Milosz, Czeslaw

Berkeley. 1977. University Of California Press. 1st American Edition. Previous Owner's Name Penned in Front, Otherwise Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0520033027. Some sections of the present volume were written in English and some in Polish. Those written in Polish were translated by the author & Lillian Vallee, Richard Lourie, Stanley H. Wallace, Waclaw Lednicki, & Reuel K. Wislon. 253 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John E. Johnson, Jr. keywords: Poland Translated Eastern Europe Literature Literary Criticism. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The volume as a whole is distinguished for its combination of intellectual inquiry and the personal reflective quality which is Milosz's hallmark. This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective in a fashion that has become quite rare. The volume opens with a true story, which is a confession of the author's remorse based on conflict with French intellectuals. ‘Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist' concerns Vladimir Solovyov. ‘Krasifiski's Retreat' is another return to the author's student readings which attempts to determine how a Polish romantic poet could write in 1833 a drama on the approaching world revolution. ‘On Pasternak Soberly' is a polemic, not unrelated to the author's practice as a poet, with certain poetics of our century represented perfectly by the oeuvre of this Russian poet. ‘On Modern Russian Literature and the West' raises the old issue of two perspectives radically opposed to one another. ‘The Importance of Simone Weil' is a tribute to a thinker who pushed to an extreme her disagreement with ‘the world' and the powers that rule over it ‘Shestov or the Purity of Despair' is about a great Russian philosopher akin to Simone Well in his refusal to assuage the unbearable character of human existence with vain consolations, but the essay also recalls a desperate young woman in Paris who took great comfort in his books. ‘Swedenborg and Dostoevsky' is the outcome of reflections on the great Swede who has been maligned and often treated as a madman - though not by Dostoevsky. The name in the next title - ‘On Thomas Mayne Reid' - does not say anything to the public, and the author relates who he was, how he discovered him in his childhood, and why he is known in Slavic countries. ‘Joseph Conrad's Father' sketches the biography of a poet and revolutionary and also throws some light upon the fate of the hero of the last chapter, ‘A One-Man Army: Stanislaw Brzozowski,' a philosopher who was a major influence in the author's youth and who is still at the center of intellectual controversies in Poland. inventory #16908 ISBN: 0520033027.