MILOSZ, Czeslaw 1911-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania; died August 14, 2004, in Krakow, Poland. Milosz, the Nobel Prizewinning poet who also wrote fiction, nonfiction, and translations, was one of the most acclaimed figures in modern Polish literature. Born in a time and place marked by war and racial and political oppression, the brilliant Milosz became a powerful voice for beauty, truth, and intellectual freedom. He grew up in a region that switched political hands within Lithuanian and Polish borders, Nazi and Communist rulers. While a schoolchild in the town of Vilnius, he published his first poem when he was fifteen and struggled with the decision of whether to study science or the arts. He eventually chose the latter, though his 1934 degree from the University of Stephan Batory was in law. Moving to Paris, he studied literature under a scholarship. His first poetry collection, Poemat o czasie zastyglym, had already been published in 1933, and after a second collection was published the next year, Milosz returned to Vilnius and worked at a radio station. Fired because of his personal beliefs, which the station owners saw as too liberal, he moved to Warsaw and found a job as a programmer for Polish National Radio during the late 1930s. When Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, marking the beginning of World War II, Milosz found work at the Warsaw University Library and also secretly aided the efforts of the Polish Resistance. While in Warsaw, the poet witnessed the burning of the Jewish ghetto by the Nazis, as well as the subsequent doomed uprising by the Jews, events that affected him deeply and would be addressed in some of his poems. When the war was over, he traveled to Paris as a cultural attaché for the Polish Embassy. Post-war eastern Europe was swallowed up by the Soviet Union, and Poland became a satellite country under Moscow's control. Milosz soon realized he could not return to his homeland, and in 1951, while still in Paris, he officially defected. Earning a living as a freelance writer, for the next decade the poet built a reputation as an intellectual, adding fluency in English and French to his list of languages, which already included Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian. He made friends in high places that included the likes of Albert Einstein, Pope John Paul II, and future Polish president Lech Walesa. By 1960, Milosz tired of Paris and its leftist intellectuals, who still supported the idea of Communism, though the poet understood its failings all too well. He immigrated to the United States in 1960 to accept a visiting lecture-ship at the University of California at Berkeley. Deciding to stay, the poet became professor of Slavic languages and literature the next year and remained at Berkeley until retiring as professor emeritus in 1978. Though retired, he continued his active authorship into the twenty-first century, publishing dozens of poetry books, as well as fiction, nonfiction, essay collections, translations, and more. Milosz, who wrote his poetry in Polish first because he felt a poet should write in his native tongue, had several of his collections translated, including The Separate Notebooks (1984), The Collected Poems, 1931-1987 (1988), Facing the River: New Poems (1995), and New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001 (2001). He also published two novels, which were translated as The Seizure of Power (1955) and The Issa Valley (1981), and such notable nonfiction as The History of Polish Literature (1969; revised edition, 1983), Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections (1992), and To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (2001). In 1981, Milosz returned to Poland for the first time in decades to a hero's welcome. During the 1990s, he spent many of his summers in Krakow, and it was during one of these visits that his declining health caught up with him. Milosz's final books, a collection of essays titled Legends of the Modern and a poetry work titled Second Space, were released posthumously.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, August 16, 2004, section 1, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2004, p. B14.

New York Times, August 15, 2004, p. A28.

Times (London, England), August 16, 2004, p. 24.

Washington Post, August 15, 2004, p. C9.