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] is familiar to most as the title of one of the seminal films of the post-World War II era. As such, it has somewhat overshadowed the work upon which Andrzej Wajda based his 1958 screen adaptation, a novel of the same name by Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909–1983), one of Poland’s most distinguished post-war literary figures. Since its appearance in 1948, Andrzejewski’s tale about the immediate aftermath of World War II in Poland has come to occupy a prominent place in the Polish literary canon and has been translated into some twenty-seven languages. Although surely an indication of its intrinsic literary merits, the novel’s reputation—and even the very shape of the work itself—was nonetheless just as much a function of certain extrinsic…

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Citation: Koropeckyj, Roman. "Popiół i diament". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 July 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35627, accessed 23 November 2024.]