Miłosz na Żuławach i Żuławy Miłosza: (Mady - Sopot - Gdańsk)

ENAs we wander about the world during our lifetime, we not only leave behind our footprints, as on fresh snow, but we also take a fragment of the world with us. We weave a complicated and unique system among the lines of individual existence, and the world constantly marks every individual being. Drewnica, Sopot and Gdańsk: three different sites on the map of Poland; three important elements in Czesław Milosz's biography. In each of these places the poet has left his trace, but each of them has been internalized in a different way and his testimony about each of them is different. In Sopot there is Milosz's mother's grave; in Gdańsk his poetry became an inherent element of memory and battle, inscribed in the three shipyard crosses. Drewnica - as an element of the Żuławy landscape - awaited its separate poem. Sopot became a separated setting, excluded and private, Gdańsk a place of poetry forced to be a sign of history's commotion, while Żuławy - with Drewnica lost in the land's depression - became the theme of not merely occasional regional poetry. In this sketch I study these three authentic settings, symbolically marking the space of Milosz's new North.