Alissa Valles

Vivid accounts of life in a Soviet prison camp by the author of 'Inhuman Land.' Interned with thousands of Polish army officers and a handful of civilians in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, the artist J zef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre carried out in the forest of Katyn in April 1940. In prose written while the war still raged, Czapski portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait and others in vivid sketches imbued with a rare combination of intimacy and respect, registering their fierce striving to remain fully engaged in humane pursuits under hopeless circumstances. This memoir is complemented by essays on art, history, and literature that show Czapski's lifelong attachment to the Russian culture that educated him, in all its contradictory manifestations, from the poet Aleksandr Blok's fascinated response to revolution to the lonely struggle of the painter Chaim Soutine. They include a wartime sequence of short essays on painting written on a train when Czapski was traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army's strategic base in Central Asia, which are among his most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.

The first uncensored, English-language translation of a Polish dissident poet's brave act of witness in post-World-War-II Europe. The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called "a strange and beautiful marriage of Joseph Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective." Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a po te maudit and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community. Our Life Grows, published in Paris in 1978, was the first poetry collection to appear as Krynicki intended, beyond the reach of the Communist censorship that had crippled his earlier books. These poems, combining a biting wit and rigorously questioning mind with a surreal imagination, are a vital part of the story of postwar Europe.