Milosz

An Iconic Statesman, Poet and Nobel Laureate

Czeslaw Milosz was a Polish poet, writer and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naive" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attache in Paris and Washington, D.C., and then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) became a classic of anti-Stalinism.

From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Krakow, Poland.

MILOSZ shows the poet as a full-blooded character, a man whose life is like a novel where art sits next to political passion, sensuality next to mysticism. It exposes his obsessions and fears which pushed him into work and discipline throughout his long life, in which he, like a cyclist, had to press on the pedals in order to maintain balance, as he said in one of the interviews. MILOSZ is a portrait of the man who has been described as one who visited all hells of the 21st century.