MEMORIES OF STAROBIELSK
1. Aleksander Świętochowski (1849–1938), prominent positivist thinker and writer, editor of the periodical Prawda (Truth), champion of education as a remedy for social ills, a critic of both capitalism and socialism, and the author of History of the Polish Peasants (1925–1928).
2. Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), a leading Polish Romantic poet and dramatist often grouped with Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, who were described as playing the role of “bards” or poet-prophets in Polish culture.
3. November 11 is celebrated as the anniversary of Poland’s independence in 1918.
4. Alexis Carrel (1873–1944), French surgeon and biologist (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1912). His book L’Homme, cet inconnu (Man, the Unknown, 1935) became a best seller.
5. Two characters in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy (1884–1888).
6. A member of a bohemian subculture in Lvov that flourished from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and which had its own Polish dialect, a batiar was generally thought of as an impecunious, bighearted city dweller prone to good-natured joking.
7. The Intermarium (Międzymorze in Polish) was a plan pursued after World War I by Marshal Józef Piłsudski for a federation of Central and Eastern European countries. It was intended to emulate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which existed from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century), and stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
8. The story is told in Mark 5:21–43, Matthew 9:18–26, and Luke 8:40–56.
9. Or-Ot was the pen name of Artur Franciszek Oppman (1867–1931), a poet of the Young Poland period. The poem “Letter from Siberia,” in which a Siberian exile addresses his mother, was published in a collection in 1926.
10. Jan Lechoń (1899–1956), a Polish poet, critic, and diplomat who was one of the founders of the Skamander literary movement. He committed suicide in New York City.
11. Lech Józef Piwowar (1909–1940), a poet, satirist, journalist, translator, critic, and Polish infantry officer murdered at Katyń.
12. “No greater pain than to remember happy times in the midst of misery” (Inferno, canto V, lines 121–23).
13. Edward Manteuffel-Szoege (1908–1940), Polish artist who took part in art competitions at the Olympics in Berlin in 1936. Arrested by the NKVD and executed in the Soviet Union.
14. Play by Stanisław Wyspiański published in 1903.
15. Juliusz Osterwa (1885–1947), prominent actor and theorist of theater, who studied under Stanislavsky in Moscow after having spent time in exile in Russia during World War I; founder of the experimental Teatr Reduta in Warsaw, a laboratory stage that became a major independent theater with an institute attached to it to train actors.
16. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874–1941), poet, critic, and translator of French literary classics; member of the Young Poland movement, murdered in July 1941 in the Nazi “massacre of Lvov professors.”
17. Lagry, “camps”; ocheredi, “queues”; pajki, “rations.”
THE RUSSIAN BACKGROUND
1. Czapski’s lectures on Proust were published by NYRB Classics as Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp in 2018.
2. Term derived from Komitet Paryski, or “KP” (Paris Committee), the group of artists with whom Czapski traveled to Paris in the 1920s.
3. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), writer, painter, philosopher, theorist, playwright, novelist, photographer; active from the 1910s through the interwar period. Tytus Czyżewski (1880–1945), painter, art theoretician, poet, and playwright, member of the Polish avant-garde group known as the Formists in the 1920s. Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952), avant-garde painter born in Minsk and active in Warsaw from 1923; with Henryk Berlewi he founded the constructivist group Blok.
ON VISION AND CONTEMPLATION
1. Ignacy Aleksander Gierymski (1850–1901), late nineteenth-century painter whose work was a bridge between realism and impressionism in Poland.
CONVERSATION ABOUT STAROBIELSK
1. The Korpus Obrony Pogranicza (Border Protection Corps), a Polish military formation created in 1924 to defend the country’s eastern borders against armed Soviet incursions and local bandits.
2. White Eagle (Orzel Bialy), a weekly published from 1941 to 1946 by the propaganda arm of the Second Polish army, first in the Soviet Union and later wherever the army was stationed in the Middle East and Italy; in 1946 it was banned by the Communist authorities in Poland.
BLOK AND INNER FREEDOM
1. Konstantin Simonov (1915–1979): poet, war reporter for Red Star and later Pravda, playwright, novelist, editor of Novy Mir (1946–1950, 1954–1958), and from 1967 to 1979 the secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Aleksandr Fadeyev (1901–1956), novelist who won the Stalin Prize in 1946 for the World War II novel The Young Guard and cofounded the Soviet Writers’ Union; Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), novelist and war reporter, coeditor with Vasily Grossman of The Black Book of Soviet Jewry; Konstantin Fedin (1892-1977): began his literary career as a member of the Serapion Brothers, pro-Revolution but in favor of independent art, later took the Party line on socialist realism and acted as first secretary of the Writers’ Union steering committee (1959–1971).
2. Nina Berberova, Alexandre Blok et son temps, suivi d’un choix de poemes (1947).
3. Witold Olszewski’s novel Budujemy kanał: Wspomnienia kierownika Biura Planowania (We’re Building a Canal: Memoirs of a Planning Bureau Director) was published in 1947 as a satire of the totalitarian Soviet state and its propaganda.
MONTAGNES RUSSES
1. Literally “Russian mountains,” this is also the French name for roller coasters.
2. The term for members of the Changing Signposts (Smena vekh) movement among Russian emigrants in the early 1920s, supporters of a conciliatory stance toward the Bolsheviks, motivated by the hope of steering Soviet Russia toward a more “acceptable” form.
3. A sorcerer in Polish folklore and literature who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for special powers and meets a tragic fate.
4. Eclaireurs: “scouts”; émeutes: “riots”; ruminent: “they ruminate.”
5. Karl Radek, pseudonym of Karol Sobelsohn (1885–1939), was a Marxist Social Democrat active in Germany and in Polish lands before World War I who became a Communist leader in the Soviet Union.
KATYŃ AND THE THAW
1. The Quiet American (1955).
2. Bolesław Bogdan Piasecki (1915–1979), far-right-wing nationalist Polish politician before the war and a postwar collaborator with the Communist government; founder of the Catholic organization PAX in 1945.
3. Stanisław Vikentyevich Kosior (1889–1939), Soviet member of the Politburo and deputy prime minister; of Polish parentage. Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseyenko (1883–1938), Ukrainian Bolshevik politician. Béla Kun (1886–1938), Hungarian Communist activist and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919; executed in the Great Purge. Adolf Warski (1868–1937), Polish journalist and Communist theoretician executed by Stalin. Leński was the nickname of Julian Leszczyński (1899–1939), Polish activist and journalist who headed the Stalinist faction in the Communist Party of Poland. He led the Party in the 1930s, but was killed in the Great Purge. Bruno Jasieński (1901–1938), poet, novelist, playwright, and important force in creating Polish Futurism in the 1920s. A Communist active in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, he perished in the Great Purge.
4. Viktor Alter (1890–1943) and Henryk Ehrlich (1882–1942), activists of the socialist Jewish Bund. Ehrlich was a member of the Petrograd Soviet; he and Alter were imprisoned and executed in the Soviet Union during World War II despite interventions by Eleanor Roosevelt and others.
5. Yan Borisovich Gamarnik (1894–1937), Ukrainian-born Revolutionary leader, later commissar on the southern front in the civil war, and head of political administration of the Red Army from 1930 to his death, by suicide, in 1937.
6. As Applebaum writes in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, PAX was “A loyal, legal, pro-communist Catholic ‘opposition’ party, the only one that would ever be allowed to exist in communist Poland or indeed anywhere else in communist Europe.”
7. Polish artist, 1889–1950.
NATIONALITY OR EXCEPTIONALITY?
1. The Poznań protests of June 1956 set off a wave of large demonstrations against the Polish Communist government, culminating in October 1956, when a reformist government, which was granted some independence from the Soviet Union, was allowed to take power.
2. Yelena Dmitriyevna Stasova (1873–1966) Russian revolutionary and Comintern representative, president of International Red Aid from 1927 to 1937, and editor of International Literature from 1938 to 1946.
3. Czapski may be referring to Miłosz’s essay “Stereotyp u Conrada” (The Stereotype in Conrad), included in the collection Conrad żywy (The Living Conrad, 1957), edited by W. Tarnawski.
4. “Arrogant Pole.” Quoted from Pushkin’s 1831 poem “To the Slanderers of Russia.”
5. Franciszek Henryk Duchiński (1816–1893), Polish ethnographer and historian, émigré activist.
6. Wacław Alfred Zbyszewski (1903–1985), Polish journalist and publicist who lived in London from 1939.
DERVISH
1. “I’ve decided to return to Chartres, I’m too sad. . . . I decided not to accept the woman writer’s invitation, she’s too boring.”
2. Claude Roger-Marx (1888–1977), French writer, playwright, art critic, and historian.
3. Emil Szittya (1886–1964), Hungarian-born French artist and author of Soutine et son temps (1955).
4. Camille Mauclair (1872–1945), French writer and art critic.
5. Waldemar George (1893–1970), Polish-French art critic.
6. Olga Sacharoff (1889–1967), Russian-Spanish artist; Hana Orloff (1888–1968), French-Israeli sculptor and decorative artist.
7. Leopold Zborowski (1889–1932), Polish writer and art dealer.
8. Madeleine Castaing (1894–1992), French antiques dealer and interior designer, supporter of Soutine.
ON ANNA AKHMATOVA
1. Alexey Alexandrovich Surkov (1899–1983), Russian Soviet poet, editor, critic, and head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, 1953–1959.
2. Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982), celebrated Russian-Jewish linguist and literary theorist; in the United States from 1941 and at Harvard University from 1949.
3. Sergey Konstantinovich Makovsky (1877–1962) Russian poet, art critic, and editor of the important arts journal Apollon. Anna Akhmatova disputed many of the claims in his 1955 memoir, Portraits of Contemporaries. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891–1938), Russian poet.
4. Maria Dąbrowska (1889–1965), celebrated Polish novelist, playwright, critic, and translator; social and political activist who after 1956 opposed the Polish Communist regime.
5. Stanisław Baliński (1898–1984), Polish poet and writer; a diplomat in London from 1940–1945, he remained in emigration after the war. Antoni Słonimski (1895–1976), Polish poet of the Skamander group and during the Thaw (1956–1959), president of the Union of Polish Writers.
6. Baliński’s “Warsaw Carol 1939” is a poem addressed to the Virgin Mary.
7. An early title for Akhmatova’s “Poem Without a Hero,” composed from 1940 to 1962.
RECOLLECTIONS
1. Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868–1927), Polish novelist, dramatist, poet, and cultural provocateur of the Young Poland movement, who wrote in both Polish and German.
2. Janusz Korczak (1878/79–1942): renowned pedagogue and writer, who established a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw between 1911 and 1912; he served as an army doctor during World War I but returned to work with orphans, enabling children to run the orphanage as a miniature republic with its own parliament, court, and newspaper. After the Nazi occupation in 1939, instead of seeking sanctuary for himself, he remained with the orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto and went with them when they were deported to Treblinka in 1942. Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925), eminent Polish novelist and playwright associated with the Young Poland movement.
3. Stanisław Leopold Brzozowski (1878–1911), philosopher, writer, publicist, and influential critic of Polish social and philosophical thought and of the traditionalism and provincialism of nineteenth-century Poland. His denunciatory Legend of Young Poland: Studies on the Structure of the Cultural Spirit appeared in 1910.
4. Marian Zdziechowski (1861–1938), Polish philosopher and cultural historian, a critic of fascist and Communist totalitarianism.
5. Jean Colin d’Amiens (1927–1959), French painter.
6. Antoni Józef Marylski-Łuszczewski (1894–1973), social activist and editor who engaged in nonviolent service with the Polish Home Army during World War II; he founded an institute for the blind at Laski in Poland and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1971.
7. In 1917, when Marshal Piłsudski forbade Polish soldiers to swear a loyalty oath to the Central Powers, he was imprisoned at Magdeburg.
8. Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1866–1941) novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic of the Silver Age of Russian poetry married to the poet Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945). Dmitry Vladimirovich Filosofov (1872–1940), Russian author, critic, and religious thinker, involved in the influential Mir Iskusstva circle at the turn of the twentieth century.
9. Polish painter, writer, and social activist (1878–1974).
10. Polish noble family, related to the Czapskis.
11. Yelping (French).
12. A member of the szlachta or gentry class in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, mostly landowners who were endowed with special rights, such as that of electing the monarch.
13. Woodrow Wilson’s role in the peace settlements following World War I was received more warmly in some regions of Europe than others.
14. Aleksander Lednicki (1866–1934), Polish social activist and politician. During World War I he organized a rescue mission for Poles exiled in the East.
15. Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910), novelist, prominent in the Polish positivist movement.
16. Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin (1872–1936), Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician. Opposed to World War I, he was arrested by the British government in 1917 for his antiwar writings. Leon Trotsky secured Chicherin’s release and safe passage to Russia. He served as the first people’s commissar for foreign affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to 1930, but he was often in ill health and increasingly sidelined under Stalin’s rule. (See “On Chicherin” in the present volume.)
17. The Czapski family estate in what is now Belarus.
18. Eugeniusz Karol Maria Lubomirski de Vaux (1895–1982), in World War II, aide-de-camp to General Anders, whom he met while they were both imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Przewłocki: Józek (“Józio”) Przewłocki (1895–1962), brother of Henryk (Heniś, 1884–1946), who married J. C.’s sister Karolina (Karla). Wołowicz: unidentified. Emeryk August Hutten-Czapski (1897–1979), Polish politician, military officer, diplomat, and bailiff of the Polish Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
19. Romain Rolland’s Au-dessus de la mêlée was published in Paris in 1914.
20. The Czapskis were related to the German princely house of Thurn und Taxis.
21. Baron Aleksander Feliksovich Meyendorff (1869–1964), jurist and politician of Latvian origin, briefly a member of the Russian Duma under Alexander Kerensky; after 1919 in London, where he taught at the London School of Economics.
22. Piotr Stolypin (1862–1911), the Russian prime minister from 1906 to his assassination in 1911. His brother Aleksandr Arkadeievich Stolypin (1863–1925) was a poet, journalist, constitutional monarchist, and member of the Union of October 17.
23. God save the czar (Russian).
24. The State Political Directorate (GPU) was the Russian intelligence service from February 6, 1922, to November 1923. Okhrana, an acronym for the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, was the czarist secret police force and part of the police department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the late nineteenth century.
25. Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov (1861–1925), the first prime minister of Russia after the fall of the Romanovs, from March 15 to July 21, 1917.
26. Ludwik du Puszet Puget (1877–1942), sculptor, painter, and art historian; executed in Auschwitz. Karol Stryjeński (1887-1932), artist, among the outstanding creators of Polish decorative art in the 1920s.
27. Maria Czapska’s memoir Europa w rodzinie (Europe in the Family), published in Paris in 1970.
28. Róża Czapski, J. C.’s youngest sister.
29. Leopold Staff: (1878–1957), influential modernist poet initially associated with the Young Poland movement.
30. Karol Lucjan Jan Jaroszyński (1878–1929), Russian entrepreneur, financier, philanthropist, and gambler; of Polish ethnicity.
31. Maria Leontyna Pusłowska (1870–1965) was married to Count Karol Hutten-Czapski (1860–1904), president (mayor) of Minsk from 1890 to 1901.
32. Konstanty Kazimierz Mieczysław Dowgiałło (1897–1918) and Henryk Plater-Zyberk (1894–1920), cousins of Czapski’s.
33. Wojciech Kossak (1856–1942), artist and teacher, father of the poet Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska.
NECESSITY AND GRACE
1. Stefan Kisielewski (1911–1991), Polish writer, journalist, composer, and politician.
2. The most real being (Latin), a metaphysical concept of divinity based on the proposition that reality exists in degrees, like goodness; examined in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
ON CHICHERIN
1. Poem by Juliusz Słowacki; the first part was published in 1841 and the rest was completed after Słowacki’s death in 1849 by Antoni Malecki.
2. Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (1901–1964), Austrian Jewish physicist, writer, and businessman, best known for his anti-Stalinist book Hexensabbat (1951). Born in Kraków, educated in Vienna, he emigrated to Soviet Ukraine in 1931 to build one of the most advanced physics laboratories in Kharkov and was imprisoned during the Great Purge. In 1940 he was delivered by the NKVD to the Gestapo and survived World War II in occupied Poland. After the war he settled in Western Europe and was active in the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
LETTER TO A RUSSIAN FRIEND
1. Teresa Dzieduszycka (1927–2017), close friend and (under the name Therèse Douchy) translator of Czapski into French.