Post-secular Catabase. A Booklet by Olga Tokarczuk

The subject of this article is Olga Tokarczuk’s libretto to the opera Ahat-ilī. Siostra bogów (Ahat-ilī – Sister of Gods) by Aleksander Nowak, which premiered on 16 September 2018. Although the idea for the libretto was based on the novel Anna In w grobowcach świata (Anna In in the Tombs of the World), published in 2006 as part of the Canongate Myth Series, its structure and tone diverge from its original. The author of the article conducts a comparative analysis of the aforementioned texts and specifies the direction of the changes introduced by the writer. He concludes that the differentiating repetition of the mythical tale about a Sumerian goddess Inanna can be simultaneously viewed as a mirror in which the author of Flights took a look at herself years later, and as a lens focalizing key threads of her writing, including her evolving attitude towards metaphysics and spirituality.