Bibliograph

Wartime notebooks, France, 1940-1944, Andrzej Bobkowski ; translated from the Polish by Grażyna Drabik and Laura Engelstein

Type

Label

Wartime notebooks, France, 1940-1944, Andrzej Bobkowski ; translated from the Polish by Grażyna Drabik and Laura Engelstein

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Illustrations

illustrationsplatesmaps

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Wartime notebooks

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1029892102

Responsibility statement

Andrzej Bobkowski ; translated from the Polish by Grażyna Drabik and Laura Engelstein

Series statement

The Margellos World Republic of Letters

Sub title

France, 1940-1944

Summary

A Polish writer's experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsider's perspective on politics, culture, and life under duress When the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsider's perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation. In the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocation--in a daringly untragic mode--of ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young man's pleasure in physical movement--miles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bike--and they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.--, Publisher's description

Contributor

Creator