After World War II, he remained in exile in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, where he was among the founders of Kultura monthly, one of the most influential Polish cultural journals of the 20th century.

Józef Marian Franciszek hrabia Hutten-Czapski of Leliwa, as was his full name, was born on 3 April 1896 in Prague, to an aristocratic family.

His father was landowner and conservative politician Jerzy Hutten-Czapski [pl], mother was Józefa Thun-Hohenstein, daughter of Friedrich von Thun und Hohenstein, Austrian diplomat.

His plea was accepted and he was sent to Russia with a mission of finding the whereabouts of the officers of Czapski's former regiment, taken captive by the Bolsheviks in the course of the Russian Civil War.

[2] Under Merezhkovsky's influence Czapski gave up his pacifist ideals and, upon his return to Poland, joined the ranks of the Polish Army and fought as a NCO in the crew of one of the armoured trains on the fronts of the Polish-Soviet War.

Czapski began to hold exhibitions of his work but, encouraged by Ludwik Hering, increasingly moved to becoming a critic, writing essays on art, literature, and philosophy.

Here he discovered Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which he read in French and wrote about in Polish.

He was subsequently captured by the Soviets and was successively interned in prison and labor camps in the USSR: Starobilsk, in eastern Ukraine, Pawliszczew Bor, in Smolensk Oblast, and Gryazovets, even further north, near the city of Vologda; here his love for Proust was crucial to his survival.

After the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and signing the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, Czapski joined the Polish II Corps under the command of General Anders.

His works were virtually inaccessible in Poland – after Polish October he had 1957 exhibitions in National Museum in Poznań and Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts, but the next one was held only in 1986 in Warsaw.

Because it is a first-hand account of contemporaneous negotiations with the Soviets over the missing Polish officers it became an important document until Russian guilt for the massacres was acknowledged.

In the post-war period Czapski was also among the eyewitnesses of the situation of Polish prisoners in Soviet captivity and testified on the matter before the United States Congress.