Miłosz, Czesław, << MEE wohsh, CHEHS lawf >> (1911-2004), a Lithuanian-born Polish author, won the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature. Much of his writing has a moral purpose. Miłosz often attacked Polish Communism in his writings. His rejection of the Communist government in Poland led to his voluntary exile from the country beginning in 1951. Miłosz first gained recognition as a poet, but his best-known book is a collection of essays published as The Captive Mind (1953). The book criticizes Polish intellectuals for siding with Communism. He continued this theme in his novel The Seizure of Power (1953). Miłosz’s autobiography Native Realm (1959) covers the period from his childhood to the 1950’s. The Witness of Poetry (1983) is based on lectures he delivered at Harvard University. Miłosz wrote The History of Polish Literature (1969) and worked for several years on a Polish translation of the Bible. Miłosz’s poetry was published in New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (2001) and Second Space (published in 2004, shortly after his death). A collection of his short prose pieces was published as Miłosz’s ABC’s (2001).
Miłosz was born on June 30, 1911, in Seteinisi, near Kedainiai, Lithuania. He studied at the university in Vilnius, then part of Poland, and became the leader of the “catastrophic” school of Polish poets during the 1930’s. The group was named for their predictions of an upcoming worldwide disaster. During World War II (1939-1945), Miłosz was active in the Resistance movement in Warsaw against Germany. He served in the Polish diplomatic service from 1945 to 1951. He left Poland to protest Communism there and settled in Paris in 1951. He immigrated to the United States in 1960, becoming professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. Miłosz died on Aug. 14, 2004.
