Rocznik Komparatystyczny

By her novel Dom dzienny, dom nocny (1999), Olga Tokarczuk (re)introduced the nearly forgotten figure of Saint Wilgefortis/Saint Kümmernis into modern cultural memory. The cult of Saint Wilgefortis had spread widely over Europe in the late Middle ages and Early modern times but the Saint had never been officially recognized by the Catholic Church and, consequently, her cult had been nearly totally erased in the times of the Enlightenment. The cult can serve as an example for the permeability of the borders between official and unofficial culture, for the emergence, disappearance and re-emergence of culturally significant figures. Saint Wilgefortis can serve as an example for the arbitrariness of gender constructions and the borders between them, for their partial or total incompatibility with the sexual identity of a single person. In addition to that, the saint’s many names indicate the instability of naming, its dependence on place, time and language. The instabilities of the saint’s figure and name let her become a fascinating object for the postmodern novelist Olga Tokarczuk and the dramatist Piotr Tomaszuk. The paper analyzes and compares the transfer of the history and rites of Saint Wilgefortis’ cult into a novel and from the novel into a drama.