Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a Polish-Lithuanian intellectual, poet and writer. His life-span encompassed some of the most critical events of the 20th Century. For some, Milosz, although little known outside of Poland, stands with other World War II-era thinkers such as George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil as not only of high intellect, but of moral intellect, who's stood the test of time and subsequent critics.
I first came to know about him through Tony Judt, whose books deftly delineated the post-WWII period in Europe. For those new to that history, in World War II the foundations of Western thought and morality were shaken to their foundations, in a period of moral degradation in which nations competed to show how much barbarism they could inflict. The period afterward was marked by a Cold War between Communism and the liberal democracies, a nerve shattering time for those with the imagination to understand what an impending nuclear holocaust would really mean.
Czeslaw Milosz was born in eastern Europe in 1911, grew up on a farm, studied philosophy, and was living in Poland as a writer in September of 1939, when Germany invaded and the world changed. He had a front-row seat, nay a place on the stage, of the seminal event of the 20th century, and a mind to analyze what he was seeing and experiencing. He lived in Poland all through the war, seeing his country overrun by the German Army and then the subsequent Jewish Holocaust , the Warsaw uprising of 1944, followed by the total destruction of the city by the Germans, while the Red Army looked on from the other side of the river.
In those days, as Milosz has written, only Communism seemed to have the answers to the questions that intellectuals were asking. For communism had harnessed history to it's wagon, and as Marx famously said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." In Europe, the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco had half the continent in it's thrall. The other half waited for the ultimate triumph of Communism, so far only extant in The Soviet Union.
It was the period of the "isms", readymade answers to mankind's problems. Few in Europe believed in the path of the bourgeois democracies. Milosz at the end of WWII was no doubt of the far left, perhaps a communist. Since his country had been liberated by Soviet Russian Communists, it must have seemed like history knocking.
There's a lot of nuance in the history of Poland at the end of the war. Stalin, knowing the West was watching how he treated Poland, kept the velvet gloves on. Intellectuals and writers such as Milosz were put on the state payroll, told they could write freely and practice their crafts without fear. Despite the Pole's visceral historical hatred of Russia, things looked good. Poland needed to rebuild a war-torn country; perhaps Communism was the answer. Perhaps the stories of Stalin's barbarism to his own people were untrue? Maybe the people in the gulags deserved their fate. No one knew for sure. There were no Solzhenitsyns around at that time, writing books about the gulag from personal experience. Milosz was no fool, but when your first priority is getting food and shelter after a devastating war, one must choose whatever sustains life.
Since Milosz was a well-known poet in Poland, and even had some small reputation in the West, he was offered the post of cultural attaché for the post-war Polish government. He found out first hand how it feels to be a kept man, and to have the good life. If he'd been willing to play along, he would have had all the perks that a government could offer. But around 1949-50, the hammer came down from the Party for the artists and writers of Poland. Just as in the Soviet Union, Poland would now have to adhere to officially approved art policies; in other words "socialist realism". All other non-approved art would henceforth be labelled decadent, and put the artist in serious jeopardy.
In 1951 Milosz, while serving as attaché in the Paris embassy, asked for and obtained political asylum in France. He then wrote a book in an almost unique category, a portrayal of how artists and intellectuals work under varying political environments. This book, "The Captive Mind" (published in 1953), portrayed some of Milosz's fellow Polish artists as he had known them from the 1930s through the war to the postwar People's Republic of Poland. It's a great work of art of it's own, displaying a rich knowledge of human nature and what motivates people, in this case writers, to make the political choices they do, during a period of rapid political change in which millions died for various "isms". Most of the people he writes about were personally known to him, had gone through the horrific experiences of WWII in Poland, or in concentration camps, and were now intellectuals in the new post-war Poland.
He is somewhat dismissive of their motives, seeing them as opportunists who would serve anyone who would provide them with a living. The stomach is more powerful than the mind, in his view. He dissects how Polish writers made their reputations in pre-war Poland, then describes what happened to them after Hitler's invasion, and how they came to various accommodations with the post-war People's Republic of Poland. He details the wartime experiences of those who spent time in war-time concentration camps - those who survived.
Defecting to the West wasn't an easy decision for Milosz; he was ardent in his love of the Polish language. To be an exile from your mother tongue was something he wrote about a lot in later years.
He eventually came to the United States and taught at various universities, ending up at the University of California at Berkley. He wrote several more books. He never lost his love for Poland and the Polish language.
