Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz was born in 1911 in Šeteniai, a village on the Nevėžis river in what is now Lithuania, into a Polish-speaking gentry family; his childhood there would return, decades later, as a lost Arcadia in his prose and verse. He grew up largely in Wilno (Vilnius), studied law at its Stefan Batory University, and with friends formed the poetry group Żagary, whose dark, prophetic tone earned them the label ‘catastrophists’. He spent the German occupation in Warsaw, active in clandestine literary life, and his collection Rescue (1945) holds some of the most searching poems written about that time.

After the war he served as a cultural attaché for communist Poland in the United States and France, until in 1951 he broke with the regime and sought asylum in Paris. The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how intellectuals came to accept Stalinist orthodoxy, made his name in the West, and was followed by the novel The Issa Valley and the autobiographical Native Realm. In 1960 he joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Slavic literature for many years. His poetry, meanwhile, ranged from philosophical treatise to lyric, holding history’s horrors and the radiance of the visible world in uneasy balance.

His work was officially banned in Poland until the Nobel Prize of 1980, which coincided with the rise of Solidarity; lines from his poems were inscribed on the monument to the shipyard workers killed in Gdańsk in 1970. After the fall of communism he divided his time between Berkeley and Kraków, where he spent his final years, and he died there in 2004.