Time Regained Anka Muhlstein

Almost Nothing: style gives the impression of a perpetual The 20th-Century Art and Life grazing and brushing; his touch, as flex- of Józef Czapski ible and fluttering as a flickering flame, by Eric Karpeles. is able to explore everything without New York Review Books, breaking or twisting a thing,” he wrote. 492 pp., $19.95 (paper) Another essential discovery was Goya, during a trip to Spain. “The shock of Inhuman Land: my life,” as he put it, came when he re- Searching for the Truth alized that the same artist could paint in Soviet Russia, 1941–1942 both classical portraits, with a perfect by Józef Czapski, control of detail, and wild scenes of war translated from the Polish and madness. This possibility of not by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and with having to choose between two styles an introduction­ by Timothy Snyder. came as a revelation: New York Review Books, 447 pp., $19.95 Speaking of myself, I was long tor- mented by a duality of approach— Lost Time: Weronika Orkisz/Michael Popiel de Boisgelin/Piotr de Ligier Orkisz/Michael Popiel Weronika analytical on the one hand, rational, Lectures on Proust in growing from the Dutch tradition a Soviet Prison Camp and to a certain extent from the by Józef Czapski, translated from pointillists, and on the other hand, the French and with an introduction the mad, the unpredictable—the by Eric Karpeles. true leap into the abyss. In this I New York Review Books, saw a lack of integrated personality, 90 pp., $15.95 (paper) a kind of psychic dividedness that I tried to overcome artificially, with- Eric Karpeles, a painter and an impas- out success. With time I noticed sioned reader of Proust—he is the au- the same phenomenon in a painter thor of Paintings in Proust: A Visual whose stature was not only equal to Companion to In Search of Lost Time that of Matisse but who was one of (2008)—had never even heard of Józef the very greatest—Goya. Czapski until a friend sent him a slim volume in French, Proust contre la dé- chéance, which he has now translated Upon his return to in 1932, under the title Lost Time. It consists Czapski painted, wrote, and exhibited, of five lectures on Proust that Czapski notably in 1939 at the New York World’s delivered in 1940–1941, during his cap- Fair, but war broke out on September 1 tivity in a Soviet prison camp. Karpeles of that year. Poland was attacked by read it in a single sitting and became both Germany and the USSR. Czapski obsessed with its author. was mobilized and on September 27 Who was this man capable of bring- was taken prisoner by the Soviets, along ing Proust to life, in those appalling with 15,000 other Polish officers. They conditions, without a book to refer to, Józef Czapski: Self-Portrait with Lightbulb, 1958. were split up and sent to three camps: for an audience of some forty Polish An exhibition of his illustrated diaries is on view at the National Museum’s Starobielsk, in Ukraine (where Czapski officers suffering from utmost depri- Józef Czapski Pavilion, Kraków, until December 9, 2018. ended up), Ostashkov, and Kozelsk. In vation? Capable of setting forth the the spring of 1940, Czapski and 394 of literary background of Proust’s mas- Pages, an academy that trained sons He adapted so quickly that in 1923 he his comrades were transferred to Grya­ terpiece, summing up its over­arching of the nobility and senior officials. A established the Committee with a zovets, 250 miles north of . themes, and even quoting lengthy month later the February Revolution group of friends who were determined All the other prisoners were sent to an passages almost word for word from broke out, and his life henceforth fol- to explore Paris, its museums, and its unknown location. He described his memory to illustrate a fascinating con- lowed a vertiginous course that ended galleries. The following year, they set off captivity in Memories of Starobielsk, a vergence of Proust, Tolstoy, and Dos- in 1993, when he died in at the for a stay that was supposed to last six testament to his will to preserve some toevsky? Driven by curiosity, Karpeles age of ninety-six. weeks but stretched out to seven years. semblance of an intellectual life: discovered other texts by Czapski and In May 1918, just months before the The support of Misia Sert, a society some contemporaneous accounts of end of World War I, Czapski was in figure of Polish descent whom Czapski Intellectual effort, when conducted him. Frustrated by their inadequacy, Warsaw. Poland, which had been parti- contacted through mutual friends, was without books or notes, gives an he set out to do his own research. It tioned for more than a century among crucial. She knew everyone in the arts entirely different sensation than took him more than five years to write the Austro-­Hungarian, Prussian, and in Paris and was infected by the enthu- when carried out under normal Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art Russian empires, emerged from the war siasm of these young artists who lived conditions. One’s involuntary and Life of Józef Czapski, a remark- an independent state, but beginning in from hand to mouth. When Czapski memory acts much more forcefully, ably vivid portrait, notable for the clar- February 1919 tensions with Russia de- first turned to her for help, Karpeles the memory of which Proust speaks ity with which it places a life unusual generated into a brutal conflict. Instead writes, “she said, ‘Very well, come here and which he considered to be the for its breadth and complexity in its of studying to be a painter, as he had tomorrow, we’ll take Picasso to lunch.’ sole source of literary creation. larger historical setting. wished to do, Czapski volunteered im- The next day they all went to the Meu- After a certain amount of time, Czapski’s tormented life, ravaged by mediately for military service. His cour- rice. It was decided a fund-raising event things surface in our conscious- wars and revolutions, traversed nearly age in combat earned him the Polish­ was in order and after lunch Picasso ness, details we hadn’t the slightest the entire twentieth century. He was Order of the Virtuti Militari, the coun- agreed to be its patron.” For Czapski, idea were even “stored” anywhere born in Prague in 1896, into one of try’s highest military decoration, which those seven years were marked by his in our brain. What is more, those those European aristocratic families he received at the same time as a French discovery of Bonnard’s Paradis har- memories that come from our sub- whose branches are so intertwined officer, Charles de Gaulle, who had been monieux and Matisse’s explosion of conscious are more deeply rooted, that it is impossible to assign them a sent to Poland as an observer and with color, the excitement of his own first more intimately bound up one with specific nationality. A Polish father, an whom he had become friends. Poland shows, which gained him the encour- another, more personal. Austrian mother, and Russian, Baltic, defeated Russia in 1921, but its indepen- agement of Dufy, Vuillard, Rouault, Czech, and German cousins were his dence would last barely twenty years. and even Bonnard himself, as well as That was the origin of Czapski’s lec- closest relatives. He spent his child- Demobilized and determined to de- his first sales of paintings (including tures on Proust. Czapski also dictated hood with his brother and five sisters vote his life to painting, Czapski en- one to Gertrude Stein). the texts to two fellow prisoners and on the family estate of Przyłuki in Be- rolled at the Kraków Academy of Fine It was at this time that Proust’s last kept the transcripts, thanks to which larus, then part of the , Arts. As he later wrote, “I entered the volumes were published posthumously. this astonishing example of his spiritual until he was sent at around the age of world of my new friends, an intellectual From then on, Czapski never stopped strength and capacity to adapt to the thirteen to continue his studies in Saint atmosphere marked by a carefree assur- reading and rereading Proust, and he worst conditions has been preserved. Petersburg. In January 1917, he en- ance, a winning optimism, and a sen- published an enthusiastic essay about A year later, on June 22, 1941, ev- rolled in Tsar Nicholas II’s Corps des sual joie de vivre totally alien to me.” him in a Polish magazine. “Proust’s erything was upended. “To this day,”

24 The New York Review

Muhlstein_24_29.indd 24 11/20/18 3:10 PM Czapski wrote, “I can still hear ring- impossible. He was forty-nine years old, immense influence and high circulation, You can’t examine such a rich, var- ing in my ears the wild cry of exuber- and he had to start his life over. For the and Czapski would contribute to its ied, and turbulent life without identify- ant enthusiasm thrown out by a scruffy next forty-eight years he lived in Mai- pages for the rest of his life. But he was ing a guiding thread running through colonel bending his whole upper body sons-Laffitte, on the outskirts of Paris, in a hurry to become a painter again. it. If Karpeles was attracted first of from the window: ‘Hitler attacked Rus- in a house that he shared with the rest of sia!’” A new phase of the war began. the staff of , the Polish-language cial part not only by doing major fund- to be published under pseudonyms. Stalin agreed to free all the Polish political and literary magazine founded 1 raising during his trips to Canada, the What’s more, Kultura offered émigré prisoners and deportees in order to by Jerzy Giedroyc in June 1947. Despite US, and South America, but also by authors, scattered around the world, form an independent Polish army. its extremely meager funds, it enjoyed forging relations between Kultura and their only opportunity to publish in the General Władysław Anders learned in the French literary world. His excel- . Lubyanka prison, where he had been 1Founded in Rome by Giedroyc, with lent relations with Albert Camus and In 1953 the Bibliothèque de Kultura tortured, that he had been chosen to Józef Czapski, Zofia Hertz and her Raymond Aron allowed him to ar- series began. Its earliest publications command it. husband, Zygmunt, Gustaw Herling- range for the publication in France of were ’s great work Prisoners gathered from all corners Grudziński, and , many books and essays by Polish writ- Trans-­Atlantyk and Czesław Miłosz’s of the Gulag, but the officers who were Kultura was meant to be independent ers. The magazine, which claimed to Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind), of the government-in-exile in London be primarily political, was also highly as well as a Polish translation of Orwell’s last seen in Starobielsk, Ostashkov, and and refused to be anything more than regarded for its influence in the literary 1984. And thus the two greatest con- Kozelsk never appeared. Czapski was the voice of the who had fled realm. There was a twofold clandestine temporary Polish authors—Miłosz, assigned by Anders to investigate what communism. The magazine continued movement swirling around Kultura. who received the Nobel Prize in 1980, had become of them, but he ran straight publishing until 2000 thanks to its tens Polish sailors agreed to smuggle texts and Gombrowicz, who was short-listed into a wall of silence. In the meantime, of thousands of subscribers in twenty into Poland, and certain Polish writers for the Nobel but lost by one vote in the Polish army, poorly fed, inade- or so countries. Czapski played a cru- and politicians brought texts to France 1968—were published in Kultura. quately armed, and unable to train for combat, was evacuated to Iran in the spring of 1942, and then to Iraq. It was there, in April 1943, that news reached Czapski of the discovery by the Ger- man army of the Katyn massacre. As Karpeles writes, “The bodies of thou- sands of Polish officers had been found New Perspectives in American History buried in their uniforms, their identity papers intact, stacked twelve deep.” from the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group There could be no doubt about it. These were the prisoners from the Kozelsk camp. The worst was now a certainty. FromFr bestselling historian By way of Palestine and North Af- “ To understand Hoover’s life, H.H W. Brands comes rica, the Poles rejoined the Allied front career, and his legacy in full, in Italy in May 1944 and helped capture theth riveting story of this rich new biography the fortified abbey of Monte Cassino, howh America’s second will certainly prove southeast of Rome, after three earlier generationge of political indispensable.” attacks had been thrown back. The giants—Henrygi Clay, —David Frum, The Atlantic Americans entered Rome on June 4, DanielD Webster, and two days before the Normandy land- JohnJo Calhoun—battled “ An exemplary biography— ings, while the Poles pushed north to- exhaustively researched, ward Ancona. Their singular situation toto complete the was analyzed at the time by the Ameri- unfinishedun work of the fair-minded and easy to read.” can reporter Martha Gellhorn: FoundingF Fathers and —The Wall Street Journal shapedsh our democracy. All the Poles talk about Russia all the time. . . . They follow the Russian advance across Poland with agonized interest. It seemed to me that up here, on the Polish sector of the Italian front, people “[Ellis] draws connectionss knew either what was happening “I loved this deep unknown between our history and ourr ten kilometers away or what was history. An incredible tale of present reality with an authorityy happening in Poland, and nothing a rag-tag team of students that few other authors can muster.”” else.... inventing key technologies…. They fight an enemy in front of —The New York Times Book Revieww Your mind will be blown.” them and fight him superbly. And “An exploration of our values thatt with their whole hearts they fear an —Kevin Kelly, is both timely and timeless.”” ally, who is already in their home- Senior Maverick for —Walter Isaacson, author off land. For they do not believe that Wired Magazine and Russia will relinquish their coun- author of Leonardo Da Vincii try after the war; they fear they are The Inevitable to be sacrificed in this peace, as Czechoslovakia was in 1938.

Gellhorn’s article, commissioned by “ Impressive…. Dramatic…. Collier’s , was never published. No one A good, readable story in the wanted to irritate “Uncle Joe,” the tri- FromFr Pulitzer Prize finalist umphant and indispensable ally. Czap- mode of Nathaniel Philbrick’s’s NNick Bunker, a penetrating ski had few illusions, understanding nautical histories.” nenew account of the early life of clearly that for the Poles, still trauma- —Thomas E. Ricks, BBenjamin Franklin—a complex, tized by the discovery of the Katyn mas- The New York Times drdriven young man who elbows sacre, the most important event of the Book Review summer of 1944 was the catastrophic hihis way to success. Warsaw insurrection, while for the Al- “ Deeply researched “ TThe Franklin that emerges here... lies the main news was the success of and elegantly written…. isis more dynamic and real than the Normandy invasion. His sense of Gripping and timely…. unease was well justified: in February hishi homespun alias Poor Richard 1945, at the Yalta Conference, Stalin Ekirch is such a masterful everev could be.” storyteller.”—Kathleen DuVal,al, solidified his grip on Poland. —The— Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal Czapski happened to be in Paris a few weeks before the German surrender on May 8, 1945. Going back to Poland Knopf Doubleday Academic • 1745 Broadway, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10019 PenguinRandomHouseEducation.com under the new Communist regime was

December 20, 2018 25

Muhlstein_24_29.indd 25 11/20/18 3:10 PM all by Czapski’s spiritual energy, he his Belarusian childhood, his youth in judged quite rightly that the unity of Saint Petersburg, his experience of the

his life was to be found in his passion widerski early period of the revolution, his Rus- for painting. “My feverish application sian friendships, and his perfect com- when painting,” noted Czapski in his mand of the language, he “perceive[d] diary, “may have been necessary over the Russian world . . . in all its complex, the years, it’s the only means I have of extremely interwoven, highly specific keeping from dissipation.” reality. This is why all absolute judg- He was never tempted to dabble in ments of it seem to [him] so false and abstract art and remained unswerv- even iniquitous.” ingly faithful to the precept of Turner Czapski was not a man who wrote (and secondarily of Elstir, the exem- in a linear fashion, hobbled by mere plary painter in Proust’s novel): paint chronology. Overwhelmed by memo- what you see, not what you know. The ries from different periods, he offers result was often a powerful canvas that, his reader a narrative that is often me- in Czapski’s own words, could set one’s andering but that conveys a powerful teeth on edge, with a subject that could image of Russia at war, the formidable as often as not be revolting. He noted government under Stalin, and the suf- that “a great many criticize me for ferings of the populace, while simulta- Weronika Orkisz/National Museum, Kraków/Jacek Ś bringing back from Marseille my Blind neously giving space to the moments of Man in front of the dirty green table of simple, primitive happiness he enjoyed a café instead of a view of the Old Port. after regaining his freedom, in spite of For painting the filthy steps of the Gare growing anguish as his search appeared Saint Lazare in Paris.” increasingly futile: But his range as a painter was not narrow. His work is full of contrasts, As soon as we enjoy slightly bet- equally rich in still lifes, landscapes, ter conditions, even if they are deeply felt portraits, and sketches, of far from the normal ones we were which he made thousands. For many once used to, each day brings ex- years, he exhibited regularly but sold periences and pleasures to blot out little, until a Swiss collector offered our bitter or painful memories. For to act as his dealer. Success followed every one of us at the time, not just immediately. He was eighty years old. being at liberty, not just the chance Money had never interested him be- to commune with women after two cause “he was made uncomfortable by years without seeing a single one, the monetary assessment of any item of but a piece of cheese, some meat supreme value.” Karpeles writes that and potatoes, and a glass of vodka when a German gallery suggested a se- or a bottle of beer were great treats. ries of shows of his works, provided he increase his prices tenfold, Józef Czapski: Poland (Bialołęka), 1982 During his stays in Moscow, he was once again able to buy books. A frivo- Czapski rejected the offer. He into the heart of things as if simply re- few days before his death, he scribbled lous one about Parisian life in 1890 wanted nothing to do with it, not suming a discussion. The age of his in- in the awkward handwriting of a blind amused him during the two nights he wanting to be trapped, he said, . . . terlocutor was of no importance to him. man, Bonnard, Matisse, Goya, Proust, spent waiting for a train in a packed selling “only to bankers and specu- He always maintained a striking and, in big capital letters across the station: lators.”. . .The artificial inflation of openness and youthfulness of spirit. pages, KATYN, KATYN, KATYN. the value of a work of art was not a At ninety, he fell in love with the work The entire floor was littered with game he saw himself playing. of Milton Avery: “It seems to me that hundreds of people, in an ex- Avery has figured out how to square the Inhuman Land is a memoir written tremely emaciated state. . . . On the On the other hand, an invitation circle. The bloody struggle between ab- between 1942 and 1947, focusing on floor lay the thin stumps of legs, to exhibit at the 1985 Paris Biennale stract and figurative painters that I’ve the year between Czapski’s liberation miserable, puffy faces, and heaps alongside painters who were half a seen and lived through seems resolved from the prisoner-of-war camp and his of ragged human figures in padded century younger than him gave him by this American painter.” Set free by arrival in Iran with Anders’s army, dur- jackets over their naked chests. . . . great pleasure. That pleasure, however, an artist who had achieved the synthe- ing which he traveled across the USSR I had always found it impossible didn’t last. He was horribly shocked sis he had long dreamed of, he went on on his mission to find some trace of the to understand how Leonardo and both by the paintings exhibited and the to produce an impressive series of still missing Polish officers. By virtue of the other Renaissance artists could general atmosphere of the event: lifes until his eyes finally failed him. Al- have been so creative in an era of though he stopped painting, he never- cruel tortures, of destruction and 2 he did practically until the day he My work is hanging next to another theless continued to keep his diary. A died, mixing thoughts, jotted notes, plague that wiped out entire cities. painter, who is showing one huge quotations, and sketches. A total of But now here I was . . . eagerly read- painting of a man pissing (literally) 2He never lost the habit he had begun in 274 notebooks are held in the Princes ing light, fragrant novellas . . .which on a corpse, and another, even big- adolescence of keeping a diary, which Czartoryski Library­ in Kraków.­ was not so much an escape from ger, of Menachem Begin sitting surrounding reality for me, but just in Hitler’s lap and nursing at his a way of dulling it. I was also suf- breast. On the day of the opening, fering from a hunger for books,

a live cow, painted red and green, widerski any book; those who have never was let loose to wander among the been deprived of reading matter galleries. for months on end can have no idea of what it is like. Czapski was eighty-nine, and his ability to revolt against the trampling of his val- To retain one’s sanity one must learn ues, of everything he respected, of what not necessarily to forget but at least to he considered just, had not slackened free oneself from the recollection of the over the years. His moral and intellec- horror of those experiences: “No man tual vigor never abandoned him. It is this could live or smile if he were always intensity that made him so engaging and reminiscing without ever erasing any of that Karpeles highlights so admirably. his memories.” Czapski was saved both I had known him since I was a child. by his tireless work and by his curiosity. He was a friend “from forever and for Certainly in those days a Rus- ever,” as he liked to say to my father, a sian might be afraid to talk to a for- Polish diplomat. For my sisters and me, eigner, but the interminable journeys wujek Józio (Uncle Józef) was part of the by train offered some possibilities for family. In these pages, I find him again Weronika Orkisz/National Museum, Kraków/Jacek Ś conversation: exactly as I remember him. Just over six feet six inches tall, he irresistibly called Nowhere in Russia did I ever man- to mind a Giacometti sculpture. When age to topple the walls of silence he strode briskly into a room, he never as often as in the trains, where the lost time on small talk: he leapt straight A page from Józef Czapski’s diary, 1966 clank and rattle, and the almost

26 The New York Review

Muhlstein_24_29.indd 26 11/20/18 3:10 PM anonymous, casual nature of the ants, and then the horizon captured his is much broader, as is the freedom encounters created a sense, maybe attention: with which he could move around and illusory, of less of a threat, less converse with Russians. Though his chance of being denounced. As soon as the gray sky cleared, it one conversation with Ilya Ehrenburg became strangely blue, acquiring a was a disappointment because of the He provides a lengthy account, for ex- brighter color than I had ever seen poet’s cowardice—Ehrenburg spoke ample, of the conversation that he had before, vivid peacock-blue. Was it “in a loud voice, as if assuming . . . the with a railroad worker who told him the contrast with the brown clay room was bugged”—his meeting with about the great wave of panic in Oc- and the pink branches? Or was it Anna Akhmatova in Tashkent, during Gifts for the tober 1941, when the Germans were really an unusual color, different which she recited a poem to him about threatening Moscow. The man had from the sky in Poland, or in Italy, Petersburg/Leningrad, brought him Intellectually experienced starvation and intolerable and totally different from the sky unexpected joy. They met once again, living conditions, and yet “he admit- in Vologda and Gryazovets, where in Paris in 1965, when he found her, as Curious ted to being extremely fond of reading. above the subtle green of the birch Karpeles writes, a “fragile emissary He talked with delight about Dickens’s trees it was so pale blue as to look from an unburied past.” Nicholas Nickleby,” and confessed that diluted, like watercolor? After months of effort, he was forced New Books he had once read through the night a to face facts: “I . . . still had no idea if my novel by Sir Walter Scott. Czapski’s account of his years in the comrades were alive. . . . There were no from the MIT Czapski’s painter’s eye rescued him USSR is stunning in its descriptions more doors for me to knock on in Mos- from despair. That is where we find the and its variations of vantage points. cow in the hope of them being opened justification for Karpeles’s interpreta- The cruelly constrained horizon of a to me.” There was nothing for him to do Press tion of his life. While he was in Russia, prisoner of war opens out onto a vast but to follow the Polish army and leave painting was of course out of the ques- country that he has the freedom to the USSR. He went through one last tion, but he could sketch and, above all, crisscross. There is a similar chroni- checkpoint, passed through a gate sur- jot down the things that struck him. cle by the great Polish writer Gustaw rounded by barbed wire, and entered Quite often in Czapski’s work, paint- Herling-Grudziński. Freed from the Iran. “I automatically crossed myself ing, drawing, and writing overlap. He Gulag, he managed to travel thousands and felt the driver’s hand giving my arm writes like a painter. As he approached of miles to join Anders’s army. But a friendly squeeze as he said: ‘Well, Cap- Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, he was first all his energy was focused on the dif- tain, paradise is behind you now.’” and foremost astounded by the art of ficulties of overcoming the challenges —Translated from the French irrigation as practiced by the inhabit- along the way. Czapski’s point of view by Antony Shugaar

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28 The New York Review

Muhlstein_24_29.indd 28 11/20/18 3:10 PM