Cseslaw Milosz
was born June 30, 1911, in Lithuania. An internationally
acclaimed poet and man of letters, Milosz is the first Nobel
Laureate in non-scientific to grace the Berkeley campus. The
scope of his work reflects the range of his life, lived in many
countries in the thick of some of the major historical events of
the century.
His childhood,
spent partly in Russia before and after the Revolution, is
described in his novel The Valley of Issa (published in
1955) and in his autobiography, Native Realm (1968).
While an undergraduate at the University of Wilno in
Poland, where he received a diploma in law --- a profession he
has never practiced --- Milosz published his earliest major
poems. His first book, Poem of the Frozen Time, appeared
when he was only 21.
Milosz spent most
of the Second World War in Warsaw, where he was active in the
Resistance and edited an anti-Nazi anthology. "I didn't want to
learn German," he recalled recently, "so I took to learning
English instead." The poet continues to write in Polish, but has
an active hand in the translations of his work.
From 1946 to
1950, Milosz served as a cultural attaché for the Polish
government in Washington, D.C. and Paris. Having survived
Hitler's oppression, Milosz faced the forcible remolding of the
Polish culture after the Communist takeover. In 1951, he refused
a recall to Poland, defected, and became an exile in Paris. The
reasons for his defection became clear two years later with the
appearance of the Captive Mind, the book that first
brought him a large audience in the West. "The immediate cause
of my break with the Polish People's Democracy was socialist
realism," Milosz wrote. "It would be wrong to judge that this
official theory of art, imposed by Moscow, forces the writer and
artist to renounce certain aesthetic likings. It forces him to
renounce something more: truth."
Milosz lived in
Paris, supporting himself, his wife, and their two sons by
writing until 1960, when he was offered a position in the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literature on the Berkeley
campus. Milosz and his family moved to Berkeley and have lived
here ever since. His post at the University was his first
teaching position, but he quickly earned a reputation as a
dazzling lecturer. He "retired" in 1978, at 67, but continued to
teach a full load of courses, including his popular lecture on
Dostoevsky, a survey course on Polish literature, and a graduate
seminar.
Milosz has
published studies of Dofoe, Balzac, Tolstoy, William James, and
numerous Polish writers. He has translated Shakespear, Eliot,
Milton, Whitman, and Jeffers --- as well as French, Spanish, and
Yiddish writers --- into Polish. His anthology Postwar Polish
Poetry contains his own translations of 21 major Polish
poets.
For his volume of
poetry, Bells in Winter, Professor Milosz in 1978 won the
prestigious International Neustradt Prize for Literature. At
that time, Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet, stated, "I
have no hesitation whatsoever that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the
greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." In 1980, the
Nobel committee agreed with Brodsky's assessment, awarding the
Nobel Prize in Literature to Milosz.
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Czeslaw Milosz: Literature, 1980." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 28.