Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History

by Jozef Czapski, Alissa Valles (Translator), Irena Grudzinska Gross (Introduction)

Overview

Vivid accounts of life in a Soviet prison camp by the author of Inhuman Land.

Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, Józef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre in the forest of Katyń in April 1940. Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait, others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with respect, as Czapski describes their struggle to remain human under hopeless circumstances. Essays on art, history, and literature complement the memoir, showing Czapski’s lifelong engagement with Russian culture. The short pieces on painting that he wrote while on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s strategic base in Central Asia stand among his most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374864
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.02(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Józef Czapski (1896–1993) was a writer and artist, as well as an officer in the Polish army. NYRB Classics publishes his work of reportage about the Katyn Massacre, Inhuman Land, and a collection of his lectures on Proust during his time as a prisoner of war in a Soviet prison camp, Lost Time. New York Review Books also publishes Eric Karpeles’s biography of Czapski, Almost Nothing. 

Alissa Valles is the author of the poetry collection Hospitium. Her translations include Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems and Collected Prose and Ryszard Krynicki’s Our Life Grows (NYRB Poets). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Irena Grudzińska Gross’s books include Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine, and the Romantic Imagination. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Editor's Note xvii

Memories of Starobielsk 1

Essays, Interviews, Letters (1943-1987)

The Russian Background 45

The Speed and Quality of Work 51

On Intervals in Work 57

On Vision and Contemplation 59

Fertile Indolence 61

On Leaping and Flying 63

Conversation About Starobielsk 67

God's Will 74

Blok and Inner Freedom 82

Montagnes Russes: On Remizov 91

Katyn and the Thaw 101

Nationality or Exceptionality? 108

Dervish: On Chaïm Soutine 116

On Anna Akhmatova 126

Recollections 133

Necessity and Grace 198

On Chicherin 205

Letter to a Russian Friend 210

From a Letter to Joanna Pollakówna 218

Notes 219

Editorial Reviews

What distinguishes Memories of Starobielsk and deepens our understanding of the events Czapski lived through is the vision he imparts of a Europe that the Soviets (and the Nazis) had attempted to destroy. . . . Memories of Starobielsk shows the victims not as soldiers but as doctors, professors, engineers, writers, translators—people of education and character, products of a civilization that Stalinism could not accommodate.” —Philip Ó. Ceallaigh, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Józef Czapski was a beautiful human being, courageous, noble but also hardworking; occasionally a soldier, journalist, diarist, always writing, drawing, always with a sketchbook in hand, always ready to help friends and strangers. In his person high intelligence and remarkable artistic talent met with an active, almost naive goodness—a rather rare combination, as we know” —Adam Zagajewski

From the Publisher