14
PARTISAN REVIEW
agree that he was defeated, since almost every award the world offers a poet has
been given to Milosz. Time proved him wrong. Today, Czeslaw Milosz is sur–
rounded by pupils, admirers, readers, and good friends, who have come to talk
about him and to listen to his poems once more because, as man and artist, he
was victorious. Only he knows the price he paid for that victory. Let's rejoice
at the magnitude and the fruits of that victory, keep reading his beautiful
poems and wise essays, and move beyond the limits of our own imaginations.
For thirty long years, Milosz was deprived of what a writer most val–
ues: participation in the literary life of his homeland and speaking directly
to readers in his native tongue. But his stubbonmess and perseverence were
rewarded because he did not remain completely isolated in his struggle–
there were people who cast an invisible rope between him and his Polish
readers. Thanks to emigre and underground publishers, to printers and dis–
tributors, Milosz's work made its way to readers in Poland. Thereby, it
could outlas t censorshi p and force, secret police and cus toms officials,
servile cri tics, and all the other helpers of nothingness.
His thirty-year absence in the official literature of his homeland was
the consequence of a conscious-and excruciating-decision Milosz made
in 1951. At that time he was well known in
Ii
terary circles and to the read–
ing public in Poland for his pre-war volumes,
Poem on Froz en Time, Three
Winters,
and
Rescue--the
most important volume of poetry to appear in
Poland right after the war.
After five years (1945-1950) in New York and Washington as a diplo–
mat for the People's Republic of Poland, he gave up all privileges
Communist countries accorded to writers as "engineers of souls." His cor–
respondence from that period allows us to trace the successive levels of
disenchantment with the new regime and its cultural politics. Milosz was
unable to publish the anthology of English and American poetry he had
assembled in Poland; the authorities demanded such absurd changes in the
screenplay of
Robinson Crusoe in Milrsaw,
which he wrote together with
Jerzy Andrzejewski, that Milosz demanded the removal of his name from
the film. It became increasingly difficult to get his poems and translations
into print in Polish journals. As censorship stiffened and demands for writ–
ers to adhere to socialist realist formulas grew more ruthless, the price of
compromise became too steep. After a visit to Poland at the end of 1950,
Milosz no longer had any illusions. When he left for Paris, he was still a
secretary at the Polish Embassy, but soon took refuge at the headquarters
of the Polish emigre Literary Institute (Institut Litteraire) in Maisons–
Lafitte near Paris.
This spectacular break unleashed a furious propaganda campaign
against him in Poland and a long-lasting campaign against him by many in
the Polish emigre community-because he did not repent for "serving a
