Czes?aw Mi?osz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin and subsequent American citizenship. His World War II-era sequence The World, is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. Defecting to the West in 1951, his non-fiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is one of the classics of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Czes?aw Mi?osz was born on June 30, 1911 in the village of ?eteniai/Szetejnie, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (now K?dainiai district, Kaunas County, Lithuania) on the border between two Lithuanian historical regions of Samogitia and Auk?taitija in central Lithuania. He was a son of Aleksander Mi?osz (d.1959), a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat (d.1945), descendant of the Siru?iai noble family. Milosz was fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French. His brother, Andrzej Mi?osz (1917—2002), a Polish journalist, translator of literature and of film subtitles into Polish, was a documentary-film producer who created Polish documentaries about his brother.
Mi?osz emphasized his identity with the multi-ethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a stance that led to ongoing controversies; he refused to categorically identify himself as either a Pole or a Lithuanian. He said of himself: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.", and "My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish not a Lithuanian poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me".
Mi?osz memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm. After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934. After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed for his leftist views. Mi?osz wrote all his poetry, fiction and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.
Mi?osz spent World War II in Warsaw, under Nazi Germany's "General Government". Here he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, W?adys?aw Tatarkiewicz. He did not participate in the Warsaw Uprising since he resided outside Warsaw proper. After World War II, Mi?osz served as cultural attaché of the communist People's Republic of Poland in Paris. In 1951 he defected and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).
In 1960 Mi?osz emigrated to the United States, and in 1970 he became a U.S. citizen. In 1961 he began a professorship in Polish literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He retired that same year, but continued teaching at Berkeley. Milosz' personal attitude about living in Berkeley is sensitively portrayed in his poem, "A Magic Mountain," contained in a collection of translated poems entitled Bells in Winter, published by Ecco Press (1985). Having grown up in the cold climates of Eastern Europe, Milosz was especially struck by the lack of seasonal weather in Berkeley and by some of the brilliant refugees from around the world who became his friends at the university.
In 1980 Mi?osz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since his works had been banned in Poland by the communist government, this was the first time that many Poles became aware of him. When the Iron Curtain fell, Mi?osz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live part-time in Kraków. He divided his time between his home in Berkeley and an apartment in Kraków. In 1989, he received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. During this period in Poland, his work was silenced by government-censored media.
Mi?osz's 1953 book The Captive Mind is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime, a work which he himself later translated into English. Mi?osz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much. Through the Cold War, the book was often cited by US conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr..
Mi?osz died in 2004 at his Kraków home, aged 93. His first wife, Janina (née D?uska), whom he had married in 1944, predeceased him in 1986. They had two sons, Anthony (b. 1947) and John Peter (b.1951 ). His second wife, Carol Thigpen, an American-born historian, died in 2002. Mi?osz's body was entombed at Kraków's historic Ska?ka Church, one of the last to be commemorated there.
Mi?osz is honoured at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, as one of the "Righteous among the Nations". A poem by Mi?osz appears on a Gda?sk memorial to protesting shipyard workers who had been killed by government security forces in 1970. His books and poems have been translated by many hands, including Jane Zielonko, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass.
Zagajewski, Adam, editor (2007) Polish Writers on Writing featuring Czeslaw Milosz. Trinity University Press
Faggen, Robert, editor (1996) Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czes?aw Mi?osz, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Haven, Cynthia L. , editor (2006) Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations University Press of Mississippi ISBN10 1578068290
Mi?osz, Czes?aw (2006) New and Collected Poems 1931-2001, Penguin Modern Classics Poetry ISBN10 0141186410 (posthumous collection)
Mi?osz, Czes?aw (2010) Proud To Be A Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, Penguin Translated Texts ISBN10 0141193190 (posthumous collection)
Taylor, John (2008) "Questions of Fulfillment (Czeslaw Milosz)," Into the Heart of European Poetry, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers pp. 275—277.
Biographies
1980 Nobel Prize in Literature (official site). Accessed 2010-08-04
American Academy of Poets. Accessed 2010-08-04
Interviews
Interview with Nathan Gardels for the New York Review of Books, February 1986. Accessed 2010-08-04
Conversation between Milosz and Susan Sontag. UC Berkeley, March 1990 (audio). Accessed 2010-08-04
Georgia Review 2001. Accessed 2010-08-04
Obituaries
New York Times. Accessed 2010-08-04
CBC. Accessed 2010-08-04
BBC. Accessed 2010-08-04
The Economist. Accessed 2010-08-04
Washington Post. Accessed 2010-08-04
Photos from Milosz's funeral in Krakow. Accessed 2010-08-04
Works
Three Poems. New York Review of Books. 1983. Accessed 2010-08-04
Biography and selected works listing. The Book Institute. Accessed 2010-08-04
