Chekhov’s Mistess

The Unspoken We of Czeslaw Milosz

In this week’s The New Republic Adam Zegajewski writes glowingly about Czeslaw Milosz’s final book, Second Space. One thing I enjoyed about the article was how he evoked the places the poet inhabited:

Milosz reigned in the medieval city of Kraków like Goethe in Weimar, greeted in the streets by friends and strangers, visited by young and old poets, giving interviews to local and foreign journalists, and writing (or dictating) until the very end.

“Place” is not always a city, but the state of mind that comes with either being there or not being someplace else. I was shocked to think of Milosz as ever being lonely, but as Zegajewski poignantly describes:

During the many years when he lived and worked in California, he was convinced that nobody read his poetry. His loneliness was almost perfect. When he turned sixty, he later told a friend, he did not receive a single card with birthday wishes. There is an anecdote about his meeting Adam Michnik, a young but already famous dissident, in a café in Paris in the 1970s: when Michnik started to recite from memory one after another of Milosz’s poems (he can still do it), the poet burst into tears.

“Place” lives in poetry too:

His poetry speaks a very individual language; it is unmistakably Miloszian, it has a distinct biography and a distinct geography, it has the taste of his childhood in the black forests of Lithuania and of his many years in sun-burnt California, near the San Francisco Bay—and yet it also has an amazing quality of expressing the universal battle between the different metaphysics that characterized the age in which he lived.

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth described a poet as a someone “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” That seems a particularly apt description for Milosz as he was able to write, as Zegajewski says, polyphonically…

Milosz has many voices indeed; he speaks through contradictions, hesitations, moods. He is a searcher, not a claimer; or maybe somebody who claims and searches at the same time. But he is not a fragmented or divided or schizophrenic poet: the various voices speaking through him are elements of an extremely complex modern personality, but they are not a sign of the poet’s helplessness, of his failure to attain an essential integrity. Their plurality is a sign of life…

That “polyphony”, as Donald Davie says in Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, is the way the “poet finds to speak of experience on which he has no stable purchase, how he multiplies voices and perspectives to tell the complex truth,” where “I,” either actual or as a persona, is, in the face of “complex or extreme experience… no longer serviceable…” (paraphrased from Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets).

In the poem from Second Space, “Tenant” Milosz tells a story of a Soviet officer in 1940 Wilno when the city was taken over by “our Eastern neighbor:”

…He had been taught that there was no God or devil, and so he marveled at the sight of crowds praying in churches.


It gave rise to a bitter feeling at the futility of human belief and of the supplications sent up to the throne of Absence.


It is probable that he meditated on evil, i.e., on the suffering inflicted on human beings by human beings.


And on the evil for which we, therefore, share responsibility, and on the question of what our obligations are in a world thus ordered…

Milosz is at once compassionate for the officer who “had been taught,” (as opposed to just believing or not) while damning too of his struggle with meaning in the face of an absence of faith, but it is not just the officer that he’s talking about. “We” is only used twice in the poem, but there is also an unspoken we in the last sentence. Apparently the officer could not accept the world “thus ordered,” and he committed suicide that year; the poem ends with:

Most appropriate perhaps to keep silent about religion, for he disappeared without a trace among the millennia of the planet Earth, together with the uncountable others who have never ascended to any consolation.

My first pass on this poem left me wondering why I, sitting in New York 65 years later, should care about a story of a man in a place and time so far away, but it stood out in my memory and only after several readings did I feel the poem tugging at my sleeve. It was the “we” wanting my attention. We couldn’t save the officer and he couldn’t save the lives of those whose lives he refused to take; where is salvation? Also here, he is saying that suffering is not only the responsibility of those doing the inflicting but also of those who do nothing; that questions faith (and perhaps there is here a political statement on the Catholic Church’s long silence on the holocaust). My explanations could never suffice, but I think this is an example of Milosz’s “voices” speaking and what made him a poet whose work can be loved by those who never shared his world.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: March 31, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Poetry

• Comments:0
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