Franke Lectures in the Humanities

Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived into his ninety-seventh year, embodying the complex contradictions of the entire twentieth century. Having been witness to both Russian Revolutions of 1917 as well as the fall of communism seventy-two years later, he lived a life darkened by events but illuminated by his unquenchable appetite for the visual world. This talk will consider Czapski as civilian and soldier, as prisoner-of-war in the Gulag, but will focus primarily on the life of a painter, richly illustrated with images he drew and painted to sustain himself over many decades.

Writer, translator, and painter Eric Karpeles observes and describes the relationship between the visual and the verbal. He is the author of Paintings in Proust and a trio of books inspired by Józef Czapski: Lost Time, a series of lectures; Almost Nothing, a critical biography; and An Apprenticeship of Looking, an artist’s monograph. His translations include Proust’s Overcoat from the Italian and Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Camp from the French. A fellow of the Czeslaw Milosz Institute at the Claremont Colleges, Karpeles has given the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin and spoken on Proust at Berkeley and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He studied at the Art Students League of New York as a boy and was awarded a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris as a young man.

The Soviet Gulag system was established in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, expanded under Stalin across the 1930s and into the war years, and did not reach its height until the early 1950s. Some 18 million people passed through this system and an estimated 4.5 million did not survive it. We now understand far better what the Gulag was, how it evolved, what purposes it served, how many people lived and died within it. Yet what do we really remember of the camp system? What do Russians remember? And how does that memory, or the lack of it, affect Russian politics today?

Anne Applebaum is a journalist, prize-winning historian, staff writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she coleads a project on twenty-first-century disinformation. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.