The Twelfth Grade Devil: An unforgettable teenage story from Poland
Intrigue, adventures, and teenage romance
Puzzles, cryptic clues, and clever deductions.
Evocative descriptions and exciting characters.
Old houses, ancient scrolls, references to tradition and culture. Adam, a Warsaw high school student, with established renown as a most formidable puzzle-solver and investigator, abandons his summer vacation plans when his history teacher begs him to accompany him to his family country estate. Upon arrival, he discovers that various doors have been disappearing from the manor house. He swiftly realizes the doors are linked to a treasure hidden somewhere nearby, but to his dismay, he also learns he's not the only one intent on finding it...
Kornel Makuszyński (1884-1953) one of Poland's most prominent poets and writers in the first half of the twentieth century, was elected member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature. His numerous interests and occupations included running a theater and writing critical reviews, but his main focus remained writing for young readers.
His masterly command of the Polish language and comprehensive knowledge of the Humanities, permitted him to spawn magnificent literary gems replete with beautifully composed sentences. His books, sprinkled with witty similes and references to Polish tradition, classical history, culture, and literature, are full of brisk action, compelling characters, and evocative descriptions of constantly changing settings. Such titles as the present Szatan z si dmej klasy (The Twelfth Grade Devil), Miss Eva's Folly, Argument About Basia, and the comic series Silly the Billy-Goat have earned a permanent place in the Polish literary canon and are read by people from five to one hundred, as a literary critic once said.
When Kornel Makuszyński published The Twelfth Grade Devil in 1937 it became so enormously popular with Polish readers that four more prints had to be run within the first year. Despite blacklisting his writings by the communists after WWII, they were never forgotten and Szatan's enduring popularity has resulted in its being reissued repeatedly and read in Polish schools over the decades. The story has even won international acclaim and been translated into French, Slovak, Lithuanian, Belorussian, as well as Hebrew, and seen two successful film adaptations, made by the Polish State Television in 1960 and 2006.
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