Format: 🎧 Audiobook
Polish classic · Audiobook 2026
The Devil from the Seventh Grade
A 1937 Polish detective classic, reborn. Boy detective Adam Cisowski unravels a 124-year-old riddle: Napoleonic diamonds hidden in a Vilnius manor, a pair of violet eyes, and a band you don't want to cross.
June 1937 · Warsaw
A duel with no way out
A June morning in a Warsaw gymnasium. Professor Gąsowski calls on student after student — none can answer. Adam stands up and confesses: he's cracked the professor's hidden method and built the class's secret schedule. The professor calls him a „devil" — and that's how the nickname is born.
Chapter one
Three scenes that start the case
I. History lesson
The conspiracy breaks — Adam reveals the professor's method.
II. Recess
The class rally — Adam takes responsibility for 30 classmates.
III. Saturday duel
Adam guesses the names and solves the riddle of three letters.
Dramatis personae
Fourteen faces of the mystery
A boy detective, a girl with violet eyes, a Napoleon-loving history professor, a band from the woods — and diamonds from 1813.
Adam Cisowski
Main character
Wanda Gąsowska
Violet eyes
Prof. Gąsowski
Historian
Iwo Gąsowski
Lord of the manor
Mrs. Gąsowska
Lady of the house
Dr. Cisowski
Adam's father
Stanley Burski
Loyal runner
Fr. Kazuro
Key to the mystery
Irene
„Little general"
Col. de Berier
1813 — diamonds
Camille de Berier
Antiquary
The Thin Man
Mastermind
The Painter
False artist
The Hunchback
Gang's watchmanTwo faces of the conspiracy
Antagonist · false artist
The Painter
A short, stocky drifter in a wide hat and a peacock scarf — a "wandering painter" whose hands betray him: gorilla-thick, brigand's hands. The muscle of the band — and the man who cracked Adam over the head in the dark.
Brigand's hands
Caretaker · gang's watchman
The Hunchback
A hunched peasant keeping the lonely forest cottage the band uses as its lair — the man who helps imprison Adam, then creeps in by night with milk, bread and a blanket. A conscience caught between two sides.
ConscienceFrom the Berezina to Bejgoła
Every case has its hour. The colonel's Napoleonic diamonds waited for the right boy through four generations.
The Berezina
Colonel Camille de Berier retreats from Napoleon's Moscow campaign carrying a stolen monastic treasure through the Russian winter.
Death in the manor
Dying at the Bejgoła manor near Vilnius, the colonel hides the diamonds inside a door and writes a ciphered letter to his family in France. The letter never arrives.
A Paris antique shop
The great-great-grand-nephew finds the 94-year-old letter in a dusty parcel at the back of a Parisian shop. Thirty years to break the cipher.
Adam stands up in class
In a Warsaw gymnasium, seventh-grader Adam Cisowski admits he has cracked Professor Gąsowski's hidden method — and earns the nickname that names the book.
Bejgoła
Summer at the manor near Vilnius. The first violet eyes. The first stranger by the fence. The first blow to the head.
Diamonds in the door
Adam breaks the cipher, saves the Frenchman and returns to the eighth form with a nickname no one will ever take from him.
Match the cast of Bejgoła
Flip the cards and find the pairs. Fewer moves — the sooner you catch the culprit.
Case closed!
You cracked it in 0 moves!
Time: 0:00
Chapter One
Professor Gąsowski, the silver-haired historian with the wide, astonished eyes of a child, looked at his class the way one looks at foreigners — with polite patience and a quiet hope that someone, anyone, would say something sensible.
In the third row sat Adam Cisowski, short and stocky, awkward in the shoulders but with a gaze bold and oddly piercing. Around him thirty seventh-graders feigned an interest in the Russian campaign of 1812.
“Kaczanowski!” the Professor called.
Kaczanowski rose, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally wriggled out with consummate diplomacy:
“Sir, today is Thursday, and Thursday isn’t my day.”
The Professor narrowed his eyes. Adam raised his hand. Thirty heads turned slowly — they all knew that when Cisowski stood up, something happened. Something that could not be taken back.
“Today is our Waterloo, sir. Napoleon failed to see the deep ditch on the battlefield, and I failed to foresee the Professor’s mistake. From that — our shameful defeat.”
The Professor stepped back and looked at Cisowski as one looks at a sorcerer. And Cisowski spoke on, calmly, with an ironic smile at the corner of his mouth:
“The Professor has a method. I discovered it long ago. I drafted the form’s rota. Today it was Kaczanowski’s turn. And Ostrowicki’s. And Wnuk’s. They all rose, and none of them knew, because today is Thursday — and on Thursday the boy who studies is the one going to the cinema on Friday.”
The class fell silent. You could hear the corridor clock ticking and the quiet creak of a bench — Staszek Burski held his breath so sharply that he nearly folded over.
Thirty pairs of eyes fixed on the Professor. The Professor fixed his eyes on Cisowski. A long moment passed — long enough for a history lesson to become something else entirely.
“You devil!” the Professor whispered. “You little Satan!”
That is how it began. Everything else — diamonds, letters, violet eyes — comes later.
Liked the excerpt? The whole case is waiting in the audiobook.
🎧 Buy & listenFive questions about the case
A set of Napoleonic diamonds hidden in 1813 inside a door of a crumbling manor near Vilnius. A ciphered French letter, lost for 124 years, holds the only clue to their location. Adam has one summer — and a band of criminals who got there first.
A seventeen-year-old Warsaw gymnasium student nicknamed “the Devil of Class 7” after he reveals the professor’s secret examination method to the whole form. Sharp, loyal and quietly ironic, he unravels the Napoleonic mystery during a summer stay at the Bejgoła manor near Vilnius — until a pair of violet eyes complicates every calculation.
The Painter poses as a wandering landscape artist, but his gorilla-thick brigand’s hands give him away. He is the muscle of the criminal band hunting the hidden diamonds — and the man who attacks Adam in the dark when the boy gets too close to the truth.
Yes. The Devil from the Seventh Grade (original title: Szatan z siódmej klasy by Kornel Makuszyński) is available as a full English-language audiobook on the Audio Opowieści platform, with professional narration, an original interwar score and scene illustrations.
Ages 12 and up. The 1937 novel is a young-adult detective classic widely read across generations — enjoyed equally by adult fans of classic mystery fiction. The audiobook runs approximately 8 hours 12 minutes across 13 chapters.
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