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Articles by Marta Figlerowicz
Finding Grim Lessons of the 20th Century (and a Little Hope) in the Writing of Maria Janion
I came across Maria Janion’s Uncanny Slavdom on the verge of the 2020 lockdown. The title caught my eye. Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as the nagging presence of the familiar within the strange, the strange within the familiar. That’s certainly how I felt those days. Standing in lines for toilet paper, watching the supermarket shelves empty out of everything except condiments, I might as well have been back under Soviet communism.
Fall Books: On Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
By Marta Figlerowicz September 12, 2025 In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it: He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it. “Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked. “That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied.
The Dreams and Specters of Scholastique Mukasonga
By Marta Figlerowicz October 3, 2024 “Every night the same nightmare interrupts my sleep.” With this sentence Scholastique Mukasonga begins her debut Cockroaches, a memoir that came out in French in 2006. That year, Mukasonga was fifty. She had been living in Normandy since 1992, when she moved there hoping to find employment as a social worker. She left Rwanda after a childhood marked by rising violence, shortly before the Tutsi genocide wiped out nearly her entire family.
Poland's Other Pope: Re‐appreciating Maria Janion
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The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary
By Marta Figlerowicz April 7, 2023 On Religion “Saint who?” I asked. “Eh-meh-ren-tsya,” Olga Tokarczuk repeated. Saint Anne’s mother. I was nonplussed. The mother of the mother of the Virgin Mary? Tokarczuk blew out cigarette smoke at high speed, then inhaled with excitement and impatience. I needed a lesson. We were midway through a nine-hour-long exchange about her life and writing, the edited version of which you can read in the Review’s Spring issue.
Olga Tokarczuk, The Art of Fiction No. 258
Interviewed by Marta Figlerowicz Olga Tokarczuk is young for a Nobel Prize winner. She received the award four years ago, at fifty-seven, for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Her painstakingly researched novels recover forgotten chapters of Eastern and Central Europe’s multilingual, multicultural history, drawing on Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Apocrypha, tarot, and pre-Christian paganism.
Imagining Ukraine
Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History Józef Czapski, trans. Alissa Valles New York Review Books, $17.95 (paper) In his life, Count Józef Hutten-Czapski (1896–1993)—later known just as Józef or Józio Czapski—pursued many vocations. Some of these vocations he chose for himself, to the extent anyone can; others were imposed upon him by dramatic historical events.
Marta Figlerowicz: "It Me"
to draw these parallels between an ancient genre and a digital one means acknowledging meme culture’s potential depths but also its intellectual dangers. Memes and images of mythical metamorphosis, and the uses they inspire, share a deeply ambivalent relationship to complexity and intellectual depth. This ambivalence stems in both cases from their practices of radical foreshortening and simplification.
Flat Protagonists
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Find in Worldcat Marta Figlerowicz Abstract Flat Protagonists is a book of literary theory that examines a selection of British and French novels ranging from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The authors it discusses are Aphra Behn, Isabelle de Charrière, Françoise de Graffigny, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust.
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics. Yet not long ago, these networks were the object of experiments, conflicts, and at times arbitrary choices. And the fates of many industries hung in the balance. For instance, should users pay for online access in units of time, or of bandwidth, or according to the number of websites they enter?
Democracy on Pause in Pandemic Poland
In Poland, the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to reach its peak: the country is now under lockdown, with the infection curve still rising. As of May 10, 15,996 individuals had tested positive; of this number, 80 had died. But although the full dimensions of the threat to Polish public health remain to be seen, the threat to Polish democracy is already obvious.
Intellectual Alchemists
“Since I have never produced gold, I am unable to provide an answer to this problem,” admits Umberto Eco in a 2017 lecture purporting to be on the ancient arts of alchemy.
Communism Doesn’t Work
Image: Kyle Thompson Photography, used with permission. Stuck in an apartment with his ex-boyfriend, a man meets with the government agent who will decide whether the couple has really broken up. This short story is featured in our new special project: I. Decision Maker This was before Atos, before any of those private contractors. It probably wouldn’t happen like this now. The lady was scheduled to arrive between four and five, a “decision maker” she was called in the letter.
We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence. In the late 19th century—as in the early 21st century—ordinary people were swept up in the new craze of portrait photography. “Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus,” writes Charles Baudelaire, “to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate.” It’s easy to laugh at this sentence, both at how familiar and how distant it sounds today.
English as a Sexual Language
Image: Neal Sanche Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality. Cleanness Garth Greenwell “Ela tuka, he said, come here.” Garth Greenwell’s narrator comes closer; the unnamed Bulgarian man with whom he has arranged this date on the Internet makes him move on all fours, like a dog.
Film After Auschwitz: On Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird”
JANUARY 10, 2020 “TO WRITE POETRY after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno argued in a 1951 essay. Ten years later, European filmmakers pondered an analogous dilemma: how, or whether, to represent the Holocaust’s barbarism on film. The conversation’s impetus was Jacques Rivette’s review, in Cahiers du Cinéma, of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960).
László Krasznahorkai’s Catastrophic Harmonies
Image: Wikimedia The winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature serves up an apocalyptic vision of Hungarian society.
New Parties and New Voters Make Themselves Heard
New Parties and New Voters Make Themselves Heard By Marta Figlerowicz October 25, 2019 Kacper Pempel/Reuters When Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) first rose to power in 2015, some liberal commentators dismissed the populist upsurge as an aberration. For years, the governing majority party had allowed economic and social grievances to fester without resolution, and the resulting vacuum was easy for a newcomer to step into.
Just Grab
I decided to buy a banana. It seemed like a good idea. At the café, a banana. A good idea, it seemed, so I couldn’t resist. A whole bunch of them dangled from the banana stand, all sexy like. A little stand hanger just for bananas—another good idea. People say bananas are sexy, then they smirk. They are thinking of fifth grade and sex-ed and motions behind the teacher’s back. But they are sexy, hugged up against one another in their crates. I say sexy but maybe I mean waiting. Maybe I mean a good idea.
The New Threat to Poland’s Sexual Minorities
Since the mid-1990s, things had seemed to be changing for the better for sexual minorities in Poland. The first openly gay and transgender politicians were elected to office; mainstream films and novels began to represent LGBTQ characters in a positive light; and in 2001, the country’s first pride march was held in Warsaw, after which these marches spread into provincial cities.
The Pacificist Roots of an American Nazi
Children parade for Heinrich Himmler in the Mennonite settlement of Molotschna in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, 1942. Image: Courtesy of the Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, Alber Photograph Collection 151-17. Ingrid Rimland was a pioneering voice of the neo-Nazi Internet. She was also raised Mennonite, a peaceful religion with a long history of celebrating white “ethnic” identity. In 1998 white supremacists assembled in Toronto to hear Ingrid Rimland, a doyenne of neo-Nazism.
The Myths of Enlightenment
A J. J. Grandville illustration, “Le lion abattu par l’homme,” for the Fables of La Fontaine. Image: For the philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, myths and metaphors were pivotal to philosophical thinking, not opposed to it. Blumenberg Sibylle Lewitscharoff, translated by Wieland Hoban Seagull Books, $24.50 (cloth) Lions Hans Blumenberg, translated by Kari Driscoll Seagull Books, $27.50 (cloth) Humans always defeat lions in paintings because there are no lion painters.
The Myths of Enlightenment
Blumenberg Sibylle Lewitscharoff, translated by Wieland Hoban Seagull Books, $24.50 (cloth) Lions Hans Blumenberg, translated by Kari Driscoll Seagull Books, $27.50 (cloth) Humans always defeat lions in paintings because there are no lion painters. With this lesson, the griot gets up to leave, as Dani Kouyaté’s Keïta! (1995) comes to an end. The film is set in late twentieth-century Burkina Faso.
Counter-Histories of the Internet
AP Photo/Karly Domb Sadof, File What could the internet have been? We've grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics. Yet not long ago, these networks were the object of experiments, conflicts, and at times arbitrary choices. And the fates of many industries hung in the balance. For instance, should users pay for online access in units of time, or of bandwidth, or according to the number of websites they enter?
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics. Yet not long ago, these networks were the object of experiments, conflicts, and at times arbitrary choices. And the fates of many industries hung in the balance. For instance, should users pay for online access in units of time, or of bandwidth, or according to the number of websites they enter?
Poland's Forgotten Bohemian War Hero
The life of Polish artist and diplomat Józef Czapski (1896–1993) in many ways mirrored the intellectual trajectory of twentieth-century Europe. Yet readers have likely never heard of him. That is in part because, despite being exemplary, Czapski's work is hard to contextualize. It does not fit neatly as either prewar or postwar. Instead, it reveals an old world still present in the new and seeking to understand what it had become.
How the Polish Left Could Make Its Comeback
Pawel Adamowicz, longtime mayor of Gdansk, was holding up a Roman candle at a charity event on January 13 when a man leaped onstage and stabbed him repeatedly. Thousands of Adamowicz’s constituents saw him fall. Many rushed to donate blood; others remained glued to screens overnight as doctors tried to save the mayor with emergency surgeries and a near seven-gallon blood transfusion. But two of the wounds had touched Adamowicz’s heart, and a third had pierced his bowels. He died the following day.
Poland’s Forgotten Bohemian War Hero
Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp Józef Czapski, translated by Eric Karpeles Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941–1942 Józef Czapski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski Eric Karpeles The life of Polish artist and diplomat Józef Czapski (1896–1993) in many ways mirrored the intellectual trajectory of twentieth-century Europe. Yet readers have likely never heard of him.
Poland’s Forgotten Bohemian War Hero
Józef Czapski, Autoportret z książką (Self-portrait with book), c. 1973. Image: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie (CC). From the bisexual demimonde of prewar Paris to investigating Soviet war crimes, Józef Czapski’s life encapsulates the extremes of twentieth-century Europe.
The Melodic Variations of “Cold War”
DECEMBER 21, 2018 IN THE OPENING SHOTS of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, an elderly man in earflaps faces the viewer in extreme close-up. A snowy dirt road extends behind him. The man begins to sing while playing dudy, a folk bagpipe originally brought to Poland from Central Asia. He stares toward the camera but not directly at it. It seems as if he didn’t sense its presence, or as if the device thrust in his face meant nothing to him. Another man accompanies him on a fiddle.
Against the Brahmins
Pankaj Mishra enjoys upsetting the alleged status quo. The 43-year-old Indian writer has become a leading critic of Western imperialism, globalization, and abuses of power among the political and intellectual upper crust. He charges India’s privileged class with manipulating the democratic process for self-preservation and profit.
The Curse of Modernity
“Isn’t it curious,” my theology teacher used to say with a sly smile, “that beyond good and evil is always . . . evil?” This is traditionally the last resort, the trump card, of the orthodox: there is no honor among unbelievers, or at least no security for their honor. Why should someone who doesn’t love God, or at least fear his judgment, be moral? In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens recalls a debate between the philosopher A.J. Ayer and an Anglican bishop about the existence of God.
Rewriting Poland
Image: Wikipedia Novelist Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Booker International Prize, presents a multicultural Poland, to the ire of the Polish far-right. Flights Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft Księgi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob) Olga Tokarczuk “Flights . . . got a new lease on life,” Olga Tokarczuk told a Polish journalist in May after her novel was awarded the Man Booker International Prize.
Leaving Behind the Yellow Submarine
The final scene of the 1968 animated Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine, shows the character of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., pirouetting through the cosmos, borne by a constantly expanding flower. He is the nerd-hero; he has triumphed over the closed-minded, music-hating threat of the Blue Meanies, proving that even the cruelest of adversaries can be transformed by the power of beauty, love, and a classical education.
Imperfect Remembrance
Immigrant life easily slips into melodrama. A whiff of blood sausage has me tearfully recalling the evenings when my grandmother cooked it for me. An unexpected “cześć,” or hello, overheard between two fellow Poles immerses me in involuntary memories, as I mourn greetings I shared with high school friends. I never actually liked blood sausage, or high school, and had rejoiced to leave them behind when I moved here.
Imperfect Remembrance
The Svetlana Boym Reader Edited by Cristina Vatulescu, Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, and Julia Vaingurt Bloomsbury, $39.95 (paper) Immigrant life easily slips into melodrama. A whiff of blood sausage has me tearfully recalling the evenings when my grandmother cooked it for me. An unexpected “cześć,” or hello, overheard between two fellow Poles immerses me in involuntary memories, as I mourn greetings I shared with high school friends.
Imperfect Remembrance
Image: Svetlana Boym / Facebook A new anthology is dedicated to the scholar who saw nostalgia as a radical rebellion against modern ideas of time. The Svetlana Boym Reader Edited by Cristina Vatulescu, Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, and Julia Vaingurt Bloomsbury, $39.95 (paper) Immigrant life easily slips into melodrama. A whiff of blood sausage has me tearfully recalling the evenings when my grandmother cooked it for me.
Is Germany’s New Anti-Semitism Really New?
The focus on Muslim anti-Semitism obscures the real quandary of multiculturalism in Angela Merkel’s Germany. There has been much debate about a new and distinctively Islamic anti-Semitism in Germany after a kippah-wearing Israeli was attacked by a Syrian refugee last month on a busy street in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin’s hippest neighborhood and a bastion of urban tolerance. The victim managed to film the incident and the video went viral. Moral outrage in Germany and a worldwide outcry followed.
High in Uruguay
Uruguay’s government may soon be the first in the world to produce and distribute pot. “A better hit comes from legal cannabis,” promises the bright green graffiti along a main boulevard in downtown Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital. In style and substance, the message reflects the bold policies of Uruguay’s leftist government, which has recently legalized same-sex marriage and abortion and now is redefining the debate on marijuana.
The Erotics of Mentorship
“Why would anyone want to date their teacher?” a friend said wonderingly. It took a moment to realize that, to her, this was a rhetorical question. “You mean you’ve never had a crush on one of yours?” She looked back in bewilderment. “God, no!” she certainly had not, and seemed scandalized, as if she had been told an obscene secret.
The Disillusionment of Post-Soviet Europe
Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams John Feffer Zed Books, $22.95 (paperback) One of my earliest memories is of being carried on my father’s back into an anti-government protest. I am three, and my father teaches me a rhyming slogan that compares our Soviet-imposed president to a dragon from a local folk tale. It is my first time in a large crowd, and we are in front of town hall, all chanting the same refrain.
The Disillusionment of Post-Soviet Europe
Image: Peter Burka To understand why Europe seems more balkanized now than ever, we must look to Eastern Europe's failed reconstruction. Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams John Feffer Zed Books, $22.95 (paperback) One of my earliest memories is of being carried on my father’s back into an anti-government protest. I am three, and my father teaches me a rhyming slogan that compares our Soviet-imposed president to a dragon from a local folk tale.
The Moving Pictures of “Loving Vincent”
THERE IS AN intense, monastic energy to Loving Vincent. The 90-minute animated feature consists entirely of oil paintings stylized after — and sometimes directly copying — the works of Vincent van Gogh. The labor that went into the film, seen in every dash of paint, is as difficult to imagine as the painstaking detail of ivory miniatures or Orthodox religious icons.
What Would Doctorow Do?
E. L. Doctorow died on July 21, 2015, about a month after Donald J. Trump announced and commenced his run for President of the United States. These events were not related, but they have since become fused in my mind. Doctorow was my favorite living writer, and when Trump began his campaign by riding down the escalator to the gold-plated lobby of his tower, I thought the scene could almost have been composed by that great mythologist.
Perspective | No more ‘toughing it out’: Let’s end sexual harassment on campus
One recent morning, we were outlining a lecture on Shakespeare’s sonnets for a class we teach at Yale University when a former undergraduate knocked on the door. This student, now an aspiring academic herself, wanted advice about her discomfort in her new home department.
Commentary: How an Experiment in 3-D Printing Illuminated Our Humanities Classroom
The buggy unfamiliarity of the new technology helped students see older media with fresh eyes.
Tiger Couple Gets It Wrong on Immigrant Success
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America The tiger couple is chasing its own tail, which is to say, they are stuck in circular reasoning. In their new book, The Triple Package, Amy Chua, author of the best-selling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Jed Rubenfeld tackle the question of why certain groups are overrepresented in the pantheon of success.
The Dystopia Next Door
I was fifteen when my family realized that our new neighbors could not read. They had worked on a communal farm during the Cold War; after 1989 they were allotted some of that land to farm on their own. When we met them in 2001 they were selling it off, bit by bit, to professionals such as my parents, whose salaries had risen under capitalism to the point where they could afford to build a house on the outskirts of the city.
He Said, He Said: The Feminization of James Comey
Conservatives routinely deny that gender is fluid. Yet they have feminized James Comey so rapidly, you would think he was J. Edgar Hoover. Laura Ingraham claimed that Comey is a “drama queen” who writes in an unmanly way. Comey, says Charles Payne, is “a lot more emotional than you would think the head of the FBI should be . . .
Los Angeles Review of Books
IN AN INTERVIEW LAST MONTH, Oklahoma State Representative Justin Humphrey explained the reasoning behind House Bill 1441, which, prior to an abortion, would require the written consent of the father of the fetus. Humphrey’s explanation was like a too-long hug, at first okay and then increasingly weird and full of awkward back-patting: “I understand that they [women] feel like that is their body.
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