Józef Czapski (1896-1993), a painter and writer, and an eyewitness to the turbulent history of the twentieth century, was born into an aristocratic family in Prague and grew up in Poland under czarist domination. After receiving his baccalaureate in Saint Petersburg, he went on to study law at Imperial University and was present during the February Revolution of 1917. Briefly a cavalry officer in World War I, decorated for bravery in the Polish-Bolshevik War, Czapski went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and then moved to Paris to paint. He spent seven years in Paris, moving in social circles that included friends of Proust and Bonnard, and it was only in 1931 that he returned to Warsaw, and began exhibiting his work and writing art criticism. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Czapski was mobilized as a reserve officer. Captured by the Germans, he was handed over to the Soviets as a prisoner of war, though for reasons that remain mysterious he was not among the twenty-two thousand Polish officers who were summarily executed by the Soviet secret police. Czapski described his experiences in the Soviet Union in several books:
Memories of Starobilsk (forthcoming from NYRB),
Inhuman Land, and
Lost Time (available from NYRB), the last of which reconstructs a lecture he gave to his fellow prisoners about Proust's
In Search of Lost Time. Unwilling to live in postwar communist Poland, Czapski set up a studio outside of Paris. His essays appeared in
Kultura, the leading intellectual journal of the Polish emigration that he helped establish; his painting underwent a great final flowering in the 1980s. Czapski died, nearly blind, at ninety-six.
Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski, a biography of Czapski by Eric Karpeles, was published by New York Review Books.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She has translated works by several of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and writers of reportage, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children's books. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme and former co-chair of the Translators Association of the United Kingdom.
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of several works of European history, including
Bloodlands, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize. His most recent books are
On Tyranny and The
Road to Unfreedom.
