A Rebellious Reader: The Books That Inspired Andrzej Wajda

wajda_andrzej_pap_19781001_004.jpg, large, Maja Komorowska, Daniel Olbrychski and Andrzej Wajda on the set of ‘The Maids of Wilko’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1978, photo: Witold Rozmysłowicz /

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From ‘Danton’ to ‘The Revenge’, from Żeromski to Iwaszkiewicz – Wajda created a panorama of classic Polish (and European) literature. As a reader, he was discerning. And as a creator of film adaptations of the books he read – rebellious.

Literature is comprised of words, and the images that are born from these words belong, after all, to everyone who reads them. […] So how does one transpose to the silver screen a long poem the beauty of which resides in its words – a work that is simultaneously poetic, epic, patriotic and didactic – reducing it all to the director’s vision?

These questions are what Andrzej Wajda wondered about while working on his film version of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz. He had asked himself similar questions many times before. And each time he answered them with an original work that encouraged reflection on the shared national history and traditions of Poles and sparked discussion. In her book Polska Klasyka Literacka Według Andrzeja Wajdy (Classics of Polish Literature According to Andrzej Wajda), Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska made the following observation:

Wajda turns to literature, seeking inspiration in it to express the problems and spirit of the nation to which he has devoted his art. He draws on literature because, for at least two centuries, it has been not only a witness of Polish history but also an inspiration for it. In particular, he draws on the movement that grew out of Romanticism, a tradition to which he himself ‘feels like the heir and successor’.

So what were this film director’s inspirations for over half a century?

Unfaithful to Żeromski: ‘The Ashes’

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Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Kostenko on the set of ‘The Ashes’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1965, photo: Franciszek Kądziołka / WFDiF / after Zebra Film Studio / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute.

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In 1965, Wajda adapted the nearly one thousand pages of Stefan Żeromski’s novel Ashes, which depicts a broad panorama of life in Poland during the Napoleonic Wars, into a film lasting 226 minutes that deconstructed national myths. He was accused of revisionism that went against the Sienkiewicz-style patriotism prevailing in Poland at that time (Wajda’s explanation that it was, after all, a film based on a book by Żeromski, not Sienkiewicz, failed to convince anyone) and of being unfaithful to the original literary work. He had, in fact, removed many historical subplots from the book’s multi-layered narrative, streamlined the plot by simplifying the characters’ psychological profiles, and cut out many of the lengthy sequences of dialogue. He worked on the script together with the screenwriter Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, condensing the novel’s sixty chapters into twenty-five scenes, and despite using chapter titles taken directly from the book, the final content of the film didn’t bear much similarity to the original work.

Wajda’s additions included two battle scenes, one of which took place in the Somosierra Gorge. While filming the scene, he drew inspiration from paintings such as those by Piotr Michałowski, as well as an unfinished composition by Wojciech Kossak that is known from written descriptions. The director presented this cavalry charge as an act of senseless cruelty and sacrifice, effectively stripping Żeromski’s novel of the romantic illusion of independence that it had ultimately conveyed.

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Daniel Olbrychski in ‘The Ashes’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1965, photo: Franciszek Kądziołka / WFDiF / after Zebra Film Studio / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute.

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Years later, Wajda expressed regret that he’d lacked the courage to shoot the film in colour (‘[T]he challenge of working with colour film […] might have spurred our imaginations further’). Echoing the critics, he also expressed reservations about the cast: ‘[A]part from Daniel Olbrychski’s dazzling debut in the role of Rafał [Olbromski – ed.], who was taking his very first steps as a screen actor during the making of this film, the rest of the cast didn’t manage to embody the characters of The Ashes quite as successfully.’

And although the Polish communist government continued to regard the director as a revisionist – a label that made it difficult for him to continue making films – Wajda’s professional relationship with Olbrychski lasted for several decades.

Reading Iwaszkiewicz: ‘The Birch Wood’, ‘The Maids of Wilko,’ & ‘Sweet Rush’

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‘Sweet Rush’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 2008, photo: Akson Studio.

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Wajda’s connection to the writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who was a generation older than him, also left a lasting mark on the history of cinema and literature. It began in the 1970s with The Birch Wood, reached its peak with The Maids of Wilko (which premiered in 1979, a few months before the writer’s death), and concluded with Sweet Rush in 2009. It was a friendship full of respect, warmth and appreciation, while each maintained his own creative individuality. In addition to the films, in which Wajda engaged in an intergenerational dialogue with Iwaszkiewicz that transcended genres, they also wrote each other letters for a period lasting nearly a decade. They wrote about their artistic plans and the books they were reading with politeness and civility, though they weren’t always sincere with each other.

Iwaszkiewicz to Wajda, Palermo, 23 March 1971:

I always think of ‘The Birch Wood’ with gratitude and awe. It’s so wonderful when a child has a life of its own and its own destiny, no longer dependent on its father.

Wajda on The Birch Wood:

The power of my film ‘The Birch Wood’ stems from the relationship between human fate and the natural world, which is beautifully captured in Iwaszkiewicz’s story. Nothing here was written with cinema in mind. While filming Iwaszkiewicz’s prose, I wasn’t creating cinema at all. I was simply contending with life itself.

Iwaszkiewicz in his diary, 7 July 1970:

Yesterday I saw Wajda’s film adaptation of ‘The Birch Wood’. It’s astonishing how far a film can stray from what literature presents. […] Daniel [Olbrychski] was terrible, but also so nice that I kissed him, thanking him for the role. My God, how far removed it is from what I wrote in 1932!

Wajda spoke with Iwaszkiewicz on numerous occasions about The Maids of Wilko at the writer’s home in Stawisko. He was convinced that no one had ever created better female characters in Polish literature. The author’s daughter Maria Iwaszkiewicz recalled that her mother was so appalled by one of the scenes between a man and a woman in The Birch Wood that she wrote a letter to Wajda asking him to tone down the explicit content.

Despite the necessary changes, the film adaptations of Iwaszkiewicz’s stories capture the spirit of his prose, speaking the same language of myth and symbolism. Wajda abandoned grand historical context and turned towards philosophical and existential reflection – stories about death, love and humanity. He often said that ‘when making films based on Iwaszkiewicz’s prose, we aren’t creating cinema but rather contending with life itself – with the impossible’.

‘The Maids of Wilko’ directed by Andrzej Wajda [Image Gallery]

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Letter from Wajda to Iwaszkiewicz, Aix, 2 July 1978:

[I] have begun reading ‘The Maids of Wilko’. It’s a very pleasant activity when one can dream of a film without yet thinking about how all these wonderful images and ephemeral feelings will eventually have to take on the real forms of actors, landscapes and objects.

Letter from Iwaszkiewicz to Wajda, Warsaw, 10 August 1978:

I’ve read the script and like it very much. I have no doubt that you’ll be able to create something beautiful with it.

Wajda on The Maids of Wilko:

I made my previous films with an intense energy that left its mark on the way they were created. However, the delicacy of Iwaszkiewicz’s prose required something completely different. My own inner rhythm was at odds with the slow pace of ‘The Maids of Wilko’ […].

Iwaszkiewicz in his diary, 31 December 1978:

Yesterday we went to see Wajda’s film version of ‘The Maids of Wilko’. I didn’t like it – but since watching it, I’ve been thinking about it incessantly. I suspect that it’s a wonderful film – and that I’m simply unable to accept or appreciate it immediately.

The American Film Academy, however, had no doubt whatsoever about the film’s excellence, nominating The Maids of Wilko for an Oscar (though the award ultimately went to The Tin Drum, directed by Volker Schlöndorff – another excellent adaptation of a literary masterpiece, and also starring Daniel Olbrychski).

Perhaps Iwaszkiewicz’s reaction to the film adaptation of Sweet Rush would have been similar to that of Polish critics: on the one hand, he would have been delighted by the courageous and moving performance given by Krystyna Janda, who added a monologue about her husband’s death to the script. On the other, he would have found the narrative disjointed, failing to fully capture the depth of his story. Wajda grappled with the text for a long time, describing it in a letter to Olga Tokarczuk in April 2005:

Dear Olga,

I feel compelled to write to you regarding the short article you wrote about my film ‘Sweet Rush’ for ‘Tygodnik Powszechny’. The story had been a source of constant torment for me. For many years, I’d been seeking a way to turn it into a feature-length film, for only then could Iwaszkiewicz’s story reveal its full splendour.

Wajda’s film adaptation dazzled European critics, who awarded him the FIPRESCI Prize. The Berlinale jury also praised the director for ‘opening up new horizons in the art of filmmaking’.

Wyspiański unleashed: ‘The Wedding’

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Wojciech Pszoniak in ‘The Wedding’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1972, photo: Zebra Film Studio / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute.

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Kadr z filmu "Wesele" w reżyserii Andrzeja Wajdy, 1972. Na zdjęciu: Hanna Skarżanka i Wojciech Pszoniak., fot. Renata Pajchel / Studio Filmowe "Zebra" / Filmoteka Narodowa / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and his wife Anna were impressed, however, by Wajda’s film adaptation of Stanisław Wyspiański’s play The Wedding (1972). Iwaszkiewicz could clearly see Wyspiański’s artistic vision in Wajda’s work, even though one might think this was not easy to discern. And yet the omissions and rearrangements of scenes, the unclear divisions between acts, the shortened dialogue (especially the lines spoken by Czepiec), all painstakingly prepared by the screenwriter Andrzej Kijowski, paradoxically served to further emphasise the ideas contained in the original. Right from the start, the director introduces a dreamlike quality, and as the plot unfolds, this spectral atmosphere becomes increasingly intense, leaving the audience stunned by the finale. To create a more authentic atmosphere for The Wedding, no extras were hired for the set, but rather two groups of traditional folk musicians and dancers. Altogether, including the actors, there were roughly one hundred people in the dance hall. As Wajda explained:

Shooting a film based on a play that takes place within one single indoor space is a challenging task. And filming ‘The Wedding’ meant for me, at the time, shifting the action to as many different settings as possible, and blending indoor scenes with outdoor ones. The opening scene alone offered such a possibility: in front of Saint Mary’s Church, the road to Bronowice, the arrival of the wedding guests. The story unfolded just like in a ‘real’ film. But later, in fact, it wasn’t necessary to shoot any scenes outside the room where the wedding party was held.

Nevertheless, he decided to transfer the Straw Man’s dance to an area outside the house, which – as he himself later admitted – meant that it ‘lost its essential significance’. He was also tormented by the thought that he’d failed to match Wyspiański’s artistic vision. This critical self-assessment, however, didn’t align with the opinions of film critics or the general public. The film’s premiere took place on 8 January 1973 at the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków – the very same venue where the original play version of The Wedding had been staged for the first time over 70 years earlier.

The literary & spiritual legacy of Przybyszewska: Danton

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Angela Winkler and Gérard Depardieu in ‘Danton’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1982, photo: Films du Losange / Entertainment Pictures / Forum.

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Wajda had already tackled Wyspiański’s play before, having staged The Wedding at the Stary Theatre in Kraków in 1963. It was also in a theatre – this time Les Amandiers in France – when the idea for the film Danton (1982) first began to take shape. Wajda watched Gérard Depardieu perform on stage and could immediately see the charismatic leader of the French Revolution in him, the eponymous protagonist of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s play The Danton Case. Initially, Wajda was uncertain whether a dramatic work, in which the meaning is primarily contained in the words, was suitable material for a film, but in the end, he decided to risk it. He wanted to film it in Poland, but martial law prevented him from doing so. Years later, he recalled: ‘In the streets and historic buildings of Paris, Stanisława Przybyszewska’s words immediately came to life and revealed their truth.’

Like in The Ashes, Wajda didn’t strictly follow the literary source material. While Przybyszewska leaned towards historical accuracy, Wajda was focused more on sensuality. And while the playwright sided with Robespierre, presenting an almost utopian portrait of an idealist – a man capable of imposing order upon the chaos of the revolution, yet at the same time tragically doomed by his own actions – the film director positioned himself on the other side of the political conflict, choosing to cast Danton in a more favourable light, or at least to level the playing field between him and his adversary. Nurczyńska-Fidelska has pointed out that by being unfaithful to the ideological dimension of Przybyszewska’s play, Wajda ‘was more loyal to the play’s literal meaning […] than to its spirit’.

Nobel vs. Oscar: ‘The Promised Land’

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A still from ‘The Promised Land’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1974. Pictured: Daniel Olbrychski and Kalina Jędrusik, photo: Renata Pajchel / X Film Unit / East News.

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Кадр из фильма «Земля обетованная» Анджея Вайды, 1974., фото: Polfilm / East News

Ghosts from the past came back to haunt the director sooner than he’d expected. While studying film at the academy in Łódź, Wajda had come to dislike the city (to put it mildly), yet he ended up spending another year there while adapting Władysław Reymont’s novel The Promised Land for the screen. Nowhere else would he have found such well-preserved 19th-century architecture – factories, railway stations and palaces – just waiting to be featured in a film that would come close to winning an Oscar. The entire project came about thanks to Andrzej Żuławski – he was the one who introduced the director to the Nobel Prize-winning author’s work – and a lawn resistant to the filmmaker’s shears (after a failed attempt to switch careers from film director to gardener, Wajda decided he preferred making films).

The director was impressed by Reymont’s vivid, ruthless characters, each with their own distinct voice. He also felt that the realism of The Promised Land ‘harmonised perfectly with cinema’s inherent strength, which is the photographic depiction of the world’. Yet despite this – or perhaps precisely because of it – he added more expressiveness and shifted the focus, emphasising predatory capitalism and ultimately even changing the film’s ending.

If Wajda thought he’d made the first Hollywood film about money, American critics were quick to bring him back down to earth. The discussion of the Oscar nomination for The Promised Land in 1974 was reduced to a debate about Polish antisemitism. ‘I realised then that no film could ever adequately address the tragic legacy of the genocide of Jews on Polish soil, and certainly not a Polish one,’ the filmmaker concluded.

The Promised Land by Andrzej Wajda – Image Gallery

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Dostoevsky & others

Wajda wasn’t only passionate about Polish literature. Weary of the war themes he’d explored in his films Lotna (1959, an adaptation of a short story by Wojciech Żukrowski) and Samson (1961, based on a novel by Kazimierz Brandys), Wajda was reluctant to take on yet another story about concentration camp prisoners when a project was proposed to him by a film studio in Belgrade. Instead, he decided to make Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962), based on a short story by Nikolai Leskov. He was dissatisfied with the result – it was only Aleksandar Sekulović’s cinematography that compensated to some extent for the director’s failure. He recalled bitterly: ‘I realised that a modicum of freedom elsewhere wasn’t enough. I needed more freedom at home – in Poland.’

A decade later, he decided to make a film about Christ. Initially, he sought an original screenplay, but he rejected the first two versions. He asked Zbigniew Herbert to write a third, but Herbert was leaving for the United States at that time. However, it was during this period that the first Polish translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita was published. ‘It was clear I wouldn’t find a better text on which to base a film than this novel about Pontius Pilate,’ said Wajda.

Filming for Pilate and Others (1972) began west of the Polish border: the ruins of the Nazi Party’s congress hall in Nuremberg were transformed into Pilate’s palace, a landfill near Wiesbaden became Golgotha, and the Stations of the Cross were filmed on the streets of Frankfurt. In one of Bulhakov’s scenes without dialogue, the actor playing Matthew (Daniel Olbrychski yet again) had to improvise. He was so convincing that when the film was screened in German, this sequence was left out because it was impossible to dub.

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‘Nastasja’, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1994, photo: H.I.T. / TV Tokyo.

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Another Russian novelist whose work the Polish director chose to adapt was Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wajda claimed the prose was so theatrical that it was enough simply to allow the characters to speak, rather than attempting to stage the ideas contained in the dialogue.

Over the course of a decade, the idea of adapting Demons was rejected several times by producers, cinematographers and even actors, and it wasn’t until 1988 that the project finally saw the light of day. With this experience under his belt, Wajda created a play by condensing another of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Idiot, down to its final chapter and two characters. Thus adapted, and now called Nastasja, the play was first performed at the Stary Theatre and later in Japan, featuring an unforgettable performance by the kabuki actor Bandō Tamasaburō. In 1994, it made its way to the screen.

Polish classics: ‘Pan Tadeusz’ & ‘The Revenge’

Although it seemed that Wajda had already paid his respects to Żeromski with The Ashes, he still dreamt of making a film based on his novel The Coming Spring. His first attempt was blocked by the censors, who deemed the work anti-Soviet – four subsequent screenplays were written, until eventually Wajda abandoned the idea after hearing about Filip Bajon’s plan for a film adaptation. However, it was precisely this novel by Żeromski and the idyllic image of the Nawłoć country estate, reminiscent of Soplicowo, that inspired Wajda to create a film version of Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz.

Pan Tadeusz by Andrzej Wajda – Image Gallery

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In 1995, he immersed himself in the epic poem, and he adapted it for the cinema four years later. As he explained:

The adaptation was based on three principles: to use dialogue in the film that was taken directly from the epic poem and not add a single letter to it. Next: to fully depict the action of the armed raid, which Mickiewicz describes in vivid detail as if with a film in mind; needless to say, Jacek Soplica naturally became the central character of the entire story. The third principle was to introduce the narrator’s voice into the final two volumes of the epic, a role that could only be played by the author himself.

The character of Mickiewicz appears right at the start of the film, and the director recalled that even when the cameras were off, everyone on set continued to speak in the poet’s language. Wajda himself appreciated the poem’s ‘Olympian perfection’, its ‘selflessness’ that allowed readers to immerse themselves in the world of childhood, and the abundance of conflicts and events easily translatable into film. He merely accentuated the subtle irony that is less noticeable when reading the text. He hoped that his film would be interpreted not as a political statement, but as an artistic one – and he succeeded.

The success of Pan Tadeusz motivated Wajda to work on Aleksander Fredro’s play The Revenge. In the book Jedenaście Arcydzieł Literatury w Filmach Andrzeja Wajdy (Eleven Masterpieces of Literature in the Films of Andrzej Wajda), we read:

Two masterpieces of Polish literature written at the same time are worlds apart. ‘Pan Tadeusz’, written in exile, was primarily fuelled by a longing for a lost land of freedom. ‘The Revenge’, written in Poland in a bitterly ironic style but exquisite language, portrays the national characteristics that have so often been the cause of Poland’s misfortunes.

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A still from ‘The Revenge’, directed by Andrzej Wajda, 2002. Pictured: Katarzyna Figura and Roman Polański, photo: Vision / East News.

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Kadr z filmu "Zemsta" w reżyserii Andrzeja Wajdy, 2002. Na zdjęciu: Katarzyna Figura i Roman Polański., fot. Vision / East News

The director felt that no one was better at portraying Poles than Fredro, so he decided to adapt the comedy for the cinema with no major changes. He made only minor alterations to the plot, setting the action several decades earlier in the era of the Polish nobility and opting for a winter setting.

When Wajda spoke of the role he played in bringing literary classics to the silver screen, he emphasised that, thanks to film adaptations, ‘Polish audiences have the opportunity to rediscover their cultural roots and connect with their past’. To this day, there has been no one else in the Polish film industry who has been such an insightful reader, with a critical perspective on literature, society and himself.

Originally written in Polish, March 2026, translated by Scotia Gilroy, March 2026

Sources: ‘Jedenaście arcydzieł literatury w filmach Andrzeja Wajdy’, exhibition catalogue, National Library, 2004, Warsaw, 2024; Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska, ‘Polska klasyka literacka według Andrzeja Wajdy’, Łódź, 2010; ‘Zeszyty Literackie’, no. 136/4, Warsaw–Paris, 2016; https://zeszytyliterackie.pl/olga-tokarczuk-andrzej-wajda-korespondencja/

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