Which books is it essential to have read to be a good Polish student?

What are the classics of polish litterature ? Which international writers are well-known and read a lot in Poland ? Are polish students fond of reading ? And all you can tell about litterature and Poland is welcome !

Trylogia Sienkiewicza ("Potop", "Ogniem i mieczem" and "Pan Wołodyjowski"), "Krzyżacy", "Przedwiośnie" and many others but often weird stuff.

some classic authors:
Renaissance - Mikołaj Rey, Jan Kochanowski
Enlightenment - Ignacy Krasicki, Aleksander Fredro (he's 19th century, but his writings belong more to the 18th century)
Romanticism - Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian (Kamil) Norwid
if you don't like peotry (especially written in a bit archaic language) then they aren't your picks :)
early 20th century - Henryk Sienkiewicz, Władysław Reymont, Stefan Żeromski, Isaac Bashevis Singer (writng in jidysz)
30'-40's - Witold Gombrowicz, Witkacy (pen name of a painter/writer Stanisław Ingacy Witkiewicz, because his father, a painter was named Stanisław Wtkiewicz), Bruno Schulz
war, early post-war (but dealing with the trauma of WWII) - K.K. Baczyński (poetry), Zofia Nałkowska, Tadeusz Borowski
50's-70's (and some of them were active much longer) - Tadeusz Różewicz (drama, peotry), Sławomir Mrożek (drama), Zbigniew Herbert (poetry), Czesław Miłosz (poetry), Wisława Szymborska (poetry), Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Stanisław Grochowiak

and of course I forgot my favorite playwright :(
Jerzy Szaniawski (started before the war, but was active also after)

Actually 90% of Polish famous books is a bunch of crap. It's hard, sometimes impossible, to understand even to Polish natives and mostly it's not enjoyable at all. Just try to read and You will see how fckd up it is.

My favourite essential book from high school was... 1984 by George Orwell.

batoniasty, you just need to know the classics if you want to fully understand cultural life or even language (there are lots of literary metaphors or sentences that gradually enter the common language, how Mickiewicz wrote, "trafia pod strzechy") and I was trying to answer only the first question:

I guess every country has its classics that aren't many people's favorites, still they are read at schools or considered important for the culture/history of the country.

And noone is forcing all the foreigners in Poland (or with Polish roots) to read all those things, but if someone, like Marek3, wants to know, why shouldn't I answer him?

Marek if you want to understand and get to know polish culture even a bit you should try reading some of the clasics.

Unfortunately some of them might be realy hard to read. I myself love books with the medieval and reneisance setting.
"Krzyżacy" is a great book telling a story of great victory of polish-lithuanian comonwealth.
Then there is a set of book with the 16-17th houndrets setting. Those books are crucial for understanding polish culture and the way we look at things. They might answer to many of you questions. And as somebody already wrote here, those books would be "Potop" "Ogniem i Mieczem" "Pan Włodyjowski". They're great literature and I enjoyed reading them but if you dont have guts for it... well there is still hope for you because there are movie version of those books.
Then there is literature with the setting of polish uprisings and fighting with the foreign oppresors. A good book from that era would be "Przedwiośnie" (there is also a movie ver.:))

Then there is lots of books with the setting of early XX century, 2nd WW. ]
I myself loved "Kamienie na Szaniec" Its a book about a group of young scouts who become freedom fighters when Poland gets attacked in 1939. The beuty of this book is that its based on facts and I can say that its 99% verified true.
There is also a rather large group of books with the setting of WW but from other angle... the angle of concentration camps and jewish minority. I cant recall any good titles since I despised those books and were simply unable to read more the 50pages of any of those books.

Try Shindlers Ark(now "list" by Thomas keanelly),the book the movie was loosly based on,its not anti Polish in the way the film seems to be.

Quo Vadis has been made into many film versions,though the book(apparently,I confess to not having read it yet) is meant to be far more obvious in its parrals with Polish history hidden as Roman..

As a foriegner,and someone not usually into "costume Drama" (in Britain TV and book shops are clogged with 19th C Jane Austin/Brontte/Dickins etc ) I thourally enjoyed the 1990s A.Wajda film version of Pan Tadeausz ,and saw many echos to the "Polish Spirit" and situations down the centuries. The scene near the begging defending the castle against the russians seemed to me to capture the spirit of the Warsaw uprising with Padre's and wifes' at the barricades...
The book/film Solaris is also by a Polish writer I believe though the (boo hiss lol) russian version beats the newish Hollywood version hands down.


Just been released today in the UK,the secret Mi5 dossier on Eric blair/George Orwell. He was apparently followed by the secret service from 1929 -1942,on suspicion of being a communist(which is hilarious to anyone who has read any of his work,especially his defence of the uprising and attack on Stalin at a time when most in britain thought the sun shone out of uncle joe's rear end),he was later cleared but then in 1950 handed over a list of 38 names of people he suspected of being communists,ironic,his hate of survalence sociaties and love of freedom of thought prompted him to report people to militry inteligence for thier political views :)
BTW,your lucky to have read him,my mate tells of trying to smuggle a copy of animal farm through the Berlin wall in an attempt to bring it home to Poland.

yeah, Animal Farm's first legal issue in Poland is only 1988, it was popular earlier, but it was on a black list, so only underground editions existed


probably Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of short stories, some about the life in the occupied Warsaw, some about Auschwitz (Borowski was imprisoned 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, later transferred to Dachau)
And my favorite book, reading it was a harrowing experience, is Zofia Nałkowska's Medaliony, it was obligatory in high school, otherwise I wouldn't have probably started to read it, I don't like Polish martyrology too much, but this short stories deserve reading.


and Ronek mentioned lots of adventure-war books, I guess he likes them, but don't get the false impression that Polish literature is all about fighting, it's not, though it's not so hard to find references to battles or living under occupants' oppression even in books dealing with different themes, because in the last 230 years Poland was ruled by foreign forces quite a lot, so it was very hard to completely ignore those circumstances

and I hated movie/TV series of both "Przedwiośnie" and "Ogniem i mieczem", so I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, just read the books, if you want (and I'm not aying that because I'm a bookworm, actually I prefer movies, just well made)

Ah, that's a shame. I've been looking forward to seeing the film versions. What do you think was wrong with them? "Ogniem i mieczem," (With Fire and Sword here) is one of my favorite books for historical fiction, especially for its humor, which I think makes it more enjoyable than Krzyżacy even, though both are good. Was the film just made poorly, or did they present the story itself poorly?



That's Stanisław Lem. Solaris is good, as is The Star Diaries (Dzienniki gwiazdowe), I think. Although The Star Diaries was written over something like 20 years, so the themes and style are inconsistent - some are short and fun, and others are long and philosophical and less fun.

I'm interested to know which books are taught in Polish schools today, including classics but also others. This is a good thread. :)

well, I usually don't confront the film with the book, when I'm watching it, because the languages of novel/film are different, I don't care if the film is true to the book or not, because it doesn't make it better or worse, there' have been good movies made of mediocre books, but mostly it's viceversa. I just have a problem with J. Hoffman's cinema, because it's too academic, predictible, nothing of unexpected, no revelations, no scenes you remember for a long time, no real directing, just filming the images and taping the sounds plus the dialogues are sometimes too cheesy. And I completely forgot the movie a few weeks after I had seen it, so I won't start any analysis now, sorry

its wasnt the best time in my life, when i rode it, dark memories from lesson of polish brrr

'Polski Przeklinać Słowa' by Gregory Wilusz.

No problem. It's good to hear an opinion in any case. :)

thank you all for yours answers !

But as I don't speak polish yet, can you tell me if some of this books are translated in french or in english ?? And is french literrature well-known in Poland ??

I'm not an expert, but I know that anything written by Sienkiewicz, Reymont, or Mickiewicz, is definitely available in English. Almost all Lem's work is out there in English too, if you like Sci-Fi.

Libraries are your best bet, in any case. I've had no luck at all with bookstores, which stock basically nothing besides "Quo Vadis," for Polish authors.

if course some of them were translated, but some of the books (for example Gombrowicz's essential works) were translated into Frnech and German, and from those translation they compiled an Englis version, it's actually shocking that the editors lowered themselves to such level. Fortunatelly there are newer translation now directly from original, but it only shows that you must be careful while choosing a translated book :)
and you should find a lot of Polish books on Amazon.com (at least the USA division, but I hope the French division of Amazon would have some too)