"Try to imagine such a petit maître as myself standing guard all night with a rifle and revolver, on familiar terms with things that would have made me at least faint before, such as corpses, the wounded, some frightful bandit gangs, etc. etc. It's a miracle that we got out of this business alive," Szymanowski wrote to his friend Zdzislaw Jachimecki in 1918 from Elizavetgrad, where he and his family had taken refuge from the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution. Szymanowski's stranding in Elizavetgrad became a time of questioning and stock taking. To his cousin, poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, on January 3, 1918, he complains "Can you imagine, I cannot compose now...I am writing a bit—of course without any literary aspirations—simply to get some things off my chest...." Musically he clung to his dream world of the previous few years, spent in isolation on the family estate, indulging his muse, in such things as Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin and the Three Paganini Caprices, while contemplating a specifically Polish art.

That Paganini's 1820 set of 24 Capricci for solo violin should have appealed to composers as different as Liszt and Brahms, Blacher and Lutoslawski, Rachmaninov and Szymanowski owes, perhaps, to the suggestiveness of his piquantly singing lines, which seem to cry out for harmonization and stylistic definition. With Szymanowski's piano accompaniment, Paganini's Caprice No. 20 seems a spin-off from the former's violin sonata of 1904. In his re-arrangement of the Caprice No. 21—a recomposed slow first section and omission of Paganini's fast second section—the piano transports an early Romantic classic into the lushly decadent world of Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 1, explored at length in his transformation of the theme and variations of Caprice No. 24, which Szymanowski has made wholly his own, omitting two variations and adding one of his own. In re-scoring Paganini's violin part, Szymanowski had the help of violinist Viktor Goldfeld—with whom he gave the premiere of the Three Paganini Caprices in Elisavetgrad on April 25, 1918, though the published recension is by Szymanowski's friend and the work's dedicatee, the great violin virtuoso Pawel Kochánski.

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