Czesław Miłosz:
The Conscience of the Polish Nation
Professor of Comparative Literature, Empire State College, State University of New York
Czesław Miłosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, has gained international recognition as a poet, a public intellectual and a voice of moral authority. In Poland, he has become an icon of artistic, intellectual and political integrity.
Miłosz passed away on August 14, 2004 at age 93. On August 22, 2004, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny published a special issue dedicated to the literary giant. Among the many contributors paying homage to Miłosz in that issue was the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who placed this succinct note:
| I have received with great pain the news of the passing of one of the most distinguished Polish poets, a prose writer and essayist, laureate of the literary Nobel Prize, Doctor Honoris Causa of the Catholic University of Lublin and the Jagiellonian University, honorary citizen of Lithuania. He was a man who brought permanent contributions to Polish culture and also to Polish life. Of unquestionable moral authority, exceptionally engaged in the causes of freedom and truth, he advocated tolerance among people and nations. He expressed our anxieties, longings and hopes. His voice opened the road for us to the European Union. He was one of the most distinguished minds of the 20th century in the world. He was the recipient of the White Eagle Medal. The poet has left us. His work remains. We thank him. We shall remember. President of the Polish Republic Aleksander Kwaśniewski |
President Kwaśniewski's necrological entry summed up aptly, but hardly completely Czesław Miłosz's enormous accomplishments and recognition. He held honorary doctorates from several other universities -- Harvard, the University of Witold the Great in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania), the Universities of Bologna and Rome in Italy. His books have been translated to many languages. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Miłosz was also the recipient of several other significant awards, among them The Neustadt Literary Prize and, in 1998, the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award.[for his book Piesek przydrożny].
Nor did president Kwaśniewski's statement mention or even allude to the many controversies precipitated by Miłosz's writings. Indeed, even the poet's burial sparked rather nasty debates between those who could never forgive him his early leftist leanings and those who did, and understood his intellectual and political evolution. Likewise debates raged between conservative Catholics who believed Miłosz guilty of heresy and his supporters who disagreed and understood the deeply religious underpinnings of all of Miłosz's writings. Ultimately, it was the intervention of Pope John Paul II that helped ease the tensions and Miłosz was buried in the crypt at the Church of St. Michael and St. Stanislaw on the Rock (kościół Sw. Stanisława, na Skałce) in Kraków, alongside many other famous Polish cultural figures. Thousands of people lined the streets to pay their respects.
Why was Miłosz so contradictory in his behaviors and writings and, thus, so controversial? In a diary he kept in the years 1987 and 1988, subsequently published in 1994 as A Year of the Hunter, Miłosz himself attempted to give an answer. He wrote:
Critics have sought an answer to the question: what is the source of all those contradictions in my poetry? In my prose, too, for that matter. I could enlighten them by referring to the several personalities who reside in me simultaneously, whom I have tried to suppress, generally without success. I didn't want to be so volatile, but what could I do? I hope that this diary [...] will be valued as one more attempt at demonstrating that I was conscious of the incompatibility of my various personalities.The complexity of Miłosz's personality (or personalities, if we take his word for it) may have been --partially at least --rooted in his history.
Born in 1911 in rural Lithuania into a family that had spoken Polish since the 16th century, Miłosz experienced repeated uprootings. He had been tossed by events into the ideological vortex of the 20th century. His writings --not surprisingly -- reflect a fascinating intellectual and cross-cultural journey.
In his early years, as a child of a railroad engineer, Miłosz travelled extensively throughout Russia and as far as Siberia. Originally a subject of the Russian tsar, he witnessed the fallout from the Russian revolution and saw Poland and Lithuania regain their independence in 1918. He spent his university years in the multi-ethnic city of Wilno (Vilnius), studied in Paris for a year, worked for a number of years for a Warsaw radio station, and visited Italy, absorbing its art. Having survived the horrors of WW II, mostly in Nazi occupied Warsaw, Miłosz briefly tasted life under Communist regime in Poland and then proceeded to experience life in the West, first as a member of the Polish diplomatic corps in the US and France, and later, after his defection in 1951, as an emigre in France.
In 1960, Miłosz immigrated to the United States. His affiliation with the Slavic Department of the University of California at Berkeley afforded him the opportunity to witness first hand the campus unrest of the 1960s. From his California home he observed the subsequent metamorphoses of America as well as his native Europe. And in his old age he returned to Poland and made Kraków his home. Quite an odyssey!
Miłosz defies easy definitions as a writer. Although he considered himself primarily a poet, he was also an accomplished novelist, essayist, literary historian and critic, political commentator, memoirist, and translator (among others he translated some American poets into Polish and learned Hebrew to translate some books of the Bible into Polish). In all the genres, and particularly in his poetry, he persistently searched for new means of expression. His political novel titled The Seizure of Power (1953) is distinctly different in style and tone from his poetic novel The Issa Valley (1955). His History of Polish Literature (1969), his philosophical essays in The Land of Ulro (1977), and his socio-political writings also reflect changing styles and yet different aspects of his literary personality.
In his poetry as well, Miłosz repeatedly surprised his readers by varying his style and assuming different personae. He also resorted to hybridization of various genres. In The Unattainable Earth (1984), he went even further by incorporating letters from his friends and copious quotations from his readings.
The difficulty of defining Miłosz is compounded by his protean public image. In a volume of interviews titled Conversations with Czesław Miłosz [Ewa Czarnecka and Alexander Fiut, eds. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,(1983)] he bemoaned that predicament, stating:"I think I've had special and ample opportunity in my career to be taken as other than I am."
Indeed, perceptions of Miłosz have never been unequivocal. After the publication of The Captive Mind (1953), which was an analysis of the corrosive influence of Communist regimes on writers, Miłosz -- presumed to have had a Communist allegiance -- was condemned in official circles in Poland. Among Polish emigres he continued to be viewed with scorn and suspicion as a Communist agent. And Western intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who were still naively pro-Soviet at the time, dismissed him with contempt and found his writing distasteful. Those who welcomed him enthusiastically were, for the most part, on the political right. That didn't sit well with Miłosz either ...
Miłosz was banned in Poland for 30 years, during which complete official silence surrounded his person and his work, except for rare and oblique references to him in literary scholarship. However, the award of the Nobel Prize in 1980, which coincided with the advent of Solidarity, catapulted him to the center of public attention. The Solidarity movement adopted him as a patron, and his books, including his poetry of moral opposition and his anti-totalitarian writings, were finally made public.
Miłosz returned to Poland to a hero's welcome. Numerous academic conferences on his work followed, and abundant scholarship about him has been published in Poland and abroad. In Poland, Miłosz became a national bard, a fact all the more surprising in that, over the years, his assessments of Poles and Polish culture have often been quite harsh.
Contrary to the image imposed on him in Poland, Miłosz claimed to be neither a voice of moral authority nor a symbol of integrity. In an interview with Aleksander Fiut, he made a special point of disclaiming any "moral heroism" on his part:
And that image of me as a heroic figure, especially when I was in Poland in 1981 --well, I just happened not to disgrace myself so badly because I was living abroad the whole time, actually from the end of 1945 on. I was crafty; I stayed outside the country. [...] But, oh, would I have disgraced myself had I stayed in Poland!He was very much aware both of the insidious seductiveness of Communist ideology and the compromises writers tend to make when living under totalitarian regimes.
Miłosz happened to have an uncanny ability to anticipate events. In the interwar period, while other Polish poets exulted in the newly regained national independence, Miłosz sensed the impending doom. His poetry was filled with horror of things to come and earned him the title of a "catastrophist." Indeed, he conjured apocalyptic visions, anticipating the calamities of World War II; foresaw the devastation of the country; and prophesized the carnage, even specifically the crematoria.
After World War II, when the Communist authorities appeared to have a firm grip on Poland, Miłosz time and again scorned them in his poetry, wrote essays and books detailing their Machiavelian ploys, and warned them not to be complacent. A fragment of his poem You Who Have Wronged (Który skrzywdziłeś) is worth quoting:
You who have harmed a simple manIn 1980, these very lines were engraved on the monument erected by Solidarity to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the brutal killing of striking workers at the Gdańsk shipyard.
Laughing at his wrongs [...]
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
Though you may kill him -- a new one
will be born.
In December 1981, when General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland, Miłosz issued another warning, which was widely publicized in the American press:
The Polish people have been defeated many times, and this time they are defeated in a particularly perfidious game. But as I know history, I do not believe that the democratic movement in Eastern Europe, of which Solidarity became the spearhead, is a transitory phenomenon. On the contrary, its open or latent presence will prove more durable than all the juntas of our century taken together.Another one of Miłosz's prophecies was fulfilled.
The poet admitted on various occasions that he was susceptible to mysticism. In his autobiography titled The Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa, 1958), he wrote of the enormous influence on him of his distant Lithuanian cousin, the mystical poet Oscar Miłosz, who wrote in French and whom Czesław Miłosz met in Paris in the 1930s. Further, in his novel The Issa Valley, declared by one critic [Thomas Venclova] to be a Lithuanian masterpiece, though written in Polish, Miłosz meticulously and affectionately described the various pagan mystical rites of his native Lithuania. In his critical writings as well he tended to gravitate toward mystical thinkers (like Blake, Dostoevsky, Shestov, or Swendenborg). Most significant, he spoke repeatedly of his poetry being written by a daimonion who periodically made the poet's body its domicile.
The search for self-identity was a central motif in Miłosz's work, partially because of his propensity toward introspection and partially in response to the challenges of his multiple exiles. In The Native Realm, subtitled "A Search for Self-Definition," Miłosz wrote: "In a certain sense I consider myself a typical Eastern European." An Eastern European's distinctive characteristic, he explained, "can be boiled down to a lack of form -- both inner and outer" and a tendency to be afflicted by "a sudden ebb or flow of inner chaos." The drive to order that chaos, to make sense of his personal but also his national history, to find an appropriate language to express the complexities of modern life, that drive had been a major force behind Miłosz's writing.
In his literary texts, Miłosz adopted a complex triple perspective -- of a participant, an observer, and a witness bearing testimony. And it was from this perspective that he chronicled his personal and intellectual adventures. Both in his prose works and his poetry, Miłosz dwelled on his remembrance of minute details and episodes in his life and attempted to place them in a historical, or sometimes even in a cosmic, context. He evoked affectionately the faces and names of people he had known, recaptured fleeting feelings; brought to life the textures and shapes of material objects. In his book The Witness of Poetry (1983), consisting of a series of lectures he had delivered at Harvard University, he called attention to the point that it was his poetry, rather than he himself, that was the witness.
As a defier of trends and fashions, both aesthetic and ideological, Miłosz seems to have accepted as his credo the French maxim on se pose on s'opposant [One defines oneself by opposing]. His writing reflects his individualism, his intellectual autonomy, his candor, and courage. These were the aspects of his work that most impressed and inspired his compatriotes in Poland. Like other Eastern European writers, most notably Vaclav Havel, Miłosz has been instrumental in changing the political face of his homeland. For that, too, he was revered. The celebrations of his 90th and 91st birthday in Kraków attested to that.
Miłosz's poetry was largely marked by a sense of calm. Stoical in his exile, he taught deceptively simple lessons about the beauty of the world, the joy of being alive, and the necessity of maintaining integrity. Despite the experience of historical upheavals and the "lights and shadows" of his existence on both sides of the Atlantic, Miłosz maintained till his final years a celebratory perspective and the tendency to affirm life.
The above is an edited version of a presentation made by Dr. Regina Grol to the Polish Arts Club of Buffalo on September 21, 2005. All textual translation are by the author.
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