Pushkin House's video: The Pushkin Club Between Art and History: Jozef Czapski and his Russian Background

The Pushkin Club invites you to a conversation with translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Alissa Valles, who will discuss with Masha Karp the extraordinary life and writings of Józef Czapski. Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk (Starobil'sk) in September 1939, the Polish painter Józef Czapski was one of a very small handful of people to survive the Katyń Massacre in April 1940. His novel Memories of Starobielsk recalls these doomed men with the vivid detail of a portrait artist, as Czapski describes their struggle to preserve dignity and hope in hopeless circumstances, and the additional essays on art, history and literature – on the fate of Chaim Soutine, on encounters with Anna Akhmatova, on Czapski's youth in revolutionary Petersburg, and essays on painting that he wrote on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s strategic base in Central Asia – all show his profound ties to Russian culture and his argument for defending what is best in it at a time when it was in a totalitarian stranglehold.