A Wretched Subjectivity
Eastern Europe in Czesław Miłosz’s Captive Mind
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7557/6.5828Keywords:
captivity, colonialism, Czeslaw Milosz, imperialism, mind, orientalism, subjectivityAbstract
This article rethinks critically a landmark work of the twentieth century—The Captive Mind, by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Published in 1953, the book sought to understand human subjectivity, or, as it put it, “how the human mind functions,” in Cold-War Eastern Europe. I argue that, while probing what Western intellectuals of that time saw as the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Miłosz formulates an analysis that is rather retro. He represents Eastern Europe in terms of colonialism and imperialism—as a colonized realm and a colonized mind. What is more, he casts his representation in the terms of what Edward Said famously called “Orientalism”—producing a distorted, Orientalist work. Finally, while intimating hope for overcoming Eastern Europe’s domination, Miłosz shows that hope as illusory.
References
Achebe, Chinua. 2010. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1612–1623. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Anders, Jaroslaw. 2009. “Czeslaw Milosz: A Testament of Exile.” In Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose, 67–82. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300111675.003.0004
Anderson, Terry H. 2018. The Sixties, 5th ed. New York: Routledge.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt.
Bedient, Calvin. 1985–1986. “Czeslaw Milosz: Examining the Witness.” Salmagundi, “The Literary Imagination and the Sense of the Past,” no. 68/69 (Fall-Winter): 226–44. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547831.
Bill, Stanley. 2015. “Dualism, Dostoevskii and the Devil in History: Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Neo-Manichaean’ Theory of Russian Culture.” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 3 (July): 401–28. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.93.3.0401. https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.93.3.0401
Camus, Albert. 2002. The Plague. Translated by Robin Buss. London: Penguin.
Coates, Paul. 1988. “Irony and Choice: Miłosz in the Late Forties and Early Fifties.” In Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, edited by Edward Możeiko, 134–140. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
Donahue, Bruce. 1983. “Viewing the West from the East: Solzhenitsyn, Milosz, and Kundera.” Comparative Literature Studies 20, no. 3 (Fall): 247–60. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40246402.
Dudek, Jolanta. 2014. “Czesław Miłosz on Conrad’s Polish Stereotypes.” Yearbook of Conrad Studies (Poland) 9: 109–17. Accessed July 28, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44782450. DOI: 10.4467/20843941YC.14.008.3080.
Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin.
Fiut, Aleksander. 1987. “Czesław Miłosz’s Search for ‘Humanness.’” The Slavic and East European Journal 31, no. 1 (Spring): 65–75. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/307014. https://doi.org/10.2307/307014
Fiut, Aleksander. 1990. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. Translated by Theodosia S. Robertson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Franaszek, Andrzej. 2017. Miłosz: A Biography. Edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap.
Gleason, Abbott. 1995. Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gobineau, Arthur de. 2012. Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings. Translated by Daniel O. Donoghue. Edited by Geoffrey Nash. Abingdon: Routledge.
Goldberg, Philip. 2010. American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation — How Indian Spirituality Changed the West. New York: Harmony Books.
Golubiewski, Mikołaj. 2018. The Persona of Czesław Miłosz: Authorial Poetics, Critical Debates, Reception Games. Berlin: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b14411
Gombrowicz, Witold. 1985. Pornografia. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. In Cosmos and Pornografia: Two Novels by Witold Gombrowicz. Translated by Eric Mosbacher and Alastair Hamilton. New York: Grove Press.
Grudzińska-Gross, Irena. 1999. “The Captive Mind.” Partisan Review 66, no. 1 (Winter): 60–63.
Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Jaspers, Karl. 1953. “Endurance and Miracle [Review of The Captive Mind].” Saturday Review, June 6, 1953, 13, 30.
Judt, Tony. 2010. “Captive Minds, Then and Now.” The New York Review of Books, July 13, 2010. Accessed February 23, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/07/13/captive-minds-then-and-now/.
Khairov, Shamil. 2014. “Writers’ Linguistic Observations and Creating Myths about Languages: Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky in Search of the ‘Slavonic Genius of Language.” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 3 (July): 726–48. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.109.3.0726. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.109.3.0726
Krzyżanowski, Jerzy R. 1999. “The Captive Mind Revisited.” World Literature Today, “Celebrating Czesław Miłosz,” 73, no. 4 (Autumn): 658–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/40155072
Kurzweil, Edith. 1999. “The Captive Mind.” Partisan Review 66, no. 1 (Winter): 55–60.
Levine, Madeline G. 1988. “Warnings to the West: Czesław Miłosz’s Political Prose of the 1950s.” In Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, edited by Edward Możeiko, 112–33. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
Massis, Henri. 1927. Defence of the West. Translated by F. S. Flint. London: Faber & Gwyer.
Milosz, Czeslaw. 1991. “Dictionary of Wilno Streets.” In Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. 3–22. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
Miłosz, Czesław. 2001. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. London: Penguin.
Miłosz, Czesław. 2010. Proud to Be a Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory. Translated by Catherine Leach, Bogdana Carpenter, and Madeline G. Levine. London: Penguin.
Moretta, John Anthony. 2017. The Hippies: A 1960s History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Morrow, John Andrew. 2011. “The Orientalism of Comte de Gobineau.” Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies 4, no. 3 (Summer): 257–64. Accessed May 28, 2020. EBSCOhost. Accession Number: 2013421075.
Możeiko, Edward. 1988. “Between the Universals of Moral Sensibility and Historical Consciousness: Notes on the Writings of Czesław Miłosz.” In Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, edited by Edward Możeiko, 1–29. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
Nathan, Leonard, and Arthur Quinn. 1991. The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
Orwell, George. 1990. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin.
Pound, Ezra. 2012. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th ed., vol. D, edited by Nina Baym, et al., 320–28. New York: W. W. Norton.
Said, Edward W. 1994a. Orientalism. New York: Random House.
Said, Edward W. 1994b. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Shakespeare, William. 2008. As You Like It. Edited by Alan Brissenden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spence, Jonathan D. 1999. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Walicki, Andrzej. 1996. Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Walicki, Andrzej. 1999. “The Captive Mind.” Partisan Review 66, no. 1 (Winter): 49–54.
Wesseling, H. L. 2004. The European Colonial Empires, 1815–1919. Translated by Diane Webb. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Wiesel, Elie. 1990. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” In Elie Wiesel, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Robert McAfee Brown. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University, 2nd ed., 5–19. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy. 1996. Insatiability: A Novel. Translated by Louis Iribarne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 2011. “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” In The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill, 131–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Milen Jissov
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
