MILOSZ'S WORLD TODAY
109
writer Borowski, the Writer's Union functionary Putrament, and the poet
GalczyTIski reappear in
The History oI Polish Literatllre,
then in
A Year
if
the
Hlmter,
and once more in
The
A
BC
Book.
Puu-ament and Galczynski are
also brought back in Milosz's most recent collection of essays,
Life on
Islal/ds.
In the course of the retellings, their images softened and nuanced
by the distancing of time, they become better than real. They rise
to
the
level of wonderfully sketched fictional characters of an enthralling
Zeitrol/lal/.
Andrzejewski, Borowski, Galczyriski, and Putrament do not
appear in
The ABC Book
as separate entries. Their names surface repeated–
ly, however, in entries devoted to others, as if to demonstrate that they were
inseparable from their time.
Tile Seiz llre of Power,
which addresses those
same issues in fictional form, is not a particularly successful novel, although
it is a superb dramatization of what one cri tic has aptly referred to as "the
crushing hopelessness, the utter desolation, and the dismal atmosphere" of
the first years of Communist rule in Poland_ Unlike the hypothetical novel
dreamt of by Milosz some forty years later,
The Seizllre of Power
is not inter–
national in scope. Its world has been narrowed to Poland in the grip of the
Soviet Union. The novel's many characters, struggling intellectually and
1110rally wi th the limi ted poli tical choices available to them rarely come
alive as individuals. They remain incarnate poli tical posi tions, stock char–
acters in a new kind of terrifying morality play.
Milosz 's evolving novel begins
to
take a more dramatic shape with
Native Reallll-a
book that originated in "a desire to bring Europe closer
to the Europeans" and evolved into "a quest, a voyage, into the heart of
my own, yet not only my own, past." It asserts the disintegration of all bar–
riers "between the individual and the social, between style and institution,
between aesthetics and politics." This is where we first encounter the mys–
tic poet Oscar Milosz, with his disdain for the " age ofjeering ugliness" and
his prophetic visions of the coming world war, and also "Tiger," Tadeusz
Kroriski, who "had persuaded himself that in the last analysis his deceit
served the truth." In Milosz's fascination with each of them, and particu–
larly in his anguished retelling of how Tiger opted
to
serve Poland's
Communist regime while he himself became a defector, the great intel–
lectual debates and 1110ral tensions of the century are bodied forth.
Thirty years after
Native Reallll,
Milosz was still engaged in his search
for self-defini tion, but by the time he came to wri te
A Year of the Hllnter
in
1987-88 he was a Nobel Laureate, a writer whose works had been trans–
lated into many more languages than he himself could read. It doesn't take
much cri tical acui ty
to
notice that
A Year of the HilI/tel'
is only masquerad–
ing as a journal. Milosz the diarist, almost frenetically in motion from
airport to airport, from one speaking engagement to another as he criss–
crosses the continent and nies back and forth across the ocean, seems to
