FROM 1939 to 1942: the war, the camps—Starobielsk, Pavlishchev Bor, Griazoviets, the formation of the Polish Army in the Soviet Union. The following texts are excerpts from my diary, written during a journey from Moscow to Tashkent in 1942.
In the camp at Starobielsk I was classed as a consumptive, and I was very careful not to fall out of this category, in which I had in fact been placed by mistake. Not used for any important work apart from peeling rotting potatoes, washing the stairs, and carrying out big bedbug hunts, I had time not only for reading but also for writing and even, in Griazoviets, for daily drawing, with a bad pencil, on wretched cottony paper—that was my salvation. I even managed to get little caps of children’s paint, and for a few weeks in a row, I made “portraits” of my friends in small patches of aquarelle paint, or painted still lifes—the big wooden tub at which all of us washed, with a section of wall. Thanks to that almost daily work, I didn’t daydream about drawing and painting—a dangerous kind of dreaming, in which one “soars about the heavens without decent feathers.” Cézanne wisely said that it is dangerous to think about painting without a palette in hand. I was kept in check by the consciousness that I couldn’t draw, that I couldn’t paint. Thus I was absorbed by the overcoming of concrete difficulties. And that period convinced me for good that the driest drawing—without a trace of “music,” the drawing the most miserably slavish to nature, deepened every day, sharpened, brought to the limit of one’s capacity—is for me, and I stubbornly think, for every painter, a vital source.
In the cozy Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, in a little room as narrow as a corridor, filled with precious drawings, there is a small Claude Lorrain. A few stones and grasses drawn with a fine line on gray paper, the drawing is underscored with a light white gouache; there isn’t a trace of any advance intention for any one form or another, apart from maximum precision of observation. What does a drawing like this have in common with the “ideal” vegetation of his classical paintings, which would not have existed without the preparation of these nature studies? Looking at that drawing a few weeks ago, I thought, But yes, that is how I desperately wanted to draw grasses in Griazoviets, little serrated clover leaves, the wooden tub, or the hand of a friend holding Pravda. At that time I dreamed of Corot’s drawings, his studies of shrubs and trees, a withered iris, stony landscapes and little birds, those small aquarelles I saw a decade ago in the Escorial in a half-dark room in which Philip II died. They were hung squeezed into one frame, the only sign of the king’s earthly interests amid faces of saints, hellfire, and torture instruments painted with equal precision and realism by Flemish painters.
Can one arrive at art in the full sense without following this narrow path of absolute humility, this reverence for the world seen by the eye, without this work allowing objective control of the precision of eye and hand?
In the camps, though it was rare to find paper, I wrote a great deal. I didn’t manage to take anything with me from Starobielsk. But I do still have a series of notebooks filled with tiny handwriting, mostly in pencil, from Pavlishchev Bor and Griazoviets. Notes on painting, preparations for a few dozen lectures I gave there on art and even on French literature (only my lectures on Proust,1 copied out by friends, were published in Kultura). I don’t have the patience to read them, though much there concerns themes that I touch on now, almost twenty years later, with the difference that there I illustrate them with other examples and write about them from a different perspective.
Griazoviets had a slender but precious library that we prisoners devoured: it included Russian classics, among other things a few volumes of a big Tolstoy edition. There were sketches for Anna Karenina not used in the final version, there were nineteenth-century French writers, a lot of Balzac (luckily Marx loved La Comédie humaine), Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale with an excellent introduction illuminating the era, with the inevitable Marxist twist; there was even some Thomas Hardy. I don’t think I ever read with such attention. The awakening of Stiva Oblonsky in his study after his wife discovers his infidelity, the faces of peasants in the strike scene in Balzac’s Paysans, as if painted by Ribera, and above all the scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles where Tess, in the depths of despair, wakes up on the edge of the forest and sees traces of blood nearby and a little further on, bloodied, wounded pheasants. As I said then with shame, it was as if those experiences of literature for which I hungered were often more powerful than the fall of Paris or the bombing of London, which the Soviet radio reported with evident satisfaction, because at that time I didn’t know how to touch or see those events with living imagination.
Books helped me by awakening “involuntary memory.” Though I have a dreadful memory for so many things, I could call to mind texts, fragments of other books, that I hadn’t had my hands on for many years; I saw all sorts of paintings with the eye of my imagination. For me personally, the fact that recollections surfaced that seemed long lost bordered on a miracle. We lived cut off from the world (the camp), in conditions of malnutrition though not of hunger, amid warm friendships (there were also disputes, dozens of matters of honor to be settled by duels in a free Poland), with a handful of books, a patch of northern landscape: birches against a pale sky, splendid gleaming magpies hopping around in the dry leaves, glorious weeds of supernatural size that exploded in the spring, the incomparable charm of the luxuriant northern spring. We didn’t only preserve ourselves from despair, but in that second year of imprisonment a new suspect comfort was born: it was as if the fierceness, the brutal dangers of the world—where men had to fight and couldn’t be passive or pure for even a moment, if they weren’t dying—were covered with a cloud, one’s responses slackened, one acquired distance and even resignation became less unthinkable.
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June 1941. We were wandering around the camp grounds. To this day I hear the wild cry of exuberant glee thrown out by a scruffy colonel bending his whole upper body from the window ringing in my ears: “Hitler’s attacked Russia!” For us that meant once again fever, life, and every possible hope. Barely a few weeks later, we were already with the Polish Army in formation. Yesterday we had been vile bourgeois from a feudal Poland wiped out of existence—now we were the sons of noble and invincible Poland, allies of the Soviet Union and the great Stalin.
The steppe, the wooden houses like houses of cards in the summer camp at Totsk, frost and gales, relentless waves of human shadows in rags—on their way to the army.
After a few weeks, transferred to headquarters in Buzuluk, I am head of the search office for Polish officers and soldiers missing in Russia: Kuibyshev, Chkalov, Kuibyshev, Moscow, then again Kuibyshev, and finally Yangi-Yul near Tashkent. I described all of that in Inhuman Land. Ferocious work, unrelenting pressure, a constant responsibility for human fates and lives, material conditions in large part a hundred times worse than in Griazoviets, not a single moment for “contemplation”—not to mention sketching—or for thinking in any categories but those of immediate action.
“You suffered so much in Russia!” I never know what to say to that; the mere fact that I was alive, that I could strive or fight for something, for somebody, that was happiness then.
In Moscow I tried to get through to Soviet dignitaries (I was an ally, an emissary of General Anders, and courtesy toward him was official policy), to the closed offices at the Lubyanka prison with their heavy curtains and soft couches. I was carrying memoranda with demands for missing friends (who had been killed long before). I still believed that the people who received me then with icy politeness held in their hands the power of decision and salvation.
On my way back to the army, with a suitcase stuffed with gifts from Torgsin—sausage, tea, cheese (the highest privilege). I travel more than ten days by train from Moscow to Tashkent in an upholstered car with a platskarta, a reserved seat. There are four of us in the compartment. Every day Tanya and Manya, two railway employees, prepare warm soup with kasha for us; at stations they brutally chase hordes of civilians with luggage from the steps, as well as “heroic defenders of the fatherland” sent from hospital for a short leave with their families. A likable captain, a Ukrainian, manages to get hold of kasha and bread to share among us; I share my Torgsin products and amid sincere or insincere but always equally patriotic hymns of praise to Stalin, omniscient and benevolent, I settle into the greatest comfort: a warm corner, apart from which I am sated, I have a few books, paper, and the eternal pen, and I catch only one flea on my bunk. Regarded at first with suspicion—they must have thought I was a top spy because I wrote constantly, and later perhaps that I was a madman—in the course of days spent traveling together and kasha eaten together, we become friends.
Those days, torn from a feverish routine, from obsessive activity, I now remember as happy ones. Is there any place, any Gehenna, where a man freed from physical suffering, hunger, and cold, or even from the feverishly harried responsibility of work, would not be capable of experiencing a quarter of an hour of happiness? (Simone Weil wept when she read in the newspaper about hungry children in China; she was probably incapable of such quarter hours at such times.) After all, I was on a mission whose hopelessness was becoming more and more evident, which concerned thousands and thousands of people, some of whom were dear friends; in Moscow I beat my head against the wall, yanked at eternally closed doors!
In the warm, contented compartment I looked through the icy windows at the red sun setting, the snowdrifts that stopped us every so many dozens of hours, blocking the tracks, at the ruined domes of churches with broken crosses standing in black villages; and then in the steppe beyond the Volga, a snowy desert, where across four roads from Kuibyshev a snowy plain stretches out from Yelets to the Aral Sea, without a single tree, almost without buildings, almost without people. Around broken-down stations, a few low mud houses with little statues of Lenin and Stalin. The Aral Sea, heaps of salt covered with straw.
I just catch sight of a few Kazakhs in the snow, under big fur hoods. Fascinated by the world outside the window, by my travel companions, reading and making notes constantly, I wrote these remarks on technique in art, attempts to bring together, to formulate what seemed to me the most essential in my experience after two and a half years away from work. There are echoes and reflections here of polemics with the Polish artistic climate that we Kapists2 found in Poland after our return from Paris. On varying fronts we tried to struggle with the form of thoughtlessness in Witkacy, Czyżewski, Strzemiński, and a few others.3
It seems to me though that now those notes are even more against the prevailing views, though from an entirely different angle. At present, with very rare exceptions, painters regard nature with hostility or indifference, while I am forever writing about the study of nature!
Almost twenty years after writing those notes in a Soviet train compartment, my “warm-up” as I call it here—studies of nature and a turning away from nature—happens at an earlier stage; I mostly paint from memory these days. If I had to write about my practice as a painter now, I could write more about the next stage, when a painter turns from the immediate study of nature. But even now I couldn’t arrive at true painting, as opposed to secondhand painting, without constantly returning to nature, without turning back to analytical work from nature, so what I wrote then I still sign off on today.