The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz

First published:Zniewolony umyst, 1953 (English translation, 1953)

Type of work: Cultural criticism

Form and Content

Czesław Miłosz was born of Polish parents in Russian Lithuania, an area annexed by Poland after that country’s restoration to independence in 1918. Trained in law and literature, he was a member of an avant-garde circle of Polish poets dubbed the Second Vanguard from the early 1930’s until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. During World War II he was active in the Polish Underground. After the war, although never a Communist, he became a member of the postwar government, serving as cultural attache to the Polish embassies in Washington, D.C., and Paris from 1946 to 1950. Disillusioned by the destruction of Polish intellectual life under the Stalinist regime, he defected to the West in 1951 and spent the next ten years as a free-lance writer in Paris. The Captive Mind was written during this period, as was a novel about the Lithuania of his childhood, Dolina Issy (1955; The Issa Valley, 1981). In 1961, he accepted an appointment as professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley, a position he held for two decades until his retirement. While at Berkeley, in addition to several collections of poetry and a history of Polish literature, he wrote several works of literary interpretation and introspection, including a spiritual self-portrait, Ziemia Ulro (1977; The Land of Ulro, 1984). In 1980, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Captive Mind, 240 pages in length, is divided into nine chapters. It is a series of essays united by an underlying theme—the dilemma of the Eastern European intellectual in post-World War II Europe. It was the first of Miłosz’s works to be translated into English. The first chapter, “The Pill of Murti Bing,” appeared in Partisan Review in 1951 as “The Happiness Pill.”

In 1930, the Polish playwright and novelist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote a prophetic fantasy, Nienasycenie (1930; Insatiability: A Novel in Two Parts, 1977), in which Poland is threatened by a Chinese army moving inexorably westward across the Eurasian land mass. There is no resistance because before the invading army reaches the frontier, Poland is inundated by peddlers hawking Murti Bing pills, which, when consumed, eliminate both anxiety and the will to resist. Miłosz used the metaphor of Murti Bing to explain why so many Eastern European intellectuals succumbed so readily to the crude doctrines of their Soviet conquerors. Like the pills, communism, if swallowed whole, provided a welcome antidote for those whose ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity had been destroyed during the long night of Nazi occupation.

Yet this was not the whole story. Miłosz turns, in his second chapter, “Looking to the West,” to the complicated attitude of the Eastern European intellectual community toward the prosperous, materialistic society of Western Europe and the United States. Before the war, members of this community had been ignored or patronized by their Western peers, even though Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest had been home to extremely sophisticated and innovative work in philosophy, literature, and poetry. Even worse, in the opinion of these intellectuals, Eastern Europeans had been abandoned after the war as if their culture and history were of no importance. As a result, many Poles, Czechs, and Magyars took an understandable delight in anticipating the rude awakening in store for France, Great Britain, and the United States when the Soviet tide washed over them as well.

Even so, to the more sophisticated intellectuals of Eastern Europe, the New Faith from the East was too crude to be embraced completely. To preserve some artistic integrity and to protect themselves from persecution by their new masters, many engaged in the Muslim strategy of Ketman. This was a form of protective schizophrenia which allowed them outwardly to profess complete allegiance to the doctrines of Socialist Realism while retaining inward reservations as to their truth and relevance. Ketman was not, however, without its perils. This Miłosz demonstrates in four case studies of Polish intellectuals—“Alpha, the Moralist,” “Beta, the Disappointed Lover,” “Gamma, the Slave of History,” and “Delta, the Troubador”— who were either physically or morally destroyed by playing such a dangerous game.

In his concluding chapters, “Man, This Enemy,” and “The Lesson of the Baltics,” Miłosz asserts that the totalitarianism which engulfed Eastern Europe after the war, whatever its allure, was soul-destroying. If living in the materialistic and self-indulgent societies of the West produced anxiety over status and economic position, existence in the East was much worse. Here one faced a life of fear, poverty, and conformism. The future of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkan countries could be anticipated by looking at the fate of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940. In these unfortunate countries not only had freedom of any kind been eliminated, but the very sense of nationhood had been virtually eradicated through the use of terror and mass deportations.

Critical Context

The Captive Mind is the best survey of political-cultural life in early postwar Eastern Europe available in English and is an invaluable and moving record of the mood of many intellectuals in the early Cold War period. It is also Miłosz’s most overtly political work. As such, it is grounded in the time in which it is written and there is much about it that is dated. Eastern Europe has, after all, managed to escape the worst of the fate to which many had consigned it in the early 1950’s. Rather than being absorbed into the Soviet Union, the small countries of this region have, in spite of the tragedies of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, managed to gain considerable autonomy within the Soviet imperium. As for the Soviet threat to the West, few continued to take it seriously in the age of glasnost and perestroika that followed the Cold War and detente eras. In this sense, Miłosz’s work has much in common with other gloomy period pieces of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, including W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (1947), Arthur Koestler’s The Age of Longing (1951), and Whittaker Chambers’ Witness (1952).

Nevertheless, there are significant themes in The Captive Mind that transcend the time in which it was written. Miłosz, through the skillful use of irony, anecdote, and understatement, has launched a skillful and convincing attack on the advocates of historical necessity, a doctrine which would sacrifice the present for an unattainable future. He also exposes contradictions in the logic of that kind of political realism which would justify the use of any means toward a supposedly good end. The work remains a warning to those who would forget that a society, however imperfect, that is dedicated to personal freedom and civil liberty is worth defending. For these reasons, The Captive Mind escapes being simply a period piece and becomes fit company for some of the best writing of Milovan Djilas, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and other contemporaries of Miłosz who tried, in their writing, to make sense of the catastrophe that overcame Europe during the second quarter of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. “Encounter—with What?” in The New Statesman and Nation. XLVI (October 17, 1953), p. 464.

Clancy, W. P. “The Fatal Payment,” in Commonweal. LVIII (July 3, 1953), pp. 328-330.

Czarnecka, Ewa, and Aleksandr Fiut. Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, 1987. Translated by Richard Lourie.

Davie, Donald. Czesław Miłosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, 1984.

MacDonald, Dwight. “In the Land of Diamat,” in The New Yorker. XXIX (November 7, 1953), p. 173.

Miłosz, Czesław. Interview in The New York Review of Books. XXXIII (February 27, 1986).

Parkes, H. B. “The Intellectual Devil,” in The New Republic. CXXVIII (June 22, 1953), p. 18.

Spender, Stephen. “The Predatory Jailer,” in The New Republic. CXXVIII (June 22, 1953), pp. 18, 21.