Proust In the Heart of Darkness

Józef Czapski, trans. Eric Karpeles, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

NYRB Classics, 128pp, $15.95, ISBN 9781681372587

reviewed by Mersiha Bruncevic

The painter, writer and diarist Józef Czapski (1896-1993) passed away in a small town outside Paris at the age of 96. Czapski had lived there since the end of World War II. Ailing and blind, he spent his final days listening to Chopin on an old cassette tape. The last thing he ever wrote, despite his blindness, were a few words in shaky script: ‘Bonnard, Matisse, Goya, Proust’, then, in block letters, ‘KATYN, KATYN, KATYN’. To most readers, this last word carries little meaning. To him, it was a word that carried a particular burden. He was one of only 395 survivors of the Katyn Massacre during which around 20,000 Polish officers and cadets were murdered by the Soviets in the spring of 1940.

In September 1939 Czapski, then a reserve officer in the Polish army, was captured by the Red Army. He was imprisoned along with those 20,000 doomed officers and cadets. By April 1940, the group was split in two. A few hundred were sent to Gryazovets, an old convent turned prison camp some 400 kilometres north of Moscow. Czapski was in this group and Gryazovets would become the unlikely place where he would end up giving lectures on Proust. The other men were sent to an unknown location. Only years later would Czapski learn that the others had been taken to the province of Katyn and executed in May that year. He was eventually released from Gryazovets in 1941. But before the war was over, he would make his way through the Persian corridor to Iran and Iraq, go through North Africa to reach Rome and ultimately find himself in Paris in May 1945 – almost five years to the day since the Katyn Massacre and mere days before the Germans were defeated. Somehow, despite this mad world tour, the typed-up manuscript of Czapski’s Proust lectures survived.

This volume, published by the New York Review of Books, brings Czapski’s lectures into English for the first time. Both the translator’s introduction by Eric Karpeles and the author’s own introduction recount the astonishing realities of daily life in the Gulag. Czapski and the prisoners endured temperatures reaching 45 degrees below zero, wearing threadbare uniforms and sleeping in lice-ridden beds, eating nothing but broth and bad potatoes, which were more a source of disease than nourishment. As a distraction he and a few other inmates decided to gather at night and give lectures about things they remembered best from their pre-war lives. Czapski chose Proust as his subject. Because he had read Proust in French, he decided it would be easiest to give the lectures in French. The 40-odd officers who attended were well-educated and had no trouble understanding the language.

It was a long and nomadic road that led to this point. Born in Prague into a Jewish aristocratic family, to a Polish father and an Austrian mother, Czapski had grown up on the family estate in Belarus. He studied law in Saint Petersburg before studying art in Warsaw and Kraków. At the end of World War I, Czapski fought the Russians for the first time, briefly abandoning his art to enlist. After the war, he moved to Paris. Later in life, as World War II raged, he would leave Paris and put aside art once more in order to enlist in Poland and defend his father’s country from both Soviet and Nazi assault.


It was in 1924, when the young Czapski arrived in Paris, that he tried reading Marcel Proust for the first time. The French author had recently passed away and many of Czapski’s new Parisian friends (who had incidentally also been Proust’s friends) were urging him to read this monumental new novel, parts of which were still being published posthumously. Czapski duly got the first volume of the seven that make up Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He was both overwhelmed and underwhelmed: overwhelmed by the endless assault of French words coming at him in interminable sentences and underwhelmed because the story left him cold.

A second try in 1926 proved more stirring. Heartbroken and suffering from typhoid fever, Czapski went to visit an uncle in London. Finding one of the middle volumes of the Search among his uncle’s books, the lovesick artist began reading the latter part of the novel, which recounts one of the most peculiar love stories in literature – the psychologically sadomasochistic affair that unfolds between the nameless narrator and his flighty mistress Albertine. After that, he read the entire novel. This time, it affected him unexpectedly and deeply. Decades later, in the Gulag, this is what he wanted to talk about, this is what he wanted to remember – the trace that Proust had left within him.

Labouring away in that old convent at Gryazovets, he was freezing, starving and thinking of Proust. He gave his lectures under extraordinary conditions: he was under fierce supervision, as prison guards monitored their contents; he also had no access either to the novel or to any other text on Proust, making them a feat of astonishing remembrance. From memory alone, Czapski quotes long passages verbatim from the Search. Sometimes he makes, understandably, rather glaring mistakes or confuses biographical facts from Marcel Proust’s life with events in the novel. This overlap happens as much in scholarly work on Proust as it does in these unusual lectures born from the memory of a starving prisoner. The astonishing accuracy of what Czapski remembers leaves a far deeper impression than his omissions.

None of these misrememberings detract from Czapski’s fine and detailed critical knowledge of Proust’s work. What stands out particularly is his analyses of those famous Proustian sentences. He stresses how their fluidity upended centuries of concise French clarity and how they became the gold standard of modernist prose. Czapski links this idiosyncratic approach to language to a similarly idiosyncratic approach to identity. He likens Proust’s Judeo-Catholic heritage to Joseph Conrad, a Pole writing in English.

Czapski also addresses what he sees as the prevailing monstrosity in Proust’s work. He mentions: the characters’ constant sadomasochistic mind games; how they lash out and wound their nearest and dearest at their weakest; the recurring indifference to someone’s death in the novel when the onus of mourning prevents a character from pursuing an ambition (amorous, social or professional). Czapski puts emphasis on the ‘great monstrousness’ of Proust’s ‘cruel objectivity’.

Despite this, the image of Marcel Proust that arises from Czapski’s lectures is sort of rakish and mischievous. Several anecdotes from his life and times are strangely amusing. There is the story of how Proust, off his head on opiates, goes to the headquarters of the draft board during World War I to present himself for service. He is stunned and confused to find the place closed. It was two o’clock at night. Very late some other night during the bombardments of Paris, Proust heads to the house of his Italian-speaking friend, Ramon Fernandez. He knocks on the door and politely asks how the words ‘senza rigore’ are pronounced in Italian. Fernandez tells him, and without a word Proust vanishes back into the night as quickly as he appeared.

However, it is also worth lingering on one of those errors and what they convey. There is a recurring lapsus in these lectures that is unlike any other of his minor mistakes. Czapski only started to appreciate Proust after reading the part of the novel that deals with the narrator’s frustrating love affair. In the lectures, as they appear in Lost Time, he refers to the two volumes dedicated to that affair as Albertine and Albertine Disparue. Karpeles keeps the French titles in his translation. Albertine Disparue is the correct French title. The other is not even close. The volume he refers to as Albertine is actually called La Prisonnière – the prisoner. Speaking in French during the lectures, Czapski would have had to employ the word prisoner, which in that situation would have been a sensitive matter.

Maybe it was an honest error on Czapski’s part; maybe he simply forgot the title. Yet it is tempting to read it as a pragmatic omission. Lecturing about a word like that might be explosive stuff in the Gulag. It requires no stretch of the imagination to suppose that lecturing on the wrong topic could get you killed. Perhaps, less sensationally, Czapski felt that the word was a needless reminder of their situation and, out of discretion, chose to leave it out. All conjectures aside, after the introduction added by Czapski in 1944, the word ‘prisoner’ or ‘prison’ does not occur in Lost Time. This is a meaningful absence in lectures on a novel where the notion of being a prisoner (physically and psychologically) is a central motif. As such, one of the most captivating aspects of Lost Time lies in what is absent: that the word that was the very condition of Czapski’s existence, a word that is central to Proust’s novel, is never mentioned in the lectures once.
Mersiha Bruncevic is a writer and literary scholar based in Paris and Gothenburg.