, the Other is a way of learning new and unfamiliar things both about the world and about oneself. An important dominant of her work is also the concept of "border" and "boundary" as something that marks a state of transition and change. Traveling, moving in space and time, living in the borderlands are a common chronotope for the writer's prose. Travelers and fugitives, wanderers and pilgrims – all of them search for themselves in their own way in movement, through overcoming distances in time and space. The theme of boundary is also continued by the motifs of madness and death, which are important to the author. They are embodied in the author's prose in different forms and at different stages, but in general they denote the state between order and disorder, between normal and abnormal, between reason and madness, of course, between life and death. However, it is not only places and spaces that embody boundary and transience, but also things and objects. In particular, the things that surround the characters of the story "Preserves" accompany them from the moment of life to death, reveal their inner world, become symbolic or meaningful in the process of realizing the author's idea. They help to express and reveal the main dominants of the author's worldview – boundary, madness, and mortality. The jars with the mother's preserves become not only a form of existence of the memory of her, her love, neatness and culinary hobbies, but also evidence of her gradual madness, changes and shifts in the mind of an unhappy and lonely woman. Canned food becomes a symbol and a reflection of maternal care, but also of a toxic, tragic codependency, which ultimately causes the protagonist's poisoning and death.