$XGLQJD3HOXULW\Wť7LNXLâLHQť 6RXUFHVRI&ODVVLFLVPLQ&RQWHPSRUDU\ 3ROLVKDQG/LWKXDQLDQ/LWHUDWXUH The following article discusses the origins of Polish and Lithuanian Classical views and stylistics, their parallel development, and principal differences and similarities. It is the viewpoint of this article that the work of renowned Polish poet, Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, who was born, raised and attended university in Lithuania, is an important reference point to evaluate phenomena of Clacissicm at the end of the 20th century (Neo-Classicism, Post- Classicism). Miłosz’s work also formulated and founded the most important reference points which illustrate universal European ideas in Polish and Lithuanian literature. Unlike Romanticism, which distinguished individual features of national self-consciousness, Classicism, in the late 20th century, helps in the understanding of a more universal sketch of the European mentality. Unlike the dominance in Polish poetry of the Christian myth (Paradise, Apocalypse), the active engagement of Western philosophical ideas, and the analysis of history and time, the Lithuanian version of Classicism, which formed much later than the Polish, but was largely influenced by Miłosz (together with the intellectual contribution and personal contacts of Tomas Venclova) is prone to base the tragic comprehension of history not only on the Christian myth, the version of Christian history, but also the natural version of the religion of the Ancient Balts and the Orient (Veda, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism). In this way, the motifs of the tragic eschatology and the hope for salvation, which is so important in the work of Miłosz and contemporary Polish literature, develop unexpected interpretations in Lithuanian poetry. Though, these interpretations, which have a single, common base, are also a part of the European mentality and European poetry today. The influence of the poet, essayist, and writer Czesław Miłosz (1911– 2004) in Polish literature raises many questions to this day. The life and creative career of this poet, who chose a self-imposed exile (in 1951, Miłosz requested political exile to France; later he emigrated to $XGLQJD3HOXULW\Wť7LNXLâLHQť the United States) rather than conforming to the dictates of a totalitarian regime in Poland during the Soviet era, is considered, in contemporary Poland, representative of a moral voice – a voice that spoke out during a complicated period of cultural and political transformation. Miłosz’s voice provided moral guidelines for East and Central European culture. In the study of Polish literature, which strives to engage deep Christian humanism and is influenced by Greek philosophical thought – Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Descartes and Nietzsche – these guidelines are referred to as Neoclassical. Czesław Miłosz is called “Europe’s son of the millennium” because his poetry and prose have managed to penetrate the very core of European thought – he interprets and critically reflects on the foundations of European intellectual thinking and art motifs. Miłosz’s moral voice is interesting not only because he often mentions his native Lithuania, describing it as a fog-covered land of myths along the Nevėžis River, or because he extols the cosmopolitan culture of Vilnius, but also because this land of myth, when considered in terms of Miłosz’s literary and essayistic creative work, in a larger sense – the poet’s death as well as the post-totalitarian era – serves not merely as a beautiful metaphor, but as an eternal source of memory and love, along with the poet’s own creative, vital essence – the foundations of Christian eschatology that portray man’s life in Paradise, his fall, and his complicated return. Lithuania, Vilnius is where the poet’s story began; it can also be considered the source of Miłosz’s philosophical and religious beliefs, a unique ontology of the poet’s worldview. The eschatology of Christian mythology could generally be considered the foundational well-spring of mysticism in Miłosz’s work. The shores of this Christian mythology of Paradise, still oblivious to the bitter fruit of knowledge, are the regions of Lithuania. Ewa Bieńkowska, a literary scholar, has noted that the landscapes in Miłosz’s collection Trzy zimy (Three Winters, 1936), just as in his later works, although imbued with images of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, still retain contours of the Lithuanian landscape, seared in the poet’s memories of childhood and adolescence. From the images of Vilnius and Šateiniai, drowned in valleys, to the panoramas opening up onto the sea, the landscape that .