Until recently, few readers would have been familiar with the painter, cultural ambassador and memoirist Józef Czapski. Born in 1896 into a noble Polish family, Czapski was sucked early in his life into the maelstrom of events that would rock the Slavic world for decades to come. He was in St Petersburg studying law at the outbreak of the First World War; after the October Revolution of 1917, he was recruited into an anti-Bolshevik unit. He soon declared his Tolstoyan pacifism to his commanding officer, assuming he would be court-martialled and shot. Instead, the older man, himself an aristocrat, encouraged Czapski to go off and try to change the world. For a time, he and a small group of friends and relatives lived according to primitive Christian principles, pooling their resources and distributing food to the city’s poor; but when famine struck, he returned home, briefly attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw before donning his uniform again and fighting in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21. The tale of St Cassian muddying his robe had convinced him of the need to get his own hands dirty.

Czapski resumed his art studies in Kraków in 1921. Stirred, above all, by the colour work of Pierre Bonnard, he led a group of his compatriots on a six-week journey to Paris to observe the city’s art scene first-hand. He ended up staying there for seven years, making the acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, Picasso and many others, thanks largely to the kind offices of Misia Sert, a little-remembered patron of the arts and salonnière whose father was a Polish sculptor. With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Czapski again set aside his brushes and easel. Before the month was out, he was a prisoner of the Soviets, who had overtaken his position at Lwów. He would spend nearly two years in the Soviet prison camp system in conditions ranging from deplorable to inhuman before being ‘amnestied’, along with thousands of his countrymen, in accordance with the Sikorski-Maisky agreement. After the Polish government and the USSR re-established diplomatic relations, Władysław Anders, who would later lead the Polish Second Corps into battle at Monte Cassino in Italy, tasked Czapski with locating thousands of missing Polish officers – men we now know to have been murdered in the Katyn Massacre.

Remarkably, Czapski had not yet reached the midpoint of his life. Despite being a prolific and talented painter and a writer of great discernment, he did not seek fame, nor did he achieve it. Soon after the war’s end, he moved to a 250-square-foot room on the outskirts of Paris above the offices of the influential Polish-language journal Kultura, which he helped produce. He would remain there until the end of his life. Czapski comes to our attention now thanks to the work of Eric Karpeles, a visual artist and author of the indispensable Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time. Karpeles first learned of Czapski when a friend handed him the French version of his book on Proust, which he has now translated. Its publication in English coincides with a biography of Czapski by Karpeles, Almost Nothing.

Czapski’s acquaintance with Proust’s writing began when he first visited Paris. By his own admission, the encounter was infelicitous: ‘I was more used to books where something actually happens.’ Bored by an account of a soirée stretching on for hundreds of pages, he was unable to make much of Proust’s ‘endless asides, myriad, remote, and unexpected associations, their strange manner of treating entangled themes without any kind of hierarchy’.

A year later, sick with typhoid fever and heartbroken as a result of a luckless affair with Sergei Nabokov, younger brother of Vladimir, Czapski travelled to London to stay with his uncle, where he read Albertine disparue:

I have to confess it was not Proust’s precious content that took me in at first, but rather the subject of this volume: the despair, the forsaken lover’s anguish at being abandoned by Albertine, the description of all forms of retrospective jealousy, painful memories, feverish investigations, all that psychological insight of a great writer, with its muddle of details and references that struck right at the heart of me.

This unreserved admiration of Proust exemplifies one of the more charming parts of Czapski’s personality: his eternal youthfulness and eagerness to try to live anew, which persisted throughout his ninety-six years. His indulgence of Proust’s prolixity – surely few will agree that Proust’s metaphors and arabesques ‘never become an end in themselves’ – is borne of a humility and affection pleasantly free of the mustiness of literary-critical ambition.

Proust’s remark that past moments are not stationary but ‘retain in our memory the motion which drew them toward the future’ is poignant in light of the role his book would come to play in Czapski’s life. He would go on rereading it well into his old age, claiming that ‘through Proust, bit by bit, I became aware of my own possibilities’. In his mid-eighties, when a distraught relative found him on the floor after a fall, he reassured her with the words, ‘Oh, no need to worry about me … I just lay there, perfectly happy, thinking about Proust.’

While in the Soviet camps, the Polish officers were allowed to offer evening lectures (subject to censorship). Czapski chose Proust as his topic, and his book on Proust is a collection of those lectures. His audience of prisoners of war was presumably unfamiliar with In Search of Lost Time, and there is more recapitulation in the lectures than analysis – not unwelcome since, with such a long book, even the best readers forget a great deal. The greatest insights lie in the final pages, where Czapski addresses the broader themes of vanity and death. Particularly suggestive is his comparison of Proust and Pascal, his intimation of the basic unity of the ascetic and sensual, of saintly and depraved longings, with their tension forming the ground of moral life between the childhood wonder of Swann’s Way and the inanition that overtakes the novel’s key players at the end of Time Regained.

Czapski’s most Proustian trait is perhaps his retreat from the type of ‘idolatry’ that Proust accused Ruskin of in his preface to Sesame and Lilies. From his twenties to his final decades, when he produced fascinating, almost abstract works under the influence of Milton Avery, Czapski sought to remain sincere and receptive in his approach to art. ‘Painting for me’, he told Malraux, ‘is an opening to something, nothing more. All the rest is secondary, failing to register what is essential … For the painter, the canvas must very quickly be forgotten, otherwise it obstructs what is to come.’ His probity and generosity, his belief in art and literature as instruments of insight rather than the redoubts of self-regard they are all too prone to becoming, are heartening. Those who enjoy these two books could also turn to Inhuman Land, Czapski’s account of the years after his release from prison camp. All three offer an affecting profile of a sensitive witness to the grandeur and horror of the 20th century.