Painter, dreamer, governor, spy

Of all the odd, forgotten corners of eastern Europe, the province of Volhynia must be among the oddest and most forgotten. A land of marshes and forests, memorable for its impassable roads and its lonely villages, Volhynia now lies in the north-west corner of Ukraine, along the Polish border. But before the second world war Volhynia was one of the easternmost provinces of Poland — as well as one of the poorest. In 1921, when the Polish state incorporated the province, having fought over it (and often in it) during the Polish–Bolshevik war, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network, only one had a sewage system and only three had electricity.

But where some saw a dull backwater, Henryk Jozewski, Cubist painter, theatrical scenographer, a man acquainted with the theories of Stanislavsky and the writings of Freud, saw the future. Polish by ethnicity, Jozewski had been born in pre-Revolutionary Kiev, then a part of the Russian empire.