The Captive Mind by Milosz
The Captive Mind (1953)
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Jane Zielonko
251 pages - Vintage International
A few people on my friends list had the great idea of reading something related to the theme of Remembrance Day, and so I decided to do the same, and picked out this book from my 'to-read' pile. Though it actually does have a lot to do with war, it covers much more ground as well.
Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family, and while he pursued his dream of being a poet, he also studied law. Before the Second World War he held somewhat leftist ideals, but as the Soviets took tighter and tighter control of Poland, he decided to take his chance to defect to the West. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
This book is an examination of the way in which the totalitarian ideology of Soviet Russia takes hold in the minds of certain segments of the population, and specifically it looks at the stories of four different writers who became active voices in the promotion of Stalinism, sometimes at the very same moment when their own families were being deported to slave camps. Milosz himself attributes his own decision not to accept the conditions of life under Communist rule not to a strong character or a sharp mind, but to a sick feeling in his gut. The human mind can accept and tolerate almost anything, he says, but the gut can only take so much before it rebels.
This book can be quite a harrowing read, as it takes the reader into the concentration camps of the Nazis, as well as explores the way that the Red Army stood by, delaying their march until the Warsaw Uprising was crushed by the Nazis, and then goes into the many deportations, slave labour camps, and wholesale mass-murders and genocides carried out by the Communists. The four writers highlighted found a role for themselves in the new totalitarian society, saw themselves praised and rewarded, and thus were able to, at least for a time, divorce the reality in front of their faces from what they expressed in their writings.
As someone of Lithuanian descent, it was especially affecting for me to read Milosz's account of the fate of the Baltic states, such as the quote from a Soviet official that in the future, "There will be a Lithuania; but there will be no Lithuanians." (Pg. 230) Not only did the Communists eliminate a large portion of the population with massacres and deportations to slave-labour camps in Siberia, but this very account of it was written at a time when it was not unthinkable that the party heads in Moscow would decide that it was historically necessary for the salvation of humanity, according to their Marxist science, to finish the job of extermination.
This turned out to be an excellent read to mark Remembrance Day, because it is anything but an angry or simplistic attack against Communisim. Instead, it is simply a sober account that stands witness to the people and nations who are caught, "Like a fly between two giants." Many of the ceremonies of Remembrance honour the soldiers, but make little mention of the civilian cost which is almost always many times greater. Even for those of us who live in 'free' nations, we can see today that the civilian cost of far-off wars is beneath the concern of governments.
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Jane Zielonko
251 pages - Vintage International
A few people on my friends list had the great idea of reading something related to the theme of Remembrance Day, and so I decided to do the same, and picked out this book from my 'to-read' pile. Though it actually does have a lot to do with war, it covers much more ground as well.
Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family, and while he pursued his dream of being a poet, he also studied law. Before the Second World War he held somewhat leftist ideals, but as the Soviets took tighter and tighter control of Poland, he decided to take his chance to defect to the West. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
This book is an examination of the way in which the totalitarian ideology of Soviet Russia takes hold in the minds of certain segments of the population, and specifically it looks at the stories of four different writers who became active voices in the promotion of Stalinism, sometimes at the very same moment when their own families were being deported to slave camps. Milosz himself attributes his own decision not to accept the conditions of life under Communist rule not to a strong character or a sharp mind, but to a sick feeling in his gut. The human mind can accept and tolerate almost anything, he says, but the gut can only take so much before it rebels.
This book can be quite a harrowing read, as it takes the reader into the concentration camps of the Nazis, as well as explores the way that the Red Army stood by, delaying their march until the Warsaw Uprising was crushed by the Nazis, and then goes into the many deportations, slave labour camps, and wholesale mass-murders and genocides carried out by the Communists. The four writers highlighted found a role for themselves in the new totalitarian society, saw themselves praised and rewarded, and thus were able to, at least for a time, divorce the reality in front of their faces from what they expressed in their writings.
As someone of Lithuanian descent, it was especially affecting for me to read Milosz's account of the fate of the Baltic states, such as the quote from a Soviet official that in the future, "There will be a Lithuania; but there will be no Lithuanians." (Pg. 230) Not only did the Communists eliminate a large portion of the population with massacres and deportations to slave-labour camps in Siberia, but this very account of it was written at a time when it was not unthinkable that the party heads in Moscow would decide that it was historically necessary for the salvation of humanity, according to their Marxist science, to finish the job of extermination.
This turned out to be an excellent read to mark Remembrance Day, because it is anything but an angry or simplistic attack against Communisim. Instead, it is simply a sober account that stands witness to the people and nations who are caught, "Like a fly between two giants." Many of the ceremonies of Remembrance honour the soldiers, but make little mention of the civilian cost which is almost always many times greater. Even for those of us who live in 'free' nations, we can see today that the civilian cost of far-off wars is beneath the concern of governments.
- 'The war years taught me that a man should not take a pen in his hands merely to communicate to others his own despair and defeat. This is too cheap a commodity; it takes too little effort to produce it for a man to pride himself on having done so. Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble--kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog--emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real "wasteland" is much more terrible than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism.' (pg 216)