Showing results by author "Czeslaw Milosz" in All Categories

The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right. Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

Czeslaw Miosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe", a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial. Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins.

One of the most revered poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz famously left his native Poland to escape the Communist regime that ascended after World War II. While he remains strongly associated with that country, Milosz also lived in Washington, D.C. from 1946 to 1950, working as a diplomatic official and leaving behind an old world tarnished by violence and bloodshed to take his bearings in a new world.