MAKING SENSE of CZESLAW MILOSZ: a POET's FORMATIVE DIALOGUE with HIS TRANSNATIONAL AUDIENCES by Joanna Mazurska
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MAKING SENSE OF CZESLAW MILOSZ: A POET’S FORMATIVE DIALOGUE WITH HIS TRANSNATIONAL AUDIENCES By Joanna Mazurska Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Michael Bess Professor Marci Shore Professor Helmut W. Smith Professor Frank Wcislo Professor Meike Werner To my parents, Grazyna and Piotr Mazurscy II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the members of my Dissertation Committee: Michael Bess, Marci Shore, Helmut Smith, Frank Wcislo, and Meike Werner. Each of them has contributed enormously to my project through providing professional guidance and encouragement. It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge the support of my mentor Professor Michael Bess, who has been for me a constant source of intellectual inspiration, and whose generosity and sense of humor has brightened my academic path from the very first day in graduate school. My thesis would have remained a dream had it not been for the institutional and financial support of my academic home - the Vanderbilt Department of History. I am grateful for the support from the Vanderbilt Graduate School Summer Research Fund, the George J. Graham Jr. Fellowship at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Max Kade Center Graduate Student Research Grant, the National Program for the Development of the Humanities Grant from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and the New York University Remarque Institute Visiting Fellowship. I wish to thank to my friends at the Vanderbilt Department of History who have kept me company on this journey with Milosz. I owe my deepest gratitude to my close friends involved directly in this project: Vivian Finch, Amanda Johnson, Lindsay Johnson, Angela Sutton, Jeremy DeWaal, and Agnieszka Wozniak. My work has also benefited from the intellectual guidance of Professor Jerzy W. Borejsza and Piotr Kloczowski. Nobody has been more important to me in the course of pursuing this project than the members of my family. I would like to thank to my parents, my grandparents, my brother Krzysztof and my fiancé Karol for their unwavering support and love. III CONTENTS Page Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 5 Milosz: Biographical Sketch .............................................................................................25 1. “What has a poet to do if he cannot express commiseration and terror?”: Milosz’s Dialogue with his Polish Audience in the 1940s ....................................32 Poet diplomat ........................................................................................................34 A writer and “The Reader” ...................................................................................48 People’s Poland’s supreme poet ...........................................................................52 A treatise on ironic loyalty ....................................................................................67 Nowhere to publish, nothing to write ...................................................................73 The last battle over poetry .....................................................................................82 2. Neither East nor West: The Poet and Cold War Politics .............................................96 The transatlantic intellectual community ..............................................................98 In a jar with spiders .............................................................................................108 A story of one sickness .......................................................................................119 On the Galapagos Islands ....................................................................................128 “Voices of Disillusion” .......................................................................................139 Toward the garden of poetry ...............................................................................152 3. Beyond Nationalism: Milosz in a Dialogue with East Central European Intellectuals .........................................................................................................161 Gente Lithuanus, natione Polonus ......................................................................165 “I have to admit, to Polishness I am allergic” .....................................................172 Private obligations ..............................................................................................190 Looking for a center ............................................................................................210 4. Found in Translation: Milosz and his American Audience ........................................221 A poet in exile .....................................................................................................224 Pains of addressing an American audience .........................................................229 The poet of aftermath ..........................................................................................236 Getting rid of a historic mask ..............................................................................246 “My name was made in America” ......................................................................255 IV “Yourself disconsolate, you comfort us with your poetry” ................................261 5. “Fortunate the Nation that has a Poet”: The Reception of Milosz in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s ........................................................................268 The invisible rope ...............................................................................................272 The émigré poet, the censor, and the underground publisher .............................278 Father and sons ...................................................................................................290 “That morning, people lined up for bread and for Milosz” ................................302 “On the purring breast of the nation…” ..............................................................310 Conclusions: What is an Author? ...................................................................................326 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................332 V INTRODUCTION “I am Milosz, I must be Milosz Being Milosz, I don’t want to be Milosz, I kill the Milosz within me To be more Milosz.”1 MAKING SENSE OF MILOSZ In 1981, after thirty years in exile, Czeslaw Milosz returned to Poland, hailed as a national hero. This event reveals the particularly Eastern European phenomenon of entanglement between literature and politics, through which a writer becomes a spiritual leader whose words exercise quasi-demiurgic power over his fellow citizens. In my dissertation, I investigate the mechanism of the politics of poetry in Central and Eastern Europe, and argue that within this paradigm, the writer’s position is only superficially privileged. In fact, the audience infringes on the author’s creative freedom by subordinating the literary value of his work to a narrowly political reading. With poetry having always been closely linked to the political life of the Polish nation, and the position of the leading poet carrying a strong symbolic value, Milosz’s Polish audiences strived to create an image of Milosz that would serve as a useful tool in their political battles: from supporting a nascent socialist system in Poland in the 1940s to boosting the 1980s anticommunist opposition. 1 Witold Gombrowicz, ”Przeklete zdrobnienie znowu dalo się mi we znaki (Obroncom poezji w odpowiedzi),” Kultura 7-8 (1952). 1 Rather than focusing on Milosz’s individual perception of his task as an intellectual, this dissertation aims at revealing how his intellectual responsibility emerged through a dialectical process of engagement with five distinct constituencies among his readership. The principal methodological innovation of my project consists in thinking of intellectuals such as Milosz as products of a give-and-take process in which their identity is gradually shaped and catalyzed in dialectical interaction with their audiences. I argue that Milosz’s audiences deployed Cold War politics in order to co-author the poet’s identity according to their political needs. In a dialectical process, the readers of Milosz’s poetic and prose works tried to impose certain conflicting intellectual images on Milosz – that of the leading poet of socialist Poland, an anti-communist political writer, or of the Polish national poet. While some of Milosz’s friends played an instrumental role in supporting his poetic work and in the crystallization of his artistic self, the other twentieth-century audiences tended to approach Milosz’s work through the lens of their own political interests. The aim of this project then is to show an intellectual “in the making” by investigating the following questions: What did it mean to be an Eastern European poet and intellectual in the twentieth century? Why were Milosz’s readers invested in creating his artistic and intellectual image? What mechanisms did they apply in order to make sense of Milosz? My dissertation suggests a different picture of the role of the twentieth century intellectual, as it offers approaches that focus primarily on Milosz’s