THE TEACHER AND HIS STUDENTS
91
As a youn g person from Communist Poland who was plunged into the
heady atmosphere of the Berkeley campus in the mid-sixties with its fi'ee
speech movement and Vietnam War marches, the ground under my feet
was wobbly. For a student of li terature the sense of confusion was even
greater, since these were the years of triumphant structuralism followed by
no less triumphant deconstructionism. If I finally managed to regain a
sense of firm ground, l owe it to these classes in Dwinelle Hall , where dis–
cussions of what we read and what we were experiencing around us were
always guided by a strong belief in va lues, a sense of hierarchy. Speaking
tongue-in-cheek, Milosz explain ed his need for hierarchy as illustrative of
his elitism and fastidiousness, but he taught his students the importance of
values as a defense against chaos and relativism.
My indebtedness to Milosz goes beyond the classroom experience. It
includes hi s many writings on Polish literature-from nineteenth-century
writers like Juliusz Siowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski, Sienkiewicz, and
Rodziewiczowna to twentieth-century writers like Jozef Czechowicz,
~tanislaw
Vincenz, Gombrowicz, Aleksander Wat, and Anna
Swirszczyhska. The magnum opus of Milosz's scholarship is his
History
(~f
Polish Litcratl/rc.
It has shaped my own approach to Polish literature and
teaching. In this work the scholar, the critic, and the teacher meet. Written
as a textbook, it also bears the st:1mp of the writer. Its narrative is lively and
dramatic, and it would be hard to find another history of literature that
reads so well. Milosz has the gift for vivid detail and good anecdotes.
Among my favorites is one :1bout Feliks Dzierzynski , the founder of the
Soviet Cheka (the predecessor of the KGl3), known as l3Ioody Feliks, who
recited by heart the mystical poem "King Spirit" by the Polish R.omantic
poet Juliusz Slowacki; or about the trip by eighteenth-century writer Jan
Potocki in a balloon, with his Turkish v:1let Osman. Milosz once said that
the greatest enemy of man is genera li za tion. Time and again, he presents
phenomena in the most concrete and palpable way; thus the widespread
and extraordinary but short-lived success of the Reformation of Poland is
presented through the lifespan of a man, and I quote: " If we were to imag–
ine a man born in 1500, he wou ld have been seventeen at the moment
when Martin Luther came out with hi s famous theses. Between his forty–
ninth and sixty-fourth year, he would have seen a virtual triumph of
Calvinislll. But if our man reached the age of seventy or eighty he wou ld
have noticed signs of the imminent breakdown of Protestantism."
Milosz infuses his narrative, as he did his lectures, with humor and
refreshing irreverence, delighting in the fi-ivolous poems of the fifteeenth–
century bishop and calling Mikolaj Rej, the father of Polish literature, "a
glutton, a drunkard, a lecher, a gossiper, a Illan of obscene language, and a
blasphemer." In revealing that one Polish Romanti c bard had a mother
