world where existentialism has long prompted
many of his contemporaries to discount the eth-
ical duality of good and evil altogether. ‘‘Some-
times one discovers the value of elementary
attachment to the notion of good and evil, and
my faith is rooted in my childhood,’’ responds
Milosz, in slow, thoughtful tones whose color
reflects his Eastern European background. ‘‘One
discovers the value of certain basic notions: of
catechism, of the notions of good and evil incul-
cated by our parents in childhood. So that’s a sort
of an indication of simple tools against high-
falutin and complicated things of philosophy,
and very often ominous philosophies of the 20th
century.
‘‘I have been observing so many destructions,
so many ruins, not only in the physical sense, but
in the spiritual sense, and I noticed that ruins in
the human mind preceded physical ruins. I know
to what extent catastrophes of the 20th century
were determined by a kind of erosion that was
going on during the 19th century. I should say
that if I preserved faith, it was largely empirical,
through seeing diabolical forces at work.’’
I’m struck by his unpretentiousness. Milosz
has writtenThe History of Polish Literature,a
massive, scholarly work, and is Professor Emer-
itus of Slavic and Eastern European languages at
the University of California at Berkeley. But he
possesses an ingenuous wisdom one would
expect to find in someone removed from the
academic world. It is this wisdom that takes
over when I press him about the possibility for
someone of today’s generation to possess strong
religious faith when the notion of ‘‘the banality
of evil’’ itself has become banal.
‘‘You may see a contradiction because I said
that because of experiences of the 20th century,
one appreciates naı ̈ve notions inculcated in child-
hood. I do not see any contradiction because this
is not a naı ̈ve approach, but through a religious
upbringing one can appreciate naı ̈ve attitudes.
That is not identical with being naı ̈ve, you see.
It’s looking from another angle. You understand
what I mean?’’
I assure him that I do. His tremendous faith
in his traditional religious upbringing seemed as
intuitive in his speech as it does in his poetry.
Indeed, his major literary influences include
English Romantic poet William Blake, and he
has lectured extensively on the Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I recall one of Dostoyev-
sky’s more oft-quoted statements, ‘‘If I had to
choose between Christ and truth, I would choose
Christ,’’ and ask if he agrees.
‘‘This is specific of Dostoyevsky. Simone
Weil said that when confronted with such a
choice, ‘I would always choose truth, because I
am convinced that what is really true cannot be
against Christ.’ Dostoyevsky meant scientific
truth, truth of science of the 19th century versus
Christ. And Simone Weil was fanatically
attached to science and even to the notion of
determinism in the 19th century because she con-
sidered that this didn’t interfere with her faith.
‘‘As everybody in the 20th century, I have
been under a very strong influence of science and
technology, pervading all our lives. But because
of that influence, I believe that faith in the 20th
century is something very different from naı ̈ve
faith of the past, of medieval man, for instance.
So if I have faith, it is seasoned with irony, with
humor, with various elements that are unavoid-
able once we are confronted with the scientific
world inherited from the 19th century.’’
Then what is it that attracts him to Dosto-
yevsky, if not simply his faith? ‘‘I was interested
primarily in Dostoyevsky as a spokesman of the
Russian intelligentsia in the 19th century, and as
a prophet of the Russian Revolution. Undoubt-
edly, such novels—The Possessed,for instance—
are prophetic books. And, for Dostoyevsky, the
erosion of Christianity, the erosion of religious
imagination, inevitably led his characters to a
Promethean revolutionary hope.The Possessed
is a novel about a revolutionary group that is like
a body of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Com-
munist Party. And Russians themselves recog-
nize the prophetic character of Dostoyevsky’s
writings. The Russian Revolution was not only
a social and historical phenomenon, it was a
profound metaphysical phenomenon.’’
I ask how he saw this metaphysics today, in
light of the political revolution that has recently
taken place throughout virtually all of Eastern
Europe. ‘‘External changes are very important,
but even more important is the complete end of
Marxism as a doctrine, as a philosophy. Still we
can expect many turns and turns, but one is
certain that Marxist philosophy is dead, it’s all
over. And that’s a fact of tremendous impor-
tance for the world, more important, perhaps,
than political changes that have made the rever-
sals that we see. In China we saw a reversal and it
doesn’t matter, for there is no messianic feeling,
and no messianic faith, no philosophy as aFrom the Rising of the Sun