“Orlando” – an extraordinary biography of a fictitious character, whom we meet as a sixteen-year-old aristocrat from the Elizabethan era. By the end of the novel, in the year 1928, he will have become a thirty-six-year-old poet. His transformation from a man into a woman is sudden and it does not affect his sense of identity. He remembers events from his past and remains the same person. Over those 300 years he is working on one poem, for which he finally receives a literary award. “Orlando” is about the duality of human nature, about androgyny and bisexuality as well as culturally and socially imposed sexual roles. It certainly has a feminist touch to it, but it is more than a gender novel, it becomes a story about the struggle for freedom. The play written by Szczepan Orłowski enters into a discussion with Woolf’s book. Orlando appears as three people – an egocentric person, a person trying to change and a person struggling to free themselves from their ego.

Hermit, hermitess – a monk or a nun who take the decision not to leave their cell and contact other people living in the monastery. The extreme form of eremitic life was bricking somebody up inside a cell. In the Orthodox monastic tradition the name of this form of mortification can be literary translated as “barricading oneself”.

“(…) what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?”
(Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

“1: in my dream I met you; 2: in my dream I meet myself too; 1: and me; 2: not you;”
(Szczepan Orłowski, O)