In a life that stretched from 1911 to 2004, the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz experienced the twin traumas of Poland’s 20th century: first Nazi occupation, then communist dictatorship. A man of the democratic left, he was never enamored with Stalin and the Stalinists, yet in the aftermath of World War II he became a diplomat of the Polish People’s Republic and agreed to represent Stalin’s puppet regime as a cultural attaché at the embassy in Washington, DC, in the late 1940s.
Increasingly disenchanted with establishment of a police state in his country and its totalitarian controls over intellectual life, Milosz decided to defect while in France in 1951. His wife and two sons were at that moment in Washington, DC. Thus began a long separation between the poet and his closest relatives.
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