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A compelling biography of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski that takes readers to Paris in the Roaring Twenties, to the front lines during WWII, and into the late 20th-century art world. Józef Czapski (1896–1993) lived many lives during his ninety-six years. He was a student in Saint Petersburg during the Russian Revolution and a painter in Paris in the roaring twenties. As a Polish reserve officer fighting against the invading Nazis in the opening weeks of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. For reasons unknown to this day, he was one of the very few excluded from Stalin’s sanctioned massacres of Polish officers. He never returned to Poland after the war, but worked tirelessly in Paris to keep alive awareness of the plight of his homeland, overrun by totalitarian powers. Czapski was a towering public figure, but painting gave meaning to his life. Eric Karpeles, also a painter, reveals Czapski’s full complexity, pulling together all the threads of this remarkable life.

The 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. During 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 In Search of Lost Time 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.

Paintings in Proust is a companion guide to a monumental twentieth century work of art. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, one of the most expansive literary creations ever composed, is a vast novel teeming with visual references. Author Eric Karpeles has combined his experiences as painter and writer to create a lavishly illustrated book that illuminates the winding corridors of Proust's singular, labyrinthine masterpiece. For newcomers to Proust's work, Paintings in Proust functions as a complementary guidebook, providing a firmer ground from which to undertake the task of plunging into a novel famously known for its complexity and its length. At the same time, Paintings in Proust offers further nourishment to the seasoned Proustian reader, whose plate is already extravagantly full. Paintings in Proust animates the experience of reading by revealing and clarifying much that might otherwise remain obscure. Illustrating a treasure trove of visual references, Paintings in Proust provides access and insight in its presentation of paired groupings of texts and pictures, arranged sequentially, as they appear in volume after volume of In Search of Lost Time