The young Józewski was a follower of Józef Piłsudski and an organizer of the anti-Bolshevik Promethean network. But this was near the end of his remarkable career. Artist, administrator, spy-Józewski's devotion to Poland was never more evident than when he decided-having survived the Nazi occupation-to remain underground after the communist takeover rather than, as he might have done, go into exile. It has an attractive hero, Henryk Józewski (1892–1981), whose busy life was rich equally in public adventure and inner creativity. His latest work, Sketches from a Secret War, is, in my opinion, his most compelling book so far.

Through his astute analyses of some alternative nationalist traditions, Snyder has helped us better understand the recent evolution of the otherwise puzzlingly smooth relations between postcommunist Poland and her eastern neighbors. 1 Both books were characterized by their unusually elegant prose-terse, lucid, wry-as well as by their desire to broaden our understanding of East European nationalism, too often caricatured as bloodthirstily intolerant and repressive.

A monograph on the short life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, the theorist of Polish socialism in the tsarist era, was followed by The Reconstruction of Nations, a prizewinning study of the collapse of the Commonwealth and the subsequent fate of its inhabitants over more than four centuries. Timothy Snyder is perhaps his generation's leading historian of the region that used to be known as Eastern Europe, and in particular the area that once constituted the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Snyder sketches from a secret war