On Czeslaw Milosz

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Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a significant literary figure of the twentieth century, deeply influenced by the events and ideologies of his time. Born into a Polish family in what is now Lithuania, Milosz's life was disrupted by World War I and his father's conscription into the Russian army. During World War II, he aided Jews in Warsaw as a partisan and member of the Polish socialist underground. After the war, he became a permanent exile, distancing himself from Poland, Soviet communism, his early Catholicism, and later, the stark inequalities of American society. His enduring legacy includes poetry available in multiple languages and two classic prose works, "The Captive Mind," which explores the effects of ideology, and "Native Realm," a memoir reflecting on his life in Poland and abroad. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. In this volume of the Writers on Writers series, Eva Hoffman draws from her conversations with Milosz and her own engagement with his work to explore themes such as his resistance to dogma, fascination with place, awareness of exile, love for life, capacity for pleasure, and fundamental humanism that informs his poetry.