Memories of Russia
THE FIRST thing people noticed about Józef Czapski was his height. Like many of the men (and some of the women) in his family, he was very tall. He was also thin and somewhat awkward. His friend Wojciech Karpiński called him a smiling Don Quixote. His biographer Eric Karpeles has compared him to “an elongated, striding man by Giacometti,” capturing not only his tallness but also his shy way of moving in company, among people for the most part much shorter than he was. Mary McCarthy made a similar observation. Describing, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, her visit to a packed show of Vermeer, she writes that the only person enjoying it was “a Polish painter I know called Czapski . . . he is an old man, six and a half feet tall, and he was moving contentedly through the crowd like an ostrich, taking pictorial notes in a sketchbook.”
Czapski towered over everybody, and yet Polish friends and acquaintances referred to him by a diminutive: Józio. There was something childlike about him, an enthusiasm, an openness, curiosity, and liveliness, a quickness of thought and feeling. Worn down by war and exile, Czapski grew old early—in letters to Ludwik Hering, probably the love of his life, written in 1947, when he was only fifty-one, he is already complaining about getting old—and living as he did almost to the end of the twentieth century, he was old for a long time. Still, he was always Józio.
Józef Czapski was born in 1896 in Prague, in a Thun palace that belonged to his mother’s family, and grew up in Belorussia, then part of the Russian Empire. He came from an aristocratic family, and many of his Baltic-German, Austrian, and Polish ancestors and elders, for whom nationalism was a form of parochialism, were in the service of the Russian or Austrian Empires. Czapski’s father was so indifferent to his Polish background that he learned Polish only as an adult. His mother, however, though Austrian, felt a deep affection for the suffering people of Poland, divided as their country had been between Russia, Austria, and Prussia since the eighteenth century, and she passed that love on to her children. For all that, it was to Russia that Czapski was sent for his education, attending gymnasium, military academy, and law school in Saint Petersburg.
The main dates of Czapski’s life rhyme with the historical events that shook Europe throughout the last century. He was in Saint Petersburg at the start of the First World War, when the city was renamed Petrograd, and also for the February Revolution of 1917. Returning to Poland, he enlisted in the Polish army, though his pacifist convictions led him to withdraw from it almost right away, a decision he was to regret and reverse a year later. He fought in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921, and he was sent on a mission to Petrograd to find five missing Polish military men, a mission that was unsuccessful because the men had already been killed by their Russian captors. In the 1920s he studied painting in Kraków and Paris before returning to Warsaw. When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, Czapski, as a reserve officer, was mobilized immediately and taken prisoner twenty-seven days later. He was one of some fifteen thousand Polish prisoners the Germans turned over to the Soviets, with whom they were allied at that point. The prisoners were then transported into the Soviet Union and placed in camps at Starobielsk, Kozielsk, and Ostashkov, most of them to be secretly executed by the Soviet military police between April and May 1940. Czapski was in a group of four thousand Polish officers who were held at Starobielsk. Thanks to inquiries made by his sister and his influential Austrian and German relatives, he was moved to another camp and survived. Out of almost four thousand officers, only seventy-nine survived. “I am one of them,” Czapski wrote in his Memories of Starobielsk. “All the others disappeared without a trace.”
In all, Czapski spent close to two years in Soviet camps before the German invasion of the USSR transformed the Poles from enemies of the state into welcome allies. Amnesty was extended to imprisoned Poles and at least two hundred thousand were liberated from prisons, camps, and forced settlements. Freed, Czapski traveled to the south of the Soviet Union to join the Polish army that General Władysław Anders was assembling there. Czapski closely collaborated with Anders, who, anxious to discover the whereabouts of the missing fifteen thousand Polish soldiers, delegated Czapski to look for them. Thousands upon thousands of formerly deported or imprisoned Polish citizens, now emaciated, sick, crippled men, women, and children, each with a terrible story to tell, were coming in, and Czapski, trying to locate the missing, conducted hundreds of interviews with them. He also approached the Soviet authorities about the dead men. As in 1918 in Petrograd, it was to no avail.
On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers in the forest of Katyń. Czapski would make it his lifelong duty to remind the world of the officers’ fate and that they had been killed by the Soviets (as the Germans said), rather than Germans (as the Soviets insisted until a couple of decades ago).
The Polish–Soviet truce eventually soured, and, helped by the British, the newly created Polish army crossed the Soviet border into Iran. Czapski would serve with it, first in the Middle East and then in Italy. As a propaganda and education officer in newly liberated Rome, Czapski was one of a small group of people who founded the Institut Littéraire, which would come to be known by the name of its monthly journal, Kultura, and would prove to be the most important postwar émigré Polish center. With Czesław Miłosz and Witold Gombrowicz writing for it, the journal helped to mold the opposition within communist Poland. Kultura soon moved to the suburbs of Paris, as did Czapski, who—with his sister—settled in a wing of the institute, where he would remain until his death. In Paris he gave speeches, fundraised, promoted Polish culture and causes, wrote Inhuman Land (about his experience in the Soviet Union and with Anders’s army), and was active in the anti-Stalinist work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And he had time at last to devote to the passion of his life—painting. When he died in 1993, almost blind, he was still drawing, though he could only manage a few shaky lines.
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Czapski was an autobiographical writer, always connecting his judgments, thoughts, and analyses to the experiences of his life. We can date an exhibit that inspired his interest in an artist, we know when he read a book that is a point of departure for a larger essay, we see thinkers or writers in the moment they came into his life. He had many friends who wrote memoirs, and he himself participated in events analyzed by historians and journalists. He was also an almost compulsive letter writer, bursting with admiration for books he read, reacting to current events, putting to paper his feelings and thoughts. He was a continuous notetaker, hoarding not only words but also sketches, quick visual jottings. As a painter, he rejected abstraction; as a writer, he disdained distant theories. He was serious (though sometimes funny or ironic), never flippant or useless. As he said many times, remembrance and faithfulness were most important to him, especially in matters of Russia and his lost compatriots.
Czapski’s influences as a writer and thinker were both Polish and Russian. He never rejected the legacy of either country, though in Inhuman Land, his masterpiece, he is very clear about the brutality of Soviet life when he was there during the Second World War. Leo Tolstoy was the first and most important Russian influence on him; it was under the spell of Tolstoy’s work that, on leaving the Polish army in 1917, Czapski and two army friends returned to revolutionary Petrograd, where, joined by his two sisters, they formed a commune and tried to live by pacifist and evangelical precepts. That experiment did not last long. In Petrograd, too, he made the acquaintance of the writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky; his wife, the poet Zinaida Gippius; and their housemate at the time, the critic and editor Dmitry Filosofov. It was a transformative experience. Czapski would write: “I owe to Merezhkovsky a totally new attitude to history, to Catholicism, a multifaceted approach to issues, more attentive, with historical perspectives. He told me to read Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Rozanov. Never later did I live through a period of such a power of incubation.”
The work of Vasily Rozanov, who had been close to Merezhkovsky and Filosofov, was especially important to Czapski. Rozanov was a tormented spiritual seeker who only found some rest from doubt when, destitute and hungry, he arrived at Sergiyev Posad, the heart of Orthodox Christianity, to die. Czapski was attracted by Rozanov’s quarrel with God, his compassion, and his ardent wish to reduce human suffering (he is a figure comparable to Simone Weil, who also meant a great deal to Czapski), and he would revisit Rozanov’s writing all through his life. As to the anti-Semitism for which Rozanov was also notorious, Czapski would cite Merezhkovsky’s description of him as “a jellyfish, beautiful in the depth of the sea, shapeless and slimy when thrown on land.”
Educated in Russia, Czapski awakened to his Polish roots rather late. In 1919, when he was already twenty-three, he picked up The Legend of Young Poland by Stanisław Brzozowski in a dentist’s waiting room in Kraków. “My access to Polishness was difficult though obvious,” Czapski declared in his old age. “It was like a conversion. Suddenly [reading that book] I saw that I was a Pole. Not that I became one, but that I always was a Pole only I did not know about it. . . . Thanks to Brzozowski, I saw that Poland can and has to exist, that it is necessary to fight for her. Yes, it was a kind of conversion.” Czapski described Brzozowski as “a follower of Marx and Cardinal Newman, [a thinker] with a mind that was complex, multidimensional, often self-contradictory”—the sort of thinking Czapski found most inspiring. Brzozowski too was a product of Russian schools and an early education in Russian literature. Both men adored the work of the nineteenth-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid, an estranged, lonely exile. The only book Czapski received in the mail while a prisoner in Starobielsk was a two-volume edition of Norwid’s letters, small books he kept and reread till his death in his room in the Parisian suburbs.
Life as service, as a continuous striving for an impossible perfection—these were the defining marks of the writers that Czapski returned to over and over. Such were also the forces that drove his own self. Rebellion against God, he once said to Karpiński, against man, against life, was perhaps a foundation of life: “Perhaps God, if he exists, appreciates those who rebel against him.”
He wrote books, articles, essays, and diary entries in a supple, brisk, precise Polish that is a real pleasure to read. He freely inserted words from Russian, German, and French, using them whenever he felt they were needed; plenty of literary quotations served him as his “golden nails” to hang his thoughts or reminiscences upon. In his texts he had a painter’s attention to a face, a sunset, or a landscape, but also to a street scene, a quick meaningful gesture. The director Andrzej Wajda admired his ability for cinematic framing. In a museum, Wajda said, Czapski saw not only a painting but also the people looking at it. We are back here to the image of ostrich-like Czapski sketching at the Vermeer exhibit. Once Wajda visited a Francis Bacon exhibit with Czapski. “Looking at Czapski [looking at Bacon], I felt that his presence there was extremely important, necessary, and natural. And that Bacon should paint him.”
The image of Czapski painted by Bacon has stayed in my mind. His writings (more than his paintings) reveal a persona composed of feuding parts. That is one of the reasons he has not found (as yet) his place in the Polish literary canon. Miłosz, though friends with Czapski, omitted him from his authoritative History of Polish Literature (1969). Czapski’s output is confusing, difficult to classify, and still in part unknown. Only now, as more and more pages of his journals are deciphered (not an easy task) and published, as we have new collections of his letters and his essays, we are gaining greater clarity about his importance as a painter, writer, and witness who captured his century.
Or, I should rather say, a painter, writer, and witness who tried to capture his century by continually reaching for a clearer image, for greater adequacy to what he saw, what he felt, what he dreamt. It is not only his tallness that made people compare him to Don Quixote. Czapski was in continuous spiritual motion; his work does not seem to be finished, as the Russian writings collected here prove very well. In many of them he revisits his moments of learning and awakenings; in others, he is preserving—with remembrance and faithfulness—human suffering and resistance. Perhaps this is why, when thinking about him and Russia, I have still another image of him. I see him in a camp—the image is gray—standing in line (to help a prisoner who cannot stand), bowed under rain, with a drop hanging from his nose. I remember this image from a book I have read but cannot locate. Or I could have seen it in my dreams, not unlike the dream about Kolyma that Czapski recorded in his journal on November 6, 1978. He dreamt that in this notorious Soviet camp he encountered some “wonderful Poles . . . who lived there and organized themselves and [I felt] a glow of such a strong friendship towards them . . . this happy joy of meeting these unknown, noble people in Kolyma is a reminder of old experiences in the Soviet Russia.” Wonderful and noble. Just like this compassionate Don Quixote in black and white.
—IRENA GRUDZIŃSKA GROSS
I wish to thank Alissa Valles, Tomek Gross, and Mikołaj Nowak-Rogoziński for their help with this essay.
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In Memory of Wojciech Karpiński
(1943–2020)
EDITOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK originated in 2003, when “The Russian Background,” “Fertile Indolence,” “On Vision and Contemplation,” “On Intervals in Work,” and “On Leaping and Flying,” were translated for the essay collection Polish Writers on Writing. Its editor, Adam Zagajewski, had introduced me to Józef Czapski’s writings a few years previously, and invited me to choose a text by Czapski on the anthology’s theme, taken at its broadest to be that of creative work. These short essays are not about writing (although Czapski knew that in the Russian idiom, Orthodox icons are “written,” rather than painted), but they are among the subtlest reflections I have come across on work in any art. Czapski’s eye being simultaneously that of an artist and that of a historical actor and witness, it seems right that his short series on painting, written on a train from Moscow to Kuibyshev in the middle of World War II, should sit at the heart of this collection of essays, many of which touch on history at its most brutal.
The individual essays gathered here contain a variety of insights, but I would argue that what unites them is a kind of defense of intimacy, if one takes that principle in its richest philosophical sense to mean the inner life, or what the essay “Necessity and Grace” calls the “intimate life of man”. The twentieth century staged pitiless assaults on the very notion of the self, of the inner eye, the inner voice (what Czapski in his essay on Aleksandr Blok calls inner freedom), as well as relentlessly undermining the physical basis for intimate consciousness—the integrity, dignity, privacy, and very identity of countless individual human beings, both in life and after death, burying them under tons of earth, ash, and lies. In the era of mass media and mass graves, Czapski managed to preserve the capacity to see clearly, yet with rich feeling, in both directions, inward and outward. It is to be hoped that his journals—his masterpiece—will in time become available to an English readership.
Czapski’s life and work can give rise to very different kinds of books. When offered the chance to assemble one, I chose as a principle of selection what Czapski calls tło rosyjskie, “the Russian background,” which I take to mean not only his Soviet experiences in wartime, but the role Russia and its culture played in his upbringing, education, thought, and art as a whole. He chose to live life as a Pole, but much of his battle was fought on Russian soil. He will continue to live not only in his art but in poets’ biographies and dedications, in war documentation archives and the recollections of the many who encountered him in the course of his long life. I owe to Adam Zagajewski the opportunity I had to meet several people who knew Czapski, including Paweł and Piotr Kloczowski, Elżbieta Łubieńska, Czesław Miłosz, and Henryk and Jacek Woźniakowski, all of whom were able to illuminate different facets of an extraordinary man. Teresa Dzieduszycka, Katarzyna Herbert, Wojciech Karpiński, and Barbara Toruńczyk also shared memories and materials, and Irena Grudzińska Gross, who honors this book with an introduction, generously gave vital knowledge and support while it was being completed.
—ALISSA VALLES
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In memory of Adam Zagajewski
(1945–2021)