When 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 the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocation--in a daringly untragic mode--of ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young man's pleasure in physical movement--miles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bike--and they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.

Andrzej Bobkowski was born in Wiener Neustadt on the 27th October 1913; he died in Guatemala on the 26th of June 1961. His father was Professor at the Theresianishe Akademie who later became a general.

The Bobkowskis' moved many times, living in Lida, Wilno and Modlin but he graduated in Krakow in 1933. From 1933 till 1936 he studied in the Warsaw School of Economics. In 1939 he moved to France with his wife and worked in an arms factory in Chatillon. After the Nazi occupation, the factory was moved to the south of France. He tried unsuccessfully to enlist in the Polish army and then decided to go back to Paris using the only means available, a bicycle. This was an eventful and enlightening journey described day-by-day in his diary Szkice piórkiem / Sketched With the Quill (also "Drawing-Pen Sketches", "Pen-Sketches").

After returning to Paris in 1940, he worked in the liquidation office of Atelier de Construction de Chatillon secretly helping Polish workers.

After the war, he was the manager of the Polish Bookshop in Paris and then worked as a storeman of YMCA. With Andrzej Chciuk he co-edited the underground Lyon press "Razem M?odzi Przyjaciele" ("All Together Young Friends") which existed from February 1945 till May 1947. During that time he also published literature and some teacher's books.

An important event for Bobkowski was involvement with the 'Independence and Democracy' organization in exile. There he developed his reflections on the post-war world. In the organization's 'Trybuna' press, he published his opinions about post-Yalta Europe and his critique of European culture. The 'Old World' seemed to him very parochial.

Source: Culture.pl