As the Czech Republic prepares to take center stage as Guest of Honor at the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair, the spotlight falls not only on its literary tradition, but also on the remarkable metamorphosis Czech literature has found on the big screen. Czech—and before it, Czechoslovak—cinema has long treated written works as more than just source material: novels, short stories, and poetic texts have functioned as structural foundations for some of Czechoslovakia and Czechia’s most enduring and internationally recognized films. Many of these adaptations now belong to the treasure trove of Czech cinema, shaping its aesthetic identity, defining its historical self-image, and anchoring its reputation in the canon of European art film.

From monumental literary transpositions to subversive New Wave reinterpretations and genre-defying experiments, cinematic adaptations of Czech literature have repeatedly expanded the cultural reach of the written word. They have carried Czech stories across borders at moments when literature itself was constrained, censored, or inaccessible. These films are not secondary echoes of literary achievement, but parallel cultural milestones that have secured Czech cinema a lasting place in world film history while reaffirming literature as one of its most vital creative engines.

Canon builders

One of the most celebrated book adaptations to this day is Marketa Lazarová, František Vláčil’s 1967 monumental film version of Vladislav Vančura’s 1931 baladic novel, following the spiritual and moral awakening of the adolescent Marketa, caught up in a brutal society of feuding clans, outlawed nobility, and fragile faith. The saga unfolds against the backdrop of a kingdom struggling to impose order, set out of concrete historical time, yet rooted in the ethos of the 13th century. Frequently cited as the greatest Czech film ever made, Marketa Lazarová achieved its status with an unprecedented synthesis of formal radicalism, production ambition, and myth-making power, transforming a national classic of literature into a motion-picture experience whose scale, rigor, and artistic autonomy placed Czech cinema firmly within the canon of European modernism.

Two years later Vláčil returned to literature again, shifting from medieval legend to midcentury moral reckoning with Adelheid (1969), adapted from the 1967 novella by Vladimír Körner. Set in the aftermath of World War II, the story follows a Czech officer who forms a fraught, ambiguous bond with Adelheid, the German daughter of the owner of an estate in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region, largely inhabited by Germans before the war. As the officer carries out his task of administering the estate after its confiscation, personal desire collides with collective guilt and unresolved violence. Through its uncompromising formal discipline and refusal of moral simplification, Adelheid established itself as one of Czech cinema’s most rigorous confrontations with postwar trauma.

Turning now from the austerity of modernism, Grandmother, Božena Němcová’s canonical 1855 novel, has been adapted for the screen multiple times since the early days of Czech cinema. Set in an idealized rural community, the story centers on an elderly woman whose quiet wisdom, moral authority, and harmony with nature shape the lives of her family and neighbors, offering a vision of social continuity, ethical order, and humane values that unfolds through everyday rituals rather than dramatic conflict. Among the several motion-picture versions of the novel, Antonín Moskalyk’s 1971 adaptation has become the definitive visual translation, reaffirming the novel’s foundational role in the construction of Czech national identity.

Running parallel with Němcová’s Grandmother is the endlessly reinterpreted figure of The Good Soldier Švejk, the anarchic antihero of Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished novel, published serially between 1921 and 1923. With a journey from page to screen spanning silent movies, the early talking era, and series made for TV, The Good Soldier Švejk has been adapted repeatedly, yet it is the mid-20th-century film versions directed by Karel Steklý, with Rudolf Hrušínský in the title role, that have become the most canonical, fixing Švejk’s screen persona in the collective imagination. Far from a fixed character, Švejk functions as a cultural barometer: a figure whose ostensible idiocy masks a corrosive intelligence that exposes the absurdity of power, bureaucracy, and militarism. Each cinematic adaptation has recalibrated Hašek’s satire to its historical moment—whether confronting imperial authority, Nazi occupation, or socialist conformity—making Švejk less an immutable hero than a flexible medium for the articulation of dissent.

The New Wave

In the 1960s, the emergence of the Czechoslovak New Wave coincided with an intensified engagement with contemporary fiction, not as a source of ready-made narratives but as a means of formal and ethical reorientation. At a moment when public discourse was increasingly constrained, the adaptation of literary works offered filmmakers a way to rethink history, ideology, and individual responsibility.

A defining example is The Joke, adapted by Jaromil Jireš from The Joke (1969), the debut novel by Milan Kundera, one of the most widely translated and frequently adapted Czech authors. Kundera’s fiction has inspired screen versions both at home and abroad, and of all of them The Joke remains the most historically and politically charged. Structured around multiple narrators and temporal shifts, the novel dissects how a single ironic gesture can trigger irreversible personal and political consequences. In the context of late-1960s Czechoslovakia, the adaptation itself became a veiled act of dissent, later reinforced by the film’s suppression following the Soviet invasion in 1968.

An even more radical approach to adaptation can be found in Diamonds of the Night (1964), directed by Jan Němec and inspired by the Arnošt Lustig short story “Darkness Casts No Shadow,” published in 1958. Rather than dramatize Lustig’s Holocaust narrative through exposition or psychological backstory, Němec reduces the source material to its most elemental sensations: hunger, fear, exhaustion, and the disintegration of time. Dialogue is sparse, motivations opaque, and memory intrudes in hallucinatory flashes. Here, adaptation abandons narrative fidelity in favour of experiential truth, suggesting that certain historical traumas can only be approached obliquely, through fragmentation and sensory immersion rather than explanation.

Complementing this inward, subjective mode is The Shop on Main Street (1965), adapted from a 1962 Ladislav Grosman short story titled “The Trap” by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos. Set in a small Slovak town during the World War II Aryanization of Jewish property, the story centers on an ordinary man whose passive compliance leads to moral catastrophe. Where Diamonds of the Night captured trauma through sensory immediacy, The Shop on Main Street examined historical violence through the banality of everyday choices, transforming a modest literary premise into a devastating ethical parable. Its Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film gave Czechoslovak New Wave cinema unprecedented global visibility, confirming that motion-picture adaptations of works by Czechoslovak authors could not only serve as an occasion for reflection but also carry a universal moral message.

Hrabal screened

The work of Bohumil Hrabal occupies a similarly central role in Czech filmmakers’ adaptations of literature, serving as a key reservoir for reflection on 20th-century history. Rooted in spoken language, pub anecdotes, and the fragmented memories of ordinary people, Hrabal’s writing offered filmmakers an alternative to monumental historical narratives. Instead of heroic arcs or explicit political statements, his stories articulate history through everyday survival, quiet compromise, and moments of absurdity, allowing war, occupation, and totalitarianism to emerge indirectly. This approach proved especially resonant in those periods when history was contested, censored, or officially reinterpreted.

The filmmaker who most fully translated this sensibility to the screen was Jiří Menzel, whose adaptations of Hrabal’s prose occupy a canonical position in Czech cinema. Closely Watched Trains (1966), set during the Nazi occupation, remains the most internationally recognized of these works, combining erotic farce with inescapable tragedy to portray history as something that intrudes into private lives almost by accident. Larks on a String (1969), though banned for two decades, offers an equally indispensable perspective on the early years of communist repression, depicting political prisoners and “bourgeois elements” reduced to scrapyard labor with a deceptively light, humane tone. Including also his later historical panoramas—such as I Served the King of England (2006), which traces life in Czechoslovakia from the interwar period through Nazism and communism via the rise and fall of a morally opportunistic waiter—Menzel’s Hrabal adaptations established a distinctive model of historical cinema, one in which irony, anecdote, and marginal figures reveal more about power and ideology than straightforward dramatization does.

Beyond Menzel, Hrabal’s prose repeatedly attracted filmmakers across generations, confirming its centrality to Czechoslovak and Czech cinema. The portmanteau film Pearls of the Deep (1965) stands as an early collective articulation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, consolidating its emerging aesthetic tendencies and demonstrating how Hrabal’s seemingly modest stories generated radically different cinematic approaches in the same generation of filmmakers.

Genre transgressions

Adaptations of literary works have also played a critical role in bending, and productively unsettling, genre conventions in Czech and Czechoslovak cinema, often using popular forms as a Trojan horse for philosophical inquiry and political allegory. A key work in this tradition is The Cremator (1969), adapted from the 1967 novel by Ladislav Fuks and directed by Juraj Herz, whose range of literary adaptations, from Morgiana (1972) to his dark reimagining of Beauty and the Beast (1978), reveals his fascination with obsession, repression, and moral decay. Ostensibly a black comedy and psychological horror, The Cremator proves to be a chilling study of moral disintegration, tracing how totalitarian logic infiltrates private fantasy, professional ambition, and family life. Herz amplifies Fuks’s grotesque prose through baroque visual excess, distorted sound design, and exaggerated performances, transforming the text on the page into an oppressive cinematic hallucination. The result is a cult classic whose genre hybridity, horror, satire, and allegory has ensured its lasting international resonance.

Likewise, speculative and fantastical literature have enabled Czechoslovak and Czech moviemakers to engage with genre on a global scale. Ikarie XB-1 (1963), directed by Jindřich Polák on the basis of Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1955 novel The Magellanic Cloud, stands as a landmark of European science fiction. Rejecting pulp spectacle in favour of philosophical rigor, the film imagines space travel as an ethical and psychological experiment, foregrounding collective responsibility and memory. Its clean, modernist production design and contemplative tone proved strikingly influential, anticipating elements later popularized by 2001: A Space Odyssey and confirming the ability of literary adaptations coming out of Czechoslovakia to compete at the forefront of international genre cinema.

An equally singular case is Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), adapted by Jaromil Jireš from the surrealist novel by Vítězslav Nezval, written in 1935 and published in 1945. Drawing on Gothic fantasy, erotic symbolism, and fairy-tale logic, the film reimagines adolescent awakening as a dreamlike initiation ritual. Rather than condensing the novel into a linear narrative, Jireš expands its imagery into a lush visual tapestry where desire, fear, and folklore coexist without clear boundaries. Adaptation here becomes an act of surrealist amplification, turning text into a cinematic dreamscape that resists rational interpretation.

Over a decade earlier, in Invention for Destruction (1958), Karel Zeman, aka “the Czech Méliès,” drew inspiration from 19th-century book engravings to devise a revolutionary visual style for his adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1896 patriotic novel Facing the Flag, combining live action, animation, and graphic design into a coherent aesthetic world. At the time of its release, the film became the most successful Czechoslovak production ever, influencing generations of motion picture makers to come, from Terry Gilliam to Hayao Miyazaki.