Bear with a cross: primordial tradition in the work of Czeslaw Miłosz

ENNo other Polish poet, with perhaps the exception of Adam Mickiewicz, expresses a primordial kinship with the natural world with more lyric force than Czeslaw Miłosz. His profound emotional and instinctual rootedness in nature, and the way he uses plants and animals to express moments of existential complexity, place him closer, at times, to a Pleistocene rather than modem sensibility estranged from ancient interdependencies. This resonant use of nature in his work, particularly in his poetry, does not, of course, prevent him from voicing his intellectual suspicions of nature’s beauty and magnetism (as innocent lures for the brute laws of necessity). Nonetheless the abiding poetic power of his work derives from a Pre-Socratic (rather than Cartesian) understanding of nature as divine hieroglyph.This dissertation examines the primordial tradition, linked to remnant, pre-Christian, Lithuanian cultural beliefs, in the poetry and prose of Czeslaw Miłosz. The primordial tradition assumes a specific attitude - towards the earth, animals and plants, ancestors, and the region of one’s ancestry - that some scholars have labeled “geopiety.” Miłosz was exposed to this tradition during childhood years spent at his maternal grandparents’ estate in the Lithuanian heartland. This way of thinking about the natural world is further augmented by childhood readings propagating a very specific borderland ethos, by his love of the Pre-Socratic philosophers as a student, and by fierce local traditions Miłosz absorbed during his university days in the historic capital of Lithuania, Vilnius (in his day, Wilno). Miłosz has called himself the last poet of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and as such he has created a paradoxically real yet imaginary literary space, a Lithuanian nest, consisting of his maternal grandparents’ estate and the remnants of a pre- Christian understanding of the world, to which he returns repeatedly in times of crisis. While many of Miłosz’s works bear traces of the primordial tradition and they will be discussed here, this dissertation will focus mainly on close readings of the poems - “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” “Diary of a Naturalist,” and The World (Naive Poems) - and the novel The Issa Valley.