Memories of Starobielsk
  • Published: 1 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781681374864
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.99

Memories of Starobielsk

Essays Between Art and History

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Vivid accounts of life in a Soviet prison camp by the author of 'Inhuman Land.'

Vivid accounts of life in a Soviet prison camp by the author of Inhuman Land.

Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, Józef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre in the forest of Katyń in April 1940. Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait, others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with respect, as Czapski describes their struggle to remain human under hopeless circumstances. Essays on art, history, and literature complement the memoir, showing Czapski’s lifelong engagement with Russian culture. The short pieces on painting that he wrote while on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s strategic base in Central Asia stand among his most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.
  • Published: 1 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781681374864
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.99
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Also by Jozef Czapski

Lost Time
Inhuman Land
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Praise for Memories of Starobielsk

Praise for books by and about Józef Czapski:

"This gentle, tenacious, adamantine figure has been far too little known in the West--until now. New York Review Books recently published a moving and strikingly original biography by Eric Karpeles, Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski; a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones of Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-42; and Mr. Karpeles's translation of Czapski's Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Together these books document Czapski's physical and spiritual survival during a nightmare era, but, more than that, they re-create an overlooked life, one marked by an exemplary measure of modesty, moral clarity and artistic richness." --Cynthia Haven, The Wall Street Journal