Czesław MiłoszReviews

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would, considering it was written by the literary Nobel Prize winner.

I think the main problem I had with this book was that it contained so much history - I do understand, that the literature of Poland is deeply connected with its history and to understand one you need to know something about the other - but I had this feeling, that a half or more of this book was about history and literature was less important. Some authors were just mentioned in a few lines and I kept thinking why Milosz wrote about them at all if they were obviously so unimportant for him. I'd prefer less names, but more facts about the ones who were left.

On the other hand, I think the book was very well written and really informative and may be a good textbook for people interested in learning more about both history and literature of Poland.

From my blog: https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=8925501032270629303#allposts

It feels a little strange eating this book since it was intentionally unfinished and exists mainly as the world building part of a larger story waiting to be told. Nevertheless, it's an interesting read and perhaps a strange introduction to Milosz.

"The Cardinal's Treatment" is a chapter that stood out as particularly well-formed and engaging.

One of the best anthologies anywhere. A much needed representation of world poetry for those of us whose experience has been limited by geography.

An examination of the psychology of the Stalinist totalitarian system from the view of polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He names several types of self-delusion and describes the fates of some friends he knew who stayed in the Soviet Union. A very interesting and sharp analysis from a time in which it was not yet clear if Communism would fail in it's world-conquering ambitions.

When I was looking for books about Vilnius, I came across this beautiful one published by Hanser Verlag: "Die Straßen von Wilna" by Czesław Miłosz. The curious thing is that I wasn't able to find any other information about the book and its contents. It is not included in the bibliographies of Czesław Miłosz that I found, and I don't know if it is a work standing on its own (it looks like it from the publishing information included in the book) or a collection composed by Hanser (which somehow seems more likely to me). Moreover, there is an English version shown on LT (Beginning with my streets), but upon a closer look, this is a different book containing different texts, at least in part.
Well, I read this German language one and I liked it very much.

This book consists of three parts that are interspersed by a couple of poems. In the first part, the author gives an overview of the history of the city, and like that, of Lithuanian history. This might sound a bit dry, but it is not, because Miłosz is a masterful storyteller and thus, this slice of history is immensely readable and highly fascinating. To be honest, I think most historical facts that I remembered during our trip came from this chapter and not from the travel guide we also had with us.
The second part is a description of some of the streets of Vilnius. Miłosz, who spent parts of his childhood and later also studied there, connects the streets with his personal memories, and thus, he paints a somewhat nostalgic picture of Vilnius before World War Two. He writes about the activities he took part in as a child, the people he met, the buildings and atmosphere of the streets.
The third part includes a letter Miłosz wrote to the writer Tomas Venclova, and Venclova's reply. Venclova is an ethnic Lithuanian, unlike Miłosz, who was of Polish descent and wrote in Polish (and is considered a Polish author). These two letters cover a lot of ground and deal with Lithuanian history, with many other writers the two have known, and especially with the ciity's position between Polish and Lithuanian culture, its unique status of being a provincial town, but also a capital, its changing hands for so many times. There are many interesting - and still relevant! - thoughts in these letters, especially when the writers reflected on possibilities of the future. The letters were written in the late 1970s, and they hoped for a democratic Lithuania with Vilnius as its capital, but also feared that nationalism would remain a danger to Europe. It was almost eerie to read their predictions now, 45 years later.½

Not reviewed. Not well remembered.

A collection of "international" poetry, so much is in translation. Many fine classical Chinese poems. I don't know where the publisher got the paper that this is printed on, it reminds me of the old Ace science fiction paperbacks that I bought at the Ben Franklin in the 60s, with one novel going one way and another upside down going the other way.

This is a kind of political and historical autobiography in which Miłosz looks at his own life in the context of what was going on in Lithuania and Poland at the time. Although it is quite subjective here and there, and we get some engaging anecdotes from his school and student days, a lot of the time Miłosz himself seems to disappear from view as we get his detailed analysis of the complex historical situation of Wilno/Wilna/Vilnius and the surrounding area, and of Poland and Lithuania in general. Occasionally a little dry when it gets deep into political philosophy, but also quite fascinating, and of course also very disturbing when we move into his first-hand account of occupied Poland during World War II, when he had to survive by every means available, most of them illegal — since effectively nothing was legal.

Powerful stuff.

An examination of the psychology of the Stalinist totalitarian system from the view of polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He names several types of self-delusion and describes the fates of some friends he knew who stayed in the Soviet Union. A very interesting and sharp analysis from a time in which it was not yet clear if Communism would fail in it's world-conquering ambitions.

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Published two years after his definitive break with the post-war Polish state, this is the book where Czesław Miłosz investigates in detail how Stalinism affected the minds of people living in the parts of Europe that fell under Soviet domination after World War II. He looks in the abstract at a number of mental strategies he has identified for coping with totalitarian rule, and in the light of these he considers his own experience as a left-wing writer who lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw and also looks at four other Polish writers (coincidentally called Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta) who accommodated themselves, or tried not to, in various different ways.

In the final chapters, Miłosz looks at the way the unpredictable individuality of the human mind keeps on undermining the "scientific" assumptions of totalitarian ideologies, and he devotes some time to making sure that his readers are aware of the scale of the horrors inflicted on the people of the Baltic states after the Russian occupations of 1940 and 1945 and the Nazi occupation of 1941. If you're going to have a single political system based on a Russian Centre, you'd better be prepared to put up with mass deportations, he's telling us.

Obviously some of this is very specific to the situation Miłosz was in in the early 1950s, but there are also a lot of frighteningly clear insights into the way people behave under pressure in the real world. And some prescient moments when he talks about the likelihood that the countries of Eastern Europe will rise up against Stalin and be crushed one by one, and about Catholicism as the main threat to Stalinism in Poland. Interesting too how Miłosz, who had seen all this at first hand, praises the insight of George Orwell, who hadn't.

This genre, a type of memoir in the form of alphabetical entries, is native to Poland. Memoir isn't the right word here, as it is not chronological, nor do all the entries have to do, necessarily, with Milosz. It is an intriguing form, after the reading of which, one gets a strange, hazy outline of his life as if one went through a box of photos that are in no particular order, but all have some meaning to Milosz. Probably no where else will one get as intimate a history of the Polish cultural/intellectual milieu of the pre- and post-war era. He includes many short biographies of people he knew and their significance to him or Polish history, though their names may be, for the most part, unknown. I enjoyed reading this quite a bit, and it inspired me to maybe start my own ABC -- not that my life is significant--but as a way of remembering people, places, events and images that were important to me without having to organize it into a story.

Beautiful writing and interesting ideas that are undeveloped. This work was incomplete and not meant for publication per the author. I will read more from this author in the future.

Miłosz’s meditation on how people (for most of the book, academics) forced themselves to make an agonized peace with Soviet ideology in the aftermath of WW2 resonates today for readers who’ve seen friends and colleagues start speaking in strange tongues for favor in much smaller stakes.

The text slowed to a crawl in spaces where the context was obviously more immediate at its publication, but Miłosz’s poetic voice makes other passages of horror and humility deeply affecting, ringing throughout time.

Czeslaw makes me question the meaning of history. I struggle with what becomes history and what is lost when memory fades. I guess it is a similar theory with stuff. What becomes a rare antique versus junk? The balance of life is all about contradictions and opposites. The history that flavored Milosz's prose is World War II, the Holocaust, and exile.
The more enjoyable fragments of memory include traveling during spring break after law exams, being in nature, and the poignant portraits of his friends, mixed with descriptions of their political ideals.

I don't write many reviews, but this book needs one. It's odd to have an editor of an anthology put so much personal commentary into it, but I have no problem with that in and of itself. What I have a problem with is a white, male author/editor consistently denigrating female poets even as he includes them in his anthology. He qualifies every compliment with its opposite, such as when Milosz praises Linda Gregg as one of America's best poets but then follows it up with his being "biased" since she attended his classes, to which I'm assuming he's implying that she learned such greatness from him? Even if I'm reading too deeply into that, the way in which Milosz objectifies women in general by having a section entitled "Woman's Skin" alongside others such as "Nature," "Places," and "Travel" (tell me, which one doesn't belong?) is pretty infuriating even before one realizes that one of the first poems in said section is written by a man who is reflecting in the first-person on the difficulty of women aging or in another poem's commentary where he claims that women's bellies are "emotionally different" to men's. Moreover, Milosz claims that "in some epochs of history women took an active part in literary life..." as if we have not existed as artists and writers THROUGHOUT history. I would have given this book no stars, but many of the poems included are quality, despite their unfortunate election by an obvious misogynist. Mr. Milosz, I know you're dead, but go fuck yourself.½

I'm never really sure how to review poems, especially collections like this, from an old European catholic who saw most of the 20th century. It's a perspective my life lacks almost entirely, so to see the world from his eyes is familiar and strange at the same time, in the way a school librarian might be. He's mostly looking back on his storied life, or forward to death, and trying to reconcile his faith with his experience. It feels very quick; passages feel spoken and unlabored, and this effortless honesty is his mastery, and part of the reason he won the Nobel Prize in 1980.

Very inspiring comments and introductions and interesting choice of topics, i.e. groupings. The selection isn't necessarily entirely my cup of tea that's why I gave four instead of five stars.

Some folks write journals for posterity, others give resonance to their own meandering deviation and hope for a loyal Brod: Byron to Renard.

I found this example to be an admixture, a conscious construction towards a legacy but one still wrought with doubts and misdeed.

There’s considerable judgement on display. Mourning for his wife. A quivering acknowledgement of his own destructive nature. There are trips back to Europe and lengthy asides.

There is no quick encapsulation of 20C Polish history. Milosz considers an attempt, if only through his own exceptional experience. I appreciate the reverence for Balzac, the prism of Magic Mountain to gauge the world between the wars; I did steady myself for his harsh words towards de Beauvoir and Brodsky.

I return again to the wonky confessional nature of the tome: regardless of its bent, it penetrates with verve of a poet at work. Early writing from his garden in Northern California, he notes that his childhood was virtually covered with insects, that his dotage thanks to chemical progress is free of such. Perhaps that is but another painful analogy for our age.

This was an excellent work of nonfiction. Milosz describes the state of Eastern Europe, and the ramifications that follow it, in poetic and sublime detail. His observations, hypotheses, and examples permeate to the whole conceptualization of Eastern Europe.

This is a great book. I recommend it to everyone.

I bought this last year in an effort to widen my reading. I hadn’t realised when I purchased it that it wasn’t fiction. It’s a political diatribe written by someone who survived both WWII and the Soviet takeover of Poland, but managed to resist the blandishments of both the Underground during WWII and the Soviet occupiers afterwards. As a writer, an intellectual, with acceptable political credentials, he ended up as cultural attaché in Washington but, disgusted by the responses of his peers to the new regime, he chose to exile himself. Miłosz first points out that intellectuals were a peculiar class of their own in Central and East European countries, and this particularly applied to writers, one that had no equivalent in Western European – or American – societies. After discussing “ketman”, which seems to be a a misunderstanding of an historical Islamic term (now known as “taqiya”), Miłosz describes four writers of his acquaintance and their response to Soviet occupation – and this is where The Captive Mind comes into its own. I’ve no idea who the writers are he describes, although it probably isn’t difficult to figure out, but his dissection of their character and ambitions in light of Polish history during and after WWII is fascinating stuff. I don’t think for an instant that The Captive Mind is a warning against “totalitarian culture” as the book is often described. It is specific to a time and place, and I suspect some of the tactics described by Miłosz are triggered more by an institutional drive for survival than by an y kind of coherent political thought. The Captive Mind was intended to make for scary reading, but its teeth have long since been pulled – first by Solidarność, then by glasnost, although both of course were the end result of long and dangerous campaigns. On the other hand, in 2018 we seem to be staring down the throat of full-blown fascism, despite everything our parents and grandparents fought against last century, despite the clear benefits to all and sundry that progressivism and regulated economies bring… The Captive Mind is an important historical document, but its remit is too narrow, its lessons are too focused, and the passage of time has rendered its general sense of alarm both moot and badly aimed. However. Worth reading, if you’re interested in the subject.½

Milosz's poetry touches on a myriad of topics. There are echoes of childhood, listening to a mother softly climb the shadowy stairs or watching a father quietly read in the library. There are a series of poems that lovingly describe a house and its inhabitants. Linked poetry that are meant to be read hand in hand with the next.

Thanks to Goodreads and the publisher for a free copy of The Mountains of Parnassus!

Beautifully-written sci-fi. But I think the most incredible part is how thought-provoking it is. The notes at the beginning, the introduction from the author himself... they raise issues about science fiction and its relationship to reality and religion, about a work's completeness and how the reading process can also be creative, and so much more. So engaging, and so thought-provoking.

"The Issa Valley has the distinction of being inhabited by an unusually large number of devils."

So begins this magical autobiographical coming of age novel by Nobelist Milosz. Thomas lives in a remote valley in the disputed area between Lithuania and Poland with his grandparents. The time is just after World War I, and pagan spirits and ancient spells are very real to the villagers and to Thomas. As a young boy, Thomas explores nature with scientific avidity. When he's a bit older, he idolizes one of the peasants who is a skilled hunter, and seeks to emulate him, until he discovers he is unable to kill. As Thomas comes of age, the cycles of nature in all its glory and wonder are also prominently displayed. Although there is not much plot, Milosz writes beautifully of Thomas's world, with a unique sense of place and time.