it’s impossible to grasp everything at once.” The sorrow that present in every single thing, in every phenomenon. Answers, even made-up ones, are balm against the pain of not knowing or, borrowing from the language of Tokarczuk’s excellent novel Primeval and Other Times, recently translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones: “the sorrow that under everything. It is a welcome analysis, especially considering Tokarczuk’s fiction often draws from the same well of symbolism that we do in searching for a reason for our calamities. The horrified mind tries to find meaning, but lets itself be seduced by old myths. Intellect gives way to the gloom of the collective psyche. I am reminded that when a major trauma occurs, the kind that is both individual and collective, something happens that Jungian psychology calls an “ abaissement du niveau mental”-a lowering of the level of consciousness. Politicians who only a few days ago were at each other’s throats are now speaking, in trembling voices, of “deep meaning” and “the metaphysics of Katyn.” Not much more than 20 years ago, some of these same people suppressed the truth about the deaths at Katyn to follow the Communist Party line. I turned on the TV Sunday afternoon, and the more the night drew on, the more I heard words like nation, victim, mystical coincidence, sign, accursed place, true patriotism, Katyn, truth. In a Times op-ed, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk offers her thoughts on the disaster: “They wanted to cut off our head there,” Lech Wałęsa said shortly after the crash, “and here the flower of our nation has also perished.”

It was “the curse of Katyn,” a “second Katyn,” and the forest, “a damned place,” in the words of former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski. The fact that this rarest of delegations, bound from Warsaw to Smolensk on a Polish air force-flown Tupolev Tu-154, was flying to commemorate what has come to be known as the Katyn Massacre-the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police in 1940-compounded the almost unimaginable loss, shrouding the tragedy in a terrible symbolism. On April 10, 2010, heavy fog in the vicinity of the Russian forest of Katyn determined the fate of Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, and ninety-six other Polish leaders, including members of parliament, the heads of both the army and navy, the president of Poland’s national bank, and Anna Walentynowicz, the eighty-year-old former dockworker whose firing in 1980 catalyzed Solidarity.

Primeval and other times olga tokarczuk