Resistance and Revolt

The Captive Mind 

by Czesław Miłosz

“A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature.”   ― Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind




1911 saw the birth of Czesław Miłosz in central Lithuania, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. In two books, Native Realm, his memoir, and The Issa Valley, his novel, he wrote affectionately about his childhood in Lithuania. When he visited Paris in his twenties, he was impacted by the poetry of his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet with Lithuanian ancestry. The outcome, a collection of his own poems, was released in 1934. That year, he graduated from law school and again took advantage of a fellowship to spend a year in Paris. He was fired from his position as a commentator at Radio Wilno after returning to Poland due to his leftist beliefs.

Miłosz spent World War II in Warsaw, under Nazi Germany's "General Government," where, among other things, he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He did not participate in the Warsaw Uprising due to his residence outside of Warsaw proper. Following the conflict, Miłosz worked as the communist People's Republic of Poland's cultural attaché in Paris. He did, however, defect in 1951 and seek political asylum in France. The Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize) was awarded to him in 1953.

Miłosz immigrated to the United States in 1960, obtained US citizenship in 1970, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 for his work "Voiding man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts with uncompromising clear-sightedness." Many Poles were unaware of him for the first time, as the communist government had banned his works from being published in Poland. Miłosz continued to spend time annually in America but was able to return to Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain, first as a visitor and then as a part-time resident in Kraków. Miłosz was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the United States and an honorary doctorate by Harvard University in 1989. Through the Cold War, his name was often invoked in the United States, particularly by conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr., usually in the context of Miłosz's 1953 book The Captive Mind. During the same time, his name was largely ignored by the government-censored media and publications in Poland.

The Captive Mind has been described as one of the finest studies of the behavior of intellectuals under a repressive regime. In the preface, Miłosz observed that "I lived through five years of Nazi occupation... I do not regret those years in Warsaw.". But it is his analysis of Poland and her intellectuals under the heel of Soviet Communism that is the primary content of this book. Through the examples of four intellectuals, Milosz is able to capture the psychological impact on the lives of his countrymen. The criticism is devastating, and it has not lost its impact more than fifty years later. He even was prescient enough to speculate that the Soviet dictatorship might fall at some future date; little did he know in 1953 that it would come to pass less than thirty years later. This reader found that Milosz' prose is as beautifully written as his poetry, and he is an author to whom I will continue to return for inspiration.