Written in 1932 by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma is a classic Polish novel of the 20th century and one of Polish readers’ all time favourites. It depicts the rather fortunate rise to power of a man from nowhere (the titular Nicodemus Dyzma), who by sheer luck and opportunism reaches the top tiers of public administration. The novel’s lasting grip on the imagination of the reading public can be seen in the way that the protagonist’s name has since become a proverbial way to refer in Polish to the type of crude opportunist who has a tendency to fall upwards through society with the help of trickery, public acquiescence and a handful of good luck.

Published now for the first time in English, the book admittedly gained some wider notoriety in the English-speaking world as early as the 1970s, when some critics pointed to the strange similarities between its plot and that of Jerzy Kosiński’s novel Being There. Some even went so far as to accuse Kosiński’s novel of plagiarism. While the book is certainly a brilliant and poignant satire on the political life of interwar Poland (with its omnipresent corruption and nepotism), its focus on an unskilled and ill-equipped parvenue’s ascendancy to the top governmental ranks certainly has a more universal appeal – one which has been only gaining relevance in recent years.