Abstract

Among various ecological problems, the theme of animals is one of the constantly recurring leitmotifs in Olga Tokarczuk’s work. The issues of the right to kill them and the legitimacy of the custom of hunting are addressed in the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Its protagonist, Janina Duszejko, who shares the writer’s philosophy regarding our attitude toward these beings, defends them in a radical way, oscillating between tenderness and anger. The present analysis focuses on this dichotomy by examining the interactions between these two extreme emotions and the behaviors that these interactions lead to. Reading the novel in the light of the philosophy of deep ecology, close to Tokarczuk’s thinking, but also using the tools of ecopoetics, I attempt to find what the status of creatures other than human beings is in this text, noting how they are represented and named, as well as trying to specify the role they play.