Miłosz’s earliest memories were of fear. He remembered sitting on a bench with a friendly Cossack who suddenly jumped to give a hand to his fellow soldiers, who had caught and were about to slaughter a white lamb that the young Miłosz was attached to. Back in Lithuania, he did not attend school, so his mother took charge of his early education. Unlike writers and intellectuals he knew later in life, most of whom were raised in cities, he spent his childhood in a small farming community, which he idealized later as an earthly paradise, playing with peasant children and roaming the countryside alone or in their company. As is often the case, the way he saw the world as an adult was closely related to the place where he was born and grew up. If Miłosz retained in his poetry the traces of a pantheistic strain in Lithuanian folk culture—which holds that the divine is dispersed throughout nature—that ought not to come as a surprise. [...]
Miłosz held a job as a literary programmer and commentator for Radio Wilno until he was dismissed because of his leftist views and his willingness to allow Jews to broadcast. Like others in Europe and the United States, he was appalled by the suffering inflicted on workers under capitalism and open to the idea of a radical change. Though he wanted to see the old order destroyed, he grew uncomfortable as his friends moved further to the left since he had no idea what new system could replace the old and was repulsed by the supporters of both Soviet communism and Polish nationalism. “I was governed,” he said, “less by reason than by a sense of smell…and this, in turn, put me on guard against any ‘ism.’” [...]
Once he became a free man, Miłosz was ostracized by the Parisian literary world; Stalinism was in vogue with many of the writers he’d gotten to know at parties at the Polish and Russian embassies, and they took every opportunity to tell their hosts how fortunate it must be to live in such enlightened societies back home. Now these same intellectuals turned their backs on Miłosz and called him an American agent. Polish expatriates were even nastier. “If Miłosz has an ounce of honesty, he ought to hang himself,” a fellow poet wrote to an émigré paper.
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