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The senior of the Big Three of
modern Polish poetry, Czeslaw
Milosz (b. 1911) was already a recognized poet before
World War II as co-founder of Zagary, an influential
leftist/mystical/catastrophic poetic group in Vilnius (presently the
capital of independent Lithuania). He spent the War in Warsaw, working
as a concierge at the University Library there and publishing his
works in the underground. In 1945, he entered diplomatic service for
Poland's post-war
communist government. Posted first to the US and then to Paris, he defected
there to the West in 1951, and moved to California in 1960 to teach
Slavic Studies at Berkeley. As "an enemy of the People's
Republic" (Polish General Encyclopedia, 1966) and a
non-person for official Polish censorship and publishing houses, he
could return to Poland only in 1981 thanks to the Royal Swedish
Academy, which, a year previously, honored him with the Nobel Prize in
Literature as a poet "who with uncompromising
clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe
conflicts." A long-term inhabitant of Berkeley, he now shares his
year between California and the much more historic Kraków, Poland.
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