The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Czeslaw Milosz
Literature, 1980
By Russell Schoch
1984
Czeslaw Milosz was born June 30, 1911, in Lithuania. An internationally
acclaimed poet and man of letters, Milosz is the first Nobel Laureate in
non-scientific field to grace the Berkeley campus. The scope of his work
reflects the range of his life, lived in many countries in the thick of some
of the major historical events of the century.
His childhood, spent partly in Russia before and after the Revolution, is
described in his novel The Valley of Issa (published in 1955) and in
his autobiography, Native Realm (1968). While an undergraduate at the
University of Wilno in Poland, where he received a diploma in law --- a
profession he has never practiced --- Milosz published his earliest major
poems. His first book, Poem of the Frozen Time, appeared when he was
only 21.
Milosz spent most of the Second World War in Warsaw, where he was active in
the Resistance and edited an anti-nazi anthology. "I didn't want to learn
German," he recalled recently, "so I took to learning English
instead." The poet continues to write in Polish, but has an active hand
in the translations of his work.
From 1946 to 1950, Milosz served as a cultural attaché for the Polish
government in Washington, D.C. and Paris. Having survived Hitler's oppression,
Milosz faced the forcible remolding of the Polish culture after the Communist
takeover. In 1951, he refused a recall to Poland, defected, and became an
exile in Paris. The reasons for his defection became clear two years later
with the appearance of the Captive Mind, the book that first brought
him a large audience in the West. "The immediate cause of my break with
the Polish People's Democracy was socialist realism," Milosz wrote.
"It would be wrong to judge that this official theory of art, imposed by
Moscow, forces the writer and artist to renounce certain aesthetic likings. It
forces him to renounce something more: truth."
Milosz lived in Paris, supporting himself, his wife, and their two sons by
writing until 1960, when he was offered a position in the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literature on the Berkeley campus. Milosz and his family moved
to Berkeley and have lived here ever since. His post at the University was his
first teaching position, but he quickly earned a reputation as a dazzling
lecturer. He "retired" in 1978, at 67, but continued to teach a full
load of courses, including his popular lecture on Dostoevsky, a survey course
on Polish literature, and a graduate seminar.
Milosz has published studies of Dofoe, Balzac, Tolstoy, William James, and
numerous Polish writers. He has translated Shakespeare, Eliot, Milton,
Whitman, and Jeffers --- as well as French, Spanish, and Yiddish writers ---
into Polish. His anthology Postwar Polish Poetry contains his own
translations of 21 major Polish poets.
For his volume of poetry, Bells in Winter, Professor Milosz in 1978
won the prestigious International Neustradt Prize for Literature. At that
time, Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet, stated, "I have no
hesitation whatsoever in saying that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest
poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." In 1980, the Nobel committee
agreed with Brodsky's assessment, awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to
Milosz.
----------
Schoch, Russell. "Czeslaw Milosz:
Literature, 1980." The Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 28.
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