BOOKS
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reach anybody in particular, except perhaps a few fastidious people
able to read my Polish and belonging to the same circle of the
literati."
In fact, even Polish critics were perplexed when the book first
appeared in the original. When I myself read it back in 1978, I felt
overwhelmed and dazed not only by its unconstrainedly meandering
manner of presentation, which moves in sudden leaps and turns
from one name, epoch or country to another, but also by the com–
pletely new set of ideas and problems it opened to me . I can foresee
the same kind of feeling in the American reader. Regardless of
cultural differences, we all instinctively expect that an essayistic
book, original as it may be, will, at least to some degree, fit into one
or another ideological pigeonhole; we want to place it somewhere on
our pocket map, the four quarters of which are usually "left" versus
"right" and "conservative" versus "progressive." Milosz shakes off all
these labels. "I am fighting," he says at one point, "for the right to ex–
ercise my mind outside accepted disciplines"; "... and ideological
categories," we might add.
This is possible because the point of departure for
The Land of
Ulro
is personal and autobiographical, though the book deals with
nothing less than problems in the intellectual history of Western
civilization. Through asking in the very beginning "Who was I?" and
"Who am I now, years later?" Milosz ostensibly tries to elucidate the
reasons for his own evolution; since it so happens, however, that the
questions he constantly asks himself are questions that centuries of
our civilization have tried to answer, his treatise on himself soon
becomes a treatise on a certain current of thought, a certain
neglected philosophical tradition.
This tradition's invisible thread, which in Milosz's book links
such seemingly distant figures as Emmanuel Swedenborg, William
Blake, Fedor Dostoevsky, the Polish romantic poet Adam Mickie–
wicz or the French symbolist (and Milosz's relative) Oskar W.
Milosz, is the perennial question of
unde malum,
of the origins of evil.
Even before Milosz began to search for an answer in the works of
philosophers, ranging from the Manichaeans and Gnostics to Lev
Shestov and Simone Weil, he had become obsessed by the irresolv–
able problem of how to reconcile the presence of evil with the notion
of Providence. This obsession resulted in his lifelong attitude of
paradoxical "ecstatic pessimism." But it also made him sensitive to
the fact that Western civilization had for at least two centuries been
bypassing the central paradoxes of human existence on earth and
