Questions about suffering - “Job” by Karol Wojtyła

ABSTRACT: The drama “Job”, written about 6 months after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, is not only a literary fact but also an event of a spiritual and religious nature, the more extraordinary because it was written by a man in whom two vocations met: the poet and the priest, and for whom literary creativity is one of the many ways of knowing and exploring human reality. Wojtyła addresses the most difficult and important issue at the time of war. Before Easter 1940, Wojtyla wrote in his letters to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk about the new drama: "I wrote a new drama. Greek in form, Christian in spirit, eternal in content, like Everyman. A Drama About Suffering–Job". The paper will examine how features mentioned by Wojtyla influenced this drama, and how Wojtyła’s “Job” inspires next generations of artists in answering questions about suffering.

Dr Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska works in the Institute of Literary Studies at Cardinal Wyszynski University in Warsaw, Poland. She received her MA, PhD and habilitation at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, in 2006 was a Sternberg Fellow in The Woolf Institute Cambridge, UK. For many years she served as a Director of the Institute of Polish Philology (2012-16), Chair of PhD Studies at the Faculty of Humanities (2014-2022), and Director of the Institute of Literary Studies UKSW (2021-24). She chairs The department of European Modernism and the Unit for Transcultural Literary studies. Her publications include books “... You Will Get Married to a Fire”: J. Liebert. The Experience of Transcendence in the Life and the Works of Jerzy Liebert. (2003), To Forgive God. A Figure of Job in the Literature Related to WWII (2008) and To Believe Words (2023). She publishes articles and edits volumes on contemporary literature.