Regarding and Reading Józef Czapski

The contradictions of Józef Czapski (1896–1993) begin with his physicality: he was conspicuously lanky and tall and stood out in any group. Born as a child of privilege into a cosmopolitan Catholic family of East Central European aristocrats (his full name at birth was Count Józef Maria Emeryk Franciszek Ignacy Hutten-Czapski of Leliwa), he lived a modest life as a bohemian artist in Poland and France between the two world wars and then experienced economic dispossession as a Polish dissident émigré in France after World War II. Belying his many years of distinguished service as a soldier and officer in Poland's beleaguered army (and earlier as a soldier in the Czarist army), his was a gentle and thoughtful presence. A homosexual artist and aesthete, a passionate reader of Proust and a student of French impressionist and post-impressionist painting, he was also in his unimposing way a natural leader and diplomat. His high level of culture and education (he was fluent in a half-dozen languages) was combined with an unpretentious directness and warmth that inspired the trust of those without his social advantages. His physical stature and long life seemed to contradict the many grave episodes of physical illness he endured, often in the brutal conditions of the Soviet Gulag. Eric Karpeles quotes Czapski's American friend Mary McCarthy describing the writer as “elegant, physically and morally,” and went on to declare him “to be an essential link between the cultures of Poland and Eastern Europe and those of Western Europe and the United States.”Czapski was understandably humbled and in wonder at his own survival as one of the tiny number Polish army officers spared by Soviets in the 1941 Katyń massacre. The Soviets surely came to regret sparing Czapski's life, as Katyń inspired him to lead a lifelong campaign to document and reveal the truth of Soviet responsibility for the massacre. To insist on talking about Katyń as a Polish dissident in the face of Soviet propaganda and apologists for Stalin among Allied leaders and leftist intellectuals in the West during the Cold War was to confront a political binary: one was either sympathetic to Soviet communism or a fascist tout court. That Czapski was part of a postwar Polish expatriate intellectual and artistic network that was in fact secular, progressive, and directly opposed to Poland's prewar nationalist-chauvinist political movements was waved aside as an ideological impossibility. The reality of a significant coalition of secular Poles, Catholic leftists, Jews, homosexuals, artists, and intellectuals who favored a future politics of democratic socialism and broad coalition-building over a Soviet-style dictatorship struggled for visibility, legitimacy, and political traction.Most of Czapski's artistic output before 1939 was destroyed in the war, which eventually produced a deeply private and meditative approach to his painting after 1949, an almost Buddhist perspective on often mundane subject matter and the very act of painting itself. There is also a sublime sensuality in many of his paintings: he was both a representational painter and at times an exuberant colorist.In contrast to the deeply subjective connection between interiority and perception in Czapski's postwar painting, his experience of Katyń, the Gulag, and eventually the war against Hitler also gave birth to Czapski the writer and engaged public intellectual. He was a founding editor, writer, and defining intellectual presence for the historic Paris-based Polish dissident press Instytut Literacki / Institut Littéraire (popularly known by the title of its venerable monthly publication Kultura, which stopped publication in 2000 after 637 issues). Czapski and his one surviving sister, Maria, for decades shared a studio apartment in the headquarters of Kultura in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, where the editorial team for the press worked and lived collectively. The villa in Maisons-Laffitte was his home through his death in 1993, four years after the peaceful end of communist rule in Poland.Czapski's first publication was a short version of Inhuman Land, published in Polish in Paris in 1949, which was quickly followed by an abridged French translation. The cuts in the French edition were carried over into the first English translation in 1951. In 1969, Czapski added six chapters for the first German edition of the text. The integral text of Inhuman Land was published in Poland for the first time in 2001 by the Catholic publishing house Znak. This newest translation and edition of the expanded text published by the New York Review of Books is the first integral edition of the book in English, and appeared in tandem in 2018 with Eric Karpeles's handsomely printed biography by the same press.Inhuman Land, together with Gustaw Herling-Grudziński's Inny Świat [A World Apart] (published in Polish in Paris in 1951), was the first book to break open the subject of the Soviet Gulag in general, and of the significant Polish presence there in particular. Herling-Grudziński was also at the center of the Kultura circle from the start, and the French edition of A World Apart was praised by Albert Camus and others in France. The majority of Inhuman Land consists of Czapski's firsthand reportage. His style is engaging, neither sensationalistic nor overly detached, filled with concrete human and physical details. Czapski begins with his account of his journey from the killing fields around Katyń to being a political prisoner in the absurd and pauperized Soviet prison system. This is followed by the wonderland of then being born anew as an officer in a suddenly Soviet-allied Polish military being reassembled in Central Asia when Hitler's Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, violating the tacit alliance between the two countries that began with their joint invasion and partitioning of Poland in 1939. This starving and barely clothed army also carried the burden of saving as many Polish noncombatants fleeing the Soviet prison camps as possible on its path from Uzbekistan to Iran, where astonished and leery British forces received them. From there, the Polish forces traveled overland to the Middle East and Italy, where they eventually coalesced into the legendary Anders Army that fought with distinction at Monte Cassino and elsewhere. Like Czapski, most of these Polish soldiers did not return to Poland after the war.In the last chapters added for the German edition in 1969, Czapski includes a chapter of stunning reportage on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which relies on the writings of his sister Maria, who was present in the city's center through it all, and barely escaped rape and murder at the hands of Soviet defectors that had joined the Nazi forces in suppressing the uprising and carrying out the subsequent carnage against the city's surviving civilian population. No less miraculous than Czapski's own escape from execution at Katyń was Maria's survival as an unaccompanied woman in the center of these events, in which ultimately more civilians died than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined the following year. Following these events, the lifelong attachment of these two siblings into old age goes without saying. This is the first time that Czapski surrenders the role of direct witness to the events portrayed in the book. In a different kind of departure, the last chapter, titled “The Germans,” is Czapski's reflection on the phenomenon of Nazism twenty-five years after the end of the war. This moral settling of accounts benefits from the passage of time and his processing of every kind of reporting on the Nazis in the meantime. The hard-won moral complexity displayed is akin to his ability to judge the many Russians he knew and appreciated apart from the system that ruled their lives. Many notable Russians were mutual in their appreciation of him.Józef Czapski's tragic brilliance was his quiet insistence on being authentically himself: Polish, an observant Catholic leftist, an artist, an intellectual, and gay. These attributes were what he was unapologetically for—and at the same made him a target that forced him to define what he must also be against. The complex fullness of Czapski's identity still makes him a challenging and unique presence in Poland no less than abroad. Had his fate led him to live in the United States instead of France, his natural intellectual and political circle would've been among the founders of the New York Review of Books. It is to the credit of that publication's current leadership that they have belatedly recognized Czapski as a kindred spirit and invested in thoughtfully curated new editions of his work as well as Eric Karpeles's biography.The Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who has researched and written on the historic impact of the Kultura cohort on contemporary Europe, provides the Introduction to the NYRB edition of Inhuman Land. Snyder elsewhere has described editor Jerzy Giedroyc, Czapski's collaborator in the creation of Kultura, as “the most important Polish intellectual of the twentieth century,” primarily for his role in defining the “Giedroyc-Mieroszewski Doctrine” that would later inform postcommunist Poland's pacifist foreign policy with its eastern neighbors. Contemporary Poland's extraordinary reconciliation with Ukraine following the Russian invasions in 2014 and 2022 would be impossible to imagine without the intellectual foundation provided by Giedroyc, Czapski, and the intellectual circle at Kultura.Snyder concisely traces Czapski's personal ethical journey from Tolstoyan pacifism in Czarist Petersburg through active military service against the nascent Soviet Union in the Polish-Russian War of 1919–20, through standing against Poland's national chauvinist forces in the interwar period. Snyder aptly quotes Czapski quoting Proust: “Perhaps a great artist serves his fatherland—but can only do so by seeing truth, which means forgetting everything else, including the fatherland.” That Czapski's anti-Soviet politics were never nationalist in spirit is confirmed by his deep ties to Russian culture, and in particular to dissidents such as Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Czapski's Inhuman Land in fact first appeared in print thirteen years before Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.Eric Karpeles is an astonishing surprise as an American voice taking up the cause of Józef Czapski in English. Karpeles is a painter, a fine writer, and a nuanced thinker at a healthy remove from academia and the tempests of Polish culture and politics. He is not Polish but has done his research thoroughly and knows how to share what he has gleaned meaningfully with an American reader. Czapski the painter and the lifelong reader of Proust is the valid foundation for Karpeles's engagement, along with his apparent sympathy for Czapski's quietly gay sexuality and sensibility, which this cosmopolitan American shares. Had they met in person, in spite of their difference in ages, they would surely have been friends based on their temperaments and artistic tastes alone. Karpeles appreciates and honors Czapski the public intellectual, though these dimensions of his subject are without parallel in American art—and are perhaps unique in the history of twentieth-century art in general.The beauty of Czapski is also the challenge of the person and his work: there is so much to talk about.