Czesław Miłosz
- Born:
- June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania, Russian Empire [now in Lithuania]
- Awards And Honors:
- Nobel Prize (1980)
- Movement / Style:
- catastrophism
Czesław Miłosz (born June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania, Russian Empire [now in Lithuania]—died August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland) was a Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He was cited then as a writer “who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.” Miłosz’s writing examines the impact of repressive regimes and systems such as national socialism and communism on the human spirit. He was foremost a poet, but his best-known work is the essay collection The Captive Mind (1953).
Background and wartime experience
The son of a civil engineer, Miłosz completed his university studies in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), which belonged to Poland between the two World Wars. His first book of verse, Poemat o czasie zastygłym (1933; “Poem of Frozen Time”), expresses catastrophic fears of an impending war and worldwide disaster. During the Nazi occupation he moved to Warsaw, where he was active in the resistance and edited Pieśń niepodległa: poezja polska czasu wojny (1942; “Independent Song: Polish Wartime Poetry”), a clandestine anthology of well-known contemporary poems.
Diplomatic and teaching career and political asylum
Miłosz’s collection Ocalenie (1945; “Rescue”) contains his prewar poems and those written during the occupation. In the same year, he joined the Polish diplomatic service and was sent, after briefly working during 1946 in the Polish embassy in New York City, to Washington, D.C., as cultural attaché, and then to Paris, as first secretary for cultural affairs in Paris. There he asked for political asylum in 1951. Nine years later he immigrated to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley and taught Slavic languages and literature until his retirement in 1980. Miłosz became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1970.
Nobel Prize
Until 1980, when Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work was banned in Poland because of his defiance of the country’s communist government. Yet he was widely admired there, and many underground editions of his poetry collections were printed. His winning the Nobel Prize led the Polish government to authorize an anthology of his poems, which sold a remarkable 200,000 copies.
Literary works
There are several volumes of English translations of Miłosz’s poetry, including The Collected Poems 1931–1987 (1988) and Provinces (1991). His prose works include his autobiography, Rodzinna Europa (1959; Native Realm), Prywatne obowiązki (1972; “Private Obligations”), the novel Dolina Issy (1955; The Issa Valley), and The History of Polish Literature (1969).
Though Miłosz was primarily a poet, his best-known work became his collection of essays Zniewolony umysł (1953; The Captive Mind), in which he condemns the accommodation of many Polish intellectuals to communism. This theme is also present in his novel Zdobycie władzy (1955; The Seizure of Power). His poetic works are noted for their classical style and their preoccupation with philosophical and political issues. An important example is Traktat poetycki (1957; Treatise on Poetry), which combines a defense of poetry with a history of Poland from 1918 to the 1950s. The critic Helen Vendler wrote that this long poem seemed to her “the most comprehensive and moving poem” of the latter half of the 20th century.
In 2001 Miłosz published To Begin Where I Am, a collection of autobiographical essays, and New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001. Both books contain English translations of new and earlier pieces. Many other collections appeared after his death in 2004. Some of his earlier poems were translated into English in Poet in the New World (2025), edited by Robert Hass and David Frick.
