A classic work of reportage about the Katyn Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself.
J zef Czapski (1896-1993), a painter and writer, and an eyewitness
to the turbulent history of the twentieth century, was born into an
aristocratic family in Prague and grew up in Poland under czarist
domination. After receiving his baccalaureate in Saint Petersburg,
he went on to study law at Imperial University and was present
during the February Revolution of 1917. Briefly a cavalry officer
in World War I, decorated for bravery in the Polish-Bolshevik War,
Czapski went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Krak w and
then moved to Paris to paint. He spent seven years in Paris, moving
in social circles that included friends of Proust and Bonnard, and
it was only in 1931 that he returned to Warsaw, and began
exhibiting his work and writing art criticism. When Germany invaded
Poland in September 1939, Czapski was mobilized as a reserve
officer. Captured by the Germans, he was handed over to the Soviets
as a prisoner of war, though for reasons that remain mysterious he
was not among the twenty-two thousand Polish officers who were
summarily executed by the Soviet secret police. Czapski described
his experiences in the Soviet Union in several books- Memories of
Starobilsk (forthcoming from NYRB), Inhuman Land, and Lost Time
(available from NYRB), the last of which reconstructs a lecture he
gave to his fellow prisoners about Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Unwilling to live in postwar communist Poland, Czapski set up a
studio outside of Paris. His essays appeared in Kultura, the
leading intellectual journal of the Polish emigration that he
helped establish; his painting underwent a great final flowering in
the 1980s. Czapski died, nearly blind, at ninety-six. Almost
Nothing- The 20th-Century Art and Life of J zef Czapski, a
biography of Czapski by Eric Karpeles, was published by New York
Review Books.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award
for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She
has translated works by several of Poland's leading contemporary
novelists and writers of reportage, as well as crime fiction,
poetry, and children's books. She is a mentor for the Emerging
Translator Mentorship Programme and former co-chair of the
Translators Association of the United Kingdom.
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale
and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in
Vienna. He is the author of several works of European history,
including Bloodlands, winner of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters Literature Award, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig
Book Prize. His most recent books are On Tyranny and The Road to
Unfreedom.
"This gentle, tenacious, adamantine figure has been far too little
known in the West—until now. New York Review Books recently
published a moving and strikingly original biography by Eric
Karpeles, Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of
Józef Czapski; a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
of Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia,
1941-42; and Mr. Karpeles’s translation of Czapski’s Lost
Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Together these
books document Czapski’s physical and spiritual survival during a
nightmare era, but, more than that, they re-create an overlooked
life, one marked by an exemplary measure of modesty, moral clarity
and artistic richness. Moreover, Mr. Karpeles, a California-based
painter and art critic, has ignited international interest in
Czapski’s artwork.” —Cynthia Haven, The Wall Street Journal
"The Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived through almost
the entire twentieth century as an exception to the rule. A
pacifist who became a Polish army officer being deported to a
Soviet prison camp in 1939, he was one of very few to survive the
Katyn massacre perpetrated by Stalin’s secret police the following
year....He was both a patriot and a European in the deepest sense,
with friends and family connections across the continent. In this
year’s centenary of independence regained, a new generation of
Poles in a country at the crossroads must decide whether Czapski’s
vision will also be theirs." —Stanley Bill, Times Literary
Supplement
“Inhuman Land is a gripping and heartrending depiction of the
Soviet Union at war in the years 1941–43. Equipped with a perfect
knowledge of Russian, Józef Czapski was able to describe the USSR
in all its cruel complexity, alert both to the brutality of Soviet
power and the generosity of ordinary Russians. Here Czapski reveals
himself as one of the great witnesses of the twentieth century.”
—Anka Muhlstein
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