Syzyfowe prace

I watched "Syzyfowe prace" (Sisyphean labors) mostly because of the memory of my grandparents, who went to school in Tsarist Russia. But my grandparents were not noblemen, and my grandfather had a carpentry workshop, and in addition to that, they both also ran a small farm. For me personally, the most important subplot in " Sisyphean labors" was the story of Andrzej Radek (Bartek Kasprzykowski), where I could see how the sons of noblemen persecuted common folks like my grandparents and treated them like dirt. I grew up in a small village on the Polish-Ukrainian border, where before World War II the population was 30% Polish, 30% Ukrainian, 30% Jewish, and the rest was a mixture of Russians and Germans. Each ethnic group spoke its own language, but everyone also knew Russian (and later Polish), so there was no problem with communication. I was good at school, leading my parents and teachers to convince me to attend one of Poland's top secondary schools, located in a major city. It was in the 1970s, around 100 years later than the plot of " Sisyphean labors". There are scenes in the film where pupils don't pay any attention to Russian teachers but are enthusiastic about the works of Mickiewicz and Slowacki. A century later, my colleagues and I listened with equal boredom to Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Sienkiewicz, and Zeromski. We only took science lessons seriously, viewing communism from the point of view of George Orwell and the teaching of the Catholic Church from the point of view of "The Life of Brian". Many of us were interested in literature and movies, but we primarily read Western European and American writers. For example, when I was at the age of Marcin Borowicz (Lukasz Garlicki), my favorite writers were Thomas Mann, Jean Paul Sartre, Arthur Miller, and Saul Bellow. We regarded Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz, and Zeromski as totally outdated writers of the feudal period. The problem is complex and not only Polish, because we cannot completely erase great writers of the feudal period like Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, or Jane Austen. For me, the film "The Sisyphean labors" does not show even the slightest understanding of the problems of changing judgments and our current perception of history and classical literary works.

I was looking forward to this film to see what a filming of a novel I actually remember quite well even though I read it more than 45 years ago. The reason I remember it so well is that the ending brought tears to my teenage eyes when Marcin finds out that a girl he adores is gone with the family to the vast Russia. I was surprised to hear the girl's father reprimand his family, or perhaps her, not to use Polish language at home. I don't remember that from the novel and I was under the impression that their exile to Russia was a political punishment. A good deal of the film is appropriately enough in Russian language while the novel is entirely in Polish. The student struggle is portrayed well and the oppressive Russian domination. The film focuses on the last years described in the novel.