Czeslaw Milosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Oskar Milosz, and Aleksander Wat

'To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings. Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is on the side of man.'

'Critics from many countries, as well as contemporary poets, like Joseph Brodsky, for instance, sweep his literary oeuvre with superlatives. His poetry is rich in visual-symbolic metaphor. The idyllic and the apocalyptic go hand-in-hand. The verse sometimes suggests naked philosophical discourse of religious epiphany. Songs and theological treatises alternate, as in the "child-like rhymes" about the German Occupation of Warsaw in The World: Naive Poems (1943) or Six Lectures in Verse from the volume Chronicles (1987). Miłosz transcends genre. As a poet and translator, he moves easily from contemporary American poets to the Bible (portions of which he has rendered anew into Polish).

As a novelist, he won renown with The Seizure of Power (1953), about the installation of communism in Poland. Both Milosz and his readers have a particular liking for the semi-autobiographical The Issa Valley (1955), a tale of growing up and the loss of innocence that abounds in philosophical sub-texts. There are also many personal themes in Milosz's essays, as well as in The Captive Mind (1953), a classic of the literature of totalitarianism. Native Realm (1959) remains one of the best studies of the evolution of the Central European mentality. The Land of Ulro (1977) is a sort of intellectual and literary autobiography. It was followed by books like The Witness of Poetry (1982), The Metaphysical Pause (1995) and Life on Islands (1997) that penetrate to the central issues of life and literature today.'

Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline E. Levine write that: 'Having experienced in his lifetime all the major convulsions of twentieth-century Europe, Milosz has taken upon himself the duty to bear witness to counter the voices that would obscure the historical facts as he knows them, and simultaneously to challenge the omnipotence of death. For Milosz, it would seem, everyone who survives in his memory has a claim on his pen ... Equally important is Milosz's need for teachers and kindred souls: "I met Tiger in the way a river, hollowing out a bed for itself on a plain, meets a second river; it had been inevitable." The image captures the importance of intellectual friendships in Milosz's life and his need for partners against whom he can try out his ideas or with whom he shares common values. These partners can be friends, but they can also be writers or philosophers from other eras. His essays on Simone Weil, Lev Shestov, William Blake, and Oskar Milosz are good examples of dialogues constructed across time and space. Milosz constructs a private pantheon of philosophers, poets, and thinkers who share his preoccupations and come close to his own solutions, whether it be Shestov's protest against necessity and reason, Weil's praise of contradictions and her unorthodox Catholicism, or Blake's vision of the land of Ulro. They are "other voices," but they accord with his own.'

Oskar Milosz was a distant cousin of Czeslaw Milocsz, who wrote that the questions inspired by Oskar Milosz's Ars Magna and Les Arcanes decided his career. In addition to Cszelaw Milosz's essay on Oskar Milosz, it is also instructive to read Christopher Bamford's introduction in Temenos to the work of Oskar Milosz and to read translations of his poetry by such as David Gascoyne and others. 

Jerzy Andrzejewski (the 'Alpha' of Milosz's essay in To Begin Where I Am) 'was a prolific Polish writer. His works confront controversial moral issues such as betrayal, the Jews and Auschwitz in the wartime. His novels, Ashes and Diamonds, and Holy Week, have been made into film adaptations by the Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda.'

Finally, 'In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation―in which Wat was a major participant―that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."'

Alissa Z. Leigh-Valles writes that: 'Milosz was a loyal friend to Wat in his last years (though he describes the friendship as "not particularly ardent," more collegial than intimate) and an important ally to Ola for the two decades after Wat's death.33 As an anthologist, historian and ambassador of Polish literature Milosz also largely created the literary-critical framework within which Wat's work could be placed and to some degree reverberate. With his powerful will to rational order and judgment, Milosz was honest enough to admit (paradoxically) to strong personal and intellectual dislikes that played a part in his critical and editorial work. Milosz's presentation of poets he befriended and translated is an integral part of his argument with Polish poetry, a tradition in which he felt strongly his own unusual status as a poet who placed a higher value on intellectual form than on musical form. These factors had a significant impact on the context he created for Wat in English.'

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David Gascoyne - 'H' by Oskar Milosz.