Milosz: A Biography
ANDRZEJ FRANASZEK, TRANSLATED BY ALEKSANDRA PARKER AND MICHAEL PARKER
In 1920 a nine-year-old boy was asleep in his grandparents’ house in rural Lithuania. In the morning he saw a hole in the window. A search revealed a grenade, with the pin out, under his bed. A Lithuanian nationalist had attacked his Polish-Lithuanian gentry family who had lived in the area for centuries. This was the first of several lucky, or providential, escapes, later from the flying bullets of border guards and the Gestapo, which preserved the life of Czeslaw Milosz, the greatest Catholic poet of the twentieth century. He died in Cracow, aged 93, in 2004.
The outlines of Milosz’s long and extraordinary life have been known for many years to his admirers. But Andrzej Franaszek’s book, published in Poland in 2011, now translated into English (moderately well: there are infelicities here and there), and using a wealth of unpublished or hard-to-find material, is the first major biography. The story it tells, with sympathy and perception, is of great interest.
Milosz was born in the Tsarist empire. After the First World War, and the local wars that followed, Lithuania and Poland emerged as separate independent countries, with Wilno (now Vilnius and the capital of Lithuania) then in Poland. Milosz was educated, after his idyllic rural childhood, in a Jesuit school in Wilno and then in its university. Although so remote from the West, the university was already 450 years old, centuries older than the universities of Warsaw or, come to that, Berlin; it had been kept closed by Russia between 1832 and 1920.
