Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Involuntary Memories

What other more essential function can literature have than to let us know that there are experiences other than those immediately our own? Literature may also evoke emotions or help us to formulate our own interpretations of the world, but only after it has enticed us into perceiving the world from a different point of view. In a time of routine, that is to say expected daily life, the knowledge that there are other worlds than the one we contingently inhabit can be consoling, inspiring, or merely distracting. But for those who find themselves in extremis physically, mentally, or spiritually, and who have prepared themselves sufficiently, literature can be a matter of survival.

Jósef Czapski was such a person in such a situation. Interned as a Polish Army officer by the Soviet Army during WW II, Czapski and his other Polish comrades faced not just extreme physical hardship but also the likelihood of sudden and unexplained death at the hands of their captors. Literally the only resource available to Czapski was his own intellect and his ability to share it with the intellects of his fellow prisoners. If either he or they had not developed their taste and understanding of the written word, they very well could have succumbed to their circumstances.

For both Czapski and his fellow-prisoners, the social glue which helped them stay united and mutually supportive was not shared personal memories, of which there are necessarily few among any random collection of people, nor shared commitments, to their Polish nationality for example, which once expressed can only become tediously repetitive or simply hollow. Unexpectedly, what arose in Czapski’s mind were entire sections of books he had read, especially parts of Proust’s immense fictional memoir. Czapski finds himself re-enacting in the prison-camp the kind of stream of remembrance, not of his own life but of his experience of Proust’s writing including the allusions, ideas, and suggestions it provoked in him.

From these thoughts he lectured to groups of other prisoners after days of hard labour in overwhelmingly difficult conditions. In the lectures Proust became a “template for survival” among the prisoners, a growing reminder that the world of their gulag was not the entire world. They provided, literally, a spiritual escape and therefore a hope of physical freedom. These lectures were written down from memory after the war and published by Czapski with the explicit purpose of commemorating those men, their courageous suffering and the debt they owed to literature for enabling them to endure what they did.

Because he had no access to a library, nor indeed to any reference material at all, Czapski had to rely entirely on his memory. So what he talked and wrote about Proust was not in any way an academic exercise. Rather, his lectures are reports about what he had learned, about how and why he came to appreciate Proust. Literary history, biography, poetry, art, criticism, and philosophy run into and across one another continuously. He shows, in other words, how Proust slowly influenced his aesthetic judgment, and therefore how Czapski came to perceive not just Proust, but also the world and himself.

The result, therefore, is an aesthetic biography which probably could never have been written in circumstances other than total deprivation by a man who had unknowingly prepared for just that task throughout his education. As Czapski notes in his lectures. “Proust repeatedly insists that only involuntary memory is significant in art.” All Czapski and his fellow-prisoners had were these involuntary memories. What they were able to do with them is remarkable.

Oh, and yes, it is a rather good introduction for reading Proust.

Postscript: I am indebted to Nick Grammos on GR in Australia (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2...) for directing me toward this extraordinary work. Thanks Nick.

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