Lost Time: Lectures On Proust In A Soviet Prison Camp

by Jozef Czapski

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

843.912

Collection

Publication

NYRB Classics (2018), Edition: Main, 128 pages

Description

"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

LibraryThing member aileverte
I read this book when it first came out in French, and just re-read it in Karpeles's English translation. A Proust scholar will find perhaps little that they would consider new in terms of research, and the main interest of the book may be its context. While imprisoned in Gryazovets, a Russian camp
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near Vologda, located in a bombed-out monastery, Czapski participated in a series of sometimes authorized, sometimes clandestine lectures: inmates would discourse from memory on any topic dear to them, whether literature, sports, geography... Czapski gave a series of talks on the history of painting (and, as we learn from Karpeles's biography of Czapski, "Almost Nothing," even drafted an art historical volume, but the notes were lost, confiscated...). As he worked on his topic, another idea came to haunt him: to present to his fellow prisoners the work of Proust -- whom he saw as a sort of prisoner, locked in his "corked bedroom," in disregard of his health, entirely devoted to his work. Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" brought hope of a time regained into a place so remote and seemingly antithetical to the aristocratic world he describes. Speaking to Polish fellows in arms, Czapski nevertheless gave his lectures in French. His notes, some of which are reproduced and translated (with only a handful of very slight errors) in the plate section, are a visual map to his interpretation of Proust, drafted mainly in Polish, with a sprinkling of French, German, Latin, as required by the origin of the references. The French edition of these talks presents perhaps a more fragile text as it preserves some grammatical errors and omissions made in the surviving transcripts of these lectures. (The journey from the original conception to the published text is in itself fascinating: it's not clear whether Czapski had detailed notes or whether he spoke based on the mental map in the form of visual diagrams recorded in the notebooks; afterwards, he dictated the lectures in abridged form to two inmates who transcribed it on a typewriter -- as Karpeles points out, mystery envelops the circumstances of the creation of this typescript [a typewriter in a gulag?]. Eventually a second typescript was created. Both bear some handwritten corrections made by Czapski, perhaps others. Karpeles's version relies on a comparison between the two versions; whereas the French publication had access to only one typescript.) Perhaps because of publishing costs, the NYRB edition reproduces only a few select pages with the draft diagrams, accompanied by a translation on the facing page. The French version doesn't offer translations of its plates, but includes color photographs of the entire notebook, including the two tattered covers with the title "Tyetrad" [Exercise Book], printed in Cyrillics.

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!
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LibraryThing member stillatim
Five stars for the back-story, three stars for general Proustiana, but really, unless you're obsessed with Proust, this is not even remotely worth reading. You can get the back story from a solid goodreads review. If you are obsessed with Proust, on the other hand, this is a delightful little squib.

Language

Original language

French

Original publication date

2018 (English Translation)
1987

Physical description

128 p.

ISBN

1681372584 / 9781681372587

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