Józef Łobodowski

Józef Łobodowski
Łobodowski in 1938
Born	(1909-03-19)March 19, 1909 Purwiszki, Russian Empire (Partitioned Poland)
Died	April 18, 1988(1988-04-18) (aged 79) Madrid, Spain
Pen name	Józef Kuryłło (occasional)
Occupation	Poet, writer, and translator
Nationality	Polish
Literary movement	Druga Awangarda
Notable awards	Youth Prize of the Polish Academy of Literature 1937
Spouse	Jadwiga Kuryłło (Łobodowska from 1938; secundo voto Kuczyńska)
Children	none
Relatives	Władysława Łobodowska (married name, Tomanek; b. 1905; sister) Adam Tomanek (nephew)

Józef Stanisław Łobodowski (born at the Purwiszki country estate in the (historical) Sejny County within the Suwałki region (Pol., Suwałszczyzna) of what was then the Russian Empire (now in Lithuania) on 19 March 1909; died on 18 April 1988 in Madrid) was a noted Polish poet, writer, and a prolific publicist with sharply defined political views active in the Polish émigré press. He was known for his personal admiration for Ukrainian culture and its spiritual values, and described himself as an Ukrainophile.

Life

Łobodowski was born on 19 March 1909 in the lands of Partitioned Poland on the (relatively modest) Purwiszki estate 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 will die in childhood, leaving the son Józef alone with his surviving (elder) sister Władysława. In 1910 the Łobodowskis were obliged to sell their country estate and moved house to Lublin. Then, 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. However, the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 soon forced the family to flee for their lives to Yeysk in the Ciscaucasia, where — drastically reduced in their means — they suffered severe privations for five years. In this place and in these conditions Łobodowski passed the formative years of his life between the ages of 8 and 13. Yeysk did not prove a safe haven, and here his father, Władysław Łobodowski, was 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 the mother, Stefanja Łobodowska, decided to take her three surviving children (one daughter had 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. 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 sister, Łobodowski's aunt.

The city of Lublin 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.

Łobodowski made an unsuccessful attempt on his life in 1934.

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, on the morrow of 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 1941). 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 "Noc nad granicą" (The Night on the Frontier). The next day, 19 September 1939, they crossed the Polish border through the Yablonitsky Pass: unbeknownst to him, 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 so well known, although he intended like most men of his unit to join Sikorski's Army in France. 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. His first text in prose published in Paris, on the other hand, was the political article "O sojuszu sowiecko-niemieckim" (On the Pact entered into by the Soviets and the Germans) published in Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie, a weekly newspaper newly founded by Mieczysław Grydzewski.

On 20 February 1940 Łobodowski, then aged 30, was arrested by the French police in Paris in circumstances which to this day remain unclear, an event which 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, however — which included anticommunist propaganda leaflets apparently secretly authored by Łobodowski for the Polish government-in-exile and intended to be dropped from airplanes over the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland for the purpose of fomenting subversion among the Red Army — were the reason for his detention at the Cherche-Midi military prison over a period of some six months after the government minister responsible for ordering the leaflets (Professor Kot) denied any involvement. Łobodowski will use the scurrilously offensive satirical verse "Na Profesora Kota" (On the subject of Professor Kot) to lampoon the minister in question in his 1954 collection Uczta zadżumionych ("The Banquet of the Plague-stricken"). 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). 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 first stolen 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.)

Bibliography

• Tymon Terlecki, "Poezje Cezarego Baryki: rzecz o Łobodowskim", Tygodnik Ilustrowany, No. 16, 1937, pages 311–312.
• Józef Zięba, "Żywot Józefa Łobodowskiego", in 8 installments, Relacje, Nos. 3–10, 1989.
• Irena Szypowska, Łobodowski: od "Atamana Łobody" do "Seniora Lobo", Warsaw, Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 2001. ISBN 8320545897.
• Paweł Libera, "Józef Łobodowski (1909–1988): szkic do biografii politycznej pisarza zaangażowanego", Zeszyty Historyczne, No. 160, Paris, Instytut Literacki (Association Institut Littéraire Kultura), 2007, pages 3–34. ISSN 0406-0393; ISBN 2716802076. (Useful despite some inaccuracies: Łobodowski's date of birth given as "9 March 1909" instead of 19 March 1909, Tymon Terlecki misnamed "Olgierd Terlecki", etc.)

See also

• List of Poles
• List of Polish-language poets

External links

• A 1914 photograph showing Józef Łobodowski as a child (first on the left) with his mother, father, and sisters
• A 1938 photograph showing Józef Łobodowski with his wife Jadwiga in the Krakowskie Przedmieście street in Warsaw
• An undated photograph of Józef Łobodowski in old age
• Łobodowski's hand-filled application form to become a student at the Lublin University dated 16 September 1931
• Łobodowski's typed letter to his sister Władysława dated Madrid 12 June 1975
• Łobodowski's typed letter to his sister Władysława dated Madrid 12 August 1976