"Confined in a Soviet prison camp in 1941, Polish painter Józef Czapski chose a unique way to cope: He lectured to the other prisoners on Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time."

"In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Czapski’s ambitious project and the surprising importance of literature to the prisoners of oppressive regimes."

Highly recommended! With no books and exhausted from deprivation and forced labor, prisoners preserved and reveled in their humanity by lecturing to each other about something they had in their memory. And Czapski lectured about what he could remember about a novel about memory.

ADDED: What if you were trapped somewhere with other people and you decided to keep yourself and the others going by lecturing from the knowledge stored in your head? What topic would you choose? Notice that these people were not thinking about preserving knowledge for the sake of all humanity. The books still existed and were not threatened with destruction. The prisoners were cut off. They were trying to preserve themselves. In that light, what would you select?

AND: From "Józef Czapski: painter, prisoner, and disciple of Proust/Czapski survived his incarceration in a Soviet prison camp and went on to produce vivid paintings and prose. But his life and work was haunted by the massacre that he escaped" (NY Review of Books).

In a stroke of genius, Czapski compares Proust with Blaise Pascal.... A 17th-century French mathematician and physicist... Pascal “considered all the ephemeral joys of the senses unacceptable.” For Proust, on the other hand, only the world of the senses existed and had value. In a letter to a friend, he confessed he desired only one thing: to take pleasure in life and physical love...

As much as any of Pascal’s Pensées, Proust’s monumental novel is a meditation on death and the vanity of life. Swann, “a refined and intelligent man of the world”, receives a sentence of death from his doctors. When he tries to pass on the news to his aristocratic friends, they tell the quaking cadaverous figure that he looks marvellous, then leave him standing in front of their magnificent townhouse as they walk off, talking of the mismatch between the duchess’s shoes and her ruby necklace....

Whereas Pascal turns from the world with disgust, Proust seeks salvation in its fugitive sensations.... Czapski was not mistaken in finding in Proust’s work a kind of religion: not a story of redemption, but a struggle to defy time and disillusion, and eternalise the passing moment in memories of meaning and beauty.

And here is Czapski's "Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp."