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'Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp' and Czapski, 'Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942'

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'Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp' and Czapski, 'Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942' H-Poland Mazurczak on Czapski, 'Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp' and Czapski, 'Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942' Review published on Monday, June 3, 2019 Józef Czapski. Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Translated by Eric Karpeles. NYRB Classics Series. New York: New York Review Books, 2018. Illustrations. 128 pp. $15.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-68137-258-7.Józef Czapski. Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. NYRB Classics Series. New York: New York Review Books, 2018. 480 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-68137-256-3. Reviewed by Filip Mazurczak (Jagiellonian University)Published on H-Poland (June, 2019) Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53634 The New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics series’ recent publication of two works by the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski,Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 and Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, can only be described as timely. It nearly coincides with the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, during which Poland was the victim of not only the Third Reich but also the Soviet Union, and comes amid growing historical revisionism and amnesia in Russia. These books, particularlyInhuman Land, are exceedingly useful in understanding Russian society under the Soviet regime and the repercussions of that seventy-four-year terror that are still evident today, as well as the intellectual amid extreme persecution. Born in Prague, raised outside Minsk, and educated in St. Petersburg and Krakow, Czapski was truly cosmopolitan. In 1939, he was conscripted into the Polish Army and taken prisoner by the Soviets. Miraculously spared from the infamous Katyn massacre of twenty-two thousand Polish officers by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), Czapski would spend the next two years in Soviet prison camps. After Operation Barbarossa was launched on June 22, 1941, the Soviets were desperate for men to fight against the German invaders. Thus under the Sikorski-Mayski agreement, they amnestied tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war—starved, diseased, lice-infested, and afflicted with scurvy and night blindness after two years under the extreme conditions of Soviet captivity—and allowed them to form the Polish II Corps under the command of General Władysław Anders alongside the Allies. Anders’s Army, as it is commonly known, made its way south and west across the Middle East and participated in the Italian campaign; it is especially remembered for its enormous contribution to the Battle of Monte Cassino. Among those amnestied was Czapski, who would become the head of the Department of Propaganda and Information at the Polish II Corps’ General Staff. Inhuman Land begins with his liberation from captivity. To look for arrivals to the new formation and facilitate their adaptation from gulag to army life, Czapski traveled across the Soviet Union. He became increasingly aware of the fact that twenty- two thousand or so of his comrades were missing. Only later would he realize that they had been Citation: H-Net Reviews. Mazurczak on Czapski, 'Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp' and Czapski, 'Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942'. H-Poland. 06-03-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/4177712/mazurczak-czapski-lost-time-lectures-proust-soviet-prison-camp-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Poland murdered. Inhuman Land is Czapski’s memoir of his sojourn across the USSR in 1941 and 1942. For historians, the greatest value of Czapski’s work is its unique perspective. From Yevgenia Ginzburg to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czapski’s close postwar collaborator Gustaw Herling- Grudziński, a large body of literature, both fiction and memoirs, as seen from the perspective of victims of Soviet repression, has appeared throughout the decades. Although Czapski was certainly a victim, he makes very few references to his own ordeals in the camps. Rather, Inhuman Land reads like a diary, an immensely influential genre in postwar Polish literature, as the popularity of diaries of Leopold Tyrmand, Witold Gombrowicz, or Herling-Grudziński shows. The work is a scrapbook of recollections of conversations with strangers and officials as well as sensory experiences. It is an invaluable piece of sociological observation that can help the contemporary reader to understand Homo Sovieticus. Czapski is a critical spectator of Russian society, and he would likely agree with the views of his compatriot, the late historian Richard Pipes, who believed Stalinism to be the logical culmination of a millennium of authoritarian Russian political culture. In his recollections of encounters with ordinary Russians, Czapski depicts them as overwhelmingly true believers in the ideology that led to the murder of millions of them: “To judge from the conversations I heard, it seemed that the vast majority of them really did believe in Stalin’s infallibility and also that outside the Soviet Union there was nothing but ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’” (p. 162). As a Pole, Czapski was treated by ordinary Russians as a “fascist,” because that was the line that Soviet propaganda had fed them for the past two years. In April 2019, after more than a quarter-century of access to scholarship independent of state censorship that has revealed the extent of Stalinist crimes against humanity, a poll by the Levada Center showed that 70 percent of Russians viewed Stalin favorably. Thus Czapski’s observations cannot be dismissed and can help one to better understand Russian society today. As a painter, Czapski offers numerous assessments of the aesthetic failure of socialist realist art. “As I searched from Moscow to Ashgabat, I did not see a single picture that wasn’t atrocious or hopelessly mediocre,” he wryly muses (pp. 66-67). His observations are reminiscent of the famous poem “The Power of Taste” (2008) by Zbigniew Herbert, who wrote that it was not heroism but a sense of aesthetics that led to the rejection of communism. The 2018 NYRB Classics edition of Inhuman Land also contains the English translation of six chapters Czapski wrote to accompany the German edition of the book to give German readers historical context. These deal with the history of Poland during World War II and are helpful to contemporary Anglophone readers, who unfortunately for the most part are unfamiliar with Polish wartime history, and NYRB Classics deserves praise for including them. Apart from chapters dealing with the formation of Anders’s Army and the Warsaw Uprising, this section contains a chapter simply titled “The Germans,” which is a fascinating essay depicting the inner struggle many progressive Polish intellectuals dealt with after the war. At various points in Inhuman Land, Czapski’s rejection of the anti-Semitism growing in interwar Poland and sympathy for the Ukrainian position in the Polish-Ukrainian political conflict at that time are clear. In addition to his distaste for ethnic chauvinism, Czapski himself was of partial German and Austrian ancestry. In this essay, he depicts his inner conflict between these facts and the awareness of the horrors Citation: H-Net Reviews. Mazurczak on Czapski, 'Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp' and Czapski, 'Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942'. H-Poland. 06-03-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/4177712/mazurczak-czapski-lost-time-lectures-proust-soviet-prison-camp-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Poland Germany had inflicted on his nation. Ultimately, though, he concludes that reading about German resisters to Nazism cleared him of any prejudices. In his introduction to Inhuman Land, Timothy Snyder identifies Czapski as espousing Tolstoyan Christian pacifist views in the interwar period. Unfortunately, Czapski does not explain if the horrors of the war further rooted him in these convictions or if, on the contrary, they proved to him that si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war). Perhaps this results from the fact that Czapski’s writing is never self-indulgent; he is not interested in himself but in the greater sociopolitical forces at work, which gives his writing a universalist dimension. While NYRB Classics deserves praise for making this outstanding contribution to Russian, Soviet, and communist studies available to American readers, this edition does contain a couple factual errors. In his introduction to Inhuman Land, Snyder gives the wrong date for the signing of the peace treaty that concluded the Polish-Bolshevik War. Meanwhile, the back cover incorrectly states that the Katyn massacre was “a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility.” While the Soviets did deny their culpability for Katyn for fifty years, instead blaming the war crime on the Germans, Mikhail Gorbachev did confess to the NKVD’s responsibility in 1990. The second book by Czapski that NYRB Classics has recently published isLost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. In 1926, Czapski read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume opus In Search of Lost Time (1913). Thirteen years later, as a prisoner of war of the Soviets at an NKVD camp in Gryazovets, Russia, he gave his countrymen lectures from memory (naturally, he had no access to books on the topic at the time) on Proust; they gladly listened to him passionately discuss a writer about whom they knew nothing. One may ask why NYRB Classics has decided to publish Lost Time in book form in English.
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