Józef Czapski’s Encounters with Russian Emigrant Writers

Abstract

In the article issues connected with Józef Czapski’s personal acquaintances and meetings with Russian emigrant writers, as well as with ones concerning the reception of their work in the Polish writer’s essays are tackled. J. Czapski, an artist and essayist, made his acquaintance with Russian writers even in St Petersburg, where he met Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Filosofov with whom he kept up acquaintance, or even friendship in Warsaw – in the 1920s with the Merezhkovskys, and in the 1930s with D. Filosofov. Czapski’s Russian contacts also involve meeting Aleksey Tolstoy and Anna Akhmatova. Owing to the Merezhkovsys and D. Filosofov the Polish writer was able to penetrate deeper into Russian literature with a definite ethical dimension, among others into works by Vasily Rosanov and Aleksey Remisov, whom he met personally and visited in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s. He contained his hermeneutic reflection on the writers’ works as well as accounts of his encounters with them in numerous essays, sketches and in his memorial fiction. Czapski also met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Zürich in November 1974, where he represented, besides Jerzy Giedroyc, the circle of the Paris “Kultura”. As a writer of conscience and a searcher for the truth Czapski made a great contribution to the relations with Russian friend-emigrants; together with them he discovered, first of all, a different Russia, not only inhuman and cruel, but also one that has a face that is connected with religion, spirituality and Christian humanism.