Czeslaw Milosz; NY Times obit

[Hyfler/Rosner]

August 15, 2004
Czeslaw Milosz, Poet and Nobelist Who Wrote of Modern
Cruelties, Dies at 93
By RAYMOND H. ANDERSON NY Times

Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish émigré writer who won the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, in part for a powerful
pre-mortem dissection of Communism, in part for tragic,
ironic poetry that set a standard for the world, died
Saturday at his home in Krakow, his assistant, Agnieszka
Kosinska, told The Associated Press. He was 93

An artist of extraordinary intellectual energy, Mr.
Milosz was also an essayist, literary translator and scholar
of the first rank.

Many of his fellow poets were in awe of his skills.
When another Nobel poet and exile from totalitarianism, the
Russian Joseph Brodsky, presented Mr. Milosz with the
Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1978, he
said, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that
Czeslaw Milosz in one of the greatest poets of our time,
perhaps the greatest."

Mr. Milosz was often described as a poet of memory and
a poet of witness.

Terrence Des Pres, writing in The Nation, said of him:
"In exile from a world which no longer exists, a witness to
the Nazi devastation of Poland and the Soviet takeover of
Eastern Europe, Milosz deals in his poetry with the central
issues of our time: the impact of history upon moral being,
the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined
world."

In 1951, he was in Paris, on duty there as a Polish
cultural attaché following elite assignments in the United
States at the consulate in New York and the embassy in
Washington. An urbane man fluent in Polish, Lithuanian,
Russian, English and French, Mr. Milosz had established
close associations with leading left-wing intellectuals in
Paris.

These diplomatic contacts were important to the Warsaw
authorities, but Mr. Milosz, a skeptic about Marxist rule,
was tipped off that he faced arrest and trial in the
Stalinist purges then under way if he returned to Poland. So
he denounced the Moscow-dominated system that was tightening
its grip on his homeland and took political asylum in
France.

Formulating a New 'New Faith'

In his youth, Mr. Milosz had been drawn to some of the
idealized aspects of Marxism but he rejected dictatorship.
In large measure, he defected, he explained later, because
of damage he saw inflicted on spiritual values and intellect
by Communist dogma, which he scorned as the "New Faith." For
Mr. Milosz, faith was something else, as he made clear in a
1985 poem under that title:

Faith is in you whenever you look

At a dewdrop or a floating leaf

And know that they are because they have to be.

Even if you close your eyes and dream up things

The world will remain as it has always been

And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the
river.

Mr. Milosz detested Socialist Realism, the
Soviet-contrived literary doctrine that distorted truth into
propaganda to promote the political and ideological goals of
the Communist Party.

Two years after defecting, Czeslaw Milosz, (pronounced
CHESS-wahf MEE-wosh) published "The Captive Mind," a searing
analysis of Stalinist tactics and their numbing effect on
intellectuals. "The Captive Mind" was translated and
published in many countries, becoming itself a historical
document.

In it, Mr. Milosz wrote:

"The philosophy of history emanating from Moscow is
not just an abstract theory; it is a material force that
uses guns, tanks, planes and all the machines of war and
oppression. All the crushing might of an armed state is
hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith.

"At the same time, Stalinism attacks him from within,
saying his opposition is caused by his 'class
consciousness,' just as psychoanalysts accuse their foes of
wanting to preserve their complexes."

"Still," he added, prophetically, "it is not hard to
imagine the day when millions of obedient followers of the
New Faith may suddenly turn against it."

"The Captive Mind" was among a powerful group of books
in the early 1950's that condemned Communist ideology and
foreshadowed the downfall of Communist power. A similar book
was "The New Class" by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav
dissident, which deplored self-aggrandizement and moral rot
in the Communist leadership.

After his defection, Mr. Milosz explained in a speech:
"I have rejected the New Faith because the practice of the
lie is one of its principal commandments, and Socialist
Realism is nothing more than a different name for a lie."

In the same year "The Captive Mind" appeared, Mr.
Milosz also published "The Seizure of Power," a
fictionalized scrutiny of the relationship between Communism
and intellectuals.

By 1960, Mr. Milosz had tired of his life amid leftist
intellectual squabbling in France. Years later he would
speak with acerbity of those in Western Europe who continued
to regard the Soviet Union as the hope of the future,
particularly those "French intellectuals who considered that
only a man who was insane could abandon his position of a
writer in a people's democracy in order to choose the
capitalistic, decadent West." He accepted a professorship in
the Slavic Department at the University of California,
Berkeley.

He became an American citizen and lived in the
Berkeley hills in a modest house with a stunning view of San
Francisco Bay. He celebrated that vista in his poetry
("Views From San Francisco Bay" in 1972), but he also spoke
of the alien remoteness of the California landscape.

Mr. Milosz, with his bushy eyebrows, herringbone tweed
jacket, wry humor and brilliant lectures was soon a popular
figure on campus, especially in his seminars and lectures on
Dostoyevsky. He continued to write verse, translated
literary masterpieces into Polish and compiled a large
volume, "History of Polish Literature," published in 1969.

The hardships and dangers in Mr. Milosz's life, first
under Nazi military terror and then under Communist
oppression, followed by long years as an émigré in the West,
clearly marked his writing.

"In both an outward and inward sense he is an exile
writer, a stranger for whom physical exile is really a
reflection of a metaphysical - or even religious - spiritual
exile applying to humanity in general," the Nobel Committee
observed in 1980. "The world that Milosz depicts in his
poetry, prose and essays is the world in which man lives
after having been driven out of Paradise."

A Multilingual Boyhood

Czeslaw Milosz was born June 30, 1911, to a
Polish-speaking family in Szetejnie, Lithuania, which
together with Poland, Latvia and Estonia was part of the
Russian empire at the time. The complex, multiethnic Baltic
region was inhabited by communities of Poles, Lithuanians,
Jews, Russians and others, all speaking their separate
languages and living their own cultures.

His family was not rich but it was distinguished and
intellectual. He was only 3 when World War I broke out, and
his father, a civil engineer, served in the czar's army,
while his family was kept on the run from advancing German
armies.

From his childhood on, Mr. Milosz had a rich inner
life, reading widely. He also had a challenging array of
talents, interests and skills. As a schoolboy, he was
fascinated by the scientific world of animals.

But in the end, he enrolled in law school at the
University of Vilnius, graduating at the age of 23. He
worked several years in radio, and sometimes remarked in
interviews that he felt guilty for having abandoned science.

Mr. Milosz traced the distinctive imagery of his
poetry to his boyhood experiences in the rural countryside
of Lithuania; his childhood is evoked in an autobiographical
novel published in the United States as "The Issa Valley"
(1981) and in "Native Realm," an autobiography. In one of
his essays he wrote: "If I were asked to say where my poetry
comes from I would say that its roots are in my childhood in
Christmas carols, in the liturgy of Marian and vesper
offices, and in the Bible."

The author Eva Hoffman, a native of Poland, said of
him: "He has never been a provincial artist. His writing may
bear the marks of his particular Lithuanian-Polish past, but
the material of his own life is filtered through a fully
cultivated intelligence and probed to those depths at which
individual experience becomes universal."

He attended high school in the city of Vilnius, which
by then had been transferred from Lithuania to Poland, and
later restored to Lithuania, and published his first poem at
the age of 15, He studied Latin for seven years in school,
and in his Nobel acceptance speech credited that underlying
linguistic discipline and classroom translations of poems
with helping him to develop his mastery. He also learned
Hebrew and Greek well enough to later translate the Bible
into Polish.

Poetic Vision Born of War

At the age of 22, while attending law school, Mr.
Milosz published his first experimental verse, "Poem on Time
Frozen." Favorable reaction helped him win a state
scholarship to study literature in Paris after he was
awarded a law degree in 1934. A relative there, Oscar
Milosz, who worked in the Lithuanian legation and wrote
poetry in French, helped broaden his world outlook and shape
his poetic style.

He returned to Vilnius after the publication of a
second book of poems called "Three Winters" but was fired
from his job at a local Polish radio station for being too
liberal. Mr. Milosz was working in Warsaw for Polish Radio
when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939.

During the Nazi occupation, he worked in the Warsaw
University Library, wrote for the anti-Nazi underground,
heard the screams and gunfire in 1943 as Germans killed or
captured the remaining Jews in the walled Ghetto and
witnessed the razing of nearly all Warsaw after the uprising
in 1944.

One of his most moving poems, "A Poor Christian Looks
at the Ghetto" (1943), described the assault on the Jews:

Bees build around red liver,

Ants around black bone.

It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,

It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper,
nickel,

silver, foam

Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets,
leaves, balls,

crystals,

Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls

Engulfs animal and human hair.

Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs,

Ants build around white bone.

Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,

Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.

The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat
seizes the

foundations.

Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,

With one leafless tree.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his
way,

With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.

He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,

He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,

The ashes of each man by a different part of the
spectrum.

Bees build around a red trace.

Ants build around the place left by my body.

I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.

He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch

Who has sat much in the light of candles

Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,

Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of
Jesus?

My broken body will deliver me to his sight

And he will count me among the helpers of death:

The uncircumcised.

After the war, a collection of poems called "Rescue,"
which showed the influence of T. S. Eliot, established him
among Poland's pre-eminent writers. Although he was not a
member of the Communist Party he was accepted into the
diplomatic corps in 1946 and began the journey that ended
with his defection in 1951 in Paris.

Mr. Milosz chose throughout his life to compose his
poetry in the complex but rich Polish language, even after
he mastered French and English. Poetry can be true, he said,
only if created in one's mother tongue.

As his work won increasing attention and respect, Mr.
Milosz developed close ties to many leading world
intellectuals, writers, and political and religious leaders,
especially to Pope John Paul II, his countryman and leader
of his faith.

When he consulted on his plan to break with Communism,
it was with no less a figure than Albert Einstein, who
advised him during a talk at Princeton University that he
should go home to Poland, not defect to the West to join the
sad fate of exiles.

'A Poet Remembers'

Mr. Milosz also knew Lech Walesa, the electrician who
led the anti-Communist Solidarity movement and went on to
become president of Poland. Lines from a verse by Mr. Milosz
were put on a memorial in Gdansk to honor Mr. Walesa's
fellow shipyard workers who were shot by the police in the
early 1970's:

"You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure: for
a poet remembers."

When Communism was smashed in Poland, Mr. Milosz
returned to what he called "the country of my first
immigration." Arriving in Warsaw after an absence of three
decades, he received a hero's welcome. Mr. Milosz was
regarded as one of the world's literary immortals. When he
chose, he walked and talked with the great men of his time,
but he remained humble.

He also had a remarkable memory and could readily
recall the names of his early teachers, companions and
friends, and he remembered in vivid detail the first books
he read, his adventures and mishaps. He demonstrated that
acute memory in his 1968 book "Native Realm, A Search for
Self-Definition," a compelling and mildly ironic account of
his life, work and thoughts in the illuminating context of
Baltic and family history.

Mr. Milosz enjoyed pleasures of the body as well as of
the mind, as he acknowledged in his 1985 poem, "A
Confession," translated by himself and Robert Hass:

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.

Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,

Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.

So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit

Have visited such a man? Many others

Were justly called, and trustworthy.

Who would have trusted me? For they saw

How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,

And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.

Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,

Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,

And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,

I know what was left for smaller men like me:

A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.

A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

At times, Mr. Milosz fell into melancholy, but he
firmly fended off any would-be therapists. His early poetry
was in what was called the "Catastrophist" school of the
1930's, which foresaw the annihilation of the principal
values of modern culture and a devastating war. His wartime
ordeals tended in ways to bear out the forebodings.

Mr. Milosz was a man of quiet manner but strong
opinions and he expressed them, sometimes to the distress of
his admirers. For example, in a PEN congress talk he
reminded his fellow writers, "Innumerable millions of human
beings were killed in this century in the name of utopia -
either progressive or reactionary, and always there were
writers who provided convincing justifications for
massacre."

Reacting to the atrocities in the struggle between
Christians and Muslims in Bosnia in the 1990's, Mr. Milosz
blamed intellectuals more than politicians and generals.

"These people who had liberated themselves from
Marxist doctrine very quickly became nationalists," he said
in 1996. "And we see what happens now in Yugoslavia. In my
opinion, intellectuals are responsible for the horrors in
Bosnia, for they initiated the new nationalist tendencies
there."

Mr. Milosz was married twice. His first wife, Janina
Dluska, shared his ordeals in Warsaw during the Nazi
occupation and went into exile with him. She died in 1986.
They had two sons, Anthony and John Peter, who survive him.
In 1992, Mr. Milosz married Carol Thigpen, a historian. Ms.
Thigpen died in 2003, The Associated Press said.

After Mr. Milosz was awarded the Nobel, many of his
books were translated into English and published in the
United States. Ecco Press gathered a half-century of his
work in "The Collected Poems 1931-1987." In it is a 1986
poem called "And Yet the Books," which contained these
lines:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange
pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.