New Biography of Czeslaw Milosz Moves Gracefully Between Life & Writing

An apt week for a post about one of Poland’s most famous persons of letters: In Milosz, Polish critic Andrzej Franaszek’s full-length biography of poet  Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004), tensions can be traced, writes Edward Hirsch for New Republic, particularly around the notion of a poet as a witness to history. “Capably edited and translated by Alexsandra and Michael Parker from the significantly longer Polish edition, Franaszek’s work moves gracefully between the events in Milosz’s life and his obsessive writing about it. Along with historical maps, its chronology enables us to pinpoint the fateful intersection between Milosz’s experience and historic events, showing a poet who was determined both to embody and to transcend his own historical circumstances, who longed to liberate himself from the times that entangled him,” writes Hirsch. Further in:

Milosz never placed much faith in the utopian promise of communism, especially under the Soviet occupation. But the state of things in Poland, the country he identified as “the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe,” inclined him toward the political left. After the war he made what he would call a “pact with the devil” and entered the Polish diplomatic service, posted first to New York, then to Washington and Paris. When he was recalled to Europe, Janka stayed in the United States, afraid that they would be permanently trapped in Poland. His dissident thinking, meanwhile, aroused suspicion. While he was on a short visit to Warsaw, the authorities temporarily confiscated his passport. Finally, he was posted back to Paris and, in 1951, he broke for good with the Polish Communist regime, seeking political asylum in France.

Lonely and unmoored in Paris, Milosz kept himself from succumbing to despair by writing about his experiences in Poland. He sought to understand what had happened to his generation. In 1953, he published The Captive Mind, his most famous book, a study of the allure of communism and the dangerous appeal of totalitarian thought. Written out of great inner turmoil, it is in part a portrait of friends seduced by authoritarianism. The four central chapters each portray a talented writer who capitulated to the State. They are not named but identified as archetypes: Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, the Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour. In the English edition of Franaszek’s biography, the editors do not provide us with the names of the real-life models for these figures—Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski—authors well-known enough in Poland to be easily identified by readers there.

The Captive Mind was a devastating blow to the communist mentality. Its success brought Milosz international acclaim, but also condemnation from many leftist poets and intellectuals, such as Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre, who naïvely continued to embrace Soviet communism...

Read the full review of Milosz at New Republic.