Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

2022; Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300841.67.1.15

2330-0841

Alice-Catherine Carls,

Central European Literary Studies

Józef Czapski was a formidable witness of the twentieth century, from his debut in 1923 as the founder of the Kapist (Paris Committee) post-Impressionist movement, to his experiences as a Soviet prisoner of war during World War II and his Cold War exile of almost fifty years. The steady international exhibits of his paintings ensured that he never faded from the cultural scene. A film about his life, Józef Czapski—świadek wieku (1896–1993) [Józef Czapski—witness of the twentieth Century, 1896–1993] appeared in 2015, followed by a tribute in the Polish Senate in April 2016. Yet Czapski remains virtually unknown to the English-speaking public. American painter and art historian Eric Karpeles, a lifelong reader of Proust, discovered Czapski's camp lectures, Proust contre la déchéance. Conférences au camp de Griazowietz [Proust against degradation. Lectures at the Gryazovetz camp] in 2012. Karpeles spent several years researching the book's genealogy, translating Czapski's lectures from the French, and writing a 30-page translator's introduction. The result is the book currently under review, matched by Karpeles’ biography, Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski. Both books were published by the New York Review Books in 2018, while a Polish edition of Almost Nothing appeared in Poland in 2019 under the title Prawie nic. Józef Czapski. Biografia malarza.Lost Time defies classification. Neither memoir nor scholarly discourse about Proust, its erudite tone is inseparable from the historical context in which it was conceived. Czapski prepared multilingual notecards that started as talking points about late nineteenth-century art and became what Karpeles calls a “cosmology” of Proust. Sometime after delivering the lectures in French, Czapski dictated them, also in French, to two friends who smuggled the typescripts to the West. The text of the lectures was published in Polish in 1948 as “Proust w Griazowcu” [Proust in Gryazovetz] by Kultura, the monthly organ of the Maisons-Laffitte émigré center Instytut Literacki. Forty years later, the Editions Noir sur Blanc published photographs of the notecards and the text of the lectures in French in 1987 under the title Proust contre la déchéance [Proust against degradation]. The 1987 edition, reprinted in 2012, remains the authoritative version despite a few discrepancies between the two typescripts.In 1940, Czapski suffered a bout of typhus, was sent to a Soviet infirmary, then to the NKVD camp of Gryazovetz along with 395 Polish officers. While the prisoners were unaware at this time of what became known as the Katyn massacre, death was their daily companion. Czapski delivered his lectures during the winter of 1940–1941 as part of a cultural program by which the prisoners insulated themselves from camp life. Czapski lectured in French for several reasons, not least because he was speaking to a public of highly educated Polish officers who spoke French fluently. In his 1944 introduction, Czapski apologized for the imprecision of the lectures, calling them “the recollection of the work to which I was deeply indebted and which I was not sure of seeing again in my life” (p. 5). And yet Karpeles found his treatment of Proust remarkably accurate. While mentioning major themes of Proust's work such as the little madeleine, the uneven pavement, the lavish aristocratic parties, or his grandmother's death, Czapski mentioned details to which his fellow prisoners could relate, such as the extreme cold felt by Proust in his overheated room; likewise, Proust's description of pre-World War I high society parties could conjure familiar images of happier times. Czapski also excluded futurists, cubists, and formalists from his presentations of early twentieth century art in order to present a world unscarred, just as he favored Du côté de chez Swann [From Swann's side] which was written before the war.Delivered as practices in survival, Czaski's lectures gave prisoners hope and perhaps a way to re-equilibrate and re-center their lives. Czapski's new understanding of Proust crystallized what he later called his “almost nothing” approach to painting, his ability to divine the invisible from color, light, space, and form. The counterpoint inherent to this approach immediately attracted Eric Karpeles, who understood that the imprisonment and proximity of death in which Proust and Czapski found themselves (symbolic for Proust, real for Czapski) coaxed new powers of observation and remembrance for both artists. Furthermore, the infinite complexity of Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu [In search of lost time], borne from “almost nothing,” like the frantic complexity of Czapski's notecards, revealed multiple time dimensions. Proust divined the new, Bergsonian continuous dimension of time and pioneered experiments in subjective and repetitive time; Czapski battled a time fragmented by the violence of war through the incremental multiplication of memories of Proust; and Karpeles, who lives in our post-modern time, fully experiences its Einsteinian proportions. For all three artists, time is a creative process: induced by forced idleness, the delay between seeing and remembering allows one to escape the immediacy of reality, only to construct another one made of scintillating details.Czapski's final lecture described the death of the Proustian character of Bergotte, recounted from a description borrowed from Pierre-Quint's biography of Proust. Having read Pierre-Quint's “still life reconstruction” of the death of Proust, Karpeles grasped the importance of Czapski's representation of death in an artistic fashion. Together with Czapski's mention of Gide's autobiography Si le grain ne meurt [If the grain dies on me], a phrase excerpted from John 12:24, this vision of death brings closure to the lectures on Proust: to die is to pass into artistic eternity; to bear fruit, one must die—the highest affirmation that the life of the spirit is the essence of humanity.