Robinson Crusoe from Warsaw
Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz — the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 — offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. Franaszek recounts the poet’s personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Milosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004. Here is a look at at his life just after World War II.
When, in the occupied capital, Miłosz was working on Prologue, his only play, presciently he imagined as its backdrop a Warsaw utterly devastated, with ghosts of fighters ‘in plain clothes’ as the inhabitants of the city. In the post-war period, he imagined a clash between a politician and a poet who sets against the need to forge a unified nation, born from carnage and a terrible struggle for survival, another necessity, the necessity to remember the fallen. To remember is to acknowledge a basic defining element that makes us human:
spurned word, forgotten word! . . . Do not let it be ill-treated! Do not!
Because it will spring from the earth like a pillar of fire An accusation from the dead that we betrayed them.
(‘Prolog’, in Pamiętnik Teatralny, 1–2)
It now appeared that those who died on the barricades in the Warsaw Rising were to be erased from memory, buried beneath a layer of obscurity. Miłosz’s conclusion was that under this newly-installed regime one would be compelled to play a double game:
If someone had no illusions regarding the nature of the Soviet state, the only moral stand they could take was not to support them. I looked criti- cally at my leftist friends who involved themselves actively in working with the Soviets after 1940 . . . In 1945 they showed up in Poland with the Red Army as the influential ‘Wilno group’. The unfolding course of events supported the validity of their pre-war convictions, I had to admit, but it did not mean that I could afford to talk to them openly . . . I was prepared to use my connections, but kept back my Jesuit reservatio men- talis (mental objections). In no circumstances would I join the Polish Workers’ Party, although I shared their hostility and paranoia about the right, so in fact, I did not have to lie.
The game of pretence was really linked to a growing wish to leave Poland, but it was also crucial for Miłosz to maintain an active position in the literary field. To be marginalised, especially now, when he felt at the height of his creative potential, would be too much to bear. He paid a visit to Jerzy Putrament, then chief editor of the Dziennik Polski, who received him in his office dressed in his army uniform. Soon afterwards, in the 11 February 1945 issue of the paper, a poem appeared that began with the words ‘They fell into the darkness of contempt’, a line from the chorus in Prologue. As Miłosz admitted later, the poem, when taken out of its dramatic context in a paper sponsored by the new authorities, unexpectedly began to acquire a secondary meaning. Whereas initially the ‘they’ referred to were the Nazi occupiers, following Poland’s ‘liberation’ by the Red Army the pro- noun might equally be applied to its new masters:
They fell into the darkness of contempt
. . .
Those displaying deceit and arrogance, Envoys of unlawful intention, Leaving behind them burning cities, Above their heads a crown of cinders.
. . .
Humble people trample on the ashes. The mission of violence is now complete, The most horrific of all undertakings. (Wiersze I, 226)
It would be interesting to know which of the two at that meeting — the editor or his visitor — came up with the idea of the latter contributing a regular column. Why did Miłosz agree? To secure an additional source of income? To make a small political gesture? To consolidate his position as a writer? The outcome of the visit was two series of opinion pieces, Jaunts and Literary Jaunts, which together added up to over thirty articles. In one of these he described a wartime hecatomb of books and appealed to readers: ‘When you see books in an abandoned house, immediately hand them over to the library authorities, so that they don’t end up as mats placed under saucepans’. In another, he addressed writers directly, reminding them that given all that their readers had experienced in the last five years, they were able to discern truth in literature, and its absence. He observed that there were now ‘swarms of thieves in Poland. There were those who stole money, public property, awards, time, rights and entitlements,’ and said that if there was no other weapon to fight those who ceased being true to themselves in the recent past, then poking fun at them might be a harmless punishment. He expressed contentment at the annexation of Pomerania by Poland, since it gave the country a large stretch of the Baltic coastline. It meant that a friend of his, ‘a thirteen-year-old shepherd from a small village, who longed to be a sailor, will now be able to realise that dream. Endeavouring to maintain a balance, he assessed the position of Polish émigrés. More contentiously, later in the piece, he alluded to those who declined to join in the process of rebuilding the country. ‘We wish for the particles of golden sand to find their place here, so that they stop being unhappy, but not for the dry leaves and garbage, who know how to fight, but not how to build.’ Generally speaking, Miłosz expressed opinions on subjects close to his heart, which two years earlier he would have had to defend in underground meetings. Now some of his pronouncements began to sound like propaganda, since he was writing for a newspaper funded by the regime. There were those who found it disturbing that he could criticise civil servants, yet not express his opinions on the wholesale arrests of wartime underground fighters. Later, he reconsidered his opinions and regretted using bitter words about those who emigrated, because although there was some truth in them, they unnecessarily hurt people’s feelings. That he became quickly aware of how his involvement was being manipulated may be sensed in his choice of the following quotation: ‘Why did Mickiewicz call adult- hood a time of defeat? Because when we reach maturity, we realise the price we have to pay for all our actions.’
Miłosz entered into a polemical debate with those who, long before the imposition of social realism, wanted to subject literature to dogmatic rules. He protested against central planning in the editing process, saying that it would stifle initiative and radically reduce the number of new titles. I would gather all those who have any editorial plans and would shout to them: get on with it, publish and reprint — even those books which I would regard as less significant . . . I want the minds of young generations to develop in knowledge and not in ignorance. I want them to be able to declare that an author is an idiot, but after reading him, not as a result of being told so.
He opposed policies aimed at limiting people’s access to great art and plans to replace outstanding authors with third-rate but ‘correct’ ones. ‘We own Shakespeare, Mickiewicz, Velasquez and Titian’, he affirmed, and after suffering appallingly in recent years people deserved to be granted ‘their full rights to art.’.
At the end of February 1945, Miłosz completed a project entitled ‘Accounts of Losses in Poland’s Sciences and Arts’, which was intended as ‘an indictment. It would document for the benefit of the rest of the world our losses and would find a place on the table at the peace conference.’ It would feature pictures of artists and scientists who had perished as a result of the war and the German occupation. In the spring, together with Breza, he drafted a memorandum, ‘On the Full Use of the Creative and Social Potential of the Writer’, which reflected his leftist sympathies and a strong conviction that, after the war’s end, it would be impossible to return to a totally liberal model of society, and that it would be essential to leave the regulation of cultural life to the state, on condition that it is enlightened and strongly democratic.
The writer’s status has been elevated considerably . . . everyone is of the opinion that he has to become a healer for all the psychological disorders caused by the occupation and a moral legislator for building the future. Writers welcome statements from government representatives which honour them, but they do not much care about being praised for per- forming useful roles. What roles? By writing, which is their profession, and what they are best at. The authors called on the government to create conditions most conducive to producing good work, so that they would not be compelled to supplement their income by additional under- takings, like journalism. Society ought to look upon the writer as a person who has a predisposition to carry out a kind of production work, which would make a necessary contribution to society.
Around this time, Miłosz was responsible for penning a beautiful polemic against Jan Kott, who nonchalantly had drawn up a new literary canon, from which almost all twentieth-century literature had been excised. He also wanted to ban Dante, and argued for a condensed version of the Bible. Kott had identified ‘two books without which I cannot imagine a library. One of them is the Bible, even a version with selected fragments, and the other one, Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.’. In response to this, Miłosz remarked:
If one is seeking ‘good’ books, I would not recommend the Bible — it is a horrific book, bloody and depressing. And it is not a book, as such. It is the world. You can hear a cry of longing by the waters of Babylon, thunderous sounds of joy in a Jerusalem temple. It contains the history of one of the most fascinating nations in the world, which first under- stood the notion of what we call history. This suffering nation’s journey can only be explained perhaps by their status as a chosen people. For centuries they prepared for the coming of Christ. On Babylonian roads, Egyptian sands, through the fortifications of Jerusalem, and at Treblinka, the nation poured out copious amounts of blood in atonement.
I wonder how Kott imagines the Bible in selected form. He, Jan Kott, will sit down and censor Solomon’s Proverbs, abbreviate Jeremiah, im- prove Ezekiel. It is so easy, almost as easy as putting together the Bible and Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, composed a long time ago in a sultan’s harem, as a joke.
