E proust resisted despair

(Source: IC Photo)

Shi Ji/Wen

Remembrance of the Watery Years is a classic literary work that writers and literary critics cannot get around, and there are many reviews of this work and its Proust language. But for the average reader, opening this voluminous volume means starting a marathon reading journey. The famous Polish painter, writer, and literary critic Józef Czapski (1896-1993) took this magnificent work from the hands of the literary elite at a dark and desperate moment and shared an extraordinary spiritual journey with his fellow prisoners who embarked on a journey of death.

A life of ill-fatedness

Born in Prague in 1896 to a Polish aristocratic family, Joseph Czapski spent his childhood in a family estate near present-day Minsk, Belarus. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at st. Petersburg University, witnessed the February Revolution, served as a cavalry officer in World War I, and was awarded the Polish Military Medal for his bravery in the Polish-Soviet War. After the First World War, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Krakow, after which he lived and studied in Paris for seven years, and his social circle included Proust. In 1931 he returned to Warsaw and began exhibiting works and writing art reviews. He was a member of the Cappist art group, which was heavily influenced by the French painter Cézanne.

After the outbreak of World War II, between 1939 and 1940, Czapski and 4,000 Polish officers and men were taken prisoner of war and held by the Soviet Union in the Starobelsk concentration camp near Siberia. 4,000 officers and soldiers were massacred in the Katyn massacre, and only 79 people, including Czapsky, survived. Chapsky firmly believes that "it is the unshirkable duty of the writer to reveal the truth, because the writer should be more sensitive to authenticity." In two nonfiction works, Memoirs of Starobilsk (1945) and The Inhuman Land (1949), he recorded his experiences as a prisoner of war and an investigation into the Katyn incident, recreating the physical and mental devastation of life in the concentration camp: "Every picture I saw was filled with cruelty or despair." The famous French writers Malraux, Mauriac and Raymond Aron have all been active in the publication of two works in France. The Inhuman Lands later became the classic reportage of the Katyn Massacre. These two works are indispensable testimonies to the destruction of the world by two totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

After the war, Czapski settled on the outskirts of Paris, France, established his own studio, and together with his colleagues founded the most influential cultural journal of Polish immigrant intellectuals of the 20th century. His paintings, which underwent the last leap forward in the 1980s, attracted widespread attention, with paintings exhibited in France, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, Brazil and Belgium. But it was not until after 1989 that his literary and artistic works were lifted in his native Poland, where in 1990 the Polish government awarded him the Cross of polish revival, and in 1993 he died at the age of 96. Through almost the entire 20th century, with his elegant and tenacious disposition, with the light of artistic and literary accomplishment, he twice survived the long night of nightmares.

A book-sharing session in a concentration camp

Before the Katyn massacre, Czapski and his fellow refugees had tried to give lectures in concentration camps, but were eventually expelled: "From October 1939 to the spring of 1940, we four thousand Polish officers crowded ten acres of Starobilsk near Kharkiv. We try to restore some of the mental work that helps us overcome despair and pain so that our brains are not rusted. Some of us started giving lectures on military, history, and literature. The guards at the time thought it was counter-revolutionary activity, and some of the lecturers were immediately expelled to an unknown place. ”

In the spring of 1940, 79 surviving people, including Czapsky, were transferred to the Gryazovic concentration camp. It was also originally a pilgrimage site, a monastery. Churches were blown to rubble, prisoners' rooms were piled with wood, and bedding was crawling with bed bugs. Here, they plotted more carefully, and after many requests, finally obtained official permission for the lecture, on the condition that each time the pre-lecture text had to be submitted for review. Everyone was crowded in the small dining room, and each person spoke about the area where his memory was clearest. This is a series of unique and incredible special book sharing sessions, the darkness shines through, and the misery cannot hide the dignity:

"The history of books, told by Dr. Lwów Ehrlich, a book-lover bibliophile, is evocative; Kamil Kantak, abbot of Pisk and editor of the Gdansk Daily, lectured on the history of England and human migration, and he was an admirer of Malami; Professor Siennicki of the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute taught us the history of architecture; Lieutenant Ostrowski was the author of an outstanding book on mountaineering, having climbed the tatra peaks of the Caucasus and Cordilleras regions. He told us about South America.

I gave a series of lectures on French and Polish painting and French literature. Fortunately, after recovering from a serious illness, all the hard labor was spared except for cleaning the monastery's grand staircase and peeling potatoes, so I was able to prepare these lectures in a quiet manner.

The scene at that time is vividly remembered. Exhausted from toiling in the freezing cold of minus 45 degrees, my comrades-in-arms huddled under the portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin and listened to our lectures, the subjects of which were so far removed from our reality.

I thought excitedly about Proust in such a warm cork-walled room, how surprised and moved he would have been to hear with such a strong interest the story of the Marquise of Gelmont, the death of Belgot (note: all the characters in "Remembrance of the Years of Water") and all the precious psychological revelations and literary beauty of this precious psychological revelation and literary beauty in my memory 20 years after his death...

Being able to participate in mental activity and be happy, proving that we can still think and react to mental activity that has nothing in common with the reality of our time, adds a rosy touch to the time we spent in the dining room of the former monastery. It's a strange truancy, where we relive a world that seems to be lost forever.

It is difficult for us to understand why 15,000 comrades-in-arms disappeared somewhere along the Arctic Circle and the Siberian border, while only 400 of our officers and men survived. Against this tragic backdrop, those who spent time with Proust and Delacroix seemed to me to be the happiest moments.

I would like to pay a humble tribute to the French art that has helped us survive these years in the Soviet Union. ”

The history of books, the history of England, the history of human migration, the history of architecture, and the lectures on South America mentioned in the preface are missing. Chapsky's lecture is arguably the only surviving testimony that these lectures ever existed.

The contest between literature and despair

Chapsky later compiled the speech in its entirety in French. The Polish text of the 1948 lecture was published in the 12th and 13th issues of the Polish monthly magazine "March" in Cairo, entitled "Proust at the Grazowec concentration camp." In 1987, the original French version of the lecture was published, entitled "Resistance to Despair with Proust". In the preface to the French edition, Chapusky writes: "Some things are inaccurate and subjective because I have no books, no books on the subjectS I am going to deal with. The last time I saw a Book in French was before September 1939. It's just the most accurate memory I've ever tried to awaken about Proust's work. This is not a literary criticism in the true sense of the word, but a recollection of the works I have learned so much from it. And I'm not sure if I'll ever look back again. "A prisoner who is seriously ill, reconstructing the scene of "Remembrance of the Lost Water" without the original work and without any reference book, quotes sentences accurate enough that the editor can effortlessly find the exact source of the quotation, which is in itself impressive. Moreover, he is not simply repeating the plot, his interpretation is talented, his perspective is unique, and his insights are not under many so-called professional French literary critics. It is the crystallization of the unashamed, highly concentrated mental activity of a prisoner in the center of an extremely harsh environment. Opening this pamphlet, we will, like the audience at the time, temporarily forget the background of the lecture and involuntarily follow Chapsky's wonderful lesson "Remembrance of The Age of Water" (hereinafter referred to as "Remembrance") reading and appreciation.

One summer in the 1920s, Czapsky contracted typhoid fever and spent his entire summer in bed recuperating from his illness. At the beginning, what made "Remembrance" difficult for him to release was Proust's delicate psychological portrayal of the jealousy, pain, and fanatical pursuit of the desperate and anxious lovers: "The psychological speculation of this great writer, and these huge details and associations, hit my heart. He marveled at the discovery of "a brand new psychoanalytic machine, with unprecedented precision, a whole new poetic world, a treasure trove of literary forms." Proust's original "long stream-of-consciousness sentences interspersed with endless 'side sentences', as well as the variety of, marginal, unexpected associations, and the peculiar way of dealing with intertwined themes without layers" reveled him, and he wandered through them, chewing on "a high degree of precision and rich connotations."

He told his fellow inmates about the shadow of Proust's life in Remembrance, showing the cultural trends and artistic genres of Proust's era, from naturalistic literature, symbolist poetry, Impressionist painting and music, primitivism, Cubism, futurism to Wagnerist music, Russian ballet and even oriental colors: "This is the soil where Proust art is sensitively rooted, the art we see in his works that has been absorbed and transplanted."

What impressed me was that he set off Proust's unique vision by contrasting the different perspectives of the four great writers on aristocratic society. The memoirs of Duke Saint-Simon, who are located in the court of the late Louis XIV and regent periods, are recorded in the annals of literary history, and the relationship between palace life and court figures is very precious; as a bystander bent on entering high society, Balzac's depiction of the aristocratic salon of Paris's Saint-Germain is "so naïve and idealistic", and his "heavenly or unbearable women remind people of the lives on the canvases of Romantic painters, not flesh and blood women". Although Proust also observes this class from the outside, he is more close to the cold eye, the character portrayal is more realistic, and the psychological analysis is more delicate. Czapski then relates to Tolstoy's depictions of this class in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and other works. He argues that while Tolstoy's observations of this declining high society are equally sober, Proust's narrative is actually more realistic... Some in the audience may remember these hand-picked comparisons and generate the desire to read or reread them.

As a painter, Chapski was particularly sensitive to the art form, taking it for granted that art was independent of any ideology. In particular, he emphasized overt tendencies, prominent personal likes and dislikes, and moral preaching that undermined the artistry of the work: "When we measure the writer's contribution to his country, it is not some idea he expresses, but his creation of form that pushes it to its limits. Even the greatest writers can be in such a situation: their tendencies diminish the effect of the work not only through his artistic point of view, but even by the point of view he wants to express. Therefore, he believes that the preaching in Resurrection is too obvious compared to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and the artistic charm of this work is slightly inferior. Proust's work, on the other hand, avoids tendencies altogether: "He has absolutely no prejudice, wants to know and understand the most opposing states of thought, to find in the humblest people a gesture close to the sublime, to find subconscious low-level movements in the purest." His work is like a life filtered and illuminated by a consciousness that affects us much more accurately than our own consciousness. They would be surprised if I had told proust readers that I personally thought the ideology of Remembrance was almost Pascal. "Why Pascal? Chapsky notes that "God" does not appear once in the thousands of pages of Remembrance, so that Remembrance "this deification of all the fleeting joys of life leaves us with the aftertaste of Pascal ashes." "Are prousts and Chapsky both perpetuating Pascal's famous gamble on God?"

In the harsh situation, not using ideology against ideology, believing that ideological tendencies will damage the quality of literary works, and defending the independence of literary art form innovation, this is actually a purer spiritual resistance.

In "Remembrance", the exquisite elegance of French high society and the artistic accomplishment of the literati and scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are not so strange to these Polish elites imprisoned in concentration camps. They have also experienced the lust, friendship, nostalgia, sadness, or anxiety, jealousy, and snobbery that flow from this magnificent masterpiece. When they listened to this lecture in the cold, foul-smelling prisoner of war canteen, all these small emotions were a luxury. Proust's attempt to reminisce about the irrevocable passage of time, covered and integrated by a new era. The past of these captured officers and men, along with their flesh, can be brutally destroyed at any time and vanished.

Chapski's analysis of Proust's lecture is not echoing "Remembrance", pursuing the yesterday of the Polish intellectual and cultural elite who was killed by two totalitarian powers? If "Remembrance" is a struggle between memory and forgetting, this "bookless reading" is a contest between literature and despair, a contest that does not distinguish between victory and defeat.

(Written in Paris, France on September 9, 2021)