CZESLAW MILOSZ
479
one language but could not find translators or publishers in any other
languages For example, J6zef Czapski's
On the Inhllman Earth
and
Starobielsk Notes,
and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's
A World Apart.
1 wrote
The Captive MiNd
in what may have been the worst year,
1951, when the Stalin cu lt in France was at its height, shortly after a to–
tally implausible (from today's perspective) and widely publicized trial.
The Communist
L'Hllmallite
had accused David Rousset, a former con–
centration-camp prisoner, of referring to the existence of concentration
camps in Russia in his book
L'Univers concentrationnaire.
At the same
time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Janson were preparing to hurl mud at
Albert Camus in
Les Tell/ps Modemes
because of
The Rebel,
in which he
makes the same arguments. (I read that book after I finished writing
Th e
Captille Milld.)
Thus , the only suitable word for all that is probably
" psychosis." But also "power," fortunately without "poli ce." Sartre's
and Janson's articles were simply denunciations, a cry for Camus's pun–
ishment. When 1 was looking for a translator, a young man was recom–
mended to me, a beginning writer of Polish-Jewish descent; he assured
me that he would very much like to do the translation but could not,
because no one would publish him afterward. Andre Prudhommeaux, an
anarchist who fought in Spain, undertook the job for me. He worked as
a copy editor at
Prellves
in Paris. But Prudhommeaux did not know
Polish - so 1 dictated
The Captive Mind
to him in its entirety, sentence by
sentence; all he did was correct the style .
Decell/ber
29, 1987. Writing
The Captive Mind
cost me too much for me
to boast about it. That is, it required a series of preconditions: first, my
departure from America, because Joe McCarthy was in the process of di–
recting hi s witch-hunt for Communists, casting a pall of terror over in–
tellectual circles. Obviously, no self-respecting person would join an anti–
Communist campaign that was interpreted as the beginning of Fascism in
America. The intellectual level of the hunters justified such an ass ump–
tion. 1 read somewhere a stenographic report of Bertold Brecht's testi–
mony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He played
with them like a cat with a mouse . Shortly afterward, he left for East
Berlin. The unfortunate Whittaker Chambers can stand as an example of
what awa ited those hotheads who violated the code of this circle. The
long-time editor of
The Daily Worker
broke with Communism because
of a real inner crisis and stepped forward as a key witness for the prose–
cution in the espionage trial of Alger Hiss. From that day until his death
he was excluded from the circle of people worthy of having their hands
