A Polish writer’s experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsider’s perspective on politics, culture, and life under duressWhen the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsider’s perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation.In t...

Maciej Nowak’s book is the first monograph on the writings of Andrzej Bobkowski (1913–1961), a Polish émigré writer from the millieu of Jerzy Giedroyc’s Kultura journal. Bobkowski is famous for his diary Wartime Notebooks: France 1940–1944, translated into many languages, including English. Using current methods of the French school in the study of diaristics and epistolography, Nowak overcomes the limits of aesthetic analysis to reach the anthropological center of Bobkow...