Epos dla klasy średniej? Mieszczańskie genealogie w „Księgach Jakubowych” Olgi Tokarczuk

Abstract

Olga Tokarczuk’s work has often been situated within the horizon of the Polish middle class — as literature read by, addressed to, or symbolically legitimizing this social formation. Such claims, widespread in journalism and literary criticism, rarely lead to systematic analyses of the texts themselves as sites where bourgeois imagination and narratives of origin are produced. This article reverses that perspective by reading Tokarczuk’s prose not merely as a product of middle-class taste but as a space in which the genealogy and symbolic legitimation of the contemporary Polish middle class are constructed. The first part reconstructs critical interpretations that frame Tokarczuk as a representative of “middlebrow prose” and connects them to transformations in the literary field after 1989, including the rise of a new bourgeois readership and the marketization of literary production. Drawing on sociological approaches to literature and class, the article situates Tokarczuk within a broader process in which writers negotiate cultural, symbolic, and economic capital while addressing both intelligentsia and popular audiences. The second part turns to the problem of “bourgeois genealogies” in post-socialist literature and interprets Tokarczuk’s work as an attempt to identify historical figures and foundational scenes for the contemporary middle class. This tendency culminates in The Books of Jacob (2014), read here as an alternative epic of modern bourgeois subject formation set in the heterogeneous, multicultural Poland of the eighteenth century. The novel participates in the long-term symbolic production of the Polish middle class by negotiating its past, ethos, and place within modernity.