Józef Łobodowski

Józef Łobodowski

Łobodowski in 1938
Born (1909-03-19)19 March 1909
Purwiszki, Partitioned Poland
Died 18 April 1988(1988-04-18) (aged 79)
Madrid, Spain
Pen name Stefan Kuryłło[1]
Łoboda[2]
Iosif Władisławowicz Łobodowskij[3]
Paragraf[4]
Occupation Poet, dramatist, writer, translator, magazine editor, opinion journalist, radio personality
Nationality Polish
Ethnicity Polish
Period Interbellum
Ciemne dziesięciolecie ("Dark Decade"; 1928–1939)
Second World War
Post-War period
Genre Catastrophism (katastrofizm)
Neo-romanticism
Lyric poetry
Ghazal
Qasida
Bagatelle (fraszka)
Satirical poetry
Literary movement Skamander
The Second Avant-garde (Druga Awangarda)
Notable works Rozmowa z ojczyzną
("A Conversation with the Fatherland"; 1935);
Demonom nocy ("To the Demons of the Night"; 1936)
Notable awards Youth Prize of the
Polish Academy of Literature
(1937)
Spouse Jadwiga Laura Zofia, née Kuryłło (Łobodowska from 1938; secundo voto Kuczyńska; d. 1993)[5]
Children none
Relatives Władysława Łobodowska (b. 1905; married name (from 1927), Tomanek or Tomankowa; sister)
Adam Tomanek (b. 1928; nephew)[6]

Józef Stanisław Łobodowski was a Polish poet and political thinker.

Łobodowski was born 19 March 1909 at the Purwiszki country estate, Sejny County in the Suwałki Land (Pol., Suwalszczyzna), Polish lands of the Russian Partition (now within the territory of Lithuania) and died 18 April 1988 in Madrid.

His poetic works are broadly divided into two distinct phases: the earlier one, until about 1934, in which he was sometimes identified as "the last of the Skamandrites",[7] and the second phase beginning about 1935, marked by the pessimistic and tragic colouring associated with the newly nascent current in Polish poetry known as katastrofizm (catastrophism). The evolution of his political thought, from the radical left to radical anticommunism, broadly paralleled the trajectory of his poetic oeuvre.

To the contemporary reading public Łobodowski was also known as the founder and editor of several avant-garde literary periodicals, of a newspaper, translator, novelist, prose writer in the Polish and Spanish languages, radio personality, and preeminently a prolific opinion writer with sharply defined political views active before, during and after the Second World War in the Polish press (since 1940 only in the émigré press). He was appreciated by two nations for his personal admiration for Ukrainian culture and its spiritual values: Łobodowski described himself as an Ukrainophile and devoted three of his books to Ukrainian themes, including two collections of poetry (Pieśń o Ukrainie and Złota hramota).[8] He spoke out in defence of ethnic minorities persecuted in Poland before and after the Second World War, condemning for example the forced resettlement of the Lemko community in the so-called Operation Vistula mounted by the communist régime in 1947,[9] or the destruction of churches built in the Eastern Orthodox architectural style out of favour in the Western-oriented Poland of the Interbellum.[10] He denounced in print the anti-Jewish sentiment prevalent in some Polish literary circles before the War, defending for example the Polish poet Franciszka Arnsztajnowa against antisemitic attacks.[11] An inveterate and caustic critic of totalitarianism in all its forms, he was blacklisted by the communist censorship of the post-War Poland and spent most of his life in exile in Spain.

Life and work

Early life

Łobodowski was born on 19 March 1909 in the lands of Partitioned Poland on the (relatively modest) Purwiszki farmstead of his father, Władysław Łobodowski, a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army, and his wife Stefanja Łobodowska, née Doborejko-Jarząbkiewicz. Of the Łobodowskis' four children — three daughters and one son — two daughters died in childhood, leaving Józef and his surviving (elder) sister Władysława.[12] In 1910 the Łobodowskis were obliged to sell their country estate and moved to Lublin. In 1914, owing to the outbreak of the First World War, Władysław Łobodowski was transferred together with his family to Moscow as a measure taken by the Imperial Russian Army to shield its officer corps from the hostilities of war. It is to this period of his early schooling in Moscow that Łobodowski owed his excellent knowledge of the Russian language. However, the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 soon forced the family to flee for their lives to Yeysk in the Kuban region of the Ciscaucasia, where — drastically reduced in their means — they suffered severe privations for five years, including hunger. In this place and in these conditions Łobodowski passed the for­ma­tive years of his life between the ages of 8 and 13, at times forced by circumstances into wheeling and dealing in the town's streets to help the family survive. The name "Kuban", as a reference to the broadly conceived world of the Kuban Cossacks, crops up in all discussions of Łobodowski's life and creative oeuvre as the single most sig­nif­i­cant toponym of his entire biography. The Kuban period will be fictionalized in his 1955 novel Komysze ("The Bushmen"), a text which paints a faithful and seductively vivid picture of the last months of freedom and decadence in Russia in a secluded port in the Zakubanskie Marshes on the Sea of Azov.[13] It is also here, in the Kuban, that Łobo­dow­ski first came in contact with Ukrainian culture, owing to the presence in the region of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had been resettled there after the banning of the Zaporizhian Sich by Catherine II in 1775.[14] However, the Kuban, and Yeysk in particular did not prove a safe haven for the family, and here his father, Władysław Łobodowski, was at last arrested by the Bolsheviks: although eventually released through the intervention of a former comrade-in-arms from the Imperial Russian Army who had crossed over the new ideological divide, he died there of natural causes on 4 March 1922 and is buried in town. Thereupon Łobodowski's mother, Stefanja Łobodowska, decided to take her three surviving children (one daughter had already died earlier) to the nascent Second Polish Republic, a long and perilous journey which claimed the life of another of her children, a second daughter, hurriedly buried along the way in an unmarked grave.[6] Thus reduced in numbers and deprived of means of support, the family settled once again in Lublin, in an establishment owned by Stefanja Łobodowska's stepsister, Łobodowski's aunt.

Youth and the early period as a poet

The city of Lublin (now in independent Poland) was thus to become the centre of his youth, and here Łobodowski spent his tumultuous high-school years which saw his first forays into poetry, encouraged by the poet Julian Tuwim, soon to become the dominant preoccupation of his life. In the first years of his life as a poet his sympathies lay with the so-called Second Avant-garde (Druga Awangarda) movement centred round the poet Józef Czechowicz and his circle, whose style was characterized by visionary catastrophism mediated by Expressionism, although the personal idiom Łobodowski developed was distinctively and unmistakably his own.[15] One of the first compositions published by Łobodowski was the poem "Dlaczego" (Why?) which appeared in May 1928 in the bimonthly magazine W Słońce which he co-edited and which also carried in its first issue the article of a 19-year-old Łobodowski on the nature of poetry in general as the art of the unsayable, and some other of his poems.[16] His début in book form in 1929, at the age of 20, was the collection of poems entitled Słońce przez szpary ("Sunshine through the Cracks"). This was followed by the volume entitled Gwiezdny psałterz ("Astral Psaltery") released in the autumn of 1931, whose programmatic poem "Poezja" (Poetry) is dedicated to Julian Tuwim in obvious ac­knowl­edge­ment of his indebtedness to the Skamander circle.[17] However, another poem in the collection, "Hymn brzucha" (The Hymn of the Belly), in which reverberate the echos of the terrible period of hunger experienced in Yeysk in 1917–1922, will mark the beginning, stylistically, of a post-Skamander stage in Łobodowski's creative journey.[18] These early volumes largely escaped the notice of the literary establishment at the time.

On the Red Colour of Blood and other colours

Łobodowski began to draw attention with his third collection of poetry on account of the controversy it caused. The controversy stemmed principally from the fact that the newly independent Poland was not a fully democratic country with unfettered freedom of speech, but constituted instead an environment in which the ostensibly "leftist" ideology he espoused early in his life as a vehicle for his nonconformist ideas was treated with suspicion. The entire print run of O czerwonej krwi ("On the Red Colour of Blood"), his third collection of poems published in January 1932 expressing revolt against the prevailing standards of morality and challenging all authority, was seized by the authorities and criminal pro­ceed­ings were instituted against Łobodowski as the author.[19] Although the protracted court case ended, on appeal, with mere confiscation of all the copies of the book and no fines or imprisonment were imposed, the affair had damaging consequences for Łobodowski since — as it coincided with the commencement of his studies in the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Lublin in 1931 — he was promptly expelled from the university in February 1932, at the beginning of the second semester of the first year and, for good measure, blacklisted by all institutions of higher education in Poland "for the propagation of pornography and blasphemy through poetical works".[20]

Łobodowski responded defiantly by releasing another collection of poetry later the same year under the title W przeddzień ("On the Eve"), his fourth book which included the title poem "W przeddzień" (On the Eve) incorporating the following three lines addressed to the Polish dictator First Marshal Piłsudski (who had earlier called his coup d'état a "revolution", and who is referenced in the poem by name):

towarzyszu Piłsudski,
w przeddzień polskiej rewolucji
krwią wasze imię wypisujemy na tarczach...
_________________________________

Comrade Piłsudski,
on the eve of the Polish Revolution,
we inscribe your name in blood upon our armoury of battle...

(emphasis in the original).[21] This book, which appeared towards the end of June 1932 in a print run of 100 copies, was placed under an interdict by the local authorities in Lublin on 2 July 1932; the interdict was however lifted by the decision of the Lublin district court just eleven days later.[22] The authorities evidently considered it wise to ignore the challenge this time round to avoid giving Łobodowski the benefit of extra publicity, his star having risen markedly since he had been stamped with the hallmark of a "confiscated poet" the last time. Indeed, thrust into the public spotlight with the O czerwonej krwi affair of March 1932, with his books suddenly an object of attention, Łobodowski started billing his previously released (but unsold) volume Gwiezdny psałterz as now still forthcoming in newspaper notices intended to capitalize on the newly found wave of popularity with this title, too.[23] On the other hand, the individual poem entitled "Słowo do prokuratora" (A Word to the Prosecutor), published separately in the Trybuna in March 1932, a literary journal of which he was for a time the editor-in-chief, will be the cause of another court case against him in 1933.[24] This time in addition to the usual charges of subversive publications will be added the charges of contacts with the Communist Party of Poland: Łobodowski will be acquitted only on appeal in a Warsaw court in October 1933.[25] For all the exertions of the Sanacja régime against him as a communist subversive, Łobodowski's leftist stance was to a significant extent superficial, adopted as an expedient by an angry young man to transmit his ideas of rebellion against reality, tout court (and was soon to be abandoned of his own accord for other forms of poetic discourse better suited to his evolving perception of human condition). Some critics have used the adjective światoburczy to describe the nature of Łobodowski's political writings, a partly jocose word whose meaning is a blend of such concepts as iconoclasm, radicalism, and dissatisfaction with the status quo (welterschütternd in German).[26] The evidence of how seriously Łobodowski was taken as a political commentator at this time can on the other hand be illustrated by the fact that, at the age of 23, he could print opinion pieces on the first page of the premier daily newspaper of a major Polish city (the Kurjer Lubelski of Lublin) with such headlines as "What You Need is a Suicide" (a title he used in an article stressing the need for the Polish society to free itself from the old entrenched modes of thought).[27] There is evidence that Łobodowski, even at this particular period of his life, held in contempt those who — like Jerzy Putrament — admired him for his leftist leanings rather than his poetical craftsmanship.[28] Józef Czechowicz, the leading light of the Lublin avant-garde, went so far (in a private letter) as to express the opinion that Łobodowski deliberately fostered around himself an atmosphere of sensation and scandal in which to move his wings, and that not only in the political sphere but in the literary and social domains as well.[29] Despite the wide publicity his first four volumes of poetry had received, Łobodowski himself considered his output up to this point "unoriginal".[30] Łobodowski was twice the editor-in-chief of the Kurjer Lubelski, one of the most important daily newspapers of the interbellum Poland, in 1932 and 1937. Upon assuming the office of the editor in 1932 he promptly published the article "Why the Work of the Opposition is Harmful", arguing that the fight with the Sanacja system had been hijacked by other equally distasteful political groupings making the whole exercise of the political opposition moot and suspect.[31] In its so-called Fifth Phase in 1937, after his own ideological turnabout, he attempted to revive the broadsheet on Promethean lines, that is to say to make it unabashedly an organ "of the struggle to dismember the Russian–Soviet empire into its constituent parts".[32]

Turnabout in ideology and poetics

Suicide attempt

During the military service he was performing at a reserve officers' cadet school (szkoła podchorążych rezerwy) in the Polish town of Równe in the Volhynia in 1933–1934 Łobodowski made an unsuccessful attempt on his life by shooting himself. The act was witnessed by others. He was hospitalized, and in the aftermath of the incident arrested (10 March 1934) on charges of possessing "leftist propaganda" (that apparently meant his own poems in manuscript, which were found during a search of his belongings performed in his absence) and placed in military prison for three weeks.[33] The intervention of his literary friends who mobilized some of the greatest names in Polish literature on his behalf, including the well-connected writer Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (1892–1983) but also Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina (1899–1986) and others, was in­stru­men­tal in bringing about his release from jail and in making the whole affair die a sudden death without a court martial or other long-lasting adverse consequences for Łobodowski.[34] Łobodowski's explanation of the reasons for his suicide attempt given sub­se­quent­ly to Iłła­ko­wi­czówna and reported in her memoirs as attributable to disappointed love (presumably for Zuzanna Ginczanka) has been treated with scepticism by critical opinion since its publication in 1968. While Łobodowski avoided the subject throughout the rest of his life, a set of more complex reasons concerning the ideological turmoil he was in at the time are nowadays credited as the real cause of the dramatic act he resorted to.[35] Following the military affair at Równe, Łobodowski moved to Warsaw in May 1934.[36]

Polemics with Wasilewska

During this period Łobodowski changed some of his political views, a fact which is signalled most dramatically in his polemical exchanges with Wanda Wasilewska, a writer of a staunch communist, pro-Soviet, Stalinist stance that she will maintain unshaken even in the face of the Soviet Union's (later) alliance with Hitler and their joint attack on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. In an article published in 1935 in the most prestigious literary periodical in Poland at the time, the Wiadomości Literackie weekly — as part of his ongoing war of words with Wasilewska — Łobodowski made the following statement which posits self-criticism as the essential element of moral courage, and which thus holds special significance for this period of his ideological transition and the whole rest of his life:

“ A distinction must be made between on the one hand a heroism of life, which consists in a determined fight [for one's ideals] and the rejection of all compromise, and on the other hand a heroism of mind that has no fear of criticism and of a continuous reappraisal of its primary assumptions. It often so happens that people who bravely go to jail for many years for their beliefs lack the courage to admit before themselves that their sacrifice may be useless — or worse, misguided, being offered in the wrong cause. In this sense many a hero or revolutionary is a retrograde intellectual coward. I doubt it whether Ms. Wasilewska — who in her novels has given us a striking example of the crudity to which facile ideologies can lead — whether she understands this distinction. ”
— from "The Prophetess of Heroism", Wiadomości Literackie, 1 December 1935.[37]

New direction in poetry

Critical acclaim and wide recognition as an important voice in literature brought him the collections of poetry Rozmowa z ojczyzną ("A Conversation with the Fatherland"; 1935; 2nd ed., corr. & enl., 1936), much appreciated by Zuzanna Ginczanka, and Demonom nocy ("To the Demons of the Night"; 1936), which won him a coveted prize of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1937 but in private was sharply criticized by Ginczanka.[17][38] The general adulation showered on him by both the reading public and the critics was tempered by the dissenting voice of Ignacy Fik who wrote of Łobodowski ad personam as "a character most alien to the Polish psyche, a pagan Scythian, a Romantic shot through with anarchism and nihilism, an expansive Russian nature whose longings for his Marzanna are inspired by boredom. And where Łobodowski ends, [Czesław] Miłosz takes over...".[39] Another carping critic, Ludwik Fryde, for his part, accused Łobodowski of "actorship, playacting".[40] However, by 1937 such barbs served as a confirmation of Łobodowski's presence in the public spotlight with his firmly established fame. It has been observed that the latter works for the first time sound a note — from now on to be the characteristic theme of Łobodowski's oeuvre — of tragic pessimism which has been seen by scholars to have its source in the dramatic confrontation between the powers of élan vital and biology on the one hand, and those of culture and ideology on the other.[17] Tymon Terlecki (1905–2000), one of the most astute Polish critics, wrote in 1937 that inasmuch as Łobodowski was difficult of classification in general he did not fit easily within the cultural parameters of any known literary tradition.[41]

The collection Rozmowa z ojczyzną ("A Conversation with the Fatherland"), like the previous book W przeddzień ("On the Eve") of 1932, contains an engagé poem dealing with the Polish dictator First Marshal Piłsudski. Indeed, in this case, the name of Piłsudski is not merely incorporated into the body of the text but constitutes the very title of the 6-stanza, 25-line poem "Piłsudski".[42]

Marriage and relationship with Zuzanna Ginczanka

In March 1938 Łobodowski married Jadwiga Kuryłło, an undistinguished woman of Polish ethnicity, after the prospect of a union with a Jewish woman he really loved and had an affair with — a renowned poet in her own right, Zuzanna Ginczanka — met with staunch opposition from his mother and his sister, who together joined forces to arrange an "ethnically palatable" substitute match for him.[43] The alliance with Kuryłło, on the other hand, was opposed by the bride's family who were against her association with Łobodowski on account of the aura of official disapprobation surrounding his person in the public arena: for that reason the marriage had to be contracted in secret, without the Kuryłło family's knowledge.[44] Łobodowski first met Zuzanna Ginczanka — in his words, "a precociously mature woman... with eyes scintillating like the vast expanse of the sea shimmering in the sun" — at the multicultural Polish locality of Równe in Volhynia (now within the borders of the Ukraine), where he had the uncommon good fortune to have been performing his military service in the autumn of 1933, when Ginczanka was 16 and he 24. They continued their relationship thenceforth virtually uninterrupted until March 1938 when Łobodowski's marriage to Kuryłło put paid to Ginczanka's interest.[45] (She would perish in the Holocaust; he would never return to Poland after the War to live with his married wife, who would eventually remarry.) After the War, while living in Madrid, Łobodowski would receive a small parcel posted from Pamplona containing the gift of a golden diamond-studded tie pin, with a small note skewered on it, which read: "From the mother of Zuzanna".[46] What remains for posterity is the extraordinary volume of understated erotic lyrics modelled stylistically on the Song of Songs, with an introduction important for historical reasons, which Łobodowski will dedicate to Ginczanka posthumously late in his own life (at the age of 78): his collection Pamięci Sulamity ("In Remembrance of the Shulamite Woman"),[47] brimming as it is with love for Ginczanka undimmed by the passage of time.[48]

Second World War

During the last few years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War Łobodowski lived in Łuck, in what was then Poland, moving to Warsaw in April 1938 after his marriage. He was called up in August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War, and saw action during the September Campaign in Wiśnicz, Łańcut, and several other places, including a locality known as Dublany (then in Poland, now in the Ukraine), which he memorialized in the poem entitled "Dublany" (first published in France in 1941).[49] After the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, while waiting with the remnants of his brigade at Tatarów (now Tatariv in the Ukraine) to cross the border into Hungary, he wrote the memorable lines of the "Noc nad granicą" (A Night on the Frontier). The next day, 19 September 1939, they crossed the Polish border through the Yablonitsky Pass: this was the moment Łobodowski would leave his homeland for ever. The veterans of his unit were interned in various places throughout the territory of Hungary, Łobodowski ending up at first at a camp at Tapolca near Lake Balaton. His subsequent wartime peregrinations are not well known; he intended like most men of his unit to join Sikorski's Army in France, and this intention guided his actions while in Hungarian detention. After two unsuccessful attempts at escape, he finally managed to flee to Yugoslavia about a month after arriving in Hungary, eventually reaching Paris on 9 or 10 November 1939. In Paris Łobodowski encountered the Polish poets Jan Lechoń and Kazimierz Wierzyński (who was eager to meet his younger colleague whose fame had preceded him to France), and he began to publish his poems in the émigré press there.

On the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the way of ending the War

Łobodowski's first text in prose published in Paris was the full-page political article entitled "On the Soviet–German Alliance" which appeared in March 1940 in the Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie, a weekly émigré newspaper newly founded by Mieczysław Grydzewski.[50] The principal thesis of the article was the contention that however unexpected and shocking the collusion between Hitler and Stalin in starting the Second World War might have been in the eyes of the world, their compact was in fact predictable. (He had foretold it himself, he pointed out, in the article published in the Wiadomości Literackie of Warsaw on 2 April 1939, fully 4 months and 3 weeks before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which at the time resulted in the wholesale confiscation by the Polish authorities of the newspaper carrying the article on the grounds that the author was spreading unsubstantiated rumours detrimental to public peace.)[51] Such precautions against rumours were predicated on a mistaken view of the Soviet Union as less noxious than that of Nazi Germany, a view that was based not on facts but on wishful thinking. Łobodowski wrote that the only way of ending the War quickly in an Allied victory obtained without millions of dead was not by attacking Nazi Germany on the Western Front but by way of an Allied attack on the Soviet Union on the south-eastern front in the region of the Black Sea and the Caucasuses. Such an attack on the Soviet Union would be the most effective form of attack on Nazi Germany itself for the simple reason — Łobodowski wrote — that it would pre-empt Germany's own inevitable transfer of the theatre of war to the region and terminally undermine its capacity to pursue long-term goals (by severing access to natural resources concentrated in the area): but unlike in Europe, a successful outcome for Germany there — even if successful only partially — would have "incalculable consequences" (enabling Germany to strike at British India, etc.).[52] For great wars, concluded Łobodowski, are won only when the forces of history are allowed to do the fighting for you, with the military operations serving in an ancillary and corrective role to them.[50]

Arrest in Paris

On 20 February 1940 Łobodowski, then aged 30, was arrested by the French police in Paris in circumstances that to this day have not been properly established. The event involved the confiscation of some of his personal effects, including manuscripts, during the search of his hotel room. Some of these materials have never been returned. Those materials included anticommunist propaganda leaflets apparently secretly authored by Łobodowski for the Polish government-in-exile (then based in Paris), which were intended to be dropped from airplanes over the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland for the purpose of fomenting subversion among the Red Army — and as such they were the reason for his detention at the Cherche-Midi military prison over a period of some six months after the Polish government minister responsible for ordering the leaflets in question (Professor Stanisław Kot) denied involvement when interpellated by the French authorities. Łobodowski will use the scurrilously offensive satirical verse "Na Profesora Kota" (On Professor Kot) to lampoon the minister in question in his 1954 collection Uczta zadżumionych ("The Banquet of the Plague-stricken"),[53] calling him again a "cynical swindler" in a parting shot fired one last time towards the end of his life.[9] According to Łobodowski's own testimony, he was not released from prison until September 1940, and that only after having been tried and acquitted by the Supreme Military Court (a circumstance which it will be impossible to verify before the year 2040, as it will be impossible to ascertain the precise nature of the charges he faced).[54] While the prison experience was a significant and perhaps traumatic event in his life, its silver lining — for the posterity — proved the preservation of his police dossier containing what appears to be a complete set of his confiscated manuscripts. The dossier was initially expropriated by the Nazis after the invasion of France and taken to the Third Reich, where towards the end of the War it fell in its turn into the hands of the Soviets and was taken to Moscow, there to be repeatedly and assiduously studied during the following years at the Central Military Archives of the USSR (Центральный государственный Особый архив СССР; as evidenced by the handwritten annotations made in it), until it was finally returned by the Russian Federation to France in recent years. (It was found to contain no propaganda leaflets: only Łobodowski's poetry manuscripts and fragments were present, a circumstance explainable by the probability that the leaflets in question may form part of the as yet unopened French military archives instead.)[55]

Post-War period

While Łobodowski was a frequent victim of censorship by the Sanacja régime before the War, his legal problems then were to be eclipsed by the very effective, blanket blacklisting of all his writings by the communist censorship of the post-War Poland, which accorded him "a place of honour on the blackest of blacklists" — in the words of the literary critic Michał Chmielowiec.[56] This resulted virtually in his being rendered, while still one of the best-known names in Polish literature, into an "unperson" in the Eastern Bloc.[57] The blackout continued into the 1980s.[58] Łobodowski believed that in every country in which a criminal political system holds dominion all those participating in any capacity in governance are responsible to some degree for the crimes committed in its name.[9] For this reason he regarded with empirical scepticism and moral contempt such events as the Khrushchev Thaw and the Perestroika, for example, arguing that their authors, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev respectively, had not satisfactorily explained their own complicity in the crimes of the previous Soviet régimes which they later purported to criticize as the wrongdoing of others rather than their own.[9] The great communist empire was for him a satanic domain chiefly on account of its subversion of truth as a method of survival and self-preservation (rather than because of its expansionist propensities, the chief point in Ronald Reagan's definition of the Evil empire).[9] Thus the most effective method of combating totalitarianism was the upholding of Truth and its widest possible dissemination, a view which he upheld not only in theory but in his active practice as opinion writer and translator of the dissident writers suppressed within the Soviet Union and elsewhere: Andrei Sinyavsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuli Daniel, Andrei Sakharov, and others (see Translations).

Postscript

Unlike many other poets, Łobodowski was very good at reading his own poems in public, and they gained at his recitation.[59]

Works

Poetry

Poetry monographs

Selected poetry in periodicals

Drama

Prose

Selected opinion journalism

Selected posthumous editions of Łobodowski's works

Selected translations by Łobodowski

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ↑ Cf.Ludmiła Siryk (see Bibliography), pp. 21, 23, 44, 46, 167, 189 & 196–201.
  2. ↑ Słownik biograficzny miasta Lublina, vol. 1, ed. T. Radzik, et al., Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1993, s.v. "Łobodowski". ISBN 8322705646.
  3. ↑ The pseudonym (consisting of his real name in Russian form, his father's first name constituting his middle name, all in Polish respelling) with which he signed his article "Tropicielom polskości" (To the Assayers of Polishness), Wiadomości Literackie (see Wiadomości Literackie) (Warsaw), vol. 14, No. 25 (711), 13 June 1937, p. 5.
  4. ↑ This was the pseudonym with which Łobodowski signed the column called alternatively "Zgrzyty lubelskie" or "Zgrzyty po Lubelsku" (The Grating Noises of Lublin) which he wrote in the Kurjer Lubelski daily newspaper in 1932. Cf. The history of Kurjer Lubelski (Lublin) on the portal Ośrodek Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN of Lublin.
  5. ↑ Cf.Ludmiła Siryk (see Bibliography), pp. 20 & 209–210.
  6. 1 2 Cf. The oral recollections of Adam Tomanek, Józef Łobodowski's nephew, recorded by M. Nawratowicz on 22 September 2008 for the Ośrodek Brama Grodzka/Teatr NN of Lublin. (See transcript online.)
  7. ↑ By Wacław Iwaniuk, who called him "ostatni skamandryta"; cited in: Jadwiga Sawicka, Wołyń poetycki w przestrzeni kresowej, Warsaw, DiG, 1999, p. 55. ISBN 837181030X.
  8. ↑ Wacław Iwaniuk, Ostatni romantyk: wspomnienie o Józefie Łobodowskim (The Archiwum Emigracji: studia, szkice, dokumenty series, ed. J. Kryszak, No. 4), Toruń, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998. Cf. also Archiwum Emigracji, No. 1, p. 229. Cf. Józef Łobodowski — rzecznik dialogu polsko-ukraińskiego, ed. L. Siryk & J. Święch, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2000, passim. ISBN 8322716575.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Józef Łobodowski, "Towarzysz Kiszczak i inni?" (Comrade Kiszczak and the Others), Tydzień Polski (London), No. 18 (102), 30 April 1988, p. 16.
  10. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "'Z ziemi chełmskiej'" (1937); in id., Uczta zadżumionych, Paris, The Author and Subscribers, 1954, p. 154. The title of the poem harks back to the 1910 novel of the same name by Władysław Reymont.
  11. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "W obronie zasługi" (In Defence of Merit), letter to the editor, Wiadomości Literackie (see Wiadomości Literackie) (Warsaw), vol. 14, No. 32 (718), 1 August 1937, p. 8.
  12. ↑ Adam Tomanek (Łobodowski's nephew), "Polski redaktor tygodnika 'Wołyń'", Monitor Wołyński, 2009.
  13. ↑ So Czesław Jeśman, "W kubańskiej pustyni i puszczy" (In Kuban Desert and Wilderness), Wiadomości Literackie (London), No. 16 (524), 1956, p. 4. The title of the article, "In Kuban Desert and Wilderness", is a word play on the title of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel, In Desert and Wilderness (1911).
  14. ↑ Józef Łobodowski's letter of January 1988 to Jadwiga Sawicka; quoted in: Jadwiga Sawicka, "Hellada scytyjska: Ukraina w poezji Józefa Łobodowskiego", Więź, Nos. 11–12, 1988. (See online.)
  15. ↑ Irena Szypowska, "Łobodowski — poeta świadomy dziejów", Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 38, Łódź, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, p. 20.
  16. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Sztuka... poezja..." (On Art and Poetry), W Słońce (Lublin), vol. 1, No. 1, [1 May 1928], pp. 1–4. Id., "Dlaczego" (Why?), ibid., p. 4. Id., "Trzy śmierci" (Three Deaths), ibid., p. 8. (See online.)
  17. 1 2 3 Artur Hutnikiewicz & Andrzej Lam, eds., Literatura polska XX wieku: przewodnik encyklopedyczny, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000, p. 396. ISBN 8301130288.
  18. ↑ Cf. Irena Szypowska (see Bibliography), pp. 25–27.
  19. ↑ Irena Szypowska, "Łobodowski — poeta świadomy dziejów" (Łobodowski: A Poet Cognizant of History), Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 38, Łódź, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, p. 18.
  20. ↑ Józef Kruszyński (1877–1953), the notorious theoretician of antisemitism and rector of the Catholic University of Lublin (see Józef Kruszyński), wrote to all the rectors of Polish universities a letter dated 17 February 1932, which stated in part:
    I have the honour [sic] to inform you that... Józef Łobodowski, by the decision of the [University] Senate of 5 February 1932, was sent down from the University for propagating pornography and blasphemy [sic: za szerzenie pornografji i bluźnierstwa] through the poetic works published by himself, which had been confiscated by the prosecutor's deputies. (See facsimile online.)
    56 years and 8 months after the event, on 22 October 1988, a memorial mass will be celebrated for the "por­nog­ra­pher and blasphemer" Łobodowski at the University church: see Słownik biograficzny miasta Lublina, vol. 1, ed. T. Radzik, et al., Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1993, s.v. "Łobodowski". ISBN 8322705646. And in the year following his death, 1989, the University's own Press will publish a collection of Łobodowski's verses: Józef Łobodowski, List do kraju, comp. & ed. J. Święch, Lublin, Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1989. ISBN 8322801645.
  21. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Wiersze i poematy, ed. I. Szypowska, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1991, p. 60. ISBN 8306020162. Cf. Włodzimierz Wójcik, Legenda Piłsudskiego w polskiej literaturze międzywojennej, Warsaw, Śląsk, 1986, p. 94. ISBN 8321605338.
  22. ↑ Józef Zięba (see Bibliography), No. 6 (89), p. 4.
  23. ↑ Trybuna: pismo młodej demokracji... (Lublin), vol. 1, No. 1, 1 March 1932. Łobodowski was editor-in-chief on the first five issues of the periodical.
  24. ↑ Pamiętnik literacki: czasopismo kwartalne poświęcone historii i krytyce literatury polskiej, vol. 57, Nos. 1–2, Wrocław, Zakład im. Ossolińskich, 1966, p. 564.
  25. ↑ Marek Zaleski (see Bibliography).
  26. ↑ [Anonymous article], "Trybuna" (The Tribune), Kurjer Lubelski (Lublin), vol. 10, No. 64, 4 March 1932, p. 3.
  27. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Potrzebne jest samobójstwo" (What You Need is a Suicide), Kurjer Lubelski (Lublin), vol. 10, No. 294, 25 October 1932, p. 1.
  28. ↑ Jerzy Putrament, Pół wieku, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1961, p. 218. Cf. Tadeusz Kłak, Stolik Tadeusza Peipera: o strategiach awangardy, Cracow, Oficyna Literacka, 1993, p. 140. ISBN 8385158928.
  29. ↑ Józef Czechowicz, Listy, ed. T. Kłak, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1977, p. 220, n. 19.
  30. ↑ Irena Szypowska, "Łobodowski — poeta świadomy dziejów", Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 38, Łódź, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, p. 19.
  31. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Dlaczego działalność opozycji jest szkodliwa" (Why the Work of the Opposition is Harmful), Kurjer Lubelski (Lublin), vol. 10, No. 291, 22 October 1932, p. 1. (See online.)
  32. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Fragmenty wspomnień" (Scraps of Memory), Kontakt: miesięcznik redagowany przez członków i współpracowników NSZZ Solidarność (Paris), No. 10, 1987, p. 59.
  33. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Adwokatka heroizmu" (The Prophetess of Heroism), Wiadomości Literackie (see Wiadomości Literackie) (Warsaw), vol. 12, No. 48 (628), 1 December 1935, p. 7.
  34. ↑ Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, the grande dame of Polish literature then at the height of her career ("literary and other­wise", as she puts it), recalls in her memoirs being approached by some of Łobodowski's friends with the request to intercede on his behalf before the authorities in order to get him out of "the military clink" where he was put away "for com­mu­nism and attempted suicide". One of the most famous Polish writers of the 20th century, Iłła­ko­wi­czówna was also employed at the time as private secretary to the Polish strong­man, General Piłsudski. Her preliminary in­quiries revealed that Łobodowski had a case of sedition registered against him "already in high school". While performing his military service, to make the point of unfamiliarity with firearms, he apparently shot the wrong way, towards himself, receiving wounds that required hospitalization. In the ensuing investigation, a search of his room revealed leftist literature on the premises, to wit, "communist verses" in manuscript and "subversive letters" written to friends. He was to be prosecuted on his leaving the hospital. Thus appraised of the situation but unsure how to proceed, Iłła­ko­wi­czówna accidentally ran ("in a doorway at work") into the general responsible for the area of the country in which Łobodowski was held, and recognizing her opportunity she instantaneously set upon him "with all the superior might of female fury", impressing upon him that he would pass into the annals of history as a subverter of Polish culture, eternally held up to ridicule like so many other "petty satraps" before him "who rolled out heavy artillery against but­ter­flies". "My dear lady — responded the general curtly — the feller (facet) is first and foremost a malingerer: if he really wanted to shoot himself dead, he would have chosen [a gun of] a bigger calibre... He is not in the clink with us... In any case, this is a matter for the prosecutor, not me...", and he trotted off into the distance down the corridor. The next thing Iłła­ko­wi­czówna knew, Łobodowski was appearing before her with thanks. He received with in­dig­na­tion the news that he was being suspected of malingering, telling her, "Too small a calibre? That's a good one on me all right! Was I supposed to use a cannon or something? (...) I have shrapnel all over me inside..." She then decided to probe delicately into the motives behind the attempted suicide: "Have they mistreated you in any way during your service?" Łobodowski's explanation (which she received with "total shock") was that the reason lay in disappointed love. Iłła­ko­wi­czówna ends this chapter of her memoirs by observing that in this particular instance, no legal pro­ceed­ings ("of any kind", she stresses) were instituted against Łobodowski. See Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, "Dziwny casus Józefa Ł." (The Strange Case of Józef Ł.); in id., Trazymeński zając: księga dygresji, Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968, pp. 91–93.
  35. ↑ Jacek Trznadel, "O Józefie Łobodowskim", Arka (Warsaw), No. 50, 1994, pp. 104–111. Cf. Irena Szypowska, "O niepublikowanych notatnikach Józefa Łobodowskiego" (On Józef Łobodowski's Unpublished Notebooks), Eslavística Complutense (Madrid), No. 10, 2010, pp. 197–198. ISSN 1578-1763.
  36. ↑ Irena Szypowska (see Bibliography), p. 56.
  37. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Adwokatka heroizmu" (The Prophetess of Heroism), Wiadomości Literackie (see Wiadomości Literackie) (Warsaw), vol. 12, No. 48 (628), 1 December 1935, p. 7. Original text in Polish:
    Trzeba też odróżnić heroizm życiowy, polegający na bojowej niezłomności i odrzuceniu wszelkiego kompromisu, od heroizmu myśli, nie lękającej się nieustannej krytyki i rewizji własnych założeń. Często ludzie, którzy idą śmiało na wiele lat do więzienia, nie mają odwagi przyznać się przed samymi sobą, że ich poświęcenie jest bezużyteczne albo co gorsza, służy złej sprawie. W tym sensie nie jeden bohater i rewolucjonista jest intelektualnym tchórzem i wstecznikiem. Wątpię, czy p. Wasilewska, która w swoich powieściach dała jaskrawy przykład, do jakiego prostactwa dopro­wa­dzi­ła ułatwiona ideologja, zrozumie to rozróżnienie.
  38. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Demonom nocy, Warsaw, Księgarnia F. Hoesicka, 1936 (85 pp.). On the reception of the two volumes by Ginczanka, see Józef Łobodowski, Pamięci Sulamity, Toronto, Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie, 1987, p. 11.
  39. ↑ Ignacy Fik, 20 lat literatury polskiej (1918–1938), Cracow, Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik, 1939, p. 84; 2nd ed., Cracow, Spółdzielnia Pracy i Użytkowników "Placówka" , 1949, p. 91.
  40. ↑ Życie Literackie, No. 2, 1937. Cited in: Ludwik Fryde, Wybór pism krytycznych, ed. A. Biernacki, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1966, p. 206.
  41. ↑ Tymon Terlecki (see Bibliography). (See also Tymon Terlecki.)
  42. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, "Piłsudski"; in id., Rozmowa z ojczyzną, 2nd ed., corr. & enl., Warsaw, Księgarnia F. Hoesicka, 1936, p. 19.
  43. ↑ Cf. The oral recollections of Adam Tomanek, Józef Łobodowski's nephew, recorded by M. Nawratowicz on 22 September 2008 for the Ośrodek Brama Grodzka/Teatr NN of Lublin. (See transcript online.)
  44. ↑ Ludmiła Siryk (see Bibliography), p. 20.
  45. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Pamięci Sulamity, Toronto, Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie, 1987, pp. 10–11. The quoted text in the original, "Do tego przedziwne oczy, mieniące się, jak morska woda na słońcu, sensualny wykrój ust, ciężki węzeł kruczych włosów na karku." See text
  46. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Pamięci Sulamity, Toronto, Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie, 1987, p. 15.
  47. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Pamięci Sulamity, Toronto, Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie, 1987. (64 pp.)
  48. ↑ Cf. Noelia Román, "Camino de peregrinación: de Lublin a Madrid. Los horizontes de Józef Łobodowski"; in: España en Europa: historia, contactos, viajes, ed. P. Sawicki & A. Marhall, Wrocław, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2003, p. 116. ISBN 8322924860.
  49. ↑ In: Józef Łobodowski, Z dymem pożarów, Nice, Oficyna Tyszkiewicza, 1941, pp. 24–29.
  50. 1 2 Józef Łobodowski, "O sojuszu sowiecko–niemieckim" (On the Soviet–German Alliance), Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie (see Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie) (Paris), vol. 1, No. 1, 17 March 1940, p. 6. (See online.)
  51. ↑ The confiscated issue was Wiadomości Literackie, vol. 16, No. 14 (806), 2 April 1939. This was replaced by another issue substituted for the same date: Wiadomości Literackie, vol. 16, No. 15 (807), 2 April 1939.
  52. ↑ Two years later, in July 1942, the unfolding events of the Second World War will largely bear Łobodowski's theories out: on 28 July 1942 Stalin will issue a proclamation to the effect that the "existence of the motherland is at stake" during the German advance into the Caucasuses; cf. Bernd Wegner, "The Offensive into the Caucasus"; in: Germany and the Second World War, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Research Institute for Military History), vol. 6 (The Global War), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 1022–1059, esp. p. 1023. ISBN 0198228880.
  53. ↑ Józef Łobodowski, Uczta zadżumionych, Paris, The Author and Subscribers, 1954, p. 109.
  54. ↑ Owing to the restrictions on the access to military records for 100 years after their creation imposed in France by the Heritage Act (Code du patrimoine), Article L 213–2.
  55. ↑ Paweł Libera, “Aresztowanie i «paryski okres» w życiu Józefa Łobodowskiego w 1940 roku”, Zeszyty Historyczne, No. 161, Paris, Instytut Literacki, 2007, pp. 196–235. ISSN 0406-0393; ISBN 2716802084. This invaluable source contains an appendix with transcripts (in the original French) of documents from Łobodowski's police dossier (pp. 224–233), as well as Łobodowski's personal account (incomplete) of his dramatic escape from the internment camp at Nagykanizsa in Hungary (pp. 233–235) and the two propaganda leaflets he penned for the Polish government-in-exile, the one addressed to the Ukrainian people, the other to the soldiers of the Red Army (pp. 222–224).
  56. ↑ Michał Chmielowiec, "O wierszach Józefa Łobodowskiego i o poezji w ogóle" (On the Poems of Józef Łobodowski and About Poetry in general), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 28, No. 8 (1404), 25 February 1973, p. 2.
  57. ↑ Ryszard Matuszewski (1914–2010), Alfabet: wybór z pamięci 90-latka, Warsaw, Iskry, 2004, p. 368. ISBN 8320717647.
  58. ↑ Cf. Józef Zięba (b. 1932), "Jak to ten Zięba mnie tak zeszmacił?" (How That Zięba had Trivialized Me), oral recollections of a Lublin littérateur, recorded in conversation with M. Nawratowicz on 4 February 2009 for the Ośrodek Brama Grodzka–Teatr NN of Lublin, on the subject of his dealings with the Lublin censor's office in the context of publishing Łobodowski and other Polish poets (including the national bard of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz!) (See transcript online.)
  59. ↑ Michał Chmielowiec, "O wierszach Józefa Łobodowskiego i o poezji w ogóle" (On the Poems of Józef Łobodowski and About Poetry in general), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 28, No. 8 (1404), 25 February 1973, p. 1.
  60. ↑ Galina Serebryakova's memoir Tornado portrays the experience of "a dedicated Communist whose political faith survived even two decades of incarceration": so Ronald Hingley, Russian Writers and Soviet Society, 1917–1978, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 144. ISBN 0416313906, ISBN 0297775960.

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