Józef Stanisław Łobodowski () (19 March 1909 – 18 April 1988) was a Polish poet and political thinker.
His poetic works are broadly divided into two distinct phases: the earlier one, until about 1934, in which he was sometimes identified as "the last of the Skamandrites",By Wacław Iwaniuk, who called him "ostatni skamandryta"; cited in: Jadwiga Sawicka, Wołyń poetycki w przestrzeni kresowej, Warsaw, DiG, 1999, p. 55. . and the second phase beginning about 1935, marked by the pessimistic and tragic colouring associated with the newly nascent current in Polish poetry known as katastrofizm (catastrophism). The evolution of his political thought, from the radical left to radical anticommunism, broadly paralleled the trajectory of his poetic oeuvre.
To the contemporary reading public Łobodowski was also known as the founder and editor of several avant-garde literary periodicals, of a newspaper, translator, novelist, prose writer in the Polish and Spanish languages, radio personality, and preeminently a prolific opinion writer with sharply defined political views active before, during and after the Second World War in the Polish press (since 1940 only in the émigré press). Łobodowski described himself as a Ukrainophile and devoted three of his books to Ukrainian themes, including two collections of poetry (Pieśń o Ukrainie and Złota hramota).Wacław Iwaniuk, Ostatni romantyk: wspomnienie o Józefie Łobodowskim (The Archiwum Emigracji: studia, szkice, dokumenty series, ed. J. Kryszak, No. 4), Toruń, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998. Cf. also Archiwum Emigracji, No. 1, p. 229. Cf. Józef Łobodowski rzecznik dialogu polsko-ukraińskiego, ed. L. Siryk & J. Święch, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2000, passim. . He spoke out in defence of ethnic minorities in Poland before and after the Second World War, condemning for example the forced resettlement of the Lemko community in the so-called Operation Vistula mounted by the communist régime in 1947,Józef Łobodowski, "Towarzysz Kiszczak i inni?" (Comrade Kiszczak and the Others), Tydzień Polski (London), No. 18 (102), 30 April 1988, p. 16. or the destruction of churches built in the Eastern Orthodox architectural style out of favour in the Western-oriented Poland of the Interbellum.Józef Łobodowski, "'Z ziemi chełmskiej'" (1937); in id., Uczta zadżumionych, Paris, The Author and Subscribers, 1954, p. 154. The title of the poem harks back to the 1910 novel of the same name by Władysław Reymont. He denounced in print the anti-Jewish sentiment prevalent in some Polish literary circles before the War, defending for example the Polish poet Franciszka Arnsztajnowa against antisemitic attacks.Józef Łobodowski, "W obronie zasługi" (In Defence of Merit), letter to the editor, Wiadomości Literackie (see Wiadomości Literackie) (Warsaw), vol. 14, No. 32 (718), 1 August 1937, p. 8. An inveterate and caustic critic of totalitarianism in all its forms (except fascism), he was blacklisted by the communist censorship of the post-War Poland and spent most of his life in exile in Spain.
Life and work
Early life
Łobodowski was born on 19 March 1909 in the lands of Partitioned Poland on the Purwiszki farmstead 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 died in childhood, leaving Józef and his surviving (elder) sister Władysława.Adam Tomanek (Łobodowski's nephew), "Polski redaktor tygodnika 'Wołyń'", Monitor Wołyński, 2009. In 1910 the Łobodowskis were obliged to sell their country estate and moved to Lublin. 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. It is to this period of his early schooling in Moscow that Łobodowski owed his excellent knowledge of the Russian language. However, the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 soon forced the family to flee for their lives to Yeysk in the Kuban region of the Ciscaucasia, where drastically reduced in their means they suffered severe privations for five years, including hunger. In this place and in these conditions Łobodowski passed the formative years of his life between the ages of 8 and 13, at times forced by circumstances into wheeling and dealing in the town's streets to help the family survive. The name "Kuban", as a reference to the broadly conceived world of the Kuban Cossacks, crops up in all discussions of Łobodowski's life and creative oeuvre as the single most significant toponym of his entire biography. The Kuban period will be fictionalized in his 1955 novel Komysze ("The Bushmen"), a text which paints a faithful and seductively vivid picture of the last months of freedom and decadence in Russia in a secluded port in the Zakubanskie Marshes on the Sea of Azov.So Czesław Jeśman, "W kubańskiej pustyni i puszczy" (In Kuban Desert and Wilderness), Wiadomości Literackie (London), No. 16 (524), 1956, p. 4. The title of the article, "In Kuban Desert and Wilderness", is a word play on the title of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel, In Desert and Wilderness (1911). It is also here, in the Kuban, that Łobodowski first came in contact with Ukrainian culture, owing to the presence in the region of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had been resettled there after the banning of the Zaporizhian Sich by Catherine II in 1775.Józef Łobodowski's letter of January 1988 to Jadwiga Sawicka; quoted in: Jadwiga Sawicka, "Hellada scytyjska: Ukraina w poezji Józefa Łobodowskiego", Więź, Nos. 1112, 1988. (See online.) However, the Kuban, and Yeysk in particular did not prove a safe haven for the family, and here his father, Władysław Łobodowski, was at last 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 Łobodowski's mother, Stefanja Łobodowska, decided to take her three surviving children (one daughter had already 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 in an unmarked grave. 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 stepsister, Łobodowski's aunt.
Youth and the early period as a poet
The city of Lublin (now in independent Poland) 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, although the personal idiom Łobodowski developed was distinctively and unmistakably his own.Irena Szypowska, "Łobodowski poeta świadomy dziejów", Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 38, Łódź, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, p. 20. One of the first compositions published by Łobodowski was the poem "Dlaczego" (Why?) which appeared in May 1928 in the bimonthly magazine W Słońce which he co-edited and which also carried in its first issue the article of a 19-year-old Łobodowski on the nature of poetry in general as the art of the unsayable, and some other of his poems.Józef Łobodowski, "Sztuka... poezja..." (On Art and Poetry), W Słońce (Lublin), vol. 1, No. 1, [1 May 1928], pp. 14. Id., "Dlaczego" (Why?), ibid., p. 4. Id., "Trzy śmierci" (Three Deaths), ibid., p. 8. (See online.) His début in book form in 1929, at the age of 20, was the collection of poems entitled Słońce przez szpary ("Sunshine through the Cracks"). This was followed by the volume entitled Gwiezdny psałterz ("Astral Psaltery") released in the autumn of 1931, whose programmatic poem "Poezja" (Poetry) is dedicated to Julian Tuwim in obvious acknowledgement of his indebtedness to the Skamander circle.Artur Hutnikiewicz & Andrzej Lam, eds., Literatura polska XX wieku: przewodnik encyklopedyczny, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000, p. 396. . However, another poem in the collection, "Hymn brzucha" (The Hymn of the Belly), in which reverberate the echos of the terrible period of hunger experienced in Yeysk in 19171922, will mark the beginning, stylistically, of a post-Skamander stage in Łobodowski's creative journey.Cf. Irena Szypowska (see Bibliography), pp. 2527. These early volumes largely escaped the notice of the literary establishment at the time.
On the Red Colour of Blood and other colours
Łobodowski began to draw attention with his third collection of poetry on account of the controversy it caused. The controversy stemmed principally from the fact that the newly independent Poland was not a fully democratic country with unfettered freedom of speech, but constituted instead an environment in which the ostensibly "leftist" ideology he espoused early in his life as a vehicle for his nonconformist ideas was treated with suspicion. The entire print run of O czerwonej krwi ("On the Red Colour of Blood"), his third collection of poems published in January 1932 expressing revolt against the prevailing standards of morality and challenging all authority, was seized by the authorities and criminal proceedings were instituted against Łobodowski as the author.Irena Szypowska, "Łobodowski poeta świadomy dziejów" (Łobodowski: A Poet Cognizant of History), Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 38, Łódź, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, p. 18. Although the protracted court case ended, on appeal, with mere confiscation of all the copies of the book and no fines or imprisonment were imposed, the affair had damaging consequences for Łobodowski since as it coincided with the commencement of his studies in the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Lublin in 1931 he was promptly expelled from the university in February 1932, at the beginning of the second semester of the first year and, for good measure, blacklisted by all institutions of higher education in Poland "for the propagation of pornography and blasphemy through poetical works".Józef Kruszyński (18771953), the notorious theoretician of antisemitism and rector of the Catholic University of Lublin (see Józef Kruszyński), wrote to all the rectors of Polish universities a letter dated 17 February 1932, which stated in part:
I have the honour [sic] to inform you that... Józef Łobodowski, by the decision of the [University] Senate of 5 February 1932, was sent down from the University for propagating pornography and blasphemy [sic: za szerzenie pornografji i bluźnierstwa] through the poetic works published by himself, which had been confiscated by the prosecutor's deputies. (See facsimile online.)
56 years and 8 months after the event, on 22 October 1988, a memorial mass was celebrated for the "pornographer and blasphemer" Łobodowski at the University church: see Słownik biograficzny miasta Lublina, vol. 1, ed. T. Radzik, et al., Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1993, s.v. "Łobodowski". . And in the year following his death, 1989, the University's own Press published a collection of Łobodowski's verses: Józef Łobodowski, List do kraju, comp. & ed. J. Święch, Lublin, Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1989. .