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SUMMARY:Andrzej Bobkowski with Grażyna Drabik – Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/02/02/andrzej-bobkowski-with-grazyna-drabik-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature/
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DESCRIPTION:S6E2 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.
Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian 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 and Ukrainian Literature series and the
timeline.
Andrzej Bobkowski (1913-61) is seen as a major prose stylist of the
twentieth century for a book he wrote in the 1940s, yet he was almost
completely unknown in Poland for most of his life. Before the German
invasion of Poland in September 1939, he and his fiancée had planned to
live abroad, and they found themselves in France during the war with plans
to emigrate to Argentina. They ended up emigrating to Guatemala after the
war, where he lived in obscurity for thirty years. He stayed in contact
with Polish editors such as Jerzy Giedroyć at the Instytut Literacki in
Paris and Jerzy Turowicz of the liberal Catholic paper, Tygodnik
Powszechny, and published stories and essays, but his masterpiece was
called Pen and Ink Sketches (Szkice piórkiem), his diary of the German
occupation in France, published in 1957 by Instytut Literacki. The work was
banned in Poland for its anti-totalitarian views in opposition to both Nazi
German fascism and Soviet Communism. His works and prolific correspondence
began appearing in Poland in book form in the 1990s, after Poland’s
political transformation of 1989, and more than thirty years after the
author’s death.
Pen and Ink Sketches is published in an English translation by Grażyna
Drabik and Laura Engelstein as Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940-1944.
In this episode, we focus on this work, providing some context for how
Bobkowski found himself in Paris at the outbreak of the war in Poland, and
the paradoxical situation of how he managed to maintain his identity as a
writer and intellectual in the face of impending fascism. The beginning of
the work reads much like the travelogue of a young man cycling through the
south of France while it was still the zone libre, enjoying the wine,
cuisine, and the rich landscape, at least until he returns to Paris to
rejoin his fiancée, where the German presence is much more visible. And
while we do get accounts of how he helped to keep fellow Polish émigrés
out of trouble with the authorities through his knowledge of languages and
position at a factory, he also writes reviews of the theater, musical
performances, museum exhibitions, and engages in philosophical debates, not
losing touch with the culture while surrounded by barbarism. He is of
course aware of human suffering, acknowledging, for instance, the roundup
and deportation of Jews at the Vel d'Hiver in 1942, but yet cannot fully
engage with the magnitude of such tragedy, which is at best, for Bobkowski,
unspeakable.
Andrzej Bobkowski in English translation and critical resources:
Andrzej Bobkowski. Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940-1944. Tr. Grażyna
Drabik and Laura Engelstein. Margellos World of Letters. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2018.
Engelstein, Laura. "'How to Convince Them You're Not': The Enigma of
Andrzej Bobkowski." In The Resistible Rise of Antisemitism: Exemplary
Cases from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem
Lectures. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2020. Ch. 3.
Mikołajewski, Łukasz. Disenchanted Europeans Polish Émigré Writers
from "Kultura" and Postwar Reformulations of the West. Exile Studies, vol.
16. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018.
The Polish Review. Vol. 67, no. 3 (2022). Special issue on Andrzej
Bobkowski.
Grażyna Drabik teaches American literature at City College and Macaulay
Honors College, CUNY, with special interest in literature of immigration
and exile. Her translations of Polish poetry into English and Portuguese,
have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the United
States and Brazil, including in Polônia: o Partido, a Igreja, o
Solidariedade, ed. by GD & Rubem Cesar Fernandes; Revista Brasilia; The
Massachusetts Review; Modern Poetry in Translation; and The Bedford
Anthology of World Literature. A book-length selection of Wisława
Szymborska’s poems was published by Quarterly Review of Literature
(1982), and of Anna Kamienska’s poems by Paraclete Press: Astonishments
(2007). Together with Laura Englestein she prepared English edition of
Andrzej Bobkowski's Wartime Notebooks. France 1940-1944 (Yale University
Press, 2018).
She is the editor of the blog All the World’s a Stage hosted on the
platform of the Polish Theatre Institute of New York where she also writes
regular column of theatre criticism: https://www.polishtheatre.org/blog
David A. Goldfarb, Host & ProducerBartek Remisko, Curator and Executive
ProducerNatalia Iyudin, Producer
Lead image: Andrzej Bobkowski on his bike, photo credit © M.
CzerwińskaGuest photo: Image courtesy of Grażyna Drabik
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