Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Biography
Józef Lobodowski (1909–1988) was born into a Polish family at a time when the Polish state did not exist on the political map of Europe. Since 1795, the Third Partition of Poland, his homeland had been divided between the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Lobodowski’s life itself reflects the history of Poland in all its glory and wretchedness. The son of a colonel in the Tsarist army, he entered the world near Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania. Because of his father’s career, he and his family moved to Lublin, then to Moscow, and then to the Kuban, the setting of his most famous works in prose. Lobodowski’s life and writing embody the turbulence, resilience, and contradictions of modern Polish history.
