- Milosz, Czeslaw.
The Captive Mind.
New York: Vintage, [1951, 1953, 1981] 1990.
ISBN 0-679-72856-2.
-
This book is an illuminating exploration of life in a
totalitarian society, written by a poet and acute
observer of humanity who lived under two
of the tyrannies of the twentieth century and briefly
served one of them. The author was born in Lithuania
in 1911 and studied at the university in Vilnius, a
city he describes (p. 135) as “ruled in turn
by the Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, again the
Lithuanians, again the Germans, and again the
Russians”—and now again the Lithuanians.
An ethnic Pole, he settled in Warsaw after graduation,
and witnessed the partition of Poland between Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II,
conquest and occupation by Germany, “liberation”
by the Red Army, and the imposition of Stalinist rule
under the tutelage of Moscow. After working with the
underground press during the war, the author initially
supported the “people's government”, even
serving as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassies
in Washington and Paris. As Stalinist terror descended upon
Poland and the rigid dialectical “Method” was
imposed upon intellectual life, he saw tyranny ascendant once
again and chose exile in the West, initially in Paris
and finally the U.S., where he became a professor at
the University of California at Berkeley in 1961—imagine,
an anti-communist at Berkeley!
In this book, he explores the various ways in which the human soul
comes to terms with a regime which denies its very existence. Four
long chapters explore the careers of four Polish writers he denotes as
“Alpha” through “Delta” and the choices they
made when faced with a system which offered them substantial material
rewards in return for conformity with a rigid system which put them at
the service of the State, working toward ends prescribed by the
“Center” (Moscow). He likens acceptance of this bargain
to swallowing a mythical happiness pill, which, by eliminating the
irritations of creativity, scepticism, and morality, guarantees those
who take it a tranquil place in a well-ordered society. In a
powerful chapter titled “Ketman”—a Persian word
denoting fervent protestations of faith by nonbelievers, not only in
the interest of self-preservation, but of feeling superior to those
they so easily deceive—Milosz describes how an entire population can
become actors who feign belief in an ideology and pretend to believe
the earnest affirmations of orthodoxy on the part of others while
sharing scorn for the few true believers.
The author received the 1980
Nobel
Prize in Literature.
December 2006 