Who is polish writer milosh

And yet, though befriending our neediness may be essential to happiness , how do we keep ourselves from constricting love with the cycle of insatiable need?

Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills. A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. In he reinforced his career as a poet and freelance writer by taking a law degree. As a contributor to radio he got into trouble under the pre-war right-wing government for his left-wing views. Under a more ruthless regime, his experience at dodging official opprobrium came in useful when he wrote for the underground press in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

Representing post-war Communist Poland, he was a diplomat to the United States and, in , to Paris, where he asked for political asylum. He spent ten years in Paris, and students of his writings will often get the sense that he was later more comfortable having his Polish translated into French than into English. In he published The Captive Mind , a bitterly disillusioned analysis, from the inside, of the influence of Marxist orthodoxy on his generation of idealists.

The book, which students should regard as essential reading even today, can now be seen as an early blow at the foundations of the Warsaw Pact. Written before the Berlin Wall went up, The Captive Mind was a key factor in eventually bringing it down. In he received the Nobel Prize, and after his writings began to be published in Poland: not all at once, and seldom without official doubts, but inexorably.

From the technical angle, this now looks like the next breakthrough after Ortega, early in the century, identified the newspaper article as a vital medium for serious thought.

THAT THE BIBLE , for a Western civilization, is the common good of believers and non-believers ought to be obvious, but for some reason it is a truth hard to see except when that same civilization is at the point of collapse.

It has to be remembered that the typical Polish writer was Bruno Schulz. But for that to be remembered, Bruno Schulz has to be remembered, and the main reason he was so easily forgotten is that a Gestapo officer blew his brains out.

It happened in the Drohobycz ghetto in , when Schulz was only fifty, with the best of his career ahead of him. He was a walking fountain of talent, and the flow was stopped almost before it started, by one bullet in the right place. But at least he was heard of. Among the younger elite obliterated by the Russian firing squads before the Nazis even arrived, there were probably more like him.

There were certainly more in the Warsaw ghetto, where the cultural life plangently evoked by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his long interview Die doppelte Boden was like a university of dreams.

Alas, the university had a direct rail connection with the slaughterhouse, and all that beautiful promise went into smoke. It took Roman Polanski, by his very existence, to remind us of what had ceased to exist: a whole generation of young talent was destroyed, and if Polanski had not been blessed with an inconspicuous personal appearance even he would have shared the fate of his mother.

When the war was over, the memory of all this was not: for the artists who had come through, the pit was only a step behind them. When they looked over their shoulders, they could see right into it. In that direction, there was little else in view, except rubble. Looking for something to count on, he found the Bible in the ruins. For us, blessed with a more comfortable set of ruins—even if the streets are more dangerous, most of us live better now than we did in the houses we grew up in—there seems less to be afraid of: we can persuade ourselves that history is a linear development, in which even the eternal can become outdated, and be safely forgotten.

Perhaps our own catastrophe will never come in any readily intelligible form, so it will never matter if there is nothing to go back to, no past to legitimize the permanent present, which will legitimize itself by doing us no evil except by its puffball bombardment of triviality.

There is always the chance that our confident iconoclasts are right. Like the Polish intelligentsia that was wiped out half by one set of madmen and half by another, he was just caught in the squeeze, and had his heart broken even though his body walked away. There he fell in love with a colleague, Janina Cekalska. Janka, as she was known, was unhappily married to another man, a film director.

She aspired to become a director herself, and had founded an organization to promote leftist filmmaking. Milosz, who had already been through several stormy and bruising love affairs, worried that committing himself to Janka might compromise his artistic calling, but they soon started living together, and they married some years later.

It proved to be a difficult marriage. He was opposed to everything the Communists opposed, yet he suspected that a Communist takeover would be disastrous. In the initial chaos, he fled Warsaw and took a circuitous route back to Wilno, which was momentarily free, because Lithuania was still independent.

But, in , Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving Milosz with two equally dire choices: remain, and live under Stalinism; or return to Warsaw, and live under Nazism. Either path would be extremely dangerous. The Soviets were purging and deporting Polish intellectuals; the Nazis were indiscriminately killing Poles, and herding Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto. In July, , Milosz decided that Warsaw was the better choice, and he managed to smuggle himself across the border and into the General Government, as Nazi-occupied Poland was called.

Nazism threatened the body, whereas Communism demanded the surrender of the soul. For a poet like Milosz, the latter seemed like the greater sacrifice.

Ironically, as Franaszek writes, the war years were a time of flourishing for Milosz. Although, like all Poles under Nazi rule, he faced grave risks—on several occasions, he narrowly escaped German patrols and roundups—the arrival of the apocalypse he had long dreaded also set something free within him. He was active in the underground literary scene, compiling an anthology of wartime poetry and translating Shakespeare into Polish. His poetry acquired a new simplicity, directness, and pathos—several of his masterworks date from these years—and his stature among Polish readers grew.

Still, the horrors that he witnessed and experienced permanently shaped his view of humanity and history. When gold paint flakes from the arms of sculptures, When the letter falls out of the book of laws, Then consciousness is naked as an eye. When the pages of books fall in fiery scraps Onto smashed leaves and twisted metal, The tree of good and evil is stripped bare. Eliot, whose work he knew well.

But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound. Instead, he sought a poetry that was truthful and perceptive enough to be trustworthy even when annihilation seemed imminent. A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city.

He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Milosz wanted to write poems that could survive such a judgment. All of this made it very easy to conclude that Communism was, as it claimed to be, the philosophy—even the religion—of the future, to which everyone had to bow down.

Milosz offers four case studies of writers he knew, showing how each had reasoned himself into submission. But Gamma could make this submission, Milosz suggests, only because he was not truly a poet. To be a poet involves hearing the voice of conscience, which precludes lying, even in the service of a good cause.

Whoever truly creates is alone. The people around him in the twentieth century worshipped history, which is to say, power; but the artist worships truth, which is what allows him to save his soul. When truth is invoked, we always have to ask, Whose truth? Milosz knew the reasons for skepticism as well as anyone.