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.

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.

[13] 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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, thrust into the public spotlight with the O czerwonej krwi affair of March 1932, with his books suddenly an object of attention, Łobodowski started billing his previously released (but unsold) volume Gwiezdny psałterz as now still forthcoming in newspaper notices intended to capitalize on the newly found wave of popularity with this title, too.

[22] On the other hand, the individual poem entitled "Słowo do prokuratora" (A Word to the Prosecutor), published separately in the Trybuna in March 1932, a literary journal of which he was for a time the editor-in-chief, will be the cause of another court case against him in 1933.

[24] For all the exertions of the Sanacja régime against him as a communist subversive, Łobodowski's leftist stance was to a significant extent superficial, adopted as an expedient by an angry young man to transmit his ideas of rebellion against reality, tout court (and was soon to be abandoned of his own accord for other forms of poetic discourse better suited to his evolving perception of human condition).

Some critics have used the adjective światoburczy to describe the nature of Łobodowski's political writings, a partly jocose word whose meaning is a blend of such concepts as iconoclasm, radicalism, and dissatisfaction with the status quo (welterschütternd in German).

[27] Józef Czechowicz, the leading light of the Lublin avant-garde, went so far (in a private letter) as to express the opinion that Łobodowski deliberately fostered around himself an atmosphere of sensation and scandal in which to move his wings, and that not only in the political sphere but in the literary and social domains as well.

[31] During the military service he was performing at a reserve officers' cadet school (szkoła podchorążych rezerwy) in the Polish town of Równe in the Volhynia in 1933–1934 Łobodowski made an unsuccessful attempt on his life by shooting himself.

He was hospitalized, and in the aftermath of the incident arrested (10 March 1934) on charges of possessing "leftist propaganda" (that apparently meant his own poems in manuscript, which were found during a search of his belongings performed in his absence) and placed in military prison for three weeks.

[32] The intervention of his literary friends who mobilized some of the greatest names in Polish literature on his behalf, including the well-connected writer Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (1892–1983) but also Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina (1899–1986) and others, was in­stru­men­tal in bringing about his release from jail and in making the whole affair die a sudden death without a court martial or other long-lasting adverse consequences for Łobodowski.

[35] During this period Łobodowski changed some of his political views, a fact which is signalled most dramatically in his polemical exchanges with Wanda Wasilewska, a writer of a staunch communist, pro-Soviet, Stalinist stance that she will maintain unshaken even in the face of the Soviet Union's (later) alliance with Hitler and their joint attack on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War.

In an article published in 1935 in the most prestigious literary periodical in Poland at the time, the Wiadomości Literackie weekly — as part of his ongoing war of words with Wasilewska — Łobodowski made the following statement which posits self-criticism as the essential element of moral courage, and which thus holds special significance for this period of his ideological transition and the whole rest of his life: A distinction must be made between on the one hand a heroism of life, which consists in a determined fight [for one's ideals] and the rejection of all compromise, and on the other hand a heroism of mind that has no fear of criticism and of a continuous reappraisal of its primary assumptions.

I doubt it whether Ms. Wasilewska — who in her novels has given us a striking example of the crudity to which facile ideologies can lead — whether she understands this distinction.Critical acclaim and wide recognition as an important voice in literature brought him the collections of poetry Rozmowa z ojczyzną ("A Conversation with the Fatherland"; 1935; 2nd ed., corr.

[16][37] The general adulation showered on him by both the reading public and the critics was tempered by the dissenting voice of Ignacy Fik who wrote of Łobodowski ad personam as "a character most alien to the Polish psyche, a pagan Scythian, a Romantic shot through with anarchism and nihilism, an expansive Russian nature whose longings for his Marzanna are inspired by boredom.

It has been observed that the latter works for the first time sound a note — from now on to be the characteristic theme of Łobodowski's oeuvre — of tragic pessimism which has been seen by scholars to have its source in the dramatic confrontation between the powers of élan vital and biology on the one hand, and those of culture and ideology on the other.

[44] After the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, while waiting with the remnants of his brigade at Tatarów (now Tatariv in Ukraine) to cross the border into Hungary, he wrote the memorable lines of the "Noc nad granicą" (A Night on the Frontier).

In Paris Łobodowski encountered the Polish poets Jan Lechoń and Kazimierz Wierzyński (who was eager to meet his younger colleague whose fame had preceded him to France), and he began to publish his poems in the émigré press there.

Łobodowski's first text in prose published in Paris was the full-page political article entitled "On the Soviet–German Alliance" which appeared in March 1940 in the Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie, a weekly émigré newspaper newly founded by Mieczysław Grydzewski.

Those materials included anticommunist propaganda leaflets apparently secretly authored by Łobodowski for the Polish government-in-exile (then based in Paris), which were intended to be dropped from airplanes over the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland for the purpose of fomenting subversion among the Red Army — and as such they were the reason for his detention at the Cherche-Midi military prison over a period of some six months after the Polish government minister responsible for ordering the leaflets in question (Professor Stanisław Kot) denied involvement when interpellated by the French authorities.

Łobodowski will use the scurrilously offensive satirical verse "Na Profesora Kota" (On Professor Kot) to lampoon the minister in question in his 1954 collection Uczta zadżumionych ("The Banquet of the Plague-stricken"),[48] calling him again a "cynical swindler" in a parting shot fired one last time towards the end of his life.

Trzeba też odróżnić heroizm życiowy, polegający na bojowej niezłomności i odrzuceniu wszelkiego kompromisu, od heroizmu myśli, nie lękającej się nieustannej krytyki i rewizji własnych założeń.

Często ludzie, którzy idą śmiało na wiele lat do więzienia, nie mają odwagi przyznać się przed samymi sobą, że ich poświęcenie jest bezużyteczne albo co gorsza, służy złej sprawie.