Almost Nothing by Eric Karpeles

Author:Eric Karpeles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-08-03T12:27:20+00:00

Czapski channeled his creative energies into writing his book. Narrating in a dispassionate voice, without recourse to outrage, he let the cruel facts speak for themselves. He underscores the experience of devastation by remaining objective, as acts of brutality, one after another, simply described, become almost unbearable to encounter on the page. Only on rare occasions, when the painter in him meets the writer, does Czapski yield to a lyrical turn and allow himself to compose a shocking tableau. Miłosz commented on the curbs imposed on a writer in the face of barbarism: “It is not my intention to write a commentary for Goya’s drawings. The immensity of events calls for restraint, even dryness, and this is only fitting where words do not suffice.”

In the months following the institute’s move from Hôtel Lambert to Maisons-Laffitte, Czapski put the finishing touches on his manuscript. Inhuman Land is a more calculated memoir than Memories of Starobielsk, stemming from the moral obligation he felt toward those who had not survived, those unable to speak for themselves. (“Damn you if you don’t talk about us,” he overheard someone cry out as he left one of the camps.) In the years after the war ended, the category of “those unable to speak” was no longer limited to the dead or those left behind. As Poland was materially and ideologically engulfed by the Soviet Union, the words “inhuman land” took on a broader resonance and a more complex meaning, not unlike the words “temps perdu” at Gryazovets. In his introduction to Inhuman Land, Czapski wrote, “I’ve begun to understand more powerfully than ever before the mortal danger that menaces my country today.”

When his manuscript was completed, he sent it around to sympathetic readers who might be of help in placing it with a publisher. Malraux’s response was welcome, quick in coming, fulsome in its praise. He offered to send the book out. “Malraux sent my manuscript to Calmann-Lévy and ten days later I received word from the man responsible for the collection that my book had been accepted. The man in charge was Raymond Aron. He simply advised me to edit a chapter or two on purely literary grounds.”

The French philosopher, journalist, and political scientist Raymond Aron had fled Paris to join the Free French forces in London. After the war he was named the director of the Calmann-Lévy publishing house, which offered translations of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and The Diary of Anne Frank to the French public. A rational humanist and a secular Jew, Aron had watched the rise of fascism as a student in Germany in the early 1930s and was well equipped to understand the dark powers at work in the Soviet Union. Most postwar progressive pieties, such as the unity of the left and the likelihood of a proletarian revolution, were anathema to him. His field of study was the relationship between knowledge and action, and the very limited possibilities for change in a liberal society. As the employee of a publishing firm, not the owner, he experienced these limited possibilities frequently.

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