Who's Milosz?

Czeslaw Milosz

However, all that is set to change, as in conjunction with Poland, the Lithuanian parliament has declared 2011 to be Year of Czeslaw Milosz, in honour of the internationally reknowned writer and author of the best-seller on Stalinism, The Captive Mind.

Numerous events are in the pipeline.

“Speaking honestly, I had to make a certain representative of our government aware of the fact that Oscar Milosz (a pre-war diplomat, poet and ethnographer) and Czeslaw Milosz are in fact two different people,” said Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Director of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore.

Czeslaw Milosz, who was born in 1911 in lands that are part of today's Lithuania, viewed himself as a scion of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His family were Lithuanian nobles, and although they spoke Polish from the 16th century, their identity remained firmly tied to their ancestral lands.

“We continually lack a deeper reflection on the Lithuanian dimensions of this figure,” Kvietkauskas expanded.

Nevertheless, 2011 will see a wide-ranging programme of events, as well as the publication of new books in Lithuanian.

During the 1930s, Milosz studied in the ancient Lithuanian capital of Vilnius (Wilno in Polish), a city which was annexed by Poland following the collapse of the Russian Empire. The writer spent the war in Warsaw, and ultimately emigrated to America, after becoming disillusioned with Communist Poland, which he briefly served.

Milosz's identity echoes that of Poland's national bard, Adam Mickiewicz, who wrote in Parisian exile of his lost Lithuanian fatherland. (nh/pg)


Source: PAP