Had boulevards lustrous beneath incandescent lamps. But he never wrote anything in Lithuanian, preferring instead to move closer and closer to English (via a growing team of translators), for as he confessed with brutal frankness:īut not just in our city of modest renown. Lithuania, united with Poland in 1386, is viewed by Poles with affection as an enigmatic, romantic borderland which produced Mickiewicz and Pilsudski it therefore obviously suited Milosz to stress his ties with that region to the point of denying any links with Poland. He could never understand that by choosing a life of high exposure and ideological manoeuvring, he was bound to provoke hostile reactions, as well as fierce loyalties.ĭoubtless the Nobel prize in 1980 and Milosz's conversion from Marxism to catholicism and the visionary obfuscations of Swedenborg and Blake have helped many Poles to come to terms with this humourless, jaundiced Lithuanian.

Throughout those years Milosz remained bitter and unrelenting, convinced that his life was riddled with misfortunes brought about by the malice of his countrymen. An offer of a professorship of Polish literature at Berkeley in 1961 proved irresistible. Although closely identified with France through his family tie with the poet Oscar Milosz, and his admiration for Simone Weil (whose selected works he had translated), Milosz craved for the primitive energy of American culture. It was thanks to Kultura's powerful publishing base that Milosz was able to be heard as prolific poet, translator, novelist, essayist and polemicist. More surprisingly, the mass of emigré Poles, with the exception of the Kultura circle in France and young writers in London, refused to forgive him his 'errors'. Not surprisingly, he provoked vilification from the Polish authorities and Polish intellectuals, as well as from the Stalin-infatuated French left. Using the thinly disguised biographies of his literary friends as case studies, Milosz documented communist brainwashing techniques. When in 1951 he broke with the regime and published The Captive Mind, it became an international bestseller. After the war his youthful leftwing sympathies led him to collaborate with the communist authorities, which rewarded him with prestigious diplomatic posts in Paris and Washington, so that he could enjoy the freedoms of the west at a time when Stalinism was progressively corrupting and destroying writers and intellectuals in Poland.

Postwar Polish Poetry by Czesław Miłosz