He was not an author of word games, he was a poet of difficult thought - wrote Leszek Kołakowski about Czesław Miłosz. August 14 is the anniversary of the death of the author of "The Captive Mind", "Family Europe", "Treaty of Morals", winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.
Czesław Miłosz, photo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_bjtm8jb08
Since 2000, Miłosz has been permanently living in Kraków with his beautiful wife, 33 years younger than him, surrounded by friends and admirers, treated as an authority. He continued to write and publish a lot: in the last years of the 20th century, among others, "Abecadło Miłosza" and "Piesek przydrożny" (1997) and "Inne abecadło" (1998) were published. "He practically subordinated Polish literary and intellectual life in the 1990s to himself - with the scale of his talent and knowledge, incomparable work skills, but also due to media mechanisms that somehow multiplied his presence. We, on the other hand, did not always keep up with him and it is only a bit of a joke that the opinion that we read his subsequent books much slower than he wrote them sounds" - recalled Andrzej Franaszek, author of the poet's biography. Marcin Świetlicki wrote about him in those years: "that's exactly how I imagined the Dragon. Czesław Miłosz is one of the Last Terrifying Poetic Great Monsters, about whom one can either kneel or not at all". But Miłosz did not rest on his laurels as an artist, he regularly wrote poems - in the last decade of the poet's life, among others, "Na brzeg wody" (1994), "To" (2000), "Druga przestrzeni" (2002) were published. The poet's eyesight deteriorated in his last years of life and during visits to his Krakow apartment on Bogusławskiego Street, he was most often found sitting in front of a special projector, which displayed enlarged pages of print on a screen. The last book written by his hand was "Inne abecadło" from 1998, after that he only dictated articles and poems. In 2002, Miłosz's wife, Carol, died. The poet, who had outlived most of his friends, felt that he was alone, that there was no one left to share his memories with. His health was getting worse and worse. He was cared for by Professor Andrzej Szczeklik, a doctor of Krakow artists, whom Miłosz called a shaman who could go to the afterlife and bring the soul of a sick person back to earth. Miłosz was a difficult patient because he was distrustful. He made the professor promise that he would not die in hospital, but at home. Once, a dramatic scene took place in this context. One night, Andrzej Szczeklik received a phone call - Miłosz has heart problems, he feels he is dying. The professor told him to go to the hospital, where he could quickly provide the poet with help. Miłosz, however, resisted, he wanted to die at home. Finally, he was persuaded to come to Skawińska. After a cursory examination, the doctor already knew that it was nothing serious, neuralgia, which would be helped by an IV drip. Miłosz was very rebellious at the prospect of spending a night in hospital. And then Szczeklik couldn't take it anymore and blurted out: "I've been treating you for 12 years, why don't you trust me?", which calmed Miłosz down a bit. In the morning, when the professor came to visit, Miłosz, calm, healthy, but sulking, glaring from under his brows, reluctantly admitted that he was right: "I believed in the power of your chemistry," he said.
He mostly stayed at home, cared for by his son, Antoni. The poet's assistant, Agnieszka Kosińska, recalls that Miłosz, in a sense, decided about his own death. "It was the art of dying well. A very calm, very self-confident process of ending earthly business, of separating the head from the rest, the will from the head, not chaotically, nervously and neurotically, absolutely not. It had been going on since the beginning of 2004. Everyone at home knew that he was dying, that he wanted to die and that it was supposed to look like this. He told me that he was finishing dictation. That he was finishing all literary employment, correspondence, matters with publishers, that he was leaving it to me. To him, to leave him alone." In recent months, Kosińska read a lot aloud to him. The poet's heart was getting weaker and weaker, he was increasingly admitted to hospital. He passed away on 14th of August 2004 at around 11 a.m., at the age of 93. Czesław Miłosz was born in 1911 in Szetejnie in Lithuania. He spent his school and university youth in Vilnius, where he was a co-founder of the poetry group "Żagary". He published his first volume of poetry, "Poemat o czas zastygłym" in 1933. The aversion to Polish nationalism that Miłosz displayed throughout his life was born during his studies, when the poet witnessed the brutal actions of the All-Polish Youth, the bench ghetto. Before the war, the volume "Trzy zim" was published.
In 1937, Miłosz moved to Warsaw, where he took up a job at the Polish Radio. He survived the occupation in Warsaw, working as a janitor at the Warsaw University Library, thanks to this position he had unlimited access to the collection. At that time, he wrote poems that were included in the volumes "Wiersze", "Równina", "Pieśń niepodległa", as well as in "Ocalenie" published in 1945.
From 1945, Czesław Miłosz worked as a cultural adviser for the Polish People's Republic delegations in the United States and France. "I was involved in the Game: concessions and external declarations of loyalty, tricks and intricate moves in defense of certain values" - he recalled this period in "Zniewolony myśli". In "Rodzinna Europa" he wrote years later about the time when he tried to find his way in the reality of the Polish People's Republic: "I would describe my situation as breakneck, incredible, illogical, immoral, indescribable. After many years, what I managed to achieve in literature is projected backwards, i.e. the false game of that time gains ex post justification". In 1951, in Paris, Miłosz asked for political asylum, although he was convinced that in the confrontation with communism the Western world must lose. Moreover, emigration meant for Miłosz a break from the only language in which he wanted to write. The testimonies of Zofia Hertz and Jerzy Giedroyc, who gave Miłosz shelter at that time, show him as a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As Zofia Hertz wrote, he wandered around Maisons-Laffitte, behaved "like an animal in a cage", and thought about suicide.
After several years of poverty, in 1960, at the invitation of the universities of California and Indiana, Miłosz left for the United States, where he took up the chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California in Berkeley. He lectured in the USA for over 20 years. From the perspective of time, Miłosz's American years seem to be a series of successes crowned with the Nobel Prize in 1980. Meanwhile, for a dozen or so years Miłosz was completely unknown in the USA, and he also had the feeling that no one remembered him in Poland. In sunny California, he felt spiritual alienation all the more acutely.
In the 1970s, Miłosz's wife Janka fell terminally ill. For years, the poet lectured at the university and took care of her, cleaned, cooked, and cared for her. During this period, another blow fell on him - his younger son's mental illness was revealed. At that time, Miłosz sought solace in his work on translating the Bible: Psalms and the Book of Job. In the USA, he published, among others, "The Captive Mind", "The Conquest of Power", "The Issa Valley", "The Family Europe", "A Poetic Treatise", the volumes "Visions over San Francisco Bay" (1969), "The Land of Ulro" and "My Age" (a record of Miłosz's conversations with Aleksander Wat, 1977). At that time, his work was almost completely absent from the country, at most occasionally published in anthologies.
On 9th of October 1980, the poet was woken at four in the morning by a Swedish journalist who called with the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. "That's not true," Miłosz said and went back to bed. In the morning, however, he could no longer ignore the facts - journalists were milling around in the garden of the house. At a press conference organized by his department, Miłosz, when asked for any political comment, ironically said that "a Nobel laureate is not necessarily an intelligent member" and that he would use the $200,000 prize to buy a farm and establish a marijuana plantation. Then he retreated to the lecture hall for a Dostoyevsky class, the first of the Nobel laureate’s countless escapes from media attention. As a local newspaper reporter wrote, the Berkeley campus “was proud” of Miłosz, even though “many people had never heard of this man with an unpronounceable name.”
The Polish poet received the award for his "uncompromising insight into the threat to man in a world full of violent conflicts". "I am part of Polish literature, which is relatively unknown in the world, because it is almost untranslatable. Comparing it with other literatures, I could appreciate its unparalleled strangeness. It is a kind of secret brotherhood, having its own rituals of communion with the dead, where crying and laughter, pathos and irony coexist on equal terms" - said the poet during the ceremony of presenting him with the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm. Years later, he described this moment in "Self-portrait of the Contrary": "When I received the Nobel Prize, I had completely lost control and was just tearing my hair out, finding out who I was in the eyes of others. I had always considered myself, for example, a rather hermetic poet, for a certain small audience. And what happens when such a poet becomes famous, famous, when he becomes someone like Jan Kiepura, a tenor or a football star? Naturally, some fundamental misunderstanding arises." "This crown is falling on my ears, too big..." - this is how Czesław Miłosz described his situation after the Nobel Prize.
It was only after the poet was honored with the Nobel Prize that his poems began to appear in the country, initially in the so-called underground circulation, later - already in the official circulation. But Miłosz's return to the country in June 1981 was triumphant - he was welcomed by crowds, the Lublin Catholic University of Lublin awarded him an honorary doctorate, in Gdańsk he met Lech Wałęsa and shipyard workers. Czesław Miłosz became a spiritual leader against his will, because he did not really find his place in this role. Even before the Nobel Prize, in a letter to Jan Błoński, who assured him in 1975 that he was known and appreciated in the country, he wrote: "if I have such peace in Poland, then I must ask myself why it is so, i.e. how much of it is misunderstandings masked by distance. Because I also do not know how hereditary myths work (...) or the collective instinct constantly searching for figures for national consumption, and among today's writers in Poland, few are fit for consumption".
During his visit to Poland, the poet enjoyed honors and expressions of appreciation from readers, he even accepted the introduction of sweets called "miłoszki" to the market, although an anonymous leaflet presenting him as an element of the Polish trinity: love next to faith (John Paul II) and hope (Lech Wałęsa) aroused his concern. Miłosz, striving for intellectual and artistic sovereignty, far from wanting to submit to collective emotions, had very complex feelings. He was sometimes tired of the attention, especially from journalists. "God, how I hate it when people write about me" - this is how he would start most of his conversations with them. Already during his stay in Poland, the poet began to defend himself against being put on a pedestal as a Catholic and national poet, and many people remember him as "arrogant and unsympathetic". "I really am not cut out to be a promoter of Polish nationalism, and that is what is being cut out for me. Those who write me letters and collect my autographs do not even think that someone could be anything other than a Pole and a Catholic" - he wrote to Giedroyc in January 1981, adding that in his opinion Poland was once again "under the rule of wild nationalism and messianism". Witnesses to the visit in June 1981 remembered Miłosz as a man reluctant to make political statements, tense and withdrawn.
In 2000, during the promotion of the collection of poems "It", only one question was asked of Miłosz from the audience: "If, like Faust, he could make a pact with the devil and be 18 again, but on the condition that he was no longer a great poet, that he had not lived his entire life filled with dramatic choices - would he agree to it?" The poet answered firmly: "No".
Czesław Miłosz died on 14th of August 2004 at the age of 93. "Today we say goodbye to the poet, but we do not say goodbye to his poetry. It will certainly outlive all of us here and all those absent," said Wisława Szymborska during the funeral. The poet was buried in the crypt of the distinguished friars of the monastery. Pauline monks on Skałka in Kraków - alongside Jan Długosz, Stanisław Wyspiański, Jacek Malczewski and Karol Szymanowski.
source - author: Agata Szwedowicz, PAP
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