When Czeslaw Milosz arrived at Berkeley in 1960, he arrived in obscurity. A little-known poet in a little-known tongue, he joined the Slavic Department in part to earn a better living than he could as a Polish literary expatriate in Paris. Milosz wrote and published what remains his best-known work, The Captive Mind, during his Paris years in the 1950s. But its unyielding critique of Communist totalitarianism hardly became a bestseller in a city whose intellectuals at the time were in thrall to the cult of Stalin.
Yet Milosz brought with him to Berkeley a constant, if complicated, companion. Milosz shared with Dostoevksy a profound distrust of ideology, all the more so since Milosz experienced so much terrifying violence driven by political fanaticism. At the same time, Dostoevsky's intense Russian nationalism saw the annexation of Poland as Slavic manifest destiny. And his deep Orthodox piety was matched only by his bigotry against Catholics, of which Milosz was one.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)
Still, Milosz never abandoned Dostoevsky the artist. "I think Czeslaw shared with Dostoevsky a sense that terrible violence would come from a withering of the religious imagination in the West," says Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate and the primary translator of Milosz into English.
"As a young man trying to sort out his positions," Hass says, "[Milosz] was attracted to Dostoevsky's sense that something really terrible happens when there's an abstract application of principles based on some Enlightenment idea of universal justice to actual and complex societies."
In his poem "Bypassing rue Descartes," Milosz lays out his essential conservatism in the form of a reminiscence occasioned by his return to Paris after decades away:
Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or Saigon or Marrakesh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes.Soon enough, their peers were seizing power
In order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas.
As a poet coming to Berkeley just as its embrace of "universal, beautiful ideas" was in first flower, Milosz must have felt a displacement as spiritual as it was physical. "Imagine him brooding over large, dark philosophical ideas at the same time the young were dancing in the streets and acting as if they were the first generation to discover sex," says Hass, whose friendship with Milosz spanned some three decades.
Nevertheless, word spread on campus about the Polish poet with the amazing eyebrows. His undergraduate classes on Dostoevsky became a must for anyone who cared about the art of the novel, or the intersection of literature, politics, and faith.
Milosz's dedication to his lectures appeared to be commensurate with the enthusiasm of his students for them. Though he retired as a professor in 1978, he continued to teach Dostoevsky. And when, long after he had risen from obscurity to gain international stature as the 20th century's iconic man of letters, he was given the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Milosz cut short the celebration. He had a class to teach.
Milosz died in 2004. He was 93.
– Marcus Wohlsen