Milosz: a biography

Andrzej Franaszek's award-winning biography of Czesław Miłosz--the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980--offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology. Franaszek recounts the poet's personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union's postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Miłosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004. Franaszek traces Miłosz's changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Miłosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Miłosz's poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Miłosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.--

Translated from the Polish.

Chapter 1. The garden of Eden, 1911-1920 -- 'Darkness split by distant flashes, illuminations' -- The earthly paradise -- Good and bad blood -- A grenade under the bed -- Chapter 2. The young man and the mysteries, 1921-1929 -- The apartment with fig-plants -- Tomcat -- Doctor Catchfly -- Manichean poisons -- Early literary tastes (and Russian roulette) -- Inside the lodge -- The rushing Heraclitean river -- Chapter 3. Black Ariel, 1930-1934 -- 'I devote too little time to study' -- Egg-man -- The Cezary Baryka Complex -- Friday seminars, literary Wednesdays -- Leviathan's wardens -- 'A bridge suspended in mid-air' -- The Devil's see-saw -- 'If early love had lasted ... ' -- 'To the left, to the right' -- Chapter 4. The country of the first emigration, 1935-1939 -- 'A certain student in the city of Paris' -- 'The whole cosmos revolves within us' -- 'On black meadows' -- Publican -- 'A handful of unearthly truths' -- 'Siena descends into gleams' -- 'In my homeland, to which I will not return' -- Warsaw friendships -- Janka -- Coming down to earth -- A blood-red star -- Chapter 5. Voices of poor people, 1939-1945 -- Medals in the suitcase -- Reflections on the inferno -- The theory …