Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History

Interned with thousands of Polish army officers and a handful of civilians in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, the artist Jozef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre carried out in the forest of Katyn in April 1940. In prose written while the war still raged, Czapski portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait and others in vivid sketches imbued with a rare combination of intimacy and respect, registering their fierce striving to remain fully engaged in humane pursuits in hopeless circumstances. This memoir is complemented by essays on art, history and literature that show Czapski's lifelong attachment to the Russian culture which educated him, in its all its contradictory manifestations, from the poet Alexander Blok's fascinated response to revolution to the lonely struggle of the painter Chaim Soutine. They include a wartime sequence of short essays on painting written on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army's strategic base in Central Asia which are among the painter's most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.