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List of Important Readings for Polish Language Exam Preparation

Introduction to Preparing for the Matura 2026

Preparing for the Matura exam in 2026 requires effective strategizing and understanding of essential readings. This resource has been developed by experts to help students confidently navigate their study plans and retain important information while avoiding common exam errors. The following content outlines compulsory readings that every student must know for their Polish language exam, as they serve as vital sources for exam tasks, especially essays.

Importance of Compulsory Readings

Compulsory readings are literary works that all Matura candidates must be familiar with. Their significance lies in the fact that at least one of these works will be utilized in the writing section of the exam, typically as a main argument. These readings also feature prominently in various forms of assessment including:

• Reading comprehension tests,
• Open-ended tasks,
• Interpretation prompts,
• Essay topics.
  The examiner evaluates not only the familiarity with the plot but also the thematic elements, characters, and meanings within the text. Thus, failure to reference the reading selection can lead to the loss of points for the essay, regardless of the linguistic correctness and logical coherence of the text.

Compulsory Readings for Basic Level (Zakres podstawowy)

1) Antiquity (Antyk)

• The Bible (including selected excerpts from Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Psalms, and the Book of Revelation)
    - Key Themes: Creation of the world and humanity, lost paradise, suffering, rebellion and humility before God, vanity, love, prayer, lamentation, requests, the end of the world, and the final judgment.
    - Key Issues: The relationship between humanity and God, the nature of good and evil, the meaning of suffering, limits of human reason, the purpose of life, God as protector and judge, harmony of spirit and body, hope for salvation, faith and doubt.

• Jan Parandowski, Mitologia, Part I - Greece
    - Key Themes: Gods and their power, fate, pride, reward and punishment, heroism, love, suffering and trials, metamorphosis, death and immortality, knowledge and truth.
    - Key Issues: Relationships between gods and humans, destiny and chance, abuse of power, pride (hubris) and punishment, limits of humanity, suffering as an inseparable part of the human condition, destructive power of love, attempts to explain the world, heroism and sacrifice, conflict between reason and emotion.

• Homer, Iliad (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: War, the hero and heroism, rage, honor and glory, fate, gods intervening in human affairs, death and transience, love and friendship.
    - Key Issues: The meaning of war, conflicts between individual and community, limits of human pride, relationships between humanity and fate, humanity in the face of war.

• Sophocles, Antigone
    - Key Themes: Rebellion, power, conflict, law, guilt and punishment, death, family, fate.
    - Key Issues: Moral law versus state law, limits of power, individual responses to injustice, taking responsibility for one’s decisions, role of pride, suffering as an inseparable part of human existence.

2) Middle Ages (Średniowiecze)

• Lament of Holy Cross (Lament Świętokrzyski) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Maternal sorrow, suffering and pain, the passion of Christ, maternal love, co-suffering, prayer and complaint, transience.
    - Key Issues: The meaning of suffering, mother-child relationships, humanization of Mary, empathy and compassion towards the audience, medieval devotion to the passion.

• The Conversation of Master Polikarp with Death (Rozmowa Mistrza Polikarpa ze Śmiercią) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Death, danse macabre, vanity of the world (vanitas), equality of humans in the face of death, dread and the macabre, memento mori.
    - Key Issues: The inevitability and universality of death, assessment of moral positions of individuals, the didactic function of medieval literature, religious vision of the world.

• Song of Roland (Pieśń o Rolandzie) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Knightly honor, loyalty, the conflict between Christianity and paganism, betrayal, heroic death, sacrifice, God as the highest judge, knightly community.
    - Key Issues: The knightly ethos, limits of honor and pride, loyalty to authority and God, conflict between good and evil, justice and punishment, war as a religious mission, the meaning of sacrifice.

3) Renaissance (Renesans)

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth
    - Key Themes: Power, crime, ambition, guilt and punishment, conscience, fate and free will, evil, madness.
    - Key Issues: The moral responsibility of individuals for their actions, the destructive power of ambition and the thirst for power, the relationship between evil and conscience, limits of humanity, disruption of the world's order, psychological effects of violence and guilt.

4) Baroque (Barok)

• Molière, The Miser (Skąpiec)
    - Key Themes: Avarice, money as the ultimate value, love, conflict between generations, hypocrisy and deceit, paternal authority, comedy.
    - Key Issues: Critique of avarice as a destructive flaw, relationship between money and interpersonal relationships, marriage based on love versus marriage based on reason, parental authority versus children's rights to happiness, societal image.

5) Enlightenment (Oświecenie)

• Ignacy Krasicki, Selected Satire
    - Key Themes: Human folly and vices, morality and ethics, social hierarchy, irony and humor, education and reason.
    - Key Issues: Identifying and condemning human flaws and character vices, analysis of social phenomena, critique of customs and social behaviors, moral education of the reader, conflict between reason and human passions.

6) Romanticism (Romantyzm)

• Adam Mickiewicz, Selected Ballads, e.g., Romanticism (Romantyczność)
    - Key Themes: Love, longing, death, memory, nature, spirituality, dreams and visions, belief in the supernatural.
    - Key Issues: Conflict between the rational world and belief in supernatural phenomena, clash of romantic feelings and cold logic of the environment, reflection on the role of memory, love, and loyalty in human life, representation of romantic ideals.

• Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady Part III
    - Key Themes: Messianism, rebellion, patriotism, partitions of Poland, suffering, dreaming and visions, the poet's role, Prometheanism, and transformation.
    - Key Issues: Fight for freedom and independence of the nation, persecution of Poles by the tsar, the clash of good and evil, the significance of faith, religion, and supernatural phenomena, suffering and the fate of the individual, Promethean rebellion and the role of the poet.

7) Positivism (Pozytywizm)

• Bolesław Prus, The Doll (Lalka)
    - Key Themes: Love, friendship, city-life, women, social inequality, travel, science, solitude, suicide, work, patriotism, intergenerational conflict.
    - Key Issues: Love and disillusionment stemming from social realities, society and its divisions, the development of science, technology, and entrepreneurship, patriotism and individual responsibility, isolation, and misunderstanding of the individual.

• Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Deluge (Potop) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: National liberation struggle, love, friendship, honor and loyalty, betrayal and redemption, heroism of individuals, patriotism, religion, and morality.
    - Key Issues: The conflict between duty to the nation versus personal feelings, moral development of an individual - the transformation of Kmicic into a patriot and national hero, loyalty and betrayal - consequences of characters' actions towards the community, the issue of the struggle for independence, patriotism and sacrifice for the good of the homeland, Christian values as a moral foundation and source of strength in times of war, the image of the noble society and its role in shaping national history.

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i kara)
    - Key Themes: Crime, punishment, guilt and conscience, poverty, social exclusion, redemption, love, sacrifice, city-life, faith.
    - Key Issues: The feeling of guilt and psychological effects of committed crimes, conflict between moral law and positive law, social inequalities and their influence on an individual's life, possibilities of redemption and moral transformation of man, the role of love, empathy, and sacrifice in the process of spiritual purification, juxtaposition of philosophical theories with the realities of daily life.

8) Young Poland (Młoda Polska)

• Stanisław Wyspiański, The Wedding (Wesele)
    - Key Themes: Nation, homeland, independence, peasant mania, societal stagnation and passivity, social conflict, dance, national myth, dreams and visions, fantasy, individual responsibility.
    - Key Issues: Diagnosis of the condition of Polish society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; causes of national defeats: lack of unity, chaos, and temporary enthusiasm; the superficiality of reconciliation between social strata (intelligentsia-peasants); critique of romantic myths of national liberation struggle; absence of a leader capable of guiding a nation to action; inability to seize historical opportunity for regaining independence.

• Władysław Reymont, The Peasants (Chłopi) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Village and nature, work, land, generational conflict, love and passion, women, community, customs and traditions, exclusion, life and death.
    - Key Issues: Presentation of life in Polish villages during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a realistic and epic manner; dependence of human beings on nature and the rhythm of nature; conflict between the individual and the community; hierarchy of peasant values - land, work, family, religion; mechanisms of power and justice within the village community; the position of women in patriarchal society; processes of social and mental transformation in the countryside; moral evaluation of the collectivity.

9) Interwar Period (Dwudziestolecie międzywojenne)

• Stanisław Żeromski, Before Spring (Przedwiośnie)
    - Key Themes: Utopia - glass houses, revolution, journeys, youth, maturation, rebellion, homeland, generational conflict, poverty and social inequality, love, and disillusionment.
    - Key Issues: The dispute over the form of reformed Poland, disillusionment with independence, revolution and its consequences, the formation of identity of the young generation, responsibility of the intelligentsia for the nation, accountability for personal choices.

• Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
    - Key Themes: Imposed form, mask, infantilization, school, family and home, culture and tradition, rebellion.
    - Key Issues: The problem of human identity, the enslavement of the individual by society, critique of education and upbringing, relationship between youth and maturity, the absurdity and grotesqueness of the world, lack of universal values.

10) Literature of War and Contemporary Literature

• Tadeusz Borowski, Please Gentlemen to the Gas (Proszę Państwa do gazu)
    - Key Themes: Concentration camp, death and extermination, dehumanization of humanity, moral degradation, complicity in crime, indifference, irony, and cynicism.
    - Key Issues: Being human in extreme situations, crisis in values and ethics, moral responsibility of the victim, mechanisms of totalitarianism, demythologization of martyrdom, psychological effects of war.

• Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Another World (Inny świat)
    - Key Themes: Labor camp, hunger, suffering, dehumanization of man, struggle for survival, moral boundaries, guilt and responsibility, loneliness, hope and faith, witnessing.
    - Key Issues: The human condition under totalitarianism, limits of humanity, systemic evil, moral relativism, truth versus propaganda, memory and witnessing evil, freedom.

• Hanna Krall, To Catch Before God
    - Key Themes: Extermination, fight for life, Warsaw Ghetto uprising, God and religion, death, memory, and historical witness, moral responsibility.
    - Key Issues: The meaning of life and death in extreme situations, humanity in inhuman conditions, heroism devoid of pathos, man’s relationship with God during extermination, historical truth juxtaposed with the legend of the uprising, the role of the physician as a defender of life.

• Albert Camus, The Plague (Dżuma)
    - Key Themes: Plague and epidemics, absurdity of life, solidarity and community, moral responsibility, rebellion against evil, loneliness and isolation, death and suffering, everyday heroism, religion and faith.
    - Key Issues: Living in a world of absurdity, human attitudes towards evil, individual responsibility towards others, solidarity as the foundation of humanity, critique of passivity and selfishness, the recurrence of evil.

• George Orwell, 1984
    - Key Themes: Totalitarianism, control and surveillance, manipulation of truth and history, language as a tool of power, fear and terror, individual rebellion, love as a threat to the system, dehumanization.
    - Key Issues: Mechanisms of totalitarian states, limits of power over the individual, truth versus propaganda, the condition of the individual in a world of enslavement, the role of language in shaping consciousness, the contemporary relevance of threats.

• Sławomir Mrożek, Tango
    - Key Themes: Anarchy and chaos, authority and violence, generational conflict, dance, the failure of the idealist, grotesque, revolution, collapse of form.
    - Key Issues: Crisis of values and societal norms, freedom versus anarchy, mechanisms of power acquisition, failure of the intelligentsia, decline of culture and traditions.

• Marek Nowakowski, Edzio on Top (Górą Edek)
    - Key Themes: Crisis of values, rebellion, social inequality, social transformation, violence, failure of the idealist.
    - Key Issues: Social and political transformations of the 1990s, ignorance and boorishness as new social values, feelings of helplessness and weakness.

• Andrzej Stasiuk, Place from the Volume Galician Tales (Miejsce z tomu Opowieści galicyjskie)
    - Key Themes: Transience, memory and identity of a place, memories and tales, space as a witness to history, dialogue between tradition and modernity.
    - Key Issues: The problem of transience and permanence of memory, collective versus individual identity and memory, human relationships with space, the role of narration in preserving culture.

• Olga Tokarczuk, Professor Andrews in Warsaw from the Volume Playing on Many Drums (Profesor Andrews w Warszawie z tomu Gra na wielu bębenkach)
    - Key Themes: Martial law and political realities, loneliness and alienation, urban space, clash of cultures, absurdity and grotesqueness.
    - Key Issues: Limits of knowledge and experience, critique of the political system and its impact on humanity, human isolation amid social chaos, cultural identity and foreignness, masks of normalcy and everyday humanity.

• Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus (Podróże z Herodotem) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Travel, civilization, history, war and conflict, reporter's perspective, language and communication.
    - Key Issues: The relationship between history and contemporary times, understanding others and cultural openness, limits of objectivity in reportage, nature of power, conflict, and violence, memory, identity, and sources of knowledge.

Extended Reading Requirement (Zakres rozszerzony)

• Homer, Odyssey (Odyseja) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Journey and travels, war, yearning, heroism and bravery, gods, cunning and cleverness, hospitality, trials and suffering, fidelity and loyalty.

• Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (Boska komedia) (Selected excerpts)
    - Key Themes: Spiritual journey, the guide, sin and punishment, divine grace, morality, symbolism, history, suffering.

• Jan Kochanowski, Laments (Treny) as a poetic cycle
    - Key Themes: Suffering, children, death, grief and loss, parental love, dialogue with God, memories and retrospection, philosophical issues.

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
    - Key Themes: Revenge, power, death and transience, betrayal, love, morality, family relationships.

• Juliusz Słowacki, Kordian
    - Key Themes: Youth and maturation, love, loneliness, homeland and patriotism, rebellion, journey, martyrdom and sacrifice, psychological dilemmas.

• Realist or Naturalist European Novel (e.g., Honoré de Balzac, The Father Goriot; Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Club; Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary)

• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Proces)
    - Key Themes: Power and bureaucracy, guilt and punishment, injustice, loneliness and isolation, absurdity of life, helplessness, dreams and unreality.

• Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Mistrz i Małgorzata)
    - Key Themes: Good and evil, power and manipulation, love, sacrum and profanum, philosophical issues, grotesque and absurdity, conflict with authority and censorship.

• Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Shoemakers (Szewcy)
    - Key Themes: Rebellion and anarchy, power and tyranny, decline, absurdity and grotesque, revolution, class struggle, existential pessimism.

• Bruno Schulz, Selected Stories from The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe)
    - Key Themes: Childhood and memories, family, time and transience, fantasy, dreams, the city, imagination, art and creativity.

• Tadeusz Konwicki, Little Apocalypse (Mała Apokalipsa)
    - Key Themes: Totalitarianism and political oppression, censorship and manipulation, loneliness, freedom and rebellion, absurdity and grotesqueness, morality and responsibility.

• Janusz Głowacki, Antigone in New York (Antygona w Nowym Jorku)
    - Key Themes: Rebellion and resistance, homelessness, indifference, death and tragedy, freedom and personal choices, culture and identity, city.

• Sławomir Mrożek, Selected Stories
    - Key Issues: Representation of absurdities in human interaction and societal constructs.

• Selected Essay from Gustaw Herling-Grudziński or Zbigniew Herbert
    - Key Themes/Issues: Reflection on existential dilemmas, moral philosophy, the human condition in the context of historical challenges.

Required Readings from Elementary School

• Juliusz Słowacki, Balladyna
    - Key Themes: Ambition, crime and punishment, death, love, rivalry and jealousy, morality, nature and symbolism of nature, guilt and conscience.

• Ignacy Krasicki, Fables (Bajki)
    - Key Themes: Morality and didactics, human flaws, justice and punishment, social satire, simplicity and universality, reason, and prudence.

• Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady Part II
    - Key Themes: Life and death, guilt and punishment, redemption, rituals, love and longing, spirits, memory, suffering.

• Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz
    - Key Themes: Homeland and patriotism, history and memory, love, pastoral life and nobility, conflict and reconciliation, tradition, nature, transience, and honor.

• Aleksander Fredro, Revenge (Zemsta)
    - Key Themes: Conflict and dispute, revenge and retaliation, love and marriage, cunning, noble customs and honor, humor and grotesqueness.

Conclusion

These readings collectively prepare students for a comprehensive understanding of important literary themes, characters, and issues central to Polish literature and culture, which are critical for successfully navigating the Matura exam. Reviewing the themes and issues associated with each work will solidify the student’s ability to reference them effectively during their examination.