Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz wrote dozens of books and hundreds of essays in his lifetime, most of which were at least in part autobiographical. In his verse and prose alike, he explored such themes as the World Wars (both of which he lived through, having been born in 1911), the effects of totalitarianism on the individual’s psyche, and the Holocaust. Given the lauded poet’s prodigious output, as well as the multiple biographies that’ve been published in the twenty years since his death, one may wonder what is left to be written about his life and work.
Eva Hoffman answers this question with her latest book, On Czesław Miłosz. Her most compelling insights come when she uncovers parallels between the “tangled postwar ironies” that shaped her own life and those that shaped Miłosz’s. Both writers were exiles from totalitarian Poland — “the other Europe” — and their encounters with Western attitudes and ideologies contain lessons that remain relevant today.
Miłosz had lofty goals for poetry. To be a poet, he believed, was to trust one’s inner command, to risk everything to express truth. “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?/A connivance with official lies,” he wrote soon after World War II, when the Communists came into power in Poland. The young Miłosz had leftist sympathies and stood with the Communists against the racism and antisemitism that had plagued his homeland for generations. However, his commitment to his “inner command” would make writing in a totalitarian state impossible. He simply could not bend to the demands of the regime, which silenced any voice of which it did not explicitly approve. To preserve his integrity, he fled to France in the early 1950s and was granted asylum.
Miłosz settled in mid-century Paris, whose vibrant intellectual milieu was presided over by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One would expect that Miłosz, a free thinker, would quickly find his place among the famed existentialists; but in fact this meeting among intellectuals was neither happy nor fruitful. Sartre and his circle prided themselves on their Communist sympathies, and the presence of a defector from Utopia was not something they were prepared to forgive. Miłosz found himself in Paris “a pariah among intelligentsia.” The poet was especially angered by his ostracization because he had spent years fighting fascism, both with words and active resistance. (For his courage in saving Jews during the war, Miłosz would be honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations). Analyzing the Parisian intellectuals’ rejection of Miłosz, Hoffman writes, “For Sartre and his faithful followers, their pro Soviet- sympathies and fascination with Chinese communist were a form of ideological posturing without costs or consequences. For Miłosz, his impossible choices were propelled by head-on collisions with hard, consequence-bearing realities.”
Hoffman, who emigrated to America with her Holocaust survivor parents in the 1950s, goes on to recount her own collision with ideological purity in the West. As a student at Harvard in the 1960s, she felt her “immigrant rage” rise at fellow students’ pro-Soviet sympathies. Worse than her peers’ naiveté about Soviet-imposed Communism was the patronizing scorn directed at her when she offered up her own perspective, which was informed by actual lived experience. In this brief anecdote from Hoffman’s life, we again note the contrast between the “ideological posturing” of radicalized Westerners living far from the line of battle, and the “hard, consequence-bearing realities” of those whose lives have been upturned by history.
“The human being,” Miłosz writes, “is a mammal that produces morality and law just as beets produce sugar.” Today’s readers might find this faith in one’s intrinsic moral sense to be quaint, or even delusional. But Miłosz’s earnest and uncompromising dedication to his personal code of ethics is precisely what makes his story so fascinating today. In his most famous book, The Captive Mind, he depicts Polish intellectuals playing dangerous games with their own minds, massaging their thinking to fit the needs of a regime. For anyone concerned about protecting themselves from the powerful allure of groupthink and ideological posturing today, Miłosz’s commitment to personal integrity provides a compelling lesson. His life and work, as revealed by Eva Hoffman in this sensitive study, warns us of “the strange power of ideology to influence our perceptions of reality,” and asks us whether it might be possible to develop an inner moral compass to guide us through these difficult times.
Basia Winograd, a New York City – based writer and filmmaker, teaches creative writing at Hunter College.
