THE CAPT IVE MIND
55
Edith Kurzweil :
When Robert Faggen asked me to parti cipate at a confer–
ence celebrating Czeslaw Milosz [ was pl eased, eager to express my
admjratio n for Milosz's courage and
sagesse-whi ch
Milosz himself defin es
as implying both wi sdom and caution. Long befo re
I
met him, and before [
was associated wi th
Partisall Revielll,
[
had respected him for speak.ing the
truth about communi sm , throughout the years when all but a few American
intell ectuals looked at the Soviet Union through anything but rose-tinted
glasses. Unlike Sartre, who sa id about TIl('
Captive Milld
that Milosz lacked
sagesse,
he had thrown cauti on to the winds, and had written thi s wi se book.
As Mil osz told us at a confe rence I organized at Rutgers University in
1992,
nei ther the book no r the fact that
Partisan Review
publi shed its prologue
helped him get into the United States. '' It trail ed me fo r a long time," he
recalls in December
1987
in
A Year
(if
tlte Hllllter;
'' It elicited denunciations by
Poles to the American Embassy in Pari s (fo r being crypto- communi st),
which meant it wrecked my chances for a visa to America for nine years; it
earned me the 'mark of a traito r' among the progressives; and also, something
I didn't like at all, it meant [ was considered a prose writer, a scholar in the
field of poli tical science.
No ta belle:
it did not help me obtain a position as pro–
fessor of li terature; on the contrary." [ should add that, upon rereading
TI, e
Captive Milld,
[
found it to be a prose that comes close to poetry.
R obert Faggen asked me to speak on Milosz's politics. Unlike Adam
Michnik , 1 have no t been an active parti cipant in Poland's-or any other
country's-liberati on, no r am 1 steeped in the ins and outs of Poland 's
Marxism , as are Andrzej Wali cki and lrena Grudzihska-Gross. lnstead, I will
talk about the Ameri can reception of Milosz's prose. To be sure, Milosz's
genius is mos t evident in hi s poetry, which manages to convey exactly and
yet elusively the preoccupations and malai se of our times-call it the human
conditi on , our universal preoccupati ons, or whatever else you hke-which so
few of o ur contemporari es have full y g rasped in its contradicti ons, or have
envisioned fj-om hi s penetrating comparative perspective. Both an insider and
an outsider, Mil osz has succeeded in being appreciative as well as cri tical of
our culture: he is a marginal individual in the bes t sense, and uses thi s mar–
ginality to point to truths mos t peopl e either mj ss o r aren't willing to express.
To begin wi th , however, [ want to mention Milosz's connection to
Partisan
Review
He recalls, as does William Phillips, that they first met in Pari s, around
1949,
at the home of Mac and Sheba Goodman. Prullips says in hi s memoir,
A Partisall L[fe,
that the Goodmans "cultivated many of the European refi.lgees
from Germany and Russia." And he goes on to describe TIle
Captive Milld
as
impressive in its descri pti o n of the contro l of totalitarian coun tri es....
[Mil osz l was o ne of th e few Euro p ea n po li tica l fi gures I had m et
