The Pianist (memoir)
First edition
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| Author | Wladyslaw Szpilman |
|---|---|
| Original title | Śmierć miasta |
| Translator | Anthea Bell |
| Country | Warsaw, Poland |
| Language | Polish |
| Genre | Diary, memoir, autobiography |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 224 pp |
| ISBN | (new ed.) |
| OCLC | 59463310 |
The Pianist is a memoir of the Polish composer of Jewish origin Władysław Szpilman, elaborated by Jerzy Waldorff, who met Szpilman in 1938 in Krynica. The book tells how Szpilman survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during World War II.
The book, originally entitled Death of a City (Śmierć miasta), was first published by the Polish publishing house Wiedza in 1946. In the introduction to its first edition, Jerzy Waldorff stated that he wrote down "as closely as he could" the story told to him by Szpilman, and that he used also Szpilmans notes in the process. In the same year, novelists Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czesław Miłosz wrote a screenplay based on it, for the movie called The Warsaw Robinson (Robinson Warszawski). In the next three years a number of drastic revisions were requested by the Communist Party, prompting Miłosz to quit and withdraw his name from the credits. The movie was released during the Conference of Poland's Filmographers in Wisła on November 19–22, 1949 and met with a new wave of political criticism. Further revisions were requested and new music commissioned, and the movie was re-released in popular movie theatres in December 1950 under a different title: Unsubjugated City (Miasto nieujarzmione).
Because of Stalinist cultural policy and the ostensibly "grey areas" in which Szpilman asserted that not all Germans were bad and not all of the oppressed were good, the actual book remained sidelined for more than 50 years. The latest editions were expanded and published with foreword by Andrzej Szpilman (Szpilman’s son) under a different title, The Pianist. In the preface to the new edition Andrzej Szpilman confirmed: "My father is not a writer. He wrote the first version of this book in 1945, I suspect for himself rather than humanity in general. It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and free his mind and emotions to continue with his life". Andrzej Szpilman republished his father's memoir in 1998 first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (The Miraculous Survival) and then in English as The Pianist.
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