60
PARTISAN REVIEW
other words, History with a capital H is important. Yes, I would say every
generation retells its story in its own way. Nevertheless, now that commu–
nism no longer is a threat, we have to face how we have internalized its
utopian promises. I think we are short-changing future generations by
replacing communism with, for instance, literary obfuscations that have
become fashionable in the academy, rather than teaching also the history
of events that distinguish fact from fiction. But Milosz has been telling us
all that for a long, long time. Now let's celebrate him for it.
Irena Grudzilska-Gross: I
will not speak about th e poli tics of
The Captive
Mind.
The book survived its subject. The interesting question for us today
might be why, even though communism is gone, the book remains so
important. I think that is because it is a most unusual political book. It does
not discuss party manifestos, theoretical texts of Karl Marx or Plekhanov,
and the analysis of communism it presents is based on a wonderful and
absurd novel,
Illsatiability,
by a Polish writer, Stanislaw Witkiewicz. In its
main part
The Captive Miud
consists of portraits of four or even five con–
crete and recognizable persons. Indeed, even though it attacks the people
it describes, this is a book that speaks about friendship.
In a letter to Thomas Merton, Milosz wrote, "That book was written
in
extremis
by a poet who could not address foreign language readers in verse
and hesitated between two aims: to convey the meaning of the 'Eastern'
experience
to
those not acquainted with it, and
to tel/ the trllth
(my empha–
sis) to his colleagues in Poland." The book was an explanation not so much
of communism itself as of why certain Eastern European writers and intel–
lectuals felt attracted to it. [t was also a farewell letter of one choosing exile
and rupturing his relations to his country. He addressed the West, but also
spoke to the people he left behind. His book was a sunU11ation, an accusa–
tion, a self-revelation. It was not the first text Milosz wrote after choosing
exile. In May of 1951, in the emigre monthly
Klllfllra,
he published a fifteen–
page article entitled "No" ("Nie") . In it, he expressed the themes he
developed later in
The Captive Mind:
"What I'm going to tell now could well
be called a story of a suicide," he began. The suicide in question was his
decision to enugrate, which Milosz feared would prevent him from writing.
He left Poland when there was little contact between the two political blocs
and when it was believed that, in order to write, the poet needed to be
inU11ersed in his mother tongue. Thus, the dramatic effect of this opening
sentence should be taken seriously: the gamble was real. But he could have
intended other meanings of the word "suicide." One possible meaning was
the suicide of Western cuI ture which was both the perpetrator and victim of
World War
II.
[n fact, the catastrophe of that war is one basis of
TIle
Captive
Mil1d.
The other suicide was the joining by the French intellectuals of
