The 100 Books

Biography

Czesław Miłosz (born in Szetejnie (now Šeteniai in Lithuania), 30 June 1911, died in Kraków, 14 August 2004) came from a Polish family with noble roots which used the Lubicz coat of arms. He studied in Vilnius: firstly Polish philology, then law, and made his literary debut in 1930. During the second World War, he was an active participant in the underground literary scene and was published under the pseudonym ‘Jan Syruć’. After the war, he worked for the Polish diplomatic service. In 1951, he requested political asylum in France. He moved to Maisons Laffitte, the headquarters of the Polish émigré publishing house ‘Instytut Literacki’, which was run under the guidance of Jerzy Giedroyc and which nominated Miłosz for the Nobel Prize (he received the Nobel Prize in 1980 for the sum of his literary works). In 1960, he moved to the United States where he worked as a professor at the University of California in Berkeley and at Harvard. Czesław Miłosz – poet, essayist, prose writer, literary historian, translator and winner of numerous literary prizes – was awarded the Order of the White Eagle in 1994. He returned to Poland for good in 1993, choosing to reside in Kraków and was later buried in that city's Crypt of Merit on Mount Skałka.

Summary

Czesław Miłosz wrote Zniewolony umysł in 1951 in the period after his defection to France. The work was published by Giedroyc’s Instytut Literacki in 1953 at the same time as a French translation (La pensée captive) and an English translation (The Captive Mind). The book immediately inflamed emotions and stirred controversy on account of the author and the contents. The Captive Mind is now considered to be a crucial work for understanding the mechanisms that allow totalitarian systems to exist and endure throughout the world.

The Captive Mind is a philosophical and political essay, as well as a parable in which Miłosz draws on the examples of specific individuals to illustrate, in a metaphorical manner, universal human phenomena and attitudes toward the so-called ‘New Faith’. The pseudonyms used by Miłosz (Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta) mask the identities of real figures familiar to him from the Polish literary scene: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński. In his analysis, Miłosz goes beyond obvious rationales for submitting to communist rule, such as fear or avarice, by showing that one of the ways in which people are deceived into submission is through their innately human 'internal longing for harmony and happiness'. In portraying Polish society during its most intense period of indoctrination, Miłosz puts forward a thorough critique of two philosophical systems – Marxism and Hegelian historical determinism – which he deems to be inconsistent with basic moral principles. Miłosz used the example of Poland in the late 1940s/early 1950s to portray a phenomenon that is universal in time and space.