UNESCO Quebec-Kraków Cross-Residency at the Maison de la littérature

RADEK RAK | INTERVIEW  

 

For the whole moth of August, the Maison de la littérature hosted Polish author Radek Rak as part of the UNESCO Quebec-Kraków Cross-Residency, supported by the Cultural Development Agreement. 

During his stay, Radek Rak worked on the second book of his Agla cycle, a fantasy trilogy on totalitarianism, and on a polyphonic novel on the evolution of his polish province in the last 30 years. Get to know the author in three questions. 

 

Radek, can you tell us a bit about the trilogy you're working on during your residency? 

"Agla" is a fantasy trilogy about how good people can create totalitarianism. It takes place in an alternative history of Middle and Eastern Europe, in a period reminiscent 40's or 50's of the 20th century. Much of the world is under the totalitarian reign of a mysterious being named Tsar, whom no one has seen except His Security Service and the Headsmen Guild. The Gnosis plays the role of a main ideology or some kind of religion. It is also a story about holometabolism, the process of metamorphosis which many insects undergo, and perhaps it has some correspondence with Vladimir Nabokov’s sentence "We are the larvae of angels", and Dante's "Perceive ye not we are worms, designed to form the angelic butterfly". 

But neither of them mentioned what kind of angels they had in mind. 

All of the above sounds really serious, but it is mainly a YA action novel. The main heroine, Sofja, is a girl who tries to find out what has happened to her family. Meanwhile she becomes an apprentice of a great sorceress and soon gets fired, she summons things that should not be summoned at all, she loses her friends and her beloved girlfriend, she makes some strange allies, she accidently involves herself in revolution and gets sent to a labour camp, and finally finds her answers. But the answers we get are not always the answers we were looking for. 

The title may sound rather mysterious. It is taken from Kabbalah and has many meanings. My favourite, and perhaps best matching the books, is that AGLA is a spell protecting from fire. What can save you if you are a moth flying into the flame of candle? 

The first part of "Agla" - "Alef" - was published last year, the second part - "Aurora" - is going to be published this autumn, and the last one is going to be written next year, I hope. 

One of the must-have titles in your bibliography is The Tale of the Serpent's Heart. Sounds like a captivating book! While we're waiting for it to be translated into French or even English, can you tell us a little about it, and perhaps even try to explain its success? 

My best-known book, "The Tale of the Serpent's Heart", is a historical fantasy novel about Rabacja – a peasants' rebellion in 1946 – and the life of its leader, Jakób Szela, as well as his conflict with the Polish noble family of Bogusz, especially Wiktoryn Bogusz. The book mixes historical truth and folk tales and most of it is written in local dialect. 

I know that the book may be a little bit hermetic for those readers who do not know the details of Polish history, even for the Poles themselves. From 1772 to 1918 the territory of Poland was divided between Prussia (now Germany), Austria and Russia which led to many bloody rebellions, especially against Russia, and further persecution of my nation. When you hear of Polish history during the time of partitions, you hear mostly about the part seized by Russia. On the other hand, it may lead to the assumption that in other partitions nothing really important happened, which is false. My hometown was part of the Austrian partition, which was much different than the Russian one. The land of Galicia (the name itself was made up by the Austrian government), the southernmost part of Poland, was the poorest and most densely inhabited. One of the reasons for peasants' poverty was a serfdom of enormous size, which sometimes prevented villagers from working on their own (usually really small) field. Polish nobles saw the serfdom as a basis of their income and the folwark system as an inevitable part of the economy. When you add floods, droughts and cattle pestilence in the 1840s, you know that the rebellion was near. The insurrection was supported by the Austrian invaders who were afraid of a Polish rebellion like the one which took place in the Russian partition in 1830. The kin slaying bloodshed of 1846 is one of the darkest pages of Polish history, but it might be one of the causes of our abolishing the serfdom in 1848. 

For an unknown reason, we had no adventure novel about Rabacja. So, I wrote my own. It seemed to me that a fantasy novel would be a good way. I wanted to tell a story about my own region, a very dark story indeed, a story which was not properly told before. And some relics of serfdom still can be seen. In my book we are in the 19th century, but partly we remain in temporary Poland. 

"The Tale of the Serpent's Heart" was written to be a folk-centered, anti-mainstream retelling of Polish history. It appeared (quite luckily) when the discussion about the people's history of Poland was begun. The book received many awards, both fantasy/sci-fi and mainstream, including the Nike Award, the most important Polish literary prize. Most importantly (for me), the readers also enjoyed it, which enabled me to become a full-time writer. There was a play (Stary Teatr in Kraków, directed by Beniamin Bukowski) and an opera (AUKSO Orkiestra Kameralna Miasta Tychy, directed by Aleksander Nowak) written based on my book, and there are going to be more adaptations to other media. There are translations to Hungarian, Czech and Ukrainian (these are countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, which does not surprise me at all). There was of course some political criticism, because the book cannot be easily matched to any contemporary Polish political view. To be honest, it turned out to be more successful than I expected. I still think "The Tale" to be quite a strange and niche story from a far corner of Galicia, with some old legends revived and retold. Especially the ones about the Serpent King and his heart. 

What would you like Quebec’s readers to know about you and/or your work? 

I finished Veterinary Medicine at the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, and I had been working as a veterinarian for ten years. For almost two years now, I have been working as a full-time writer, which enables me to spend more time with my family.  

For eight years now, I have lived in Kraków, which I really enjoy. But still, I feel related mostly to my hometown, Dębica, which lies 120 km east of Kraków, in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship. There are really beautiful forests south of Dębica, and maybe even the Serpent King dwells there. Many of the stories I wrote take place in Dębica or its neighbourhood and are about some very little-known historical events or local legends. Maybe it has something to do with Bruno Schulz, one of my greatest literary masters, who always wrote about his hometown, Drohobycz. I found it always hard to write about Kraków, for there is so much already written about it by many other authors better than myself. Sometimes I have a feeling that every cobblestone in Kraków has a novel and a tome of poetry behind it. "Agla" is actually my first thing about Kraków, but the city in my book is really different from the real one. 

 

About Radek Rak 

Radek Rak is a writer and veterinary surgeon. For his novel in story form Baśń o wężowym sercu albo wtóre słowo o Jakóbie Szeli ["The Tale of the Serpent's Heart" or a second word about Jakób Szela] (a fantasy tale inspired by the story of the eponymous leader of a peasant rebellion in Poland in 1846), he was awarded the 2020 Nike Prize (Poland's most prestigious literary prize), as well as the Janusz A. Zajdel Prize, the Jerzy Żuławski Prize and the European Science Fiction Society Prize in the Best Written Work of Fiction category. He is also the winner of the prize awarded by Krakow, UNESCO City of Literature in 2022 for his work on Agla. This is the first volume in a cycle of three fantasy novels about social exclusion and inequality.