Nobel laureate Milosz dies at 93

By Raymond H. Anderson
The New York Times

Polish émigré writer Czeslaw Milosz died at 93.

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Czeslaw Milosz, 93, the Polish émigré writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, in part for a powerful pre-mortem dissection of communism, in part for tragic, ironic poetry that set a standard for the world, died yesterday at his home in Krakow, his assistant, Agnieszka Kosinska, told The Associated Press.

The cause of death was not given.

An artist of extraordinary intellectual energy, Mr. Milosz also was an essayist, literary translator and scholar of the first rank.

Mr. Milosz was often described as a poet of memory and a poet of witness. Terrence Des Pres, writing in The Nation, said of him: "In exile from a world which no longer exists, a witness to the Nazi devastation of Poland and the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, Milosz deals in his poetry with the central issues of our time: the impact of history upon moral being, the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined world."

In 1951, he was in Paris, on duty as a Polish cultural attaché following elite assignments in the United States at the consulate in New York and embassy in Washington. An urbane man fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French, Mr. Milosz had established close associations with leading left-wing intellectuals in Paris.

These diplomatic contacts were important to the Warsaw authorities, but Mr. Milosz, a skeptic about Marxist rule, was tipped off that he faced arrest and trial in the Stalinist purges then under way if he returned to Poland. So he denounced the Moscow-dominated system that was tightening its grip on his homeland and took political asylum in France.

In his youth, Mr. Milosz had been drawn to some of the idealized aspects of Marxism but he rejected dictatorship.

Mr. Milosz detested Socialist Realism, the Soviet-contrived literary doctrine that distorted truth into propaganda to promote the political and ideological goals of the Communist Party.

Two years after defecting, Czeslaw Milosz, (pronounced CHESS-wahf MEE-wosh) published "The Captive Mind," a searing analysis of Stalinist tactics and their numbing effect on intellectuals. "The Captive Mind" was translated and published in many countries, becoming a historical document.
 
"The Captive Mind" was among a powerful group of books in the early 1950s that condemned communist ideology and foreshadowed the downfall of communist power. A similar book was "The New Class" by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident, which deplored self-aggrandizement and moral rot in the communist leadership.

After his defection, Mr. Milosz explained in a speech: "I have rejected the New Faith because the practice of the lie is one of its principal commandments, and Socialist Realism is nothing more than a different name for a lie."

In the same year "The Captive Mind" appeared, Mr. Milosz also published "The Seizure of Power," a fictionalized scrutiny of the relationship between communism and intellectuals.

By 1960, Mr. Milosz had tired of his life amid leftist intellectual squabbling in France. Years later he would speak with acerbity of those in Western Europe who continued to regard the Soviet Union as the hope of the future, particularly those "French intellectuals who considered that only a man who was insane could abandon his position of a writer in a people's democracy in order to choose the capitalistic, decadent West." He accepted a professorship in the Slavic Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Milosz, with his wry humor and brilliant lectures, soon was a popular figure on campus. He continued to write verse, translated literary masterpieces into Polish and compiled a large volume, "History of Polish Literature," published in 1969.

From his childhood on, Mr. Milosz had a rich inner life, reading widely. He also had a challenging array of talents, interests and skills. As a schoolboy, he was fascinated by the scientific world of animals.

But in the end, he enrolled in law school at the University of Vilnius, graduating at the age of 23. He worked several years in radio, and he sometimes remarked in interviews that he felt guilty for having abandoned science.

Czeslaw Milosz was born June 30, 1911, to a Polish-speaking family in Szetejnie, Lithuania, which together with Poland, Latvia and Estonia was part of the Russian empire at the time. The complex, multiethnic Baltic region was inhabited by communities of Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Russians and others, all speaking their separate languages and living their own cultures.

His family was not rich but distinguished and intellectual. He was only 3 when World War I broke out. His father, a civil engineer, served in the czar's army, while his family was kept on the run from advancing German armies.