{"product_id":"lost-time-isbn-9781681372587","title":"Lost Time","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s \u003ci\u003eIn Search of Lost Time\u003c\/i\u003e to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.\". . . an astonishing read. . . they deliver the pleasure of witnessing Czapski. . . delivering erudite talks that not only recall entire sections of Proust’s novel by heart but also provide valuable insights into what makes the 4,215-page work a territory so many of us continue to visit so frequently and with so much reverence.\" —Liel Leibovitz, \u003ci\u003eTablet Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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, \u003ci\u003eAlmost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski\u003c\/i\u003e; a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones of \u003ci\u003eInhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-42\u003c\/i\u003e; and Mr. Karpeles’s translation of Czapski’s \u003ci\u003eLost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp\u003c\/i\u003e.  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. Moreover, Mr. Karpeles, a  California-based painter   and art critic, has ignited international  interest in Czapski’s   artwork.” —Cynthia Haven, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eLost Time\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the most remarkable and inspiring texts to have emerged from the experience of surviving and resisting 20th-century barbaris.\" —John Gray, \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman  \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \"The Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived through almost  the entire twentieth century as an exception to the rule. A pacifist who  became a Polish army officer being deported to a Soviet prison camp in  1939, he was one of very few to survive the Katyn massacre perpetrated  by Stalin’s secret police the following year....He was both a patriot  and a European in the deepest sense, with friends and family connections  across the continent. In this year’s centenary of independence  regained, a new generation of Poles in a country at the crossroads must  decide whether Czapski’s vision will also be theirs.\" —Stanley Bill, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"To think of these radiant, incisive reflections delivered in the stinking cold of a Soviet prisoner-of-war mess hall beggars imagination. A remnant of the Polish officer class done to death en mass by Stalin, Czapski was—without benefit of books or notes—among the greatest Proustians. Long may his name live.\" —Benjamin Taylor \u003cbr\u003e“Czapski sometimes speaks of himself—but always in terms of the ceaseless battle he wages for clear vision, for full use of his gifts, the battle to imbue his life with maximal meaning.” —Adam Zagajewski\u003cb\u003eJózef Czapski \u003c\/b\u003e(1896–1993), a painter and writer, and an  eyewitness to the turbulent history of the twentieth century, was born  into an aristocratic family in Prague and grew up in Poland under  czarist domination. After receiving his baccalaureate in Saint  Petersburg, he went on to study law at Imperial University and was  present during the February Revolution of 1917. Briefly a cavalry  officer in World War I, decorated for bravery in the Polish-Soviet War,  Czapski went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and then  moved to Paris to paint. He spent seven years in Paris, moving in social  circles that included friends of Proust and Bonnard, and it was only in  1931 that he returned to Warsaw, and began exhibiting his work and  writing art criticism. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939,  Czapski sought active duty as a reserve officer. Captured by the  Germans, he was handed over to the Soviets as a prisoner of war, though  for reasons that remain mysterious he was not among the twenty-two  thousand Polish officers who were summarily executed by the Soviet  secret police. Czapski described his experiences in the Soviet Union in  two books: \u003ci\u003eMemories of Starobielsk\u003c\/i\u003e (forthcoming from NYRB) and \u003ci\u003eInhuman Land \u003c\/i\u003e(available  from NYRB), the latter of which describes his continuing efforts to  find out what had happened to his missing and murdered colleagues.  Unwilling to live in postwar communist Poland, Czapski set up a studio  outside of Paris. His essays appeared in Kultura, the leading  intellectual journal of the Polish emigration that he helped establish;  his painting underwent a great final flowering in the 1980s. Czapski  died, nearly blind, at ninety-six.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEric Karpeles\u003c\/b\u003e, painter, writer and translator, is the author of \u003ci\u003eAlmost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski\u003c\/i\u003e. His comprehensive guide, \u003ci\u003ePaintings in Proust\u003c\/i\u003e,  considers the intersection of literary and visual aesthetics in the  work of the great French novelist. He has written about the paintings of  poet Elizabeth Bishop and about the end of life as seen through the  works of Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler and Mark Rothko. Painter of the  Sanctuary and the Mary and Laurance Rockefeller Chapel, he has also  translated Lorenza Foschini's \u003ci\u003eProust's Overcoat\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in Northern California.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301403939045,"sku":"NP9781681372587","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681372587.jpg?v=1767731834","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/lost-time-isbn-9781681372587","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}