Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America

Front matter

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Chapter 1: Activités de Surface — 10 The Circumstances of the Departure for the USA — 10

In London — 10

In New York — 12

“The Special Service of Keeping the Country Informed” —— 15 Representing the Consulate in the Region — 18

At the Polish Embassy in Washington — 20

Diplomatic Activity after the Election in Poland —— 21

Public Speaking Activities — 24

An Exhibition of Polish Books in New York — 25

The American Garden of Science —— 27

The Realities of the Cold War — 28

The Turn of 1948 — 30

Organization of the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wroclaw — 33 Expositions of Wanda Telakowska’s Exhibition — 34

Creative Work after 1948 — 36

Participation in the Conference for Peace —— 37

The Future and Its Dilemmas — 39

On the Visit to Poland in 1949 — 41

On Returning to Washington — 42 How He Left the USA — 45 The "Miłosz Case” — 48

Chapter 2: Mitosz as a Public Speaker and Popularizer of Polish Culture in the USA — 50 Articles and Talks in English until 1947 — 57

The English-Language Talks — 69

«Literatura w Polsce” [Literature in Poland] — 70

The Chicago Lecture — 80

Chapter 3: Around the Series of Articles Życie w USA [Life in the USA] — 91 Introductory Remarks — 91

In the Sphere of Politics and Economics —— 102 Around the Foreign Policy of President Truman —— 105 Around the Internal Policy of the Truman Administration — 115

Mitosz’s Contradictions of American Capitalism —— 136 Reception of the Series Życie w USA — 144

Chapter 4: From Mediation to Meditation: Mitosz’s Articles of the Years 1946-1950

— 148 Transoceanic Observations — 149 “Notatniki nowojorskie” [The New York Notebooks] — 156 Essays on Culture — 161 Chapter 5: Mitosz in the American Reading Room — 173

|. Before World War Two —— 173

Plan for an Anthology of English-Language Poetry — 174

Il. Participation in the Literary Life of the United States — 175

Ill. American War Literature — 178

IV. American Literary Portraits — 185

1. On Hemingway — 187

2. On Faulkner — 190

3. On Miller — 194

4. On Moby-Dick — 196

V. Concealed Readings in America — 198

VI. Faced with Poetry in the English Language — 203

1. “List półprywatny o poezji” [A Semi-Private Letter about Poetry] — 204 2. “Wprowadzenie w Amerykanów” [Introduction to the Americans] — 206 3. "Awantura o nagrodę” [Controversy over an Award] —— 209

4. “American Poetry” — Not Only on Alain Bosquet’s Anthology —— 213 VII. Translations of Poetry — 214

Chapter 6: Miłosz and Multi-Racial Society in the United States — 226 Miłosz and Native Americans — 226 Mitosz and Black Americans — 239

Chapter 7: From “No” to “Yes.” Around Daylight — 253

Chapter 8: Around “Notatnik amerykański” [The American Notebook] — 267 Construction of “Notatnik amerykański” [The American Notebook] — 267 Colloquium on the Duties of Writer and Literature — 269

Chapter 9: Reassessments of the American Postwar Period — 282 Glossary — 300

Index of Works by Czestaw Mitosz — 325

To Frank Surma

Abbreviations

Extracts with titles in Polish within the main text have been translated by Michał

Janowski.

Zaraz po wojnie Kontynenty Autoportret przekorny

Podróżny świata

Abecadło Inne abecadło

Zaraz po wojnie. Korespondencja z pisarzami 1945-1950, Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2007.

Kontynenty. Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2007.

Czesława Miłosza autoportret przekorny. Rozmowy przeprowadził Aleksander Fiut, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1994.

Renata Gorczyńska [Ewa Czarnecka], Podróżny świata.

Rozmowy z Czesławem Miłoszem. Komentarze, Kraków 1992.

Abecadło. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997.

Inne abecadło. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1998.

Rozmowy polskie 1978-1998 Rozmowy polskie 1979—1998. Kraków: Wydawnictwo

Literackie, 2006.

Rozmowy polskie 1999-2004 Rozmowy polskie 1999-2004. Kraków: Wydawnictwo

Wiersze 1 Wiersze 2 Wiersze 3 Przekłady poetyckie

Literackie, 2010.

Wiersze tom 1. Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2001.

Wiersze tom 2. Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2002.

Wiersze tom 3. Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2003.

Przekłady poetyckie. Kraków: SIW „Znak”, 2005.

Extracts with undermentioned abbreviations have been taken from the translations

Miłosz's ABC’s Invisible Rope The Issa Valley Native Realm

A Year of the Hunter and editions:

Mitosz’s ABC's. Trans. Madeline G. Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

An Invisible Rope. Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. Ed. By C. L.

Haven, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.

The Issa Valley. Trans. from the Polish Louis Iribarne.

First publ. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981.

Native Realm. Trans. Catherine S. Leach. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981.

A Year of the Hunter. Transl. Madeline G. Levine, New York: Farrar, Strauss 8 Giroux, 1994.

Foreword: From the Adventures of a Twentieth- Century Gulliver

For the English-language reader of Czesław Milosz’s work who knows it only from translations of his poems and essays, Ewa Kołodziejczyk's book will be a real surprise, and undoubtedly a fascinating read. The author describes a little-known fragment of the Nobel laureate’s biography — his stay in the United States from 1945 to 1950. The special value of this book, difficult to overestimate, is that it is based on rich, meticulously collected source material. It consists of texts by Mitosz from Polish and American magazines, but also, which is particularly valuable, his unpublished texts, preserved in various archives. Particularly interesting is the comparison of texts published in print, i.e. various articles, columns or essays, with secret reports sent by the poet to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw.

What portrait of Czesław Miłosz emerges from Ewa Kolodziejczyk’s book? The simplest thing to say is that this is a visual description of the adventures of a twentieth-century Gulliver. This character was close to the poet, as the poem “Do Jonathana Swifta” [To Jonathan Swift] makes clear. Like his literary protagonist, Miłosz is forced to constantly face unexpected, risky experiences, different ways of thinking, and different systems of values, to constantly play the game imposed by changing social situations, adopt multiple masks and use mimicry in the process of adapting to surprising conditions, different cultural norms, and customs.

After all, this outstanding poet, the future author of the The Captive Mind, decides to play in the United States the role of a diplomat of the People’s Republic of Poland. This Polish citizen, after the experiences of war, occupation and the imposition of a totalitarian system in his homeland, finds himself at the other end of the world, where the historical experience shapes individual and collective attitudes only to a small extent. This witness of brutal degradation of humanity, cruel Nazi terror, round-ups on the streets, executions, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the total extermination of a city of more than one million residents and the invasion of the Red Army — is confronted with a society for which the war happened somewhere far away, while respect for individual rights and for fundamental moral principles remains obvious and indisputable. The European, coming from the Old World that was ruined and impoverished by war, finds himself in the New World, which boasts of its prosperity, a far higher level of development and forms of social and political organization little known to him.

As part of the background of these multifaceted experiences of the twentieth-century Gulliver, the author includes Harry Truman’s presidency and the beginnings of the Cold War in the United States, while in Poland and Central Europe, the growing dependence on the Soviet Union. It will be particularly interesting to an American reader to follow the process of getting to know his homeland in a certain historical period through the eyes ofa clever observer whois, after all, not free from Eurocentrism. As Ewa Kotodziejczyk convincingly shows, despite the pressure of the outside world,

Foreword: From the Adventures of a Twentieth-Century Gulliver —— XIII still hurting, full of moral scruples and aware of the price he has to pay for political conformism, Czesław Miłosz wants to remain faithful to his principles at all costs. Thus, he continues his efforts to bring English-language literature and American culture closer to the Polish reader through his translations and commentaries, and at the same time becomes an active promoter of Polish culture in the United States — as much in American intellectual circles as in the Polish community.

As in the case of Swift's hero, Miłosz's American adventures described by Ewa Kołodziejczyk form a parable about uprooting and putting down roots again. Gulliver, after all those adventures returned to his homeland; the Polish poet born in Lithuania was not given a chance to do so. After the collapse of the Soviet system and Poland regaining independence, he did not return to live in Wilno, the city of his youth, but in Krakow. But his first encounter with America remained an incredibly important period in his creative biography and in many ways it sculpted his poetic imagination.

Aleksander Fiut

Acknowledgements

The book had been taking shape for a long time — since the year 2000. I made the decision to write it at the beginning of 2009, despite a multitude of doubts. It was connected with the reconstruction of Czesław Miłosz's collection of postwar works which remain scattered across Poland and all over the world, which made the endeavor difficult at the outset. I owe a debt of gratitude to many people and institutions in Poland and the United States for allowing me access to Miłosz's texts that were either unknown or difficult to access.

My research work in the United States was made possible in 2011, thanks to being awarded the Alexander and Christina Schenker Fellowship. I was able to conduct research in the Czesław Miłosz archive of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I am deeply grateful to the Schenkers for funding the fellowship to help scholars in the humanities interested in studying the archives of this extraordinary library. It is difficult to overestimate its importance for scholars of Polish literature, who have made efforts to integrate the knowledge of the scattered literature of the twentieth century. It is all the more difficult to estimate the value of the meetings and discussions with the founders of the fellowship. These meetings took place in such a charming atmosphere that it is not possible to remember them with anything but affection and longing. Working in the Beinecke Library is one ofthe greatest pleasures a researcher dedicated to archival work may experience. Schenker Fellows are cared for from the moment the Fellowship is awarded and indefinitely afterward. I would like to thank Ms. Doreen Powell and Ms. Stacy Smith for their care regarding the successful organization of the fellowship and my stay in New Haven, and Ms. Natalia Sciarini for carefully monitoring my orders, thanks to which I received all the excellent quality scans of manuscripts on time. I would like to thank all the librarians and staff of the Beinecke Library, in particular Ms. Moira Fitzgerald, who oversaw the progress of our work on a daily basis, for her professionalism, commitment, and kindness. I would like to thank Doctors Elspeth and Wojciech Jajdelski for their help in preparing my application for the scholarship at the Beinecke Library.

My stay of one month on the U.S. East Coast in 2011 was replete with adventures of non-scholarly nature. When Hurricane Irene made landfall, I was in a hurry to leave New York, where I had been staying for several days prior to the start of the fellowship at the Beinecke Library, when my reservation for a room in New Haven was cancelled, forcing me to find new accommodation for the entire period in just one day. In these difficult circumstances, invaluable help came from Mr. Frank Surma, to whom this book is dedicated, who kindly lent me his helping hand, as did Ms. Linda Hallenbeck, who gave us shelter from the hurricane in Albany. My first photographs of the hotel in western Manhattan, where Janina and Czesław Miłosz lived in 1946, were taken in August 2011, on the memorable night of the hurricane, around one A.M., thanks to

Acknowledgements —— XV the determination of Frank Surma, who, despite a knee injury, arrived there with me several hours before the closing of the New York Subway.

My research in New Haven made me realize that on the East Coast of the United States there were many more archives necessary for my work. A return to New York was possible thanks to an invitation to the East Central European Center at Columbia University, which I owe to the commitment of Dr. Anna Frajlich-Zając and Professor John Micgiel. This invitation was a condition for applying for a scholarship from the Kosciuszko Foundation, which I would like to thank for supporting me with a grant for research. I would also like to thank Professors Alexander Schenker, Marian Stala and Ryszard Nycz for recommending my candidacy for the scholarship, and Dr. Jeffrey Mancini for his meticulous reading of my application. I thank Director Iwona Drag-Korga and President Magdalena Kapuścińska for their hospitality at the Józef Pitsudski Institute during the scholarship. Three months of research work at the Butler Library in Columbia, the New York Public Library, and at the Library of the Jozef Pilsudski Institute in spring 2013 enabled me to build a vision of the book as a whole and to find a great deal of information about the realities of postwar New York and Washington. The staff of the Kosciuszko Foundation, Columbia University, the Butler Library and the Józef Piłsudski Institute shared my enthusiasm and were personally involved in helping with the project that they themselves considered important. I would particularly like to thank Professor Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier for making the Manfred Kridl archive in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library available.

It is a priceless source of knowledge about Polish studies at Columbia, the relations between Polish emigrants and government diplomacy, and a testimony to the meetings, cooperation and conversations with young Miłosz, who found constant support in his former teacher from Wilno. Similar thanks are owed to Mr. Henryk Grynberg, who made available to me the archive of his own writings in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, including his correspondence with Czestaw Mitosz, which had not been catalogued. Daily professional help in archiving the sources was provided by the manager of the Digital Humanities Center in the Butler Library, Mr. Bob Scott, as well as an employee of the center, Dr. Zane Mackin. I am grateful to Dr. David Goldfarb from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York for his suggestions, bibliographical guidelines and contacts with Mitosz’s collaborators and American translators. I would like to thank the staff of the Library of Congress, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the United Nations Archive in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Archive, the Guggenheim Museum Archive, Hunter College, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Holyoke College, Smith College and Amherst College for conducting searches related to Miłosz's stay on the East Coast for me. Both American scholarships were of great personal value to me, going far beyond the academic sphere. The efforts of Ms. Katarzyna Tychanska, Mrs. Anna Frajlich-Zajac, Mr. Władysław Zajac, and Mr. John Micgiel resulted in me leaving New York enriched by the experience of our encounters.

XVI — Acknowledgements

Historical literary books are always written in a certain academic environment and they owe much of their value to it. I had the pleasure and privilege of talking about my book with many people who were interested in it. For all the inspiration and kindness coming from these conversations I would like to express my gratitude. In particular, the reviewers, Prof. Zdzisław Łapiński and Józef Olejniczak, who contributed to a similar degree to the improvement of this dissertation; thanks to their opinions it was published in the Publishing House of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

This monograph brought me two important awards: The Radom Literary Award in 2015 and the Tadeusz Kotarbiński Prize founded by the University of Łódź in 2016, which, because of its patron, is particularly pleasing to me. They contributed to obtaining a grant from the National Program for the Development of the Humanities for its translation. I would like to thank Mr. Antoni Miłosz for his permission to reuse extensive fragments of his father's work in the English version of the book. I would like to thank its translator, Dr. Michał Janowski, for his enormous work, thanks to which the book can reach lovers of Czesław Miłosz 's work all over the world.

Ewa Kołodziejczyk

Introduction

Czesław Miłosz is, at times, called an American poet. This means one thing in Poland, and something else in the United States. To Polish readers, this description is mainly related to the moment of his departure from Europe to take up employment at the University of California in Berkeley, and his settlement for many years in California, where his new poems and essays were written. Miłosz is to them an American poet, in a biographical sense, from the time he started living at Grizzly Peak until his return to Krakow, and in a symbolic sense, for as long as he cooperated with the publishing market, participated in literary life, and was an ambassador of Polish literature across the ocean. He is an American poet to the extent that his work was influenced by the thought and work of those cultural circles, in which many other émigré writers were immersed in the twentieth century. Miłosz's acceptance of American citizenship is of only secondary importance here and cannot be treated as declaratory by readers of Szukanie ojczyzny [In Search of a Homeland]. The question of the American profile of the Nobel laureate, which is more and more frequent in Poland lately, is related to the degree to which he grew into California, about the nature of his disputes with America, and about the unique features of his American outlook on the Old Continent, the New Continent, and the world. There has been growing interest in his conversations with American writers, also in translation, his academic activity, his influence on university students, some of whom are today well-known translators and poets in their own right, and the influence of cosmopolitan campus and metropolises on his style, his work, and his thinking."

From the American perspective, it took the author of Osobny zeszyt [The Separate Notebooks] much longer to become an American poet and he was not entirely independent in this process. To put it differently, this ennobling term came from the local literary milieu,” and more broadly, it went hand in hand with the transformations

1 The search for answers to these and other questions was the subject of the International Scientific Conference “Ameryka Miłosza” [Miłosz's America] organized by the Department of Contemporary Literature and Literary Criticism of the Institute of Polish Studies of the Pedagogical University of Krakow on November 16-18, 2011. The fruit of the conference is the volume Miedzy Mitoszem a Miłoszem [Between Miłosz and Miłosz], a monothematic issue of the journal Przekładaniec 2011 no. 5. Prior to this, Miłosz in the circle of California writers was presented by the monothematic issue of NaGłos 1997, no. 26-28.

2 Miłosz said, “I find it a rare triumph and privilege that I am considered by my colleagues, American poets and critics, an American poet. Solely on the basis of translations. It is a rare phenomenon for a poet writing in another language to be adopted by the American poetic community. I appreciate this. (...) No, the fact that others consider me to be (almost) an American poet is very pleasant for me, but it does not change my attitude toward my own workshop. I have been writing and continue to write poems in Polish. I don't have any tendency to claim to be an English-language poet.” Ameryka Poetów [America of Poets]. Interview with Elżbieta Sawicka (Rozmowy polskie 1979-1998 [Polish Discussions 1979-1998] 716).

that the definition of Americanness underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. As a result of these, the term has a wider range of meanings, and touches more radically on the issue of literary and personal identity.* It goes without saying how much Polish critics, artists and researchers have done to popularize Miłosz's work in the United States: Aleksander Schenker, Bogdana Carpenter, Anna Frajlich-Zajac, Stanisław Barańczak, Adam Zagajewski, Bożena Karwowska, Bożena Shallcross, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, and how the group of English-language poets, translators and critics influenced his image, including Leonard Nathan, Kenneth Rexroth, Helen Vendler, Donald Davie, Lillian Valee, Louis Iribarne, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Madeline Levine, Robert Faggen and Clare Cavanagh. A symbolic milestone on this road was the celebration of Miłosz's centenary,* which was marked by sessions and exhibitions presenting him as an American artist, and earlier the edition of memories of the international circle of his friends and collaborators,’ preceded by a volume of interviews from 2006.6

It would be difficult to overestimate the amount of critical and translational output, thanks to which the contours of Mitosz’s American portrait are becoming ever clearer. However, it is also necessary to return to the landmark year of 1960, when he had only set off for Berkeley, and ask about the awareness with which he discovered America, where fifteen years before he spent those consequential five years, and where he apparently took refuge from the consequences of the Sovietization of his native part of Europe. After all, he did not go to California for the first time in the 1960s, with a literary and historical awareness acquired in a European library. On the contrary: he returned to America as someone familiar with its realities and its lifestyle, with the reasoning and actions of its people, aware of many local customs

3 These transformations were discussed perceptively by Bożena Karwowska, who wrote “Let us also recall that the Milosz’s ‘American’ period was the time of transformations and of opening English-speaking societies to otherness — to national, sexual, and religious minorities, to the rise of multicultural societies, to emancipation of those who were traditionally pushed to the margins of non/existence. (...) Multicultural societies, characterized by their cultural mix and hybrid character, at the end of the previous century started to change their approach to national literatures, and to accept within them also the writing of multicultural immigrants. In Milosz’s case, we may say that a bilateral process was underway — both the writer tried to reach his English-language readers, and the social transformations created in the English-speaking world readers who were more ‘tuned into’ his work.” In idem: “Czestaw Miłosz i jego anglojęzyczni czytelnicy” [Czesław Miłosz and his English-language Readers], Ruch Literacki 2011, no. 3, pp. 260-261.

4 On October 27, 2011 at Columbia University a public reading of Milosz’s poems in English was held with the participation of Helen Vendler and Alana Timberlake, organized by Anna Frajlich-Zając. The conference at Yale University was held on November 4-5, 2011.

5 An Invisible Rope. Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.

6 Miłosz, Czesław: Conversations. Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

and problems, well versed in various circulations of culture and information, fluent in English, with a rich and current knowledge of the literature of the linguistic circles that permeated it.

Little is known about the postwar period, when Miłosz built this extensive awareness. For various reasons, it has not been the subject of investigations and research. Not only because the question of the poet’s American traits, posed ever more eagerly today, hides the assumption that it refers to his California period treated as a phase of life and creativity which is closed both temporally and intellectually. Such a formulation of this question also results partly from the Polish understanding of the label of an American poet. However, this question gains its full meaning only when its scope includes, firstly, the realization that 1960 was not the initial year that Miłosz learned about America — it only marked a renewal of this process in a more complex way. Secondly, the question should include our awareness of the baggage of Miłosz's experiences accumulated in the 1940s, with which he reentered the New World. In other words, understanding the process of taking root in California after 1960 is possible when we, as Mitosz himself did, take into account his American postwar period, thought-out, problematized and reassessed in Europe after 1950.

This book aims to show how Mitosz assimilated America from 1945 to 1950, how he expanded his cultural horizon there, incorporating various components within it. It was the time of the poet’s intense self-education, during which he sought — as he confessed in the correspondence of those years — to internationalize his mind. The subject of my interest has been, on the one hand, the sphere of his activities in many areas at the time, and on the other, the ways of making use of the intellectual opportunities that his stay in America created for him. These questions are only partially answered by his writings from the period, but they resound in his later works, especially in the California years, where the American postwar period becomes a natural point of reference in his renewed confrontation with the culture of the United States. In understanding Milosz’s entire oeuvre, it seems essential to trace the forms of self-education he undertook on the East Coast.

A reconstruction of this process and of the writer’s new awareness is an exceedingly difficult task. These complications result mainly from the historical and political circumstances of Milosz’s discovery of America. Many of his writings from this period remain in manuscript form in the poet’s archives in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale (this is where we find letters to the poet, transcripts of his lectures, manuscripts of articles and intimate prose, translations of poetry from the 1940s, manuscripts of poems included later in Daylight, and personal documents related to his journey across the ocean), and to a lesser extent in the Polish National Library and Adam Mickiewicz Literature Museum in Warsaw, as well as national libraries and archives. As a result, these writings and documents are not widely known by researchers or readers. Other writings, published in Poland, were censored, and their original versions have often not survived — the archives of Odrodzenie, Nowiny Literackie, Twórczość, Kuźnica, and Nowa Kultura, where Miłosz published his sketches, are scattered in various places, depleted, and not integrated. A discussion of the interference of censors in Mitosz’s articles and columns from the years 1946-1950 would require a separate study — even if we may assume that in the game with the censors he chose strategies of avoiding confrontation, he also at times withdrew certain sketches from publication, and in his letters he criticized the changes to which they were subjected.

Documents of the Polish postwar diplomatic mission in the United States are also preserved in several different collections,’ and some of them have disappeared, or remain in unknown places, so it is not possible to recreate all the details of the activities of the attaché and the second secretary of the Embassy. Similarly, the poet’s correspondence from those years remains widely dispersed — only a small part of it has been published or is available in archives. Most are in the possession of the addressees and their heirs in different parts of the world, so even locating them in a possible attempt to gather the letters would be a very laborious task. While it can be assumed that Mitosz reiterated or presented differently the same thoughts and impressions from America in his correspondence with many people, and it is possible on the basis of the published letters to build a certain shared image of these impressions, until all of his correspondence is published, our knowledge of is insufficient and uncertain.

Although Mitosz, a tireless commentator of his own life and work, spoke at some length about his years in diplomatic service, his comments have the character of assessments and reckonings, and provide such details as biographical or interpretive clues to a lesser extent. In his conversations and extended interviews, he was not asked about many issues that could be become a subject for investigations, because they did not fit within the scope of awareness of members of other generations, nor of people who did not share similar experiences and were not interested in those issues. Mitosz’s American postwar period also comprises events and situations, as well as readings and intellectual experiences that were not commented upon. A significant part of this work is therefore the first presentation of source materials in the light of which it is possible to start a discussion about this phase of the life and work of the Nobel laureate.

The book consists of four parts, each dedicated to a different aspect of Miłosz's five years in America. The first part is a reconstruction of his diplomatic and literary activities, the second discusses his articles and journalism, the third recreates the process of his study of English-language literature, and the fourth examines the ways in which he assessed the postwar experience in his poetry, essays, and correspondence. While the last part concerns the period when Miłosz, residing in France and associated with the Polish emigration monthly Kultura, looks back on the American years, which to a large extent influenced their interpretation, the three

7 Mainly in the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, and the Polish Embassy in Washington.

previous ones concern a common five-year period and constitute a mutual reference system. It is often difficult to separate the work of Mitosz the diplomat, lecturer, and columnist from his experiences as a reader, traveler, viewer, and visitor of museums and galleries, even though, as Mitosz himself admitted, he did make attempts to do so. The division into parts is therefore as arbitrary, as it is necessary, so that we may trace the emergence of the new identity of the future author of Native Realm in the chronology of events and experiences.

The first part contains a biographical chapter, and a sketch devoted to Miłosz's lectures and articles published in the United States. I present here the circumstances of his accepting a post in the diplomatic service, his journey abroad, and his adjustment to life in the United States. Further, I present the forms of his activity in the Polish Consulate in New York, the working conditions in the Polish Embassy in Washington, Mitosz’s relations with the scientific and literary community in Poland and on the East Coast, his involvement in the creation of the Adam Mickiewicz Chair of Polish Literature at Columbia University, promotional activities related to an exhibition of Wanda Telakowska’s work, preparations for the Wroclaw Congress, opportunities for engaging in creative work, and various dilemmas related to Mitosz’s professional future, and the future of his family, particularly in the context of his trip to Poland in 1949, the events accompanying his return to Europe, and the recovery of his passport in 1950.