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"The first translation of painter and writer Jozef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, in the heart of the malevolent Soviet Union, a Polish prisoner of war brought Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu to life without a single page of text available for reference. Presenting a series of lectures in an attempt to distract his fellow officers from their collective misery, Jozef Czapski managed to revive the novel and his experience of reading it purely from memory. It was a clarifying moment for him, a Proustian moment. His talks were given in French, helping to focus the men's minds and distract their thoughts from their grim surroundings. Calling upon deep reserves of aesthetic knowledge and critical thinking in a variety of languages, Czapski offered aspects of Proust's story, like Scheherazade, night after night. His lectures are a testament to the survival of memories of both worlds woven together, the fictional Faubourg Saint-Germain and the actual Soviet prison camp"--… (more)
User reviews
Let not the Proust scholar be too disappointed or walk away too early, however. While Czapski may seem to add little to the "scholarship," doesn't encountering Proust in the gulag tell us something about Proust we may have previously overlooked? And plain and "unscholarly" as Czapski's interpretation may appear, it brings in his unique erudition by setting Proust side by side Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Zeromski, Conrad in ways that to a discerning eye might indeed suggest new avenues of exploration!