Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz (June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Russian occupied Lithuania, – August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland) was a Lithuanian-Polish poet, prose writer, translator and essayist. In 1980, while living in Berkeley, California, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent the last days of his life in Kraków, Poland.
Czeslaw Milosz - Life
Czeslaw Milosz was born at Šeteniai (in Polish, Szetejny), Lithuania, into a Polonized Lithuanian family of the Lubicz coat-of-arms. Although he did not know Lithuanian, he always emphasized — like Adam Mickiewicz and Józef Pilsudski, before him — his family connections with the ancient Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He spent part of his childhood, about the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in Russia.
Milosz studied law at Vilnius University, then in the Polish-governed part of present-day Lithuania.
In 1951, as cultural attaché of the communist People's Republic of Poland in Paris, he broke with the government and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).
In 1960 Milosz came to the United States, and in 1970 he took out U.S. citizenship. In 1961 he became a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. That same year he retired, but he continued teaching at Berkeley.
In 1980 Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
When the Iron Curtain fell, Milosz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live there part-time.
In 1989 Milosz received the National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.
His book, The Captive Mind, is considered one of the finest studies of intellectuals under a repressive regime. He observed that the intellectuals who became dissidents were not necessarily the ones with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs. The mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can only take so much. He also said that as a poet he avoided touching his nation's wounds, for fear of making them holy.
Czeslaw Milosz is honored, at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, as one of the "Righteous among the Nations."
Poems by him were placed on a monument to fallen shipyard workers in Gdańsk.
Many of his books and poems have been translated into English by various hands, including his friend and Berkeley colleague, Robert Hass.
Milosz died in 2004, at his home in Kraków, aged 93. His first wife, Janina, had died in 1986; and his second wife, Carol, a U.S.-born historian, in 2002. Milosz was buried at the Skalka Church in Kraków.
Czeslaw Milosz, a poet and Nobel laureate who was a prominent symbol for anti-communist dissidents in Poland, has died at age 93. Milosz died Saturday at his home in Krakow, in southern Poland, according to his assistant, Agnieszka Kosinska. He was born in Lithuania in 1911 and later moved to Poland, where he was witness to the Nazi regime and later Soviet rule. Milosz initially supported Poland's Soviet-imposed communist government before he rejected the ideals of totalitarianism and defected to France in 1951. In his book The Captive Mind, published in 1953, he wrote that the twentieth-century mind could easily accept "totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future." After moving to California in 1960, he was hired as a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1980, just as the Solidarity movement emerged in Poland. Milosz spent 30 years in exile in the United States and France. But he returned to Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. His poems were only published in his native country after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/08/14/milosv040814.html
Czeslaw Milosz - Works
Kompozycja (1930)
Podróż (1930)
Poemat o czasie zastyglym (1933)
Trzy zimy / Three Winters (1936)
Obrachunki
Wiersze / Verses (1940)
Piesń niepodlegla (1942)
Ocalenie / Rescue (1945)
Traktat moralny / A Moral Treatise (1947)
Zniewolony umysl / The Captive Mind (1953)
Zdobycie wladzy / The Seizure of Power (1953)
Swiatlo dzienne / The Light of Day (1953)
Dolina Issy / The Issa Valley (1955)
Traktat poetycki / A Poetical Treatise (1957)
Rodzinna Europa / Native Realm (1958)
Kontynenty (1958)
Czlowiek wsród skorpionów (1961)
Król Popiel i inne wiersze / King Popiel and Other Poems (1961)
Gucio zaczarowany / Gucio Enchanted (1965)
Widzenia nad Zatoka San Francisco / Visions of San Francisco Bay (1969)
Miasto bez imienia / City Without a Name (1969)
The History of Polish Literature (1969)
Prywatne obowiazki / Private Obligations (1972)
Gdzie slońce wschodzi i kiedy zapada / Where the Sun Rises and Where It Sets (1974)
Ziemia Ulro / The Land of Ulro (1977)
Ogród nauk / The Garden of Learning (1979)
Hymn o perle / The Poem of the Pearl (1982)
The Witness of Poetry (1983)
Nieobjęta ziemio / The Unencompassed Earth (1984)
Kroniki / Chronicles (1987)
Dalsze okolice / Farther Surroundings (1991)
Zaczynajac od moich ulic / Starting from My Streets (1985)
Metafizyczna pauza / The Metaphysical Pause (1989)
Poszukiwanie ojczyzny (1991)
Rok mysliwego (1991)
Na brzegu rzeki / Facing the River (1994)
Szukanie ojczyzny / In Search of a Homeland (1992)
Legendy nowoczesnosci / Modern Legends (1996)
Życie na wyspach / Life on Islands (1997)
Piesek przydrożny / Roadside Dog (1997)
Abecadlo Milosza / Milosz's Alphabet (1997)
Inne Abecadlo / A Further Alphabet (1998)
Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie / An Excursion through the Twenties and Thirties (1999)
To / It (2000)
Orfeusz i Eurydyka (2003)
O podróżach w czasie / On Time Travel (2004)
