MiÅosz

“historical” before the noun “stage” at the beginning and end of a paragraph in the 1st Class, an italicization that does not occur in the original. This reader also wishes that New Directions had included the prologue penned by Cortázar scholar Carles Álvarez Garriga for the Spanish edition, in which we learn, for example, that Cortázar had to “lower his aim” and was unable to teach the classes as he had hoped because of the students ’ dearth of knowledge of the material, or that he found his meetings with students during office hours to be tense. None of these criticisms—call them cavils if you will—are to suggest that the nonSpanish reader will not benefit from this collection. And although I would challenge students of Spanish-language and Latin American literature to read Clases de literatura in the original, for the growing ranks of readers of Latin American literature in translation, Literature Class is welcome. George Henson University of Oklahoma Andrzej Franaszek. Miłosz: A Biography. Trans. Aleksandra & Michael Parker. Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2017. 526 pages. The first comprehensive biography of the Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was published in Kraków in 2011. Its author, Andrzej Franaszek, completed a Herculean task, digging into Polish and American archives, reading his way through a massive amount of correspondence , not to mention critical assessment of Miłosz’s published and unpublished writing. The decision of the Belknap Press to bring out an abridged version of Franaszek’s biography is most welcome: in that (in the opinion of this reviewer) Miłosz is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, this volume will remain a major source for any serious student of European (and also American) poetry of this period. Miłosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania , in 1911 and lived most of his life abroad. That life was characterized by constant change as he was tossed about by political and personal challenges and circumstances. A left-leaning young man in a nationalistic, semimilitarized Poland, he served as cultural attaché of the new (Communist) Poland in the US after World War II until his defection from his increasingly Stalinist country in 1951. It was this decision, though initially causing much hardship, and the book that came out of it, The Captive Mind, which paved his further career; without it and other prose works he wrote in the 1950s, Miłosz would have never received an invitation to teach at the University of California nine years later. As for the Noble Prize in Literature in 1980, that was only the crowning moment of his ever-widening recognition in the Englishspeaking world. Franaszek’s biography rightly concentrates on the forces that shaped Miłosz’s poetic development. He is trying to show not only the literary figure but also the private, often desperately neurotic man “with warts and all.” The role of women is stressed, starting with the poet’s closeness to his “strong” mother, Weronika Kunat, and to his first wife, Janka, without whom (as well as other women: his intellectual partner and sometime lover Jeanne Hersch, the “Ewa” of the 1981–84 period; and his second wife, Carol) Miłosz’s life would have been different. Franaszek also devotes much space to the influence of older men (father substitutes?), such as the poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the Lithuanian -leaning and francophile mystic poet Oskar Miłosz, the Hegelian Tadeusz Kroński, and, last but not least, the wise Stanisław Vincenz. One of Miłosz’s central problems is his constant grappling with history. In the beginning, he accepts that Marxist “historical necessity” is superior to individual lives, but as Franaszek illustrates, after his defection to the circle around the émigré magazine Kultura (an island of sanity in the sea of hostile Polish right-wing émigrés and pro-Communist French intellectuals), he undergoes a huge existential crisis exacerbated by the absence of his wife and children left behind in America. Once the family is reunited and serious political changes take place in Poland (1956), Miłosz recovers his balance and manages to write much good poetry once

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