Abraham Sutzkever and Czesław Miłosz belong to the same generation: Miłosz was born in 1911, in Szetejnie, a village in central Lithuania, while Sutzkever was born in 1913, in Smorgon, a town in today’s Belorussia. From a young age, both poets were exposed to local multiethnic environments, extensive traveling and prolonged living outside their parental homes. Writing of his childhood experience, Miłosz framed them with the twentieth century’s changes in mind: Throughout all my early childhood, rivers, towns and landscapes followed one another at great speed. … Such a lack of stability, the unconscious feeling that everything is temporary, cannot but affect, it seems to me, our mature judgments, and it can be the reason for taking governments and political systems lightly. History becomes fluid because it is equated with ceaseless wandering.[1]These conditions shaped an early sense of identity, exile and encounter with history for the other two poets as well. Yet, more importantly, this sense of homelessness and displacement not only increased internally, but also progressed externally. The time-space in which the poets were born and spent their childhood not only passed away, but disintegrated into the annals of history. Today, there is no more Polish-Lithuanian Szetejnie or Jewish Smorgon, nor is there much left of the city where the biographies, memories and imaginations of Sutzkever and Miłosz intersect.
Miłosz was forced to leave his native realm, the Neviaza River Valley in Central Lithuania, during the First World War. In contrast to Sutzkever’s family, who were expelled from their home, Miłosz’s family left Lithuania as war-time evacuees (Miłosz father was a road engineer, employed by the state.) The family spent the war years traveling across the vast expanses of the Russian Empire, including Siberia. In 1918, at the end of the war, the family was living in Estonia, from whence they moved to Wilno, where the young poet witnessed the devastating results of the numerous occupations of the city by different military and ideological forces. Regional peace, however, did not bring stability to Miłosz’s family affairs; separated by a short distance of no more than a hundred kilometers, the family now was split between two independent countries—Lithuania, where Miłosz’s grandparents lived in their small ancestral manor, and Poland, where the rest of the family had settled in Wilno. Since there was no diplomatic relationship between the two states, the communication between the two sides of the family was difficult and erratic.
In Wilno, young Miłosz was completely engulfed by the local patriotic Polish religious and cultural milieus: he attended Polish schools, learned Latin, studied Polish Romantics and practiced Catholicism. Although he admitted to having some classmates and friends who were not Polish, his early awareness of other cultures and nationalities of the city was sporadic and sketchy. Nonetheless, the poet’s worldview was explicitly conditioned by his everyday language, the Polish of Lithuania, rather than the Polish spoken in Poland. For Miłosz, the Polish of “Polish-speaking Lithuanians,” combined with his occasional summers spent in another country, Lithuania, at his grandparents manor, created an enduring sense of difference, of belonging to a different spatial era, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
In 1929, Miłosz started to study law at the University of Wilno. Around the same time, he also started to publish his poetry in local newspapers, and in 1933 he made his first book debut. At this time, Miłosz traveled to Paris, where he met his elder cousin, the French symbolist poet Oscar Miłosz, whose philosophy became one of the main sources of Czeslaw Miłosz’s own explorations into the realm of metaphysical and Gnostic thinking. In the mid-1930’s, Miłosz worked at Wilno Radio and belonged to the local Polish literary group called “Zagary.” Miłosz objected to the growing national patriotism and social conservatism, but like Sutzkever, he rejected the explicit adoption of modernist literary practices that would clearly demarcate a specific ideological stand. Yet, in contrast to Sutzkever, whose poetry was permeated with some idyllic sensibility, Miłosz’s poetic outlook was extremely catastrophic. In 1937, Miłosz, for political reasons, was forced to resign from his job at the local radio station and moved to Warsaw. When the war broke out, Miłosz came back to Wilno and stayed for a few months, during which he experienced both the Lithuanian and later, the Soviet rule of the city. In 1940, he escaped from the Soviet Union to Germany; from there, he smuggled himself into German-occupied Warsaw. In Warsaw, he witnessed the brutal destruction of the ghetto during the 1943 Jewish uprising, and experienced the complete annihilation of the city by the German army during the 1944 Polish insurrection. Although he did not participate in the Polish armed resistance against the Germans, he was active in underground Polish publishing.
In subsequent years, Miłosz worked as a diplomat of the People’s Republic of Poland to the United States and France. In 1951, Miłosz requested asylum in France, and between 1961 and the 1980s lived in Berkeley, California, where he taught Slavic literature at the University of California. In 1980, Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, dying in Krakow in 2004. Miłosz once said that his long and vast exile started when he left Wilno in 1937, and afterwards his true home became his language—the poetic consecration of the Polish spoken in his native Lithuanian region.
[1] Czeslaw Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 41.