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Ferdydurke
Witold Gombrowicz
Novel, 1937. Translated from Polish by Danuta Borchardt
Satirical novel of interwar Warsaw and a country manor, skewering Polish schooling, class and national identity.
Books set in Poland
Six books that put you in Poland. Three are by writers from Poland and set there, starting with Ferdydurke and The Captive Mind. The other three are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
About the literature of Poland
Poland has five Nobel laureates in Literature, most recently Olga Tokarczuk (2018), among them the poets Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996). Its national epic, Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, appeared in 1834, when Poland had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Partition, occupation and communist rule shaped writers for generations, and the Second World War runs through much Polish fiction.
Miłosz's The Captive Mind examines how intellectuals came to terms with Stalinism in post-war Poland. Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke satirises interwar Warsaw and country-manor life, and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, written in English, tracks a boy through wartime villages. Steve Sem-Sandberg's The Emperor of Lies, translated from Swedish, recounts the Łódź ghetto under Chaim Rumkowski.
By writers from Poland
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The Captive Mind
Czesław Miłosz
Essays, 1953. Translated from Polish by Jane Zielonko
Essays on intellectuals under Stalinist Poland after the Second World War, showing how communist rule shaped Polish cultural life.
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Novel, 1965
A boy wanders through wartime Eastern European villages, showing brutal peasant superstition and violence during the Holocaust.
Wider picks
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Poland.
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Novel, 1959. Translated from German
Wider pick: By a German writer born in Danzig, now Gdańsk
Danzig-born Oskar narrates the Nazi era and postwar West Germany, though much of it is set in Danzig, so this is not a pure Germany pick.
The Emperor of Lies
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Novel, 2009. Translated from Swedish by Sarah Death
Wider pick: placeholder
The Łódź ghetto under Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish elder who ran it for the Nazis, told in unflinching detail.
If This Is a Man
Primo Levi
Memoir, 1947. Translated from Italian by Stuart Woolf
Wider pick: By an Italian survivor of Auschwitz
A year in Auschwitz-Monowitz: the work, hunger and unwritten rules of camp life, recorded with a chemist's clarity.
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