Why Czeslaw Milosz Still Matters

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/why-czeslaw-milosz-still-matters.html

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In 2011, on the centenary of the birth of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and seven years after his death, a conference about his life and work took place in Sejny, a small town on the Polish-Lithuanian border. Because I had just written his biography, I was invited to discuss “Native Realm,” an autobiographical work, written over half a century before.

The book relates his own life experiences, yet at the same time stands as a biography of an intellectual from the eastern — or, as we Poles prefer to put it to differentiate ourselves from Russia, the central — part of the continent. In that book and elsewhere, Milosz wrote powerfully about totalitarianism, anti-Semitism and nationalism, the topics that occupied European intellectuals for much of the 20th century.

I declared to the audience that in my view many of the author’s political diagnoses were outdated. After all, I thought, most of my students view themselves primarily as citizens of Europe, as countless young people do throughout the European Union. They speak foreign languages, travel and work abroad to get a feel for the world, and generally do not feel under threat. The issues that outraged Milosz were things of the past.

It turns out, however, I was deeply mistaken.

Someone once said that in his life Milosz had encountered every kind of hell the 20th century could devise, yet also had at times tasted paradise. And, like Dante, he captured both for us.

As a boy, he witnessed the demise of the 19th century, which took place on the battlefields of World War I. For a while he lived in Wilno — then part of Poland, now Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius — and increasingly became aware of what was happening nearby, just beyond Poland’s eastern border, where the empire of the czars morphed bloodily into the Soviet Union.

Like the majority of young intellectuals, he retained leftist leanings, but, at the same time, found himself caught in an ideological quandary. From the mid-1920s and the early 1930s onward, much of the continent fell under the spell of two totalitarian ideologies, communism and fascism. Though they proclaimed concern for the future of humanity and pledged to bring justice and build heaven on earth, what they created bore no relation to their promises. Instead they led millions of people to their deaths.

Milosz witnessed World War II and the Holocaust, living through the German occupation of Poland and the terrible, pitiless slaughter that accompanied it. Among his many famous poems is “Campo dei Fiori,” which movingly commemorates the fate of the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

After the war, he spent several years in the United States as a diplomat representing the new, communist-run Poland. While he enjoyed reading Faulkner’s novels, translating Auden and Eliot’s poems and meeting Einstein, he was unable to come to terms with what to his mind was a consumerist, soulless society. He frequently felt at odds with communism as well as with capitalism and considered joining a Christian farming community in Paraguay.

In 1951, not without misgivings, he defected to the West, enduring the migrant’s life and fate, first in France, where at times he was shunned like a leper by Paris’s Left Bank intellectuals because he had betrayed communism. Albert Camus was one of the few French writers who helped him survive a long period of solitary exile.

Still, it was during this period that Milosz produced one of his most famous widely read works, the 1953 book “The Captive Mind.” In it he examined why so many intellectuals and artists of the time succumbed to, or pretended to believe in, communism. A successful ideology, he wrote, is comforting, an all-encompassing tool to salve our deepest fears and orient our lives. The book brought him international fame, although as a poet he felt uneasy about being pigeonholed as an analyst of Soviet politics.

Perhaps a decade ago, it would have been easy to pass off “The Captive Mind” as a relic of the totalitarian 20th century: However, the last decade has demonstrated how the mechanisms of mind control Milosz exposed continue to be deployed throughout the globe.

Some people, for example, feel certain that their failures or the collective failures of the state are caused by enemies one can easily pinpoint. They embrace ideologies that demonize liberals, communists, capitalists, Jews and, more fashionably in recent times, migrants and Muslims.

The importance of Milosz’s analysis is that it applies to much more than communism and fascism, or even political ideology. Toward the end of his life the British historian Tony Judt was reading “The Captive Mind” with his students and pointing out that there are many different ideologies to which we passively yield and lies we choose to believe in: that wealth will make us happy, that thanks to the latest iPad we will find sense in our existence, that Facebook will bring us closer to others and that, because of all this, we will avoid pain and disappointment.

Many of the political and social transmutations that appalled Milosz — the fears and hatreds — have been revived. In “Native Realm” he tells of his journey through France in the 1930s and how, walking together with his friends across a bridge joining Switzerland and France, he encountered a sign saying, “Gypsies, Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians are forbidden entry.” Change the ethnicities, and one could easily find a similar message along other borders today, and not just in Europe.

It could be said that the history of humanity is defined and dictated by two opposing processes: building bridges and raising walls. A bridge brings us closer to others, allows us to get to know them; it is a beginning of or an extension to a road. A wall separates, closes. And although it appears to provide security, it also generates a defensive mentality, the conviction that everything on the other side represents a threat, as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski points out.

Milosz was deeply critical of the narrow nationalist views of his fellow countrymen, which provoked hostility from many quarters and accusations that he was “betraying” the homeland. He often said that Poles, Lithuanians, Jews and Russians could live amicably with each other, as his long, deep friendship with the poets Joseph Brodsky of Russia and Tomas Venclova of Lithuania proved.

At least in my country, Poland, the end of 20th century and the beginning of the 21st belonged to the bridge builders. Today, however, watchers on the walls — physical and political — can be observed there and everywhere.

It is hard to comprehend why fanaticism, violence, hatred, fear and a desperate search for security are on the loose again. Could anyone a few years ago have anticipated that George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” would become a best seller on Amazon?

The vision of multicultural societies seems to have vanished; the language of politicians has become more and more nationalistic; people no longer tolerate open discussion, determined to accept only confirmation of their own point of view. That stance makes life much easier, as “The Captive Mind” shows. Everything that surrounds us has to be familiar. There should be no opponents or outsiders. We should be able to exist in an airtight bubble.

In my country, despite surprising prosperity over the last few years, millions of people imagine that they have become worse off than others and that they have been wronged by someone. Is it the Germans? The Russians? The Jews? As a result they vote for the far right. There are more and more young people, like those in the 1930s, who demonstrate, chanting chauvinist slogans against immigrants, leftists and homosexuals. Some among them break the windows of cafes run by migrants. Perhaps they will soon begin burning books.

Eighty years ago, Milosz read Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain.” It was a time when large numbers of his contemporaries did not believe in democracy, ridiculed the book’s worldly protagonist Settembrini and were drawn instead to the character of Naphta, who despises freedom and condones dictatorship. It seems that now Naphta’s attitudes are again in vogue.

There is very little a university lecturer and an author of books about poetry like me can do in this situation. But at least I urge my students to read “Native Realm,” because Milosz had already written about it all — the xenophobia, the seeking-out of enemies responsible for our economic and political crises, the lure of false ideals that promise comfort and sense in our lives. The Devil’s temptations. I just hope that the book will help them retain noncaptive minds.