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Poet, essayist, activist, teacher and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz was born on June 30th, 1911. After not only surviving both World Wars in Eastern Europe, he eventually was exiled to France and later the United States for his outspoken condemnation of totalitarianism. He settled in California – right near our old haunts in Berkeley! On this day in 2004, he died in Krakow, Poland, at the age of 93. We wanted to salute this local (by way of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and France) legend, Nobel Prize Winner, and powerful writer with a blog in his honor.
Miłosz’s early life was marked by the dangerous political landscape that was Eastern Europe at the time. His experiences of wartime, fighting, anti-semitism and angst shaped his writing for the rest of his life. He eventually studied law at the University of Vilnius, where he became a key writer for an “underground” group of avant-garde poets known as the Žagary group. His early poetry is often marked by extreme symbolism and even surrealism as he wrote of themes of alienation, disillusionment and searching for meaning in a chaotic world (obviously taken from his own life experiences). In 1933 he published his first collection of poems Poemat o czasie zastygłym (or A Poem of Frozen Time).
The outbreak of World War II changed Miłosz’s life in many ways. After working at several radio stations in Poland, unafraid to denounce Hitler and anti-semitism, Miłosz began his escape from Poland early on in the German invasion. But when he heard that the girl he loved (and would eventually have two children with and marry) had stayed behind to be with her parents, he began his journey back to her – often on foot. During the war he worked for the Polish resistance and published underground literature of both his own writing and translations of authors like Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. Along with his brother he helped several Jews escape occupied Poland. Immediately after the war in 1945 he published his fourth volume of poetry Ocalenie (or Rescue), which centers around his wartime experiences and contains several of his most critically acclaimed works.
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After the war, Miłosz served as a cultural attache for the Polish government in Paris and Washington D.C. But eventually, his disillusionment with an increasingly repressive regime in Poland caused him to realize he was no longer safe in his home country and he defected to France in 1951 and eventually the United States in 1960 – when McCarthyism had finally abated and he was offered a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing during his exile is chock full of explorations of moral and spiritual crises in the modern world, and speaks to many to this very day. His book The Captive Mind, published in 1953 when Miłosz was living in France, inspects totalitarian ideologies and the hold they have on intellectuals – drawing from Miłosz’s own experience with the new Polish regime. This work threw Miłosz into the spotlight, as he became a leading voice in the critique of totalitarianism. This work is still one of his most widely read books, and is taught in political science courses to this day. Within months of his teaching at UC Berkeley Miłosz was offered tenure, as he had impressed both students and colleagues alike with his immediate triumph as a professor – a role in which he said he felt destined for and at home in.
In 1980, Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work was praised for its “uncompromising clear-sightedness” and “passionate pursuit of truth” by the Nobel Committee, and as his work had been banned in Poland for a long time due to his condemnations of the regimes he found himself under, his win reintroduced him to the Polish people and he became a national treasure on multiple continents. Miłosz’s lasting influence is not only about his life experiences, but the fact that he used his unique understanding of humanity and morality, and added the complexities of history, religion and philosophy to describe the human condition. His work is truly one “of the people”.
