The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Milosz's ABC's by Czeslaw Milosz
David Seed

Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz’s ABC’s. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 313 pp. $24.00.

In Polish culture an ABC is a genre of short prose pieces arranged alphabetically, a hybrid form that includes memoir, essay, and anecdote. Often the title only gives a partial hint of the subject: “Adam and Eve,” for instance, turns into an epigrammatic reflection on mortality. “Blasphemy” starts with religion and shifts round to considering how the individual relates to communities held together by collective convictions. This marks one of the many points in the collection where the question of allegiance arises. Born in a territory disputed by Lithuania and Poland but then held under the Russian Empire, Milosz has experienced shifts in national and political circumstance that have shaped his writing. Thus he compares the styles of protest in Paris and the U.S. in 1968, discusses dissident Soviet writers like Andrei Amalrik, but reserves his bitterest scorn for the attacks on Camus by Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre for not toeing the pro-Soviet line. In contrast, Milosz’s respect goes to independent thinkers like Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon broke the taboo of such allegiance, or Balzac, whose novels, he argues, are constructed on a coherent set of philosophical positions. Given that it became his second country, it is not surprising that America should occupy a large part of Milosz’s attention: “What splendor! What poverty! . . . What hypocrisy!” Through its cinema and literature America penetrated his imagination in the thirties-hence his commemoration of neglected writers like Louis Adamic. Milosz reserves special praise for Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Frost, and he records what an important part was played by Henry Miller in the sixties. In his envoi Milosz calls the present volume an “instead of” book: instead of a novel, instead of an essay, instead of a memoir. Nevertheless, his ABC’s manage to combine aspects of all three. [David Seed]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Milosz's ABC's by Czeslaw Milosz David Seed Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz’s ABC’s. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 313 pp. $24.00. In Polish culture an ABC is a genre of short prose pieces arranged alphabetically, a hybrid form that includes memoir, essay, and anecdote. Often the title only gives a partial hint of the subject: “Adam and Eve,” for instance, turns into an epigrammatic reflection on mortality. “Blasphemy” starts with religion and shifts round to considering how the individual relates to communities held together by collective convictions. This marks one of the many points in the collection where the question of allegiance arises. Born in a territory disputed by Lithuania and Poland but then held under the Russian Empire, Milosz has experienced shifts in national and political circumstance that have shaped his writing. Thus he compares the styles of protest in Paris and the U.S. in 1968, discusses dissident Soviet writers like Andrei Amalrik, but reserves his bitterest scorn for the attacks on Camus by Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre for not toeing the pro-Soviet line. In contrast, Milosz’s respect goes to independent thinkers like Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon broke the taboo of such allegiance, or Balzac, whose novels, he argues, are constructed on a coherent set of philosophical positions. Given that it became his second country, it is not surprising that America should occupy a large part of Milosz’s attention: “What splendor! What poverty! . . . What hypocrisy!” Through its cinema and literature America penetrated his imagination in the thirties-hence his commemoration of neglected writers like Louis Adamic. Milosz reserves special praise for Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Frost, and he records what an important part was played by Henry Miller in the sixties. In his envoi Milosz calls the present volume an “instead of” book: instead of a novel, instead of an essay, instead of a memoir. Nevertheless, his ABC’s manage to combine aspects of all three. [David Seed]

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