Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer
Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on Jerzy Andrzejewski), a pious Catholic who became a celebrated Marxist. Others choked on their mixed feelings, like “Beta, the Disappointed Lover” (Tadeusz Borowski), an Auschwitz survivor and author of sardonic stories about life in the camp, who briefly wrote in a “socialist realist” mode before gassing himself to death at age twenty-eight.
The Captive Mind became a classic study of
“totalitarianism,” a framework bound up in Cold War narratives about the
civilized West versus the backward East. I first read it in a PhD seminar in
fall 2014, with little patience for a writer who seemed like a reactionary. My
specialty was Soviet history, and I thought that Miłosz’s profile of Communist
double-think - exemplified by the “Ketman,” who wears a mask that conceals his
inner doubts - overlooked how the “free world” also ran on hypocritical
conformity. We were living in a post-Fukuyama age, when trust in liberal
democracy had dwindled while its slogans lived on. With President Obama
deep into his second term and both parties unable to confront inequality or
climate change, Miłosz’s warnings about fervent conviction felt far away....
https://thebaffler.com/latest/miloszs-magic-mountain-neumeyer
Campo
dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski's correspondence with E.P. Thompson
