Legend of the Male-Faced Saint in Crucified Woman by Jakub Arbes and House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

This text analyses and compares the paraphrased legend of saint Wilgefortis (known as the Saint with a Beard) in the two selected novels. Arbes’s novel (romanetto) contains a paraphrase that implies a correspondence between the mysterious and the rational and point to a description of human violence during the war. In Tokarczuk’s novel the story of saint Wilgefortis encodes the problem of transsexual identity and transvestism in a philosophical and psychological context