Flights

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (originally Bieguni) is a literary Cabinet of Curiosities that defies the physics of the traditional novel. It is a “constellation novel”—fragmented, non-linear, and constantly in motion—reflecting its central thesis: that stability is an illusion and movement is the only state of grace. The title refers to a Slavic sect of Old Believers, the Bieguni (which can be translated as “Runners” or “Wanderers”), who believed that the world is in the clutches of the Devil, and the Devil has the power to pin you down if you stand still. To be captured by the static is to lose one’s soul; therefore, salvation lies in perpetual travel. Tokarczuk takes this theological radicalism and transforms it into a modern feminist philosophy, asking what it means for women specifically—historically bound to hearth and home—to join the ranks of the wanderers.

In a literary tradition where the hero is the male traveler (Odysseus) and the woman is the figure who waits (Penelope), Tokarczuk shatters the binary. Her women do not wait; they run. The most haunting narrative thread is that of Annushka, a Russian woman crushed by the relentless weight of caring for a disabled child and a burdensome, unloving husband. Her days are an endless cycle of menial labor and emotional invisibility. One day, overwhelmed by the “suffocating immobility” of her life, she simply walks out. She descends into the Moscow Metro and becomes a modern-day Bieguni, a wanderer who uses the city’s vast underground transit system to stay in constant flux. She rides the trains in circles, never exiting, never arriving, never being still. Her abandonment of her family is portrayed not as madness or cruelty, not as the pathology of a neglectful mother, but as a desperate reclaiming of subjectivity. For Annushka, the “home” is not a sanctuary but a site of enslavement, a place where her identity has been erased in service of others. Mobility is the only tool she has to assert her existence as a separate being, and the Metro—that liminal, anonymous, endlessly circulating space—becomes her cathedral.

Tokarczuk complicates easy judgments. We are not asked to celebrate or condemn Annushka, but to understand her. The novel asks: What drives a person to such extremity? What kind of social system makes “escape” feel like the only form of survival? Annushka’s story illuminates the terrible bargain that domesticity often demands of women: the complete erasure of the self in exchange for the label of “good mother” and “good wife.” When she rides the Metro, she is no one’s mother, no one’s wife. She simply is. This is not a solution, Tokarczuk suggests, but it is a kind of truth—a raw, unflinching acknowledgment of the psychological cost of enforced stability.

Parallel to this exploration of geography is a dark, fascinating exploration of the body and its preservation. Tokarczuk intertwines the stories of travelers with the history of anatomy, introducing us to figures like Dr. Blau, a chilly, “Mengele-like” anatomist obsessed with plastination—the technique of replacing bodily fluids with plastic to preserve corpses indefinitely. Blau seeks to conquer death not by believing in the soul, but by making the body immortal through science. He collects specimens with a predator’s gaze, stripping them of their humanity to turn them into perfect, enduring objects—objects that can be displayed, studied, and owned. Tokarczuk juxtaposes this male drive to control, preserve, and fix the body in place with the erratic, living chaos of the female wanderers. The anatomist’s impulse is patriarchal: to categorize, to pin down, to possess. The wanderer’s impulse is the opposite: to resist definition, to remain in flux, to escape the scalpel of classification.

The novel also introduces us to Philip Verheyen, a 17th-century anatomist who amputated his own leg and then spent years corresponding with it, writing letters to his phantom limb. This strange, beautiful detail becomes a meditation on the relationship between the self and the body—on how we are both possessors and possessed. The body, in Flights, is never a neutral object; it is a site of political struggle, a thing that can be mapped, owned, colonized, or liberated. Women’s bodies, in particular, have historically been subjected to the controlling gaze of medicine and law. Tokarczuk’s female wanderers reclaim their bodies not by fighting for control but by refusing to be fixed in one place long enough to be captured.

One of the novel’s most moving sections recounts the historical journey of Chopin’s heart, smuggled from Paris back to Warsaw by his sister Ludwika in a jar of cognac, hidden beneath her skirts. The heart, removed from Chopin’s body against Austrian law, traveled across Europe in secret, a grotesque yet tender image of the body in transit, of love encoded in flesh. This is not a triumphant tale of national preservation but a strange, melancholy story of what we do with our dead, what parts we hold onto, and why. It is also, notably, a story of a woman—Ludwika—as the agent of this forbidden transport, carrying the heart of genius beneath her clothes, past borders and checkpoints. Women, Tokarczuk suggests, have always been movers of what matters, even when history credits men.

Through these intersecting stories—and dozens more, ranging from a woman who studies syndromes of tourists who go mad in beautiful places, to reflections on islands, on airports, on the ethics of displaying human remains—Flights challenges the rigid boundaries we place around nations, bodies, and identities. It suggests that the fixed “self” is a patriarchal fiction, a convenient narrative that keeps everyone in their assigned place. We are, in truth, broken, fluid, and transient. We are not statues but rivers. By abandoning the linear narrative for a fragmented one—a novel made of essays, meditations, stories, and digressions—Tokarczuk creates a form that embodies her philosophy. The book itself is in motion. It does not want you to settle.

The translation by Jennifer Croft, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 (the same year Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, announced in 2019), captures the restless, luminous quality of the original. Flights is not an easy book; it asks patience and attention from its readers. But for those willing to surrender to its logic of perpetual motion, it offers a radical reimagining of what it means to be free. For women in particular—women who have been told that their place is in the home, that stillness is virtue, that wandering is madness or sin—Tokarczuk offers a different gospel. Freedom is not in the destination, and never in the staying put. Freedom is found in the flight itself.