On 'Why Czeslaw Milosz Matters' in the 21st Century
In 2011, Andrzej Franaszek spoke at a conference about Czeslaw Milosz, focusing in particular on Milosz's autobiographical Native Realm, and noting that many of the issues, situations, and philosophies that Milosz addressed "were things of the past." The conference celebrated Milosz's centenary and in the years after, Franaszek has paid close attention to current events and their parallels to the Polish writer's journey, stunningly coming to the conclusion that his life story is more relevant than ever before. "Someone once said that in his life Milosz had encountered every kind of hell the 20th century could devise," Franaszek explains, "yet also had at times tasted paradise. And, like Dante, he captured both for us." From there:
As a boy, he witnessed the demise of the 19th century, which took place on the battlefields of World War I. For a while he lived in Wilno — then part of Poland, now Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius — and increasingly became aware of what was happening nearby, just beyond Poland’s eastern border, where the empire of the czars morphed bloodily into the Soviet Union.
Like the majority of young intellectuals, he retained leftist leanings, but, at the same time, found himself caught in an ideological quandary. From the mid-1920s and the early 1930s onward, much of the continent fell under the spell of two totalitarian ideologies, communism and fascism. Though they proclaimed concern for the future of humanity and pledged to bring justice and build heaven on earth, what they created bore no relation to their promises. Instead they led millions of people to their deaths.
Milosz witnessed World War II and the Holocaust, living through the German occupation of Poland and the terrible, pitiless slaughter that accompanied it. Among his many famous poems is “Campo dei Fiori,” which movingly commemorates the fate of the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
After the war, he spent several years in the United States as a diplomat representing the new, communist-run Poland. While he enjoyed reading Faulkner’s novels, translating Auden and Eliot’s poems and meeting Einstein, he was unable to come to terms with what to his mind was a consumerist, soulless society. He frequently felt at odds with communism as well as with capitalism and considered joining a Christian farming community in Paraguay.
In 1951, not without misgivings, he defected to the West, enduring the migrant’s life and fate, first in France, where at times he was shunned like a leper by Paris’s Left Bank intellectuals because he had betrayed communism. Albert Camus was one of the few French writers who helped him survive a long period of solitary exile.
Read on at the New York Times.