Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943

by Czesław Miłosz

Legends of Modernity , now available in English for the first time, brings together some of Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.

"Why did the European spirit succumb to such a devastating fiasco?" the young Milosz asks. Half a century later, when Legends of Modernity saw its first publication in Poland, Milosz "If everything inside you is agitation, hatred, and despair, write measured, perfectly calm sentences..." While the essays here reflect a "perfect calm," the accompanying contemporaneous exchange of letters between Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski express the raw emotions of "agitation, hatred and despair" experienced by these two close friends struggling to understand the proximate causes of this debacle of western civilization, and the relevance, if any, of the teachings of the Catholic church.

Passionate, poignant, and compelling, Legends of Modernity is a deeply moving insight into the mind and emotions of one of the greatest writers of our time.

Genres: Essays, Poland, History, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Czesław Miłosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley , and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm . After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934.

After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania. Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

Reviews

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first encounter with Milosz. While I'm impressed with his pen and the issues he struggled with, issues still highly relevant today, it seems obvious this particular year was not the best for writing essays concerning mankind. I picked up another anthology of his, To Begin Where I Am, and I have higher hopes for that. Milosz was clearly going through a crisis here and he isn't really able to articulate the void and irrationality he faces. Given the enormity of that civilizational crisis, I'm not going to judge him on this set alone, and again, he touches on a lot of points that are truly at the crisis of modernity and liberalism today.

Two segments of his book are worth picking this book up from a library (Milosz himself saw that these chapters really do not hang together into a cohesive book and encouraged one to look at each essay as a separate entity). Letter III hints at so many problems that have come true: guilt by class or race or politics, an enforced uniformity of thought through technology, and the hallowing out of the meaning of the Church, leaving it merely a Association of Do Gooders with no spiritual or supernatural end. "Legend of the Monster City" is worth finding for its final page alone; morality has become bankrupt, leading into the emotivism warned of by Alasdair MacIntyre, largely due to the hallowing out of our metaphysical understanding of life. Christendom had its horrors, but it could not have produced the Holocaust (Jerzy Andrzejewski, Milosz's correspondent for the second half of this book, states a disturbing but true idea: killing to save a soul is somehow better than killing to exterminate "subhumans"). But Christendom broke with the Protestant Reformation; man may now go and find morality in his own conscience, his own interpretation. We use the old terms, like equality and liberty and justice, but they lack the common currency of olden days. Large segments of the Western world now use these terms in ways that are completely incompatible with how other large Western segments use those same terms.

On to the second collection!

[Don Heiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz’s “Legends of Modernity” was translated by Madeline Levine and published by Farrah, Straus, and Giroux in 1996. The book has two parts. The first part is a collection of Milosz essays about the interwar that devastated Poland and Europe from the early 1930s through 1942. The essays are Milosz’s reflections on how European warfare impacted art, religion, and philosophy. The essays also explored how inter-warfare and Polish occupation by “outside” powers “devoured metaphysics” and redefined long held principles of modernity. The second part of the book presents nine letters exchanged between Milosz and his distinguished friend-philosopher Jerzy Andrzejewski. These letter-essays explore the sufferings of many people who endured the destructive evils of war. Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and lived in Poland where he survived World War 2. After the war, he was Poland’s cultural attache to Washington, New York, and Paris. He moved to the United States in 1960 when he accepted a position at the University of California Berkeley. In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Milosz died in Krakow, Poland in 2004. The “Legends of Modernity” is very thought provoking and inspiring. (L/P)

[Brian Mikołajczyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

A two part book: the first part is a collection of essays by Miłosz about various works of art and literature and what he thinks of them philosophically and theologically; the second part of the book is a series of letters exchanged between Miłosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski, an intellectual contemporary of Miłosz. In these letters, they discuss the state of humanity circa 1942 with a focus on Poland and how WWII is going.
A interesting read, albeit superfluous from time to time.

[Dan Weiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense yet fascinating. This glimpse into the mindset of both Miłosz and Andrzejewski and the contrast of their thinking during this period is a great addition.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Тексты, написанные под оккупацией в 1941-1943 гг., обсуждающие главным образом возможность гуманизма в мире зла и войны. Очень релевантно, часто хорошо сформулировано.