To the Editors:
In the June, 1983, issue of The New Criterion, Stanislaw Baranczak reviewed Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Witness of Poetry. . . . Mr. Baranczak quotes Milosz saying that poetry can sometimes “save nations or people,” and draws from that a conclusion that “in countries such as Poland contemporary poetry more than once proved indispensable to society’s existence; its role as a witness to reality, a defense against oppression, and a source of hope is not an abstract axiom but the concrete and personal experience of many people.”
I personally cannot say for how many people poetry plays this role, but I have a sad feeling that it would not be a difficult task to count them. As for the whole idea, it belongs, when confronted with the reality of the contemporary world, to the category of “wishful thinking.” . . .
It is true that Milosz’s poems were printed in workers’ newsletters during strikes in August, 1980, in Gdansk, and probably all over the country. It is also true that they were often next to “unionist appeals and political analyses,” but that’s the end. Apparently Mr. Baranczak is trying to suggest that there was an immediate relation between the two kinds of writing. There was one indeed, but it had much more to do with the poet than with his works. Although already a legend in literary circles, Czeslaw Milosz was virtually unknown to the general reading public in Poland at this time—especially to workers in the Gdansk shipyards. (He was only mentioned occasionally in literary magazines as one of the emigrant poets, or referred to warmly by the late Jerzy Andrzejewski in his weekly column in “Literature.”)
I remember vividly the afternoon when I heard on the radio the news of Milosz’s Nobel Prize. I went back to my students and told them the news only to learn that none of them even knew his name. They were medical students, true, and one can imagine that perhaps students of Polish literature would be more knowledgeable. But even so they were twenty-five young, intelligent, and well-educated Poles who knew nothing of our greatest living poet. I believe this illustrates well Milosz’s position in Polish cultural life before the Nobel Prize. It was obviously a terrible and sad result of a cultural policy of the state where every form of intellectual activity is supposed to support an official ideology and therefore remains under strict control.
As far as I can judge on the basis of my observations and experience from Gdansk at that time, Czeslaw Milosz after he received the prize became immediately a symbol of Polish culture, and, next to the Pope, the main source of our pride and dignity. He also gave an extraordinary support and moral justification to Poles who have chosen to emigrate, and brought dignity to their decision even in the eyes of confused readers of daily propaganda in Poland, where the freedom of choosing a place to live as well as freedom of expression of ideas are practically forbidden, although formally legal. It is a rule of thumb that it takes decades of a constant presence in the cultural circuit of the nation for a poet to establish himself to some extent as a “conscience of a nation.” But that is another romantic myth much treasured by us Poles. In the period before the Solidarity epoch but after the decision in Stockholm, only twenty thousand volumes of Milosz’s poetry had been published, which meant that they were absolutely unavailable to the common reader (which I consider myself to be). Later, when Solidarity became a major political force in the country, more than a hundred thousand volumes of his poetry were published—a significant number for a nation of thirty-five million. Milosz has a right to be proud of this. However, one has to remember that the people who made long lines in front of bookstores were trying to obtain a sort of contemporary reliquary, possession of which would make their own miserable and difficult lives a little bit brighter. It is needless to add that all that happened long after the Solidarity ideology came to the peak of its influence . . . .
Czeslaw Milosz is one of the three people whom the average Pole respects most and probably one of the few Poles whom an average foreigner has heard of. He already has his place in the history of our country. He also has a place in the hearts of Poles—and not only because they are proud of him and his achievements and find in him a basis for their own pride. One of his poems, “You Wronged a Simple Man “ became almost an anthem during the short period of hope in Poland. It will remain fixed in our collective mind as firmly as the first few words of Adam Mickiewicz’s “Pan Tadeusz” (“Lithuania, my homeland, you are as health . . .”). It will certainly take Milosz time to reach the place in Polish culture that he deserves—perhaps next to Mickiewicz, perhaps not. Milosz is a great Pole and an important poet of our time, but there is no need to credit him and his poetry with an influence that is not his and that perhaps he himself would not wish to be credited with.
Andrzej J. Stankiewicz
Allston, Massachusetts