| Czeslaw Milosz passed away Maybe a century truly ends when the people who personified it die - people who have gone through the century through and through and pass away, remaining symbols of the century. Among such common losses of recent times, let us name Maurice Blanchot, Benny Carter, Henri Cartier-Bresson... On August 14, the name of the poet, prose writer, translator, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1980 - the unforgettable year of "Solidarity" - Czeslav Milosha (1911--2004).
For the century of two world catastrophes, the migration of entire peoples and the exile life of millions, Milosz’s biography itself has become exemplary. A Lithuanian on his mother’s side, a native of a farm near Kaunas, from a distant corner of Europe, where empires, languages and faiths converged for centuries, he grew up, studied and in 1933 debuted a book of poems in Vilna, the “Jerusalem of the North”, grew up as a poet and Pole in pre-war and occupied Warsaw, and finally became an adult, probably at the age of forty, in the small French town of Brie-Comte-Robert, where in 1951 he decided to remain in exile - first, for several years, in France, and then, in decades, in America. A man of two, or even three lives, six or seven languages, including Latin, Greek and Hebrew, existing everywhere and nowhere, like the tireless wanderer Odysseus (it was not for nothing that he called himself the universal name Nobody), Milos finally made it to his Ithaca - in the nineties he returned to Poland, visited Lithuania and died in Krakow.
He wrote more than once about the special attitude of the Poles to the past and to the future: the magical power of this gap, the gap in time, nourished the Polish poet-prophets of the 19th century - Mickiewicz, Slovacki, Norwid. Milosz had the chance to live and write in another, post-prophetic era, in a dark time when poetry and the poet - after Auschwitz - had to radically redefine their place in the world, the claims, possibilities and boundaries of the word. Without giving up the past and the future, Milosz chose the present - it’s not for nothing that one of his final books, published in 2001 (last year it was published in Russian), was called “This.” The key concept for Milosz as a writer was experience, which means non-detachment from what is happening and responsibility for it. He, unlike many of his contemporaries and peers, did not swear allegiance to History with a capital H, did not shield himself and did not run away from it with his other peers and contemporaries - Milos refused to be its victim, did not accept historical fatalism, the idolatry of history according to Hegel and Stalin "Short Course" He impartially spoke about this real historical fact, its cost and consequences in the books of the fifties, “The Enslaved Mind” and “Our Europe,” which were immediately translated into many languages and became the poet’s credentials in the big world. Recently, they (the second - in separate chapters) are also available in Russian.
Milos, who spoke Russian since childhood, who read Gogol and Lermontov, Chekhov and Shchedrin in the original, who knew by heart the poems of not only Pushkin, but also Nikitin, and who later read a special course on Dostoevsky in America and was friends with Brodsky, had an attitude towards Russia that Like probably most Poles, it was not easy. He himself spoke of sympathy for every Russian, of wariness towards Russian literature (especially the “melody” of its poetry and the deep insights of the “Russian novel”) and of complete rejection of the Russian empire. The poet felt the drama of his position; he never hid it; however, he did not hide it at all and did not avoid conflicts. It’s not that he was looking for them (the world around him was already full of them, and in the “angelic” detachment from the world there was something suspicious for Milos from a young age), but, a true poet, he never smoothed out the contradictions. He was driven by restlessness, or, as Stanislav Ignacy Vitkevich, a friend of his youth, said, “restlessness.” Milosz knew and did not forget - this is another most important feature of his ethical and literary position - that the world is greater than the poet. And longer than the poet. Back in 1976, the poet wrote the following words (later he included them in the book “The Roadside Little Dog”, two years ago it was also published in Russian translation) - I remembered them yesterday, when I learned about his death in the middle of the day:
Angel of death, dear,
Blue-eyed,
With chestnut curls,
He flew up while dancing.
His lips are happiness
Speech is bliss
His look is radiance
Spring is in full swing.
He touched me
Pressed me with a kiss
And returned it straight
To the very beginning.
Disappear without suffering
Without causing pain,
Cross out at once
Everything I lived before.
So that there won't be any left
Not a word from me
Not a memory
Nothing.
And the world was far away
Like an angel of death
Peerless, clear
And blessed. Boris DUBIN |
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