Warszawa Miłosza

ENWarsaw had an enormous influence on the formation of Czesław Miłosz. In one of his "American Notes" in Kontynenty he compared New York to pre-1939 Warsaw: New York is Warsaw, but bigger. It was a "Babylon ofd epravity,"which troubled and intimidated him, but also mesmerized him with its literary and political quarrels. Prewar left-leaning Warsaw and fascist-inclined Warsaw, the Warsaw of the Catholic personalists and the Warsaw that was home to a powerful Jewish literary enclave, the Warsaw of White Russian exiles, the Warsaw of the beautiful people and of literary bohemians, the Warsaw of the literary homosexual subculture, and then the Warsaw of the German occupation, with its ghetto and its two uprisings, the supply base for the Eastern front, the "bloody crossroads" of history, literature and politics: it was here that Miłosz's "Warsaw Essays" and his pivotal intellectual correspondence with Jerzy Andrzejewski and many poems and an anthology of underground poetry all came into being. For Miłosz, living through the occupation in Warsaw turned out to be decisive not only intellectually but also poetically. It was in this Warsaw occupied by the Germans that the poetics of the cycle "The Voices of the Poor" appeared, that The World (Naive Poems) came out -the very Miłosz diction that would secure him a place in Polish poetry.Hence, the Warsaw of the occupation, and the Warsaw of the immediate postwar period, and Stalinist Warsaw, and finally Solidarity's Warsaw, to which he returned triumphantly in 1981, all these Warsaws recur in Milosz's work, are interpreted anew, seep into each other. Years later, writing about his Warsaw years and about his Warsaw experiences, Miłosz sought out words with powerful emotional connotations. They are words of tenderness and of rage, of fascination and of revulsion. We therefore need to extract Milosz's "Warsaw experience" and to make it into a prism through which he lived Europe's 20th-century modernity.