The Seizure of Power by Czesław Miłosz

First published:Zdobycie wladzy, 1953 (English translation, 1955)

Type of work: Political

Time of work: From 1944 to 1950

Locale: Warsaw and other sites in Poland

Principal Characters:

• Peter Kwinto, a young intellectual employed as a journalist by the Soviet-sponsored Polish Workers’ Party
• Wolin, a former Polish nobleman in charge of organizing the security forces of the People’s Republic of Poland on behalf of the Soviets
• Professor Gil, a middle-aged professor of classical literature
• Major Baruga, the Director of Publications for the Polish Workers’ Party
• Stefan Cisovski (Seal), a cadet officer in the Polish underground army
• Michael Kamienski, a Fascist ideologue and anti-Semite
• Julian Halpern, and
• Josiah Winter, prewar acquaintances of Kwinto who are promoting the communization of Poland

The Novel

The events depicted in Czesław Miłosz’s two-part political novel The Seizure of Power take place in Poland during the final ten months of World War II and the first five years of the postwar era. Miłosz tells the story of this turbulent period though a series of interconnected sketches that involve a score of characters drawn from diverse elements of society. To some extent, The Seizure of Power is a roman a clef, and readers who are well versed in the circumstances in Poland during the Stalinist era will be able to match many of the fictive figures in the novel with their historical counterparts. Miłosz, moreover, uses a character named Peter Kwinto to reflect his own spiritual disquiet before he defected to the West in 1951 from his diplomatic post as First Secretary for Cultural Affairs at the Polish Embassy in Paris.

Part 1 opens in the summer of 1944 as the soviet army is in the midst of an offensive that has brought it to the outskirts of Warsaw. Inside the capital the branch of the Polish underground officially designated as the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) rises in revolt against the Nazis on August 1 in the belief that the entry of the Red Army is imminent. To the dismay of the Polish rebels, the Soviets decide to suspend military operations along the entire Warsaw front and thereby give the Germans a free hand to suppress the uprising inside the city. Peter Kwinto is a witness to these events, since he is serving as a political commissar in a unit known as the First Polish Division that is operating in conjunction with the Red Army. He shares his Soviet hosts’ distrust of the motives of the Home Army, since its hierarchy owes its allegiance to the Polish government-in-exile based in London. Kwinto, who is steadfastly opposed to a restoration of the reactionary social order that prevailed in prewar Poland, views the Polish Committee of National Liberation that was established at Lublin under Soviet sponsorship as a preferable alternative to the government-in-exile. Nevertheless, he follows the tragic course of events unfolding inside Warsaw with mixed emotions.

Miłosz’s account of the Warsaw uprising focuses on the fighting that takes place within the old city, where the Home Army withstands the Germans for a month before evacuating its forces from the district on September 2 through the sewers. The most memorable of the resistance fighters depicted by Miłosz is Stefan Cisovski, who is nicknamed “Seal” because of his manner of moving and his prowess as a swimmer. Separated from his wife by the fighting, Seal commits an act of sexual infidelity with Joanna Gil, the daughter of a professor of classical literature. Shortly thereafter she is killed by German shell fire while assisting a wounded man at Seal’s behest. In the process of escaping from the old city, Seal abandons a seriously injured comrade named Gdula in the belief that his wounds are terminal. Reproaching himself for the fates of Joanna and Gdula, as well as for having violated his marriage vows, Seal is overwhelmed by guilt. Miłosz does not inform his readers of Seal’s eventual fate until part 2 of the novel. Placed in an internment camp in Germany after the capitulation of the Home Army on October 2, Seal returns to Warsaw after the war to help in the reconstruction of the capital and learns that his wife had been killed during the insurrection, one day before he committed adultery with Joanna Gil. He also visits Joanna’s father and assists Professor Gil in recovering Joanna’s remains from the ruins of the city. Later in the year he is arrested by Polish security forces for having been a member of the Home Army during the German Occupation. After being detained for approximately four years without trial, Seal is taken to court and sentenced to an additional four years of imprisonment.

Most of part 2 deals with the process by which Communist rule is imposed on Poland. The key figure is a Soviet agent named Wolin who has been placed in charge of organizing the Polish Security Department. His mission, in addition to liquidating those who are opposed to the imposition of Soviet hegemony over Poland, is to recruit collaborators from among the opponents of Communist ideology, wherever it is expedient to do so. Wolin’s greatest success occurs in the course of a dialogue with Michael Kamienski in which he persuades this former leader of a Fascist youth group to head a pro-Communist organization of Catholics. The process of rationalization through which Kamienski comes to terms with the political realities of postwar Poland is far from atypical. Kwinto himself, who at this juncture of the novel is employed in the Bureau of Publications as a propagandist for the new regime, finds that his humanistic values have been steadily eroding. Hoping to rekindle the ideals nurtured by his prewar university training, he decides to take advantage of an opportunity to serve in a diplomatic post at the Polish embassy in Paris. At the last moment, Wolin has doubts concerning Kwinto’s political reliability and attempts to revoke his exit visa. Wolin’s emissaries, however, are unable to reach the airport in time to detain Kwinto, who boards a plane to Paris just as the year 1945 draws to a close and the first snow of the new winter has begun to fall.

Each of the novel’s parts begins with a short meditation by Professor Gil on the state of affairs in Poland after five or six years of Communist rule. There is also an epilogue of a similar nature. Gil, it turns out, was forced to retire from his professorship and is currently engaged in translating Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War into Polish. He is able to draw many parallels between the civil strife described by Thucydides and the postwar situation in Poland. Miłosz uses this device to validate the misgivings concerning the future course of liberty in Poland that prompted Kwinto to seek spiritual renascence in the West.

The Characters

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Peter Kwinto appeared destined to become a member of the bourgeois literary establishment in his native land. He had, for example, written a doctoral dissertation on French poetry and had received government grants enabling him to reside in France to pursue his research on the writings of Paul Valery. Setting Kwinto apart from most other members of his social class, however, is a staunch commitment to the principles of social justice. Although deeply disturbed by the totalitarian character of the postwar Polish regime, he is by no means immune to the psychological gratifications derived from the exercise of power. The turning point for Kwinto comes when he tells a dream he has had to a friend and confidante. The dream, in essence, involves Kwinto’s encounter with a kindly figure whom he at first mistakes for God the Father but later correctly identifies as Joseph Stalin. The dream has a twofold significance. First, it underscores the fact that Kwinto, as an apostate Catholic, is in danger of succumbing to a blind faith in a secular father figure. Second, it reflects Kwinto’s ambivalent attitude toward his own father, a man of firm anti-Communist convictions who was killed during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. Teresa interprets the dream as a warning and urges Kwinto to leave Poland as soon as possible.

Wolin, like Kwinto, had been thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois cultural values in his youth. Despite this background as a member of the Polish gentry, Wolin became convinced that the triumph of socialism and Communism was mandated by the laws of dialectical and historical materialism. This conviction led him to fight on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. He is totally dedicated to the objective of making Poland over in the image of the Soviet Union. From his perspective, people such as Seal and Professor Gil are historical anachronisms whose ultimate fate as individuals is of no import.

Operating on a lower level of authority than Wolin are three Polish citizens of Jewish ancestry: Josiah Winter, Julian Halpern, and Major Baruga. Although never stated directly by Miłosz, it is clear that each of these individuals views the communization of Poland as the best means of exorcising the demon of anti-Semitism from its national psyche. Josiah Winter most directly affects Kwinto’s destiny. In the fall of 1939, after Poland has been overrun by Nazi and Soviet forces, Kwinto finds himself residing temporarily in the Communist-occupied eastern provinces of the country. He is placed under arrest by Soviet security forces once it becomes known that he has written an article highly critical of several Russian poets whose work has official sanction. Winter, it is discovered, has divulged this information to the Soviets under interrogation. Sentenced to a slave labor camp in Siberia, Kwinto is on the verge of death when all Polish prisoners and deportees are granted political amnesty after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Shortly thereafter, he joins the Soviet-sponsored First Polish Division and, much to his dismay, discovers that Winter is one of his comrades. By an ironic coincidence, Winter is subsequently appointed Second Secretary to the Polish embassy in Paris and leaves Poland on the same plane that carries Kwinto to his own diplomatic post in the French capital.

Critical Context

Because Miłosz defected to the West in 1951, The Seizure of Power had to be published by the Polish emigre press in France. The same holds true for the poetry and essays which he published during the 1950’s, as well as for his only other novel, Dolina Issy (1955; The Issa Valley, 1981). When a translation of The Seizure of Power was published in France in 1953 under the title La Prise du pouvoir, Miłosz received the Prix Litteraire Europeen. Even more successful in terms of critical acclaim was Zniewolony umyslosz (1953; The Captive Mind, 1953), in which Miłosz recapitulates much of the critique of Soviet totalitarianism found in The Seizure of Power. Whereas the merits of The Captive Mind were appreciated throughout the free world at the time of its publication, it was not until the English translation of The Seizure of Power was reissued in 1982 that this work received proper critical recognition in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Renewed interest in the novel was prompted by Miłosz’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. The Seizure of Power has withstood the test of time and retained both its political and aesthetic viability.

Bibliography

Bell, Daniel. Review in The New Republic. CXXXII (May 16, 1955), pp. 41-43.

Christian Science Monitor. September 10, 1982, p. B1.

Czarnecka, Ewa, and Aleksander Fiut. Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, 1987.

Guerard, Alfred. Review in Books Abroad. XXVIII (Autumn, 1954), pp. 436-437.

Harrington, Michael. Review in Commonweal. LXII (July 8, 1955), p. 356.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. August 22, 1982, p. 1.

Miller, Jim. Review in Newsweek. C (October 4, 1982), p. 72.

New Statesman. CIV, December 17, 1982, p. 44.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXI, October 4, 1982, p. 72.

Times Literary Supplement. December 24, 1982, p. 1426.

World Literature Today. CII (Summer, 1978). Special Miłosz issue.