S3E12 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.

Józef Czapski (1896-1993) was born to aristocracy but died in materially modest circumstances, in a tiny room he had occupied for decades in Maisons-Laffitte, home of the Polish émigré press in Paris known as “Kultura.” He thought of himself mainly as a painter—an activity he pursued throughout his life, also producing hundreds of volumes of diaries and sketches. He is remembered, however, mainly as a soldier who was captured by the Germans in World War II and transferred to the Soviets, and miraculously survived the Soviet camps while around 22,000 of his fellow Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets on Stalin’s orders in the Katyń forest in 1940. While serving under General Władysław Anders in 1941-42, he returned to the Soviet Union to investigate the fate of the missing officers, without success. His Inhuman Land is a compelling account of his search, and Memories of Starobielsk might be read as an attempt to restore the humanity of the prisoners who were lost, based on what he recalled of some of their prewar civilian lives.

In this episode, we reflect on some of his humanizing portraits in words, his remarkable lectures on Marcel Proust delivered in a Soviet prison camp, and think about aspects of Czapski’s biography that are revealed in his paintings.

Józef Czapski in English Translation and books about Czapski

Czapski, Józef. Inhuman Land. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.

Czapski, Józef. Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Tr. Eric Karpeles. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.

Czapski, Józef. Memories of Starobielsk. Tr. Alissa Valles. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

Karpeles, Eric. Almost Nothing: The 20^th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.

Karpeles, Eric. Józef Czapski: An Apprenticeship of Looking. London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 2019.

Irena Grudzińska Gross (Instytut Slawistyki PAN in Warsaw and emeritus at Princeton University) was involved in the student movement and emigrated from her native Poland after the unrest of 1968. She resumed her studies in Italy and received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught courses in East European literature and history at several universities and was a 2018 Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include Miłosz and the Long Shadow of War (2020); Golden Harvest (with Jan T. Gross, 2012); Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (2009); and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination (1995).

Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer
David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer 
Natalia Iyudin, Producer

Lead image: Czapski, self portrait, 1967, image courtesy of Mikołaj Nowak-Rogoziński