  Leśniewski inspired devotion in a very small coterie of students, a few of whom stayed fiercely loyal, but sooner or later he ended up alienating nearly everyone, either through his robust professional opinions, or his manner, or his political views. He started out as a radical socialist—his decision to spend the war in Russia was partly personal and partly political—but after the excesses of the October Revolution and its aftermath he rejected socialism. From the 1920s he supported the authoritarianism of Józef Piłsudski, but from about 1930 his views took on a darker anti-Semitic tinge. An unsavory letter written to Twardowski in 1935 complains of “filthy tricks” being played on him “by certain Jew-boys or their foreign friends”, declares a personal antipathy to Tarski, whose career he would not obstruct, but admits he “would be extraordinarily pleased if some day I were to read in the newspapers that he was being offered a full professorship, for example in Jerusalem, from where he could send us offprints of his valuable works to our great profit.” Tarski had been passed over for the chair in Lwów, which went to Chwistek on the strength of praise from Russell, even though the Varsovians, including Leśniewski, had supported Tarski. Tarski certainly felt aggrieved and no doubt suspected anti-Semitic motives, but like Leśniewski he was prickly and sensitive about matters of priority. It is in retrospect mildly grotesque to see how carefully Leśniewski and Tarski dance around each other in their prefaces and acknowledgements, neither wishing to give public offence to the other. Despite their disagreements and suspicions however, they long continued to meet once a week, with no one else present, to discuss logic.