Wartime Notebooks

“Stunning in the freshness of its perspective . . . Fascinating.”—Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review

“At long last, one of the most overlooked masterpieces of postwar Polish literature is available to English-speaking readers. Thanks to the praiseworthy efforts of Grażyna Drabik and Laura Engelstein and the Margellos World Republic of Letters Series at Yale University Press, we can now significantly extend the modern canon with a work that may change a perspective from which the general Anglophone audience perceives Polish literature.”—Michał Paweł Markowski, The Polish Review

"Bobkowski is a marvelous discovery! Thanks to Laura Engelstein and Grazyna Drabik’s sparkling translation, we can read his diary of wartime France, which brims with detailed, lavish, and ironic observations of the German occupation and of the French and his fellow Poles."—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University

"Andrzej Bobkowski's Wartime Notebooks offer a fascinating perspective on European history in the middle of the twentieth century, a brilliant young Polish intellectual in France reflecting on the fate of Europe, as Poland and then France itself were conquered by the Nazis. Bobkowski's detailed observations and philosophical reflections illuminate what it meant to be Polish, what it meant to be European, and what it meant to live, observe, and survive in Nazi Europe. The notebooks allows us to understand how Eastern Europe and Western Europe were related and reconciled in the understanding of one striking European intellectual, helping us to envision a more complete intellectual history of Europe as a whole."—Larry Wolff, New York University, author of Inventing Eastern Europe and The Singing Turk