Novel
Ashes and Diamonds
Popiół i diament
Jerzy Andrzejewski · 1948
Synopsis
From 5 to 8 May 1945, in a small industrial provincial town, Germany capitulates and the new power takes hold. Two communists, among them the local party secretary, Szczuka, arrive for a meeting and find in their place the bodies of two comrades, shot by mistake by Maciek Chełmicki, a young fighter of the clandestine resistance charged with killing Szczuka. Around the hotel where everyone crosses paths, fallen aristocrats, opportunists and lost adolescents, Maciek hesitates and falls in love with Krystyna.
Context
The novel appeared in 1948 from Czytelnik. It became required reading in schools, and the author politically revised it for an edition of 1954. In 1958 Andrzej Wajda made a film of it, from a screenplay written with the author, which received the International Critics' Prize at Venice in 1959. Georges Lisowski translated it into French for Gallimard in 1967, David J. Welsh into English in 1962; the American edition of 1980 appeared with a preface by Heinrich Böll.
Who it is for
A choral novel of about four hundred pages in French translation, with many characters, which can be read in one sitting.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the best Polish novels of the post-war period and as its author's best known.
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