Against the Forces of Forgetting

...and I." The poet's relation to these lost others is at the center of his new work...

...The use of emotional reticence allows Milosz to alter the scope of the lyric tradition, widening the stage from the merely personal to the historical...

...Occasionally, the names and places are so obscure (especially to American readers), or Milosz' relation to them is so tangential, that one wonders about his process of selection...

...What emerges over time, however, is the pattern and texture of a brilliant 20th century life...

...Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911...

...You wonder why Milosz feels debunking her is necessary...

...This collection of alphabetically arranged reminiscences derives its coherence from the Nobel Prize-winner's longstanding philosophical preoccupations: the impermanence of life in the face of "the waters of oblivion," and the paradox of Christian faith in the context of mass-scale human suffering...

...Much of Milosz' criticism is reserved for intellectuals little known outside of Poland...

...Emmanuel Lévinas gave the year 1941 as the date when God 'abandoned' us," Milosz says...

...His criticism of Frost—that he is cold, moralistic, posturing—sounds reasonable enough until one rereads "The Most of It," included at the end of the entry...

...For Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, who has lived over half of his 90 years in exile, language is the single constant—"my home, whichl carry around the world"—so the logical answer is at the beginning of the alphabet...

...That was actually a compliment, but she considered herself a much greater writer—something I was not then, and still am not, convinced of...

...They are carmina, or incantations deployed in order that the horror should disappear for a moment and harmony emerge...

...In an entry about his days at Polish Radio, Milosz records the fates of his co-workers...

...He dismisses the author of The Second Sex as "a nasty hag," without offering even a cursory appreciation of her intellectual contributions...

...Fighting the rising tide of oblivion with sandbags of already fading names, places and landscapes, Milosz engages in a kind of guerrilla war against the forces of forgetting...

...Szulc, in charge of literature (died in Auschwitz...

...The alphabetical structure imposes a kind of arbitrary order, juxtaposing entries such as "Hatred" and "Hook, Sidney," "Camus" and "Capitalism...

...We sat at our desks in a couple of rooms on Dabrowski square: Adam Szpak, in charge of music (killed in Warsaw...

...Many of the most compelling entries are those with abstract titles: "Time," "Terror," "Curiosity...

...the last creature on whom I could focus my erotic passions"—it speaks to a strain of misogyny in Milosz' writing that undermines the broad humanism of its intent...

...The struggle, for Milosz, is one of memory against time...

...A pattern discernible here is the author's regrettable proclivity for score settling...

...Milosz's ABC's suffers from the unwieldiness this perspective entails, yet benefits from it as well...

...Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked...

...the most intimate personal concerns are linked to his viewing himself as a witness to history...

...Milosz's ABC's is, in part, a valediction for those who died in the camps or the Gulag...

...There he survived both the Nazi occupation and a Stalinist regime that he served as a diplomat until 1951, when he broke ranks and fled to Paris...

...With the appearance of The Captive Mind (1953) —an examination of the power of Communist ideology over Polish intellectuals—he attracted widespread attention...

...Do I deserve to be condemned for this...

...The sheer quantity of the names is a chilling reminder of the devastation wrought upon an entire generation of Eastern Europeans...

...Under "Balzac, Honoré de," he writes, "Read mainly during the German occupation of Warsaw by our threesome—Janka, Andrzejewski, and me...

...The body, as long as it is able to, sets in opposition to death the heart's contractions and the warmth of circulating blood...

...In 1960 he took a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now a professor emeritus...

...The artistry of Milosz's ABC's is not immediately apparent...

...Many of the entries are elegiac in tone...

...His vision is always global...

...One of several unflattering portraits of women—he describes Maria Dabrowska as "a vaguely cross-eyed little dwarf...

...shortly afterward the family moved to Russia, and in 1918 immigrated to Poland...

...Among the larger reputations he assails are those of Robert Frost and Simone de Beauvoir...

...If Auschwitz was death undiluted, Milosz argues, art must declare itself the opposing principle: "Life is not like death...

...Whereas I wrote idyllic verses, 'The World' and a number of others, in the very center of what was taking place in the anus mundi, and not by any means out of ignorance...

...My time," he writes, "my Twentieth Century, weighs on me as a host of voices and the faces of people whom I once knew, or heard about, and now they no longer exist...

...It is an earnest question, central to Milosz'poetics, which call for a writer to act as witness, and yet not to confuse art with mimesis...

...His own approach borrows heavily from Schopenhauer, from whom he derives the thesis that "the mind, by extracting itself from the ties of the will, can achieve an objective view...

...Only after reading several entries does one begin to notice the artfulness of his juxtapositions, and the way the entries often turn toward the end, like sonnets...

...In his recent "Poem for the End of the Century" he writes of "pain and also guilt/ In the structure of the world...

...they are the body's rebellion against its destruction...

...Anus Mundi," one of the most powerful entries, refutes Theodor Adorno's famous formulation that lyric poetry after Auschwitz would be an abomination...

...May that threesome be with me in these pages, as we were then, and not later on, when our fates diverged...

...In the tempest of time, he seems to suggest, any port, any memory, will suffice...

...Against the horrors of history and the erosion of memory, Milosz sets a highly crafted network of elegies and allusions...

...It also makes for some pages of less than captivating reading...

...no one would be able to stand it...

...Milosz' stylistic gifts are similarly embedded...

...Gentle verses written in the midst ofhorror declare themselves for life...

...Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" Where should the story of a life begin...

...The prose is dense and straightforward, and Milosz seems more concerned with documenting the existence of people and places than with evoking a sense of their being...

...About Maria Dabrowska, a Polish writer, he declares, "Dabrowska apparently was offended by me because I compared her in one of my writings to the novelist, Eliza Orzeszkowa...

...Ornithology, a leitmotif that appears in several entries, evolves into a figure for writing: the human impulse to name, categorize, define...

...It is almost enough...

...More unfortunate is the attack on de Beauvoir...

...Jozef Czechowitz, in charge of literature programming for children (killed by a bomb in Lublin...

...Parallel to the stream of personal recollections, crosscurrents of literary and philosophical thought gradually converge into something like a philosophical system: an understanding of life as a struggle between being and nothingness, creation and destruction...

...Here Milosz grants himself some freedom from the minutiae of memory and engages the intellectual history of his nine decades...

...The items on philosophers and writers, "Camus," "Schopenhauer," "Simone Weil," and "Dostoyevsky," to name a few, provide a context for Milosz' writings on suffering and the role of art in relation to history...

...This runs counter to prevailing contemporary notions about the relativity of truth and the untenability of "objective views," but it also points to one of the great strengths of Milosz' poetry: distance, and an ability to embody contradictory positions...

...A brutal writer, and a good one, especially for what was happening at that time...

...The vast, seemingly haphazard inclusiveness of this volume allows for a network of unexpected connections...

...This contributes to the sense that the book is governed by the law of associations, that it is, in fact, memory in action...