Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie in
1911 and raised in Wilno, both of which are in
present-day Lithuania. His family was part of
the large Polish-speaking population of that
city. For this reason he identified himself as a
Polish writer. Living there through his university
education, he was present in 1939 when the
Soviets invaded Lithuania, while Hitler simulta-
neously invaded Poland. At great personal risk,
he escaped through the Soviet borders and
worked for the Polish resistance in Warsaw
throughout the war. Once the war had ended,
he tried to make a life for himself in his own
nation and was part of the diplomatic corps of
Communist Poland’s postwar government. He
was posted to the consulate in New York and the
embassy in Washington. In 1951, while he was
serving as the cultural attache ́ at the Polish
embassy in Paris, he defected. He remained in
France until 1960, when he took a position at the
University of California, Berkeley, as a professor
of Slavic literature. In 1980, at the age of seventy,
he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Hav-
ing lived in exile for fifty years, he moved from
the United States to Krakow in 2001 and died
there this summer at the age of ninety-three. He
had remained productive until the end; a final
book of poems,Second Space, is being published
in English this fall.
This bare-bones summary of his life shows
that Milosz’s personal history included almost
the whole of the twentieth century. He partici-
pated in some of its most dramatic episodes and
lived within several of its colliding cultures, carv-
ing out homes in Lithuania, Poland, France, and
the United States. These are the contexts in
which his Christian vision was shaped and deliv-
ered. Although he often expressed this vision
obliquely, he was relentless in his criticism of
those who despised faith as an anachronism:
‘‘I am not afraid to say that a devout and God-
fearing man is superior as a human specimen to
a restless mocker who is glad to style himself
an ‘intellectual,’ proud of his cleverness in using
ideas which he claims as his own though
he acquired them in a pawnshop in exchange
for simplicity of heart.... The sacred exists and
is stronger than all our rebellions.’’ Milosz
believed that the role of the poet is crucial in
any society—regardless of how little poetry is
appreciated or its importance understood. Con-
sider his apologia for the poetry he was writing
during and after World War II, when the world
was undergoing a shock and disillusionment per-
haps unparalleled in human history. How should
the poet react? Here is Milosz’s proposal:
As is well known, the philosopher Adorno said
that it would be an abomination to write lyric
poetry after Auschwitz, and the philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas gave the year 1941 as the
date when God ‘‘abandoned’’ us. Whereas I
wrote idyllic verses, ‘‘The World’’ and a num-
ber of others, in the very center of what was
taking place in the anus mundi, and not by any
means out of ignorance.... Life does not like
death. The body, as long as it is able to, sets in
opposition to death the heart’s contractions
and the warmth of circulating blood. Gentle
verses written in the midst of horror declare
themselves for life; they are the body’s rebellion
against its destruction.
To retain simplicity of heart, to write verses
for life against death—these gentle-sounding
goals are not achieved without cost or without a
sustaining faith. Yet here it is necessary to remind
ourselves of the paradoxical way in which faith is
practiced. Faith is practiced in the struggle with
faith. Milosz had the courage to expose his strug-
gle in all its intensity; thus the readers with whom
he shared his troubles and doubts can trust, or at
least consider with appropriate seriousness, his
decision to stand within faith’s orbit. In a 1959
letter to the Catholic monk and writer Thomas
Merton, Milosz wrote, ‘‘As to my Catholicism,
this is perhaps a subject for a whole letter. In any
case few people suspect my basically religious
interests and I have never been ranged among
‘Catholic writers.’ Which, strategically, is perhaps
better. We are obliged to bear witness. But
of what? That we pray to have faith? This
problem—how much we should say openly—is
always present in my thoughts.’’ Two things stand
out in this candid letter. First, his careful consid-
eration of how best to treat religious themes in hisHIS FINE MIND AND HIS NATURAL
SOPHISTICATION CAUSED HIM TO HESITATE
BEFORETHE REQUIREMENTS OF FAITH. BUT IN
THE END HE REJECTED THE OPTION OF TURNING
HIS SOPHISTICATION AGAINST MORE SIMPLE
BELIEVERS.’’In Music