Milosz : a biography / Andrzej Franaszek ; edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker.

Andrzej Franaszek's award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz--the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980--offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology. Franaszek recounts the poet's personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union's postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Milosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004. Franaszek traces Milosz's changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Milosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Milosz's poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Milosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.--

Includes bibliographies and index.

Translated from the Polish.

Chapter 1. The garden of Eden, 1911-1920 -- "Darkness split by distant flashes, illuminations" -- The earthly paradise -- Good and bad blood -- A grenade under the bed -- Chapter 2. A young man and mysteries, 1921-1929 -- The apartment with fig-plants -- Tomcat -- Doctor Catchfly -- Manichean poisons -- Early literary tastes (and Russian roulette) -- Inside the lodge -- The rushing Heraclitean river -- Chapter 3. Black Ariel, 1930-1934 -- "I devote too little time to study" -- Egg-man -- The Cezary Baryka Complex -- Friday seminars, literary Wednesdays -- Leviathan's wardens -- "A bridge suspended in mid-air" -- The Devil's see-saw -- 'If early love had lasted ... ' -- "To the left, to the right" -- Chapter 4. The country of the first emigration, 1935-1939 -- "A certain student in the city of Paris" -- "The whole cosmos revolves within us" -- "On black meadows" -- Publican -- "A handful of unearthly truths" -- 'And Siena descends into light' -- 'In my homeland, to which I will not return' -- Warsaw friendships -- Janka -- Coming down to earth -- A blood-red star -- Chapter 5. Voices of poor people, 1939-1945 -- Medals in the suitcase -- Reflections on the inferno -- The theory of the last zloty -- Miranda's Island -- Gniewosz -- "A poor Christian looks at the ghetto" -- Noah's Ark -- Chapter 6. In partibus daemonis, 1945-1951 -- "We are from Lublin" -- Robinson Crusoe from Warsaw -- A pact with the Devil -- Mother's grave -- Rescue -- Chocholy -- "A passion for doing something useful" -- Open-source intelligence.

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