Teodor Parnicki

Bronisław Parnicki then married a Russian woman who sent young Teodor to a cadet corps school in Omsk and then Vladivostok.

Tired of the military drill, at the age of 12 Parnicki escaped from the cadet school and reached Harbin in Manchuria, where he was taken care of by the local Polonia community.

Parnicki quickly started his university career as both a student and a tutor and eventually lectured on Chinese language and Russian literature.

Thanks to a scholarship he received for that novel in 1936, Parnicki spent several years in Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece, where he devoted himself to studies on the Byzantine heritage of those states.

After the Polish Defensive War, during the Soviet occupation of Lwów, Parnicki was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 8 years in a gulag for alleged anti-Soviet conspiracy.