Czeslaw Miłosz

Czeslaw Miłosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, essayist, novelist, translator, and Nobel laureate, whose works are concerned predominantly with the effect of historical circumstance on human morality.

Miłosz was born in etekniai, Lithuania, an area that became disputed territory after Poland was declared an independent state in 1918. In 1929 he entered the King Stefan Batory University in Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, capital of Lithuania). His earliest poems appeared in a student publication at the university, where Miłosz was cofounder of the leftist literary group Zagary (Polish for “charred wood”). Miłosz’s first two volumes of poetry, Poemat o czasie zastyglym (Poem of the Frozen Time, 1933) and Trzy zimy (Three Winters, 1936), anticipate the despair and moral confusion of World War II (1939-1945).

In 1934 Miłosz received his law degree from the King Stefan Batory University, and traveled to Paris, France, on a scholarship to study literature. The following year he returned to Wilno to work at a radio station. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Miłosz joined the underground movement of resistance to the Nazi occupation (see National Socialism) and edited an anthology of anti-Nazi poetry Piesn niepodlegla (Invincible Song, 1942).

After the war, Miłosz worked as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassies in Paris and Washington, D.C., until 1950. He defected in 1951 and spent the next ten years in France, during which time he published “Zniewolony umysł” (“The Captive Mind,” 1953), an acclaimed political essay about the effects of World War II on the values of four imaginary writers forced to rationalize Stalinism (see Stalin, Joseph) and Nazism.

Miłosz emigrated to the United States in 1960 and became a naturalized citizen in 1970. Although his works had been officially banned in Poland since 1946, he continued to write in the Polish language. Miłosz began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961 and published a major volume of poems the following year, Król Popiel i inne wiersze (King Popiel and Other Poems, 1962). Selected Poems (1973, revised 1980) and Bells in Winter (1978) established Miłosz’s reputation in the West. In 1969 he published The History of Polish Literature (revised 1983). Later books of poetry include Unattainable Earth (1987) and Provinces (1991). In 1998 he published Piesek przydrozny (Road-side Dog), a collection of personal essays, ruminations, and poetry.

Miłosz’s translations include works by major modern poets such as T. S. Eliot as well as works by English writers William Shakespeare and John Milton. Miłosz also translated portions of the Bible from Hebrew into Polish. He received numerous awards, including the Prix Littéraire Européen in 1953 for the first of his two novels, Zdobycie wladzy (1953, translated as The Seizure of Power, 1955); the 1978 Neustadt International Literary Prize; and the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature.