This post - which happens to be Substack Post #201 - is a special request from
to share my thoughts on Czesław Miłosz. Apologies for taking a little less than two hundred posts to respond. For some time it wasn’t clear to me how to address Miłosz here. But I decided to just wing it in the end.The one family story we have of literary closeness is my father having hung out with Miłosz in Berkeley. A hangout sesh that resulted in a few shots of vodka and a brief postal exchange that, unfortunately, was lost due to circumstances that would require a lot of backstory.
Just as Lech Wałęsa was the only dissident in the home who mattered as far as the overthrowing of Communism was concerned - I only learned about the Orange Alternative, Fighting Solidarity and Adam Michnik much later - Miłosz was the only Polish poet who mattered. Those familiar with Miłosz won’t find this too surprising: by Polish literary standards, Miłosz was immensely universal. Not only that: he could be universal, provide food for thought that anyone anywhere in the world could savor; and all while never having to abandon Poland as a topic of interest. Which he could not do as long as Poland was under a wretched Communist regime. If the often hard-to-comprehend nation of Poland and its people have been difficult to comprehend to other Westerners, it is largely thanks to Miłosz that a bridge between cultural comprehension exists today. Enough of a bridge to where Brits and Americans can at least do a bit of comprehensive exploration.
Miłosz’ reputation, for this reason, hasn’t suffered as partisan politics comparable to American political tribal warfare have arisen in Poland. This in contrast to his fellow Nobel Laureate, Wisława Szymborska, an ardent supporter of the regime until the mid-1960s: though no one doubts her literary greatness, her life and audience have rendered her associated with the Polish left. Miłosz, for all intents and purposes, can only be called a thoroughly Polish poet. At least if we put aside the connection to Lithuania for a moment.
But only for a moment. Miłosz - along with fellow dissident Tadeusz Konwicki - was the last prominent Pole to come from Polish Lithuania. Spending his childhood there, Miłosz spent the interwar years becoming a prominent poet. While a brief flirtation with socialism got him into trouble with the Polish right in those days, it would soon pale in comparison to the war.
Individuals like Miłosz are why people in this region have a hierarchy of dissidence. While many further West are content with simply giving credit where credit was due - including myself to a degree - the hierarchical ranking of dissidents is especially affected by how soon, how readily and how bravely said dissident engaged in dissidence. Miłosz, for all intents and purposes, gave no reason to disappoint. He joined the underground resistance from the start and mostly contributed literarily, including his third book of poems which is considered to have been the first samizdat subversively published in occupied Warsaw. During this time he also assisted in the liberation of the Jews. A noteworthy incident toward the end was when Miłosz, while being shipped out of Warsaw following the Uprising, was rescued from the Germans by a selfless nun.
For the early part of Miłosz’ life, the poet had the conventional wariness of right-leaning politics and a left-wing bias common among literati. For this reason he did not join the Home Army. Miłosz also had no desire to be an emigre. While he understood that the Communist regime was not pro-freedom, Miłosz believed he could make a change in the system. Over the next five years he was proven wrong; but unlike others, he was honest with himself about it. After a few years representing Poland and Polish interests in the United States, Miłosz returned to Poland and found that the system he served had turned reality into a nightmare. Having been abroad, he could see how Poland was objectively turning into an ugly, totalitarian country with no semblance of freedom. Ruminating upon the need to defect - and having asked none other than Albert Einstein what he thought he should do - the regime, in turn, began to suspect Miłosz of “thought crimes” when his writings took on a more pro-freedom bent. He defected in 1951 before the authorities decided to deny him his passport with greater permanence.
Desiring to go to the United States, Miłosz was stuck for a time in Paris due to American suspicions that he might be a Communist spy; one of the regrettable side effects of McCarthyism. But Paris in and of itself was a formative epoch in his life despite the rate in which the Parisian literati spurned him; Paris in the 1950s was a Communist hotbed and a classy French intellectual at that time had to love Communism more than their own mother. Appalled by the stubborn boneheadedness of the French over this issue, Miłosz was inspired to write The Captive Mind. A formative book as it sought to explore that most effective of Marxist secret weapons: its hold over the intellectual mind. A fate that, ironically, still haunts the Polish intelligentsia to this day. (Though they would, of course, deny it)
For a time, Miłosz had to live covertly in Paris with the aid of those who worked at the Kultura magazine, the most cultured literary resistance to the Communist regime. In their journal he announced his defection and explained his reasons, making him the first artist in the entire Communist bloc to publicly reject Communist ideology. His proclamation caused quite a stir. Among Poles, emigres in America - at the time suspicious of him - began to reconsider their suspicions. While internationally, some writers came to his aid (like Albert Camus) as others condemned him. (Like the Stalinist Pablo Neruda, who wrote a reactionary piece called The Man Who Ran Away)
While The Captive Mind is Miłosz’ best-known work - credited as having woken up many, including Susan Sontag, from infatuation over Communism - Miłosz’ Paris years (1951-1960) were among his most productive in general. With the help of Kultura and other local emigre presses, he published two collections of poetry - including his acclaimed A Treatise of Poetry - and two novels: The Seizure of Power and The Issa Valley. His output also included Native Realm: the topic of this post.
In 1960, offers to teach at UC Berkeley enabled Miłosz to move to the United States, gain tenure after only two months and become a US citizen. But while he enjoyed his job - which included Dostoyevsky as well as Polish literature - his reputation had its drawbacks. His role as a poet remained obscure to his role as a “figure,” so much so that even his own colleagues were surprised when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.