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The article takes up the essential motif of European identity and memory, in Czesław Miłosz’s creativity and biography. The author aims to reconstruct Miłosz’s ideas of his own sense of belonging to Central and Eastern part of the old continent, of ‘the other Europe’, that in the writer’s memory served as an important reference point, even in the periods of depression or feeling of loss of identity caused by long emigration. Having analysed the convictions expressed by Miłosz in Native Realm, the author of the article aims to present the specific way of viewing the Nobel Laureate’s concept of Polish identity as well as European identity. 

Worldwide known poet, Czesław Miłosz, was he a dissident? The idea of ‘dissidency’ usually excludes appreciation. Yet Miłosz, being always in opposition to dominant tendencies, was always acknowledged. The article presents three periods of his life: in Vilnius, in Paris and in America. In catholic and conservative Vilnius he represented a “left­wing” orientation. Afterwords when he worked in Polish radio, it caused his transfer to Warsaw. His leftist beliefs explain his work in diplomacy for a new regime. This continued till 1950 when Miłosz, terrified with Stalinism, chose asylum in Paris. He was being fiercely attacked both by conservative emigration and leftist French intellectuals. He was accepted, however, by Parisian Kultura circle – the most creative centre of political reflection. In The Captive Mind – soon acknowledged as the most important book in this matter – Miłosz masterfully diagnoses “a new faith”. In 1960 Miłosz became a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in Berkeley. It was there that important works analyzing nihilistic crisis of Western civilization and consumerism connected with Americanization were written: The Land of Ulro (1977), Emperor of the Earth (1977) and especially A View of San Francisco Bay (1988). His reflections concentrate also on ontological crisis and working on new religious imagination.
Czesław Miłosz was never a politician or oppositionist in a traditional sense of these terms. Nevertheless, he kept searching for the essence and roots of ideology, the style of life and faith, regarding the fundamental values he fiercely criticized Communism, Americanization and the usurpation of faith by Polish nationalism. He was appreciated, but protests against his burial at Skałka confirm how sharp and influential his observations were.

The article discusses several “curiosities of American spirit” on the basis of the volume of essays A View of San Francisco Bay: the duality of Americans (based on hesitation between success and despair), nihilism noticed especially among the representatives of the younger generation, arrangement of spatial hierarchy, tearing America into two hostile camps (pure, noble minds and simple people’s minds), arrogance of one’s own “I” (being the fundamental cause of great achievements in technology and science), dissonance between biblical spirit and technological progress etc. Besides their cognitive value, Miłosz’s essays are also a great lesson of imagology on America perceived by the comparatist’s eyes.

The theme of this article has been suggested by Miłosz himself, who published in his Subjects to Let (the second part of Road­side Dog) the short essay Las [The Forest]. Author plaits the net of associations connected with the forest, which leads to reflection that this apparently obvious and exploited by generations of poets topic can still produce various contexts: geographical, natural, economic, political, cultural and literary ones as well as those of symbolic, mythical, historical and biographical character. This last context leads back to Miłosz, as a consequence of the reflection that the forest serves as a kind of symbolical frame for many plots present in his life and creativity. From a biographical and literary point of view, the poet leaves the forest. However, in 1997 (when Road­side Dog was published), toward the end of his long life, Miłosz returns to the forest in his poetry. He writes a separate text about it. There is a wide range of forest traces (literal, metaphorical, symbolical) between those two moments. They can be noticed in other books by Miłosz.

At first sight it appears that Miłosz’s poetry shares many features with modernist and postmodernist poetics. One of its main themes is the impossibility of verifying the veracity of man’s sensual impressions (i.e. their referring to an ‘external’ world), which seems to undermine the traditional concept of literature as ‘mimesis’. However, Miłosz expressly rejected the postmodernist point of view that literature as ‘mimesis’ is merely a textual effect. Even when the speakers in his poems expressly deny the possibility of recreating the external world of man’s sense-impressions by means of language, they seem to achieve the very thing they wanted to deny. One of Miłosz’s favourite devices in the poetry of his middle period was the so-called ‘irony of self-betrayal’. But this negative way of affirming the covenant between the self and the world did not satisfy him in the long run. Wishing to overcome the antinomies of mimesis he attempted to work out a poetical strategy allowing him to describe the astonishing richness of being more directly. This strategy required a metaphysical justification. The veracity of man’s sensual and intellectual involvement with the world turned out to be rooted in the religious perspective of ‘apokatastasis’. ‘Time past’ and ‘time present’ are one in a process that both redeems and transcends time, without annihilating the moments of which it consists. Miłosz’s long poems of the sixties and seventies should therefore not be simply understood as ‘literature’ or independent ‘works of art’ (poésie pure) that could be separated from other forms of being. In fact they are part of a process of redemption that occurs ‘here and now’, although it remains unclear when it will be completed. For that reason Miłosz’s longer poems should be read as ‘open texts’ or – but in a sense opposite to the postmodernist idea of ‘unfinishedness’ – ‘work in progress’. They purport to present the manifold phenomena of a man’s existential autobiography simultaneously.

In “The Dialogic Process of Restoration: Czeslaw Milosz’s Polyphony as Movement toward Poetic Apokatastasis,” Kim Jastremski explores Milosz’s use of polyphonic poetry as a defense against nihilism in its connection of Self and Other, which has the potential to develop into poetic apokatastasis. She argues that what is typically referred to as Milosz’s polyphony is not interchangeable with the term “internal dialogue.” She typologizes Milosz’s polyphony in three sub­groups: 1) poems of internal dialogue; 2) poems of external dialogue; and 3) alter ego poems.

The article analyzes a medium­like creation of a poet in Czesław Miłosz’s writings. In his works a poet is presented as a chosen man, stigmatized with an artistic destiny, dependent on ‘forces’ and ‘voices’. Splitting poet’s consciousness enables a medium­like relation, called ‘instrumental’ by Miłosz: the artist is being passively subjected to voices like an instrument. The lyric of hauntings, created this way, shows a poet inspired by daimonion’s voice and so regarded as theios aner. Miłosz recalls an antic tradition and the idea of divine inspiration (daimon) but above all the idea of daimonion created by Socrates: daimonion is perceived here as ‘a voice of god’, or ‘a divine touch’. In Miłosz’s poems that have a soliloqium form, the voice of his daimonion manifest itself through the rhythm and incantation of speech. Inspiring and ‘rhythmic whispers’ of a daimonion that take possession of the poet’s consciousness, are also regarded as a compulsion of metre, “disgust of rhythmic speech”. A struggle against a poem, against a “defect of harmony” (described by S. Balbus) is aimed also at daimonion’s incantation. However, the rhythmic whisper of daimonion favours the process of self­creation, its lack (as in the poem Bez daimoniona) directs attention to the autobiography and reveals an existential aspect of poet’s being.

The author is searching for the spots or cracks through which concealed trauma reveals itself in The World by Miłosz, a text which most of the interpreters described as idyllic. Close reading of Miłosz’s text shows that it is driven by unconscious repression that works to conceal the symptoms of traumatic experience by covering them with a simulation of a house­sanctuary. Author is trying to re­read The World, paying close attention to these spots and the fact that the date closing the book – April 1943 – is not just an ironic point, but a mark of experience that could not be erased or repressed from memory. The author also points to the intertextual relation between The World and other Miłosz’s texts, and shows how by comparing different types of poetic imagery related to the same memory, one can depict the work of unconscious repression.

Why does Miłosz so often suggest in his poetry that he has concealed something essential from his readers? What is the intended meaning of the frequent phrase of Miłosz’s: if only I told you all about myself? Why this persistent reference to some unnamed feature, truth, wisdom, revelation? Is this, as some critics tend to believe, a part of a creative strategy, some sort of a subversive play with the reader? Is this a strategy employed in order to create a dark counter­argument to luminous poetry of grateful existence? Or is it, as the author of the article suggests, a deliberate strategy to entice the reader to undertake a meticulous contemplation of Miłosz’s attitude towards the social function of poetry? Sabo suggests that Miłosz, who due to historical and social reasons, put so much stress on the utility aspect of the poetic vocation, was actually a poet who was most interested in a pure poetry unyoked from any specific cause, except the cause of relentless expression of gratitude.

The theme of the article is an attempt to answer the question concerning the way in which Czesław Miłosz’s novel The Seizure of Power exists in the contemporary readers’ reception. To which extent does it nowadays fulfill (or not) the functions for which it was artistically designed half a century earlier? Is it attractive, or do the standards of reading evolved which made it old­fashioned and unable to provoke readers emotions? The article concentrates also on searching for important distinctive features for the type of novel that The Seizure of Power is or appears to be today. It can be regarded both as a novel concerning politics with a clear autobiographical suggestions and as a key novel of a certain factual value. By a contemporary (especially young) reader this first novel of the Nobel Prize Winner will be regarded as a historical prose. By literary critics and new monographers of the author of The Issa Valley it will be treated today like the caesura in Miłosz’s artistic biography – such attitude is now more visible than ever before. It marks the point from which he distances himself from political „journalism” and favors poetry, essays and criticism.

This article presents the changes through history in the reception of The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz. The book was published in 1953, first of all for the foreign readers. There were editions in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish. However, it mainly evoked emotions of Poles at home and on emigration. After the 1989, with the first legal mass edition, we observed a decrease of interest in Poland for the Miłosz’s text. It has become a classical work, it kept up didactic function. On the other hand, the world response argues, through universal interpretations and new translations in 21th century (a Belorussian, Russian, Turkish, Catalan, Serbian), that the Miłosz’s propositions are current and attractive outside Poland, in other geopolitical conditions.

The article aims to initiate a discussion on reading and interpreting poetic works by Czesław Miłosz. Discussing an example of City Without a Name the author of the article presents the deficiences of so far dominant interpretations. He also presents the specific reception of poet’s works among literary critics.

The author of the article offers insights into the process of preparing an anthology of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry by composing a list of major challenges that either a scholar or a critic undertaking such task must face. Paradoxically, the author stresses the fact that either a mere synthesis or a complete anthology of Miłosz’s oeuvre is rendered impossible by its sheer magnitude, plurality of poetic voices, generic diversity and thematic richness. In conclusion, the author enumerates the most important features of Miłosz’s poetry, such as its unrelenting subjectivity (as in the case of the strong, subjective poetic voice, always rooted in poet’s autobiography) and numerous and persistent dichotomies: intuitive seer versus labouring artisan; mystic versus hard working rationalist; Darwinist versus naturalist; romantic versus anti­romantic; detached historian versus a subject of history musing over its meaning, and last but not least, an erudite poet versus a naive, spontaneous one.

It is a truism that the work of Adam Mickiewicz occupies a central place in Czesław Miłosz’s literary universe. The present paper seeks to investigate one particular Mickiewiczian micro­element that strikingly often recurs in Miłosz’s writings, namely the so­called “kernel” of the Lithuanian forests (jądro gęstwiny). Significantly, while wilderness areas such as woods and forests have always filled the human imagination with awe and fear, Miłosz has turned the Lithuanian “thicket” into one of the cornerstones of his poetic topography, investing its mysterious “kernel” with epiphanic and eschatological potential. Partially mediated by some of his other childhood readings Lato leśnych ludzi (The Forest People’s Summer) by Zofia Rodziewiczówna, Na tropie przyrody (On the Trail of Nature) and W puszczy (In the Wood) by Włodzimierz Korsak, Nasz las i jego mieszkańcy (Our Forest and Its Inhabitants) by Bohdan Dyakowski and Soból i panna (The Sable and the Girl) by Józef Weyssenhoff), Miłosz’s mythologization (if not sacralization) of the wildland spaces of his childhood might be said to add a particular (pagan and gendered) twist to the traditional repertory of Christian (u)topography, in particular its rural and urban manifestations (the Garden of Eden and Heavenly Jerusalem).

The author asserts that a dialogue between Miłosz and Mickiewicz sheds light not only on the great Polish Romantic, and even Polish Romanticism as such, but also on the personality of the author of The Land of Ulro. It is a difficult and full of contradictions dialogue, that used to be interpreted in relation to the uneasy history of the 20th century. The author of the article does not attempt to weaken the role of historical events in Miłosz’s spiritual evolution; she underlines, however, such aspects of his dialogue with Mickiewicz that reveal the deepest similarities and are not subjected to changeable interests. That is how Miłosz’s hesitations can be understood, as his disputes with Mickiewicz are time­bound, but both poets meet also in timeless sphere.

The article is an attempt to sum up Czesław Miłosz’s complicated relation with Adam Mickiewicz. The aim of the text is to outline Miłosz’s revisionary process and to focus on its last period called apophrades. The anxiety of influence and the anxiety of cultural emptiness, which he prophesied, seem to be especially intriguing aspects of Miłosz’s literary heritage.

The article is dedicated to detailed analyzing and interpreting the Miłosz’s poem O zbawieniu [On salvation]. This poem was most probably written two years before Miłosz’s death and was located at the end of the volume Last Poems (2006). The author confronts “the last poem” of Miłosz with Mickiewicz’s “the cry poem” written in Lausanne (“wiersz płacz” as Przyboś called it): “I shed pure tears, countless tears…”. Both poems – though representing different genres – (Mickiewicz’s poem is a model example of immediate lyrical confession; Miłosz’s poem has a form of poetic mini­treaty) express related ideas through similar figures such as: repetition, enumeration, synecdoche, ellipse. Both texts can be related not only because of the similarities in composition and structure, but also because of their catharsis­aimed character. Mickiewicz achieves purification through tears shed over his life and humble acceptance of the fact that a project formed in his youth resulted in a disaster in his manhood. Miłosz presents the state of liberating salvation as a result of the peaceful and lighted with non­of­this­world gleam contemplation of the difficult truth concerning the necessity of giving up all the earthly things. Both “last poems” of the great poets can be regarded as the masterpieces of a lyric of vanitas. Their main aim can be described as an attempt to confront the mystery of eschatological dimension of human existence.

Research on Czesław Miłosz’s works conducted in Lithuania, although not very intense, is mainly focused on the Lithuanian issues. One major trend prevails among Lithuanian researchers – an attempt to treat a substantial part of Miłosz’s works as autobiographical. Lithuanian translations of the works of Czesław Miłosz were explored in the article. The author poses the question whether works of the Nobel Laureate in any way shape and develop self­awareness of the inhabitants of Lithuania and if they help them to comprehend the diversity of the country as well as its complicated history, multiculturalism and multilingualism.

The article is dedicated mainly to the reception of Czesław Miłosz’s works in Belarus. Analyzed here is the history of Belarussian translations and some strategies of translation determining the selection of certain poems and essays. The article also aims to elucidate the specificity of readers response to Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and prose as well as to describe Belarussian literary research on the works of the Polish writer.

The article is dedicated to the reception of Czesław Miłosz’s works in Ukraine at the beginning of democratic transformations and today. The author concentrates attention mostly on two aspects: translations and critical and journalistic discourse. This enables her to indicate the specificity of the way the Polish thinker and writer’s works have been received by Ukrainian readers. Having analyzed the above mentioned issues in diachronic perspective, the author is able to present changes and main tendencies in Ukrainian reception of Czesław Miłosz’s works over time.

The article presents translations of Czesław Miłosz’s works into Czech language, in the context of socio­political situation in Czechoslovakia before 1989 and after the downfall of communist regime. In the second part of the article the author presents her own interpretations of the following texts by Czesław Miłosz: Naive Realm, The Year of the Hunter, Miłosz’s Alphabet.

The article deals with a Bulgarian translation of Czesław Miłosz’s poem Child of Europe. The author of the translation, Katia Mitova, was a well­known interpreter of Polish literature and an expert in literature. The translation itself, which appeared in fifty numbered copies, forms a separate bibliophile edition (the illustrator of the volume was Jan Libenstein). The article discusses the aspects connected with the elitism of the edition in the context of interesting Bulgarian bibliophile tradition observed in the interwar period, but also in connection with ambiguous and difficult to understand concepts found in the poem written by the Polish Noble Prize Laureate. The author of the article focuses on the very concept of Europe as it appears in the poem and its connotations to the essence of human intelligence and cognition. Additionally, the article presents various aspects of irony regarded as a form of speech, important not only in the process of appropriate comprehension of this poetic work. In translation, it also helps to attain the correct interpretation of the ideological and artistic contents of the poem.

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