Czeslaw Milosz

A collection of essays from the 1950s by the Nobel prize-winning Polish poet. He seeks analogies and historical precedents to try to understand the grip Communism took over Eastern Europe after the war.

The book is a sequence of four essays, originally published in Polish, on Polish writers whom Milosz denotes Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. These writers would be fairly well-known figures to Poles. I don’t think Czeslaw is trying to preserve their anonymity. Giving them abstract pseudonyms helps dispel any preconceptions, treats them as exemplars to study. It might also be a legal chicanery. Czeslaw writes about how each of these writers coped with the regime: to what extent they had to compromise, to what extent they became apologists. In the conditions in which they lived, writing could never be a merely artistic activity.

Reading it I get an enormous sense of the tragedy of lost idealism in this century. It seems salvation lies in discarding any kind of political idealism, apart from the very modest aim of making laws which facilitate business.

The first essay, Looking to the West, reminded me of Enzensberger’s essays (below). It is exhilarating to see our Western world seen from such a broad perspective. Reading daily newspapers gives you the feeling that the world changes irrevocably every ten years. It seems the ideas and values of the eighties are already old hat, never mind the sixties. But reading these essays is like seeing our patch of the world from a great height. Things have changed indeed, but we are still in the same era. Though there is no longer a communist world from which our society can be relativised.

We are on the outside of the society Milosz delineates, and can observe and delineate the forces at play. It is different in our own type of society. We are fish in water, and cannot describe the medium through which we move. If our minds are captive, how will we know?