Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he produced an important body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including classics such as The Captive Mind, a reflection on the hypnotic power of ideology, and Native Realm, a memoir. In this book, Eva Hoffman, like Miłosz a Polish-born writer who immigrated to the West, presents an eloquent personal portrait of the life and work of her illustrious fellow exile.
Miłosz experienced the horrors of World War II in Warsaw—the very epicenter of the inferno—and witnessed the unfolding of the Holocaust from up close. After the war, he lived as a permanent exile—from Poland, communism, and mainstream American culture. Hoffman explores how exile, historical disasters, and Miłosz’s origins in Eastern Europe shaped his vision, and she occasionally compares her own postwar trajectory with Miłosz’s to show how the question of “the Other Europe” is still with us today. She also examines his later turn to the poetry of memory and loss, driven by the need to remember and honor his many friends and others killed in the Holocaust.
Combining incisive personal and critical insights, On Czesław Miłosz captures the essence of the life and work of a great poet and writer.
Awards and Recognition
- A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year
Eva Hoffman is a critic, novelist, historian, and memoirist who grew up in Kraków, Poland, before immigrating to Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her many books include Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe. She is a visiting professor at the European Institute of University College London.
"This marvellous short book. . .is unsettling and relevant to our own times. Essential reading."—Mark Glanville, Jewish Chronicle
"Hoffman’s short book ought to be . . . one of the most perceptive and sympathetic introductions to Miłosz’s life and work available. She manages not only to bring vividly alive one of the greatest Europeans of the century, but also to raise once again all the hauntingly insistent questions about art, politics, power and suffering that the century generated – and that we are constantly in danger of forgetting."—Rowan Williams, Literary Review
"[A] profoundly honest and rather beautiful book. . . .On Czeslaw Milosz, is a true treasure to both read and embrace."—David Marx Book Reviews
"[An] illuminating study. . . . [Hoffman] knew Miłosz as only another Polish writer could know him, as she has known other Polish Nobel laureates. That makes this book, written from a fresh new angle, both distinctive and trustworthy."—Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Christian Century
“This brilliant and very personal book offers unique insights into one of the twentieth century’s most iconic poets. Drawing out Miłosz’s experience of exile, the ideas that shaped his imagination, and the almost sacred significance he found in nature, Hoffman illuminates a body of poetry rooted in a divided Europe: ‘A home that refused to acknowledge itself as a whole.’ ”—Ruth Padel, author of Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life
“One great Polish authority on exile, displacement, and memory meets another in Eva Hoffman’s subtle and succinct study. Faithful to Miłosz’s instinct that ‘literature should feed not on itself but should be supported by a knowledge of society,’ she shares his gift for relating the concrete and particular to the major flows of history. Prose as well as poetry is interrogated empathetically but not uncritically, dominated by the question of how the survivors of Europe’s traumatic mid-twentieth century can live with its history, and themselves. Readers of this masterly study will share what Hoffman herself feels on reading Miłosz: ‘recognition and gratitude.’ ”—Roy Foster, author of On Seamus Heaney
“Like her subject, Eva Hoffman writes with a rare combination of deeply felt humanity and intellectual richness, and her portrait of Czesław Miłosz’s long life is profoundly perceptive. In phrase after telling phrase, this important book considers afresh the wider questions Miłosz’s life embodied—about exile, the ‘other Europe,’ the enduring mystery of America, and the place of the individual in history.”—Fiona Sampson, author of Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“This book is engaged, learned, and passionate in its commitment to its subject. All future critics and scholars of Miłosz should benefit immeasurably from it.”—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
