 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) | |
|
Polish-American author, translator and critic, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Milosz's poetry and essays are a mixture of autobiographical confessions dealing with the effects of exile, religious or metaphysical fragments, historical and literary analyses. Acclaimed as a Catholic poet, Milosz has also a strong pantheist element in his work. "Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were and by wrestling the past from fictions and legends." (from Nobel Lecture, 1981) Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, a rural town in Lithuania, then under the domination of the Russian czarist government. In Native Realm (1959) Milosz described his birth region as a land largely forgotten by history: "For many centuries, while kingdoms rose and fell along the shores of the Mediterranean and countless generations handed down their refined pleasures and vices, my native land was a virgin forest whose only visitors were the few Viking ships that landed on the coast." After WW I Milosz's family settled in Vilna, where he had a strict Roman Catholic education. "In a Roman Catholic country," Milosz wrote at an early stage of his career, "intellectual freedom always goes hand in hand with atheism." Later Milosz accepted his religious background and started to study Hebrew in order to render the Old Testament into Polish. Milosz received his master of laws degree from the University of Vilna in 1934, and then spent a year in Paris. There he formed a close relationship with his distant uncle, Oscar Milosz (1877-1939), who was a diplomat and has also made his name as a French poet. Milosz's first collection of verse, POEMAT O CZASIE ZASTYGLYM, appeared in 1933. It was followed three years later by TRZY ZIMY. In 1936 he worked at a radio station in Vilna, but was dismissed the following year because of his leftist views. Milosz moved to Warsaw, where he became a leading figure of the Zagary group, whose catastrophism, belief in an upcoming cosmic disaster, reflected Spenglerian ideas of cultural life-cycles. Later he returned to the theme of the decline of European civilization in The Land of Ulro (1977). And the disaster came – first in 1939 when German invaded Poland and World War II broke out. WHAT ONE WAS GREAT What once could smite, now smites no more. Streched on the grass by the bank of a rives, The heated literary debates of the group were carried in Vilnius and Warsaw periodicals. In his articles Milosz condemned purely aesthetic trends in literature. He attacked on the formalism of the poetic avantgarde in the name of poetry that expresses the personality of the poet and his philosophy of the world. Milosz's early works also show traces of distaste for any form of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and ideological indoctrination. "What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?" he wrote. 'When Poland achieved independence in 1918 there were endless debates about a Polish Academy of Letters until finally it was called into existence, but not without some wild clashes. It established a Youth Prize, and when Stanislaw Pietak was awarded it in 1938, Boleslaw Micinski, who was in France at the time, wrote to his mother in the mock Russian he used when he wanted to be funny, "It vood hev bin bedder hed Milosz gut prize."' (from Milisz's A B S's, 2001) During World War II Milosz was active as a writer in the Resistance movement and witnessed the Holocaust first-hand. His collection of verse, OCALENIA (1945), impressed so the new Communist government that he was appointed junior diplomat as a non-party intellectual. In 1944 he married Janina Dluska; they had two sons. Between 1946 and 1951 Milosz was in the Polish diplomatic service in Washington D.C., and in Paris. In 1951 he sought political asylum in France. In ZNIEWOLONY UMYSL (tr. The Captive Mind, 1953), which appeared after Milosz left Poland, he revealed the problems of intellectuals living under Stalinism. He saw that there is some dark magnetic force in totalitarian ideology, to which intellectuals were not immune. Between the years 1951 and 1960 Milosz lived in Paris. During these years he published TRAKTAT POETYCKI (1957), one of his major works, in which Milosz argues that poetry is essential for every human community wanting to survive as a community. DOLINA ISSY (1955, The Issa Valley) was a novel dealing with the author's childhood in Lithuania. ZDOBYCIE WLADZY (1955), The Seizure of Power) was about life in Warsaw after a change in power. "The exile of a poet, is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery; that whoever wields power is also able to control language, and not only with the prohibition of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words." (from Nobel Lecture) Milosz moved in 1960 to the United States, becoming professor of Slavic languages and literature at University of California at Berkeley (1960-78). In 1970 he became a U.S. citizen. In California Milosz's poetry became more introspective but he did not abandon his eschatological visions. His new home country Milosz viewed ironically: "What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!" (from Milosz's A B C's, 2001) Milosz's writings include essays, poetry, autobiography, literary history, and translations from such authors as Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Baudelaire. As a writer Milosz is not easy – his essays are dense and reflect his search for the essence of man and the painful lessons of modern history. Repeatedly he has tried to find meaning behind fleeting moments of life. At the age of 25 he asked: "O my love, where are they, where are they going / The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. / I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder." And in another poem written over 70 years later, he confesses resignated to God: "Now You are closing down my five senses, slowly, / And I am an old man lying in darkness. / Delivered to that thing which has oppressed me / So that I always ran forward, composing poems." Milosz believes in the redemptive power of art and treats it as a 'moral discipline.' Sartre's attack on Camus - he hesitated to criticize Stalinism when Camus did not separate Fascism and Communism - was something that he did not want to forget. Without any compromises, Milosz has considered Russian Communism "a decidedly antihuman system." In Poland Milozs' moral stand made him a voice of conscience during the Cold War period. "I hear you saying that liberation is possible No, Raja, I must start from what I am. If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever After his defection Milosz's works were banned in Poland. He continued to write in Polish, but published many works in English. He was given a hero's welcome, when he returned to his native land shortly before he was honored with the Nobel Prize. Milosz settled in Cracow, where his 90th birthday was widely celebrated in 2001. He received European Literary Prize (1953), Kister Award (1967), Neustadt International Prize (1978), National Medal of Arts (1989). He was also appointed member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Institute of Arts and Letters. Milosz's The History of Polish Literature (1969) is the best introduction to Polish literature in English. Milosz died at home in Cracow on August 14, 2004. For further reading: Poznawanie Milosza, ed. by Jerzy Kwiatkowski (1985); Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric by D. Davie (1986); Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz by E. Czarnecka and A. Fiut (1987); Zniewolony umysl po latach by Andrej Walicki (1993); Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. by Tracy Chevalier (1997); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 3, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999) - NOTE: The Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, called Milosz perhaps the greatest poet of our time. Selected works:
|
