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“... area in Europe. The uprising failed to achieve any military or political objective: in a memoir, Czeslaw Milosz condemned it as ‘an unforgivably reckless act’. Around 180,000 civilians were killed, among them many of Poland’s elite, who might later have opposed Soviet dictatorship. When the Red Army and its Polish collaborators finally crossed the ...”

“... When​ the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he tolda story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening. ‘Tell us this,’ he said, ‘are yez unionists or are yez not?’ At the centre of Auden’s work, an equally categorical question is implicit: ‘Tell us this, are yez civilised or are yez not?’You could be forgiven for feeling caught up in some private argument here, but there is a covert link to be made between the case of Auden and what Heaney called ‘the matter of Ireland ...”

“... completed, afterwards.) To live in America meant acquiring un-English ways to read. Heaney met Czeslaw Milosz, along with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, but the most important new acquaintance was the novelist Thomas Flanagan, who later wrote The Year of the French. ‘When I landed in California,’ Heaney says, ‘my head was still basically wired ...”

“... about Konwicki’s coeval and fellow film director Andrzej Wajda, and about his relations with Czeslaw Milosz, whose novel The Issa Valley he goes off and films while this book is being written. With the other odds and ends he throws in, these constitute a fascinating picture of forty years of Poland and of Konwicki himself, ‘the above-mentioned and ...”

“... Kipling. But the timely comparison and contrast is with a more recent winner, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Both authors have written in a wide range of forms and both are exiles – Milosz in America – though in Canetti’s case exile is itself a mode made for genius, for his country is the entire European ...”

“... It  was breakfast time​  in the Europejski Hotel, that cold November morning in Warsaw forty years ago, when the waitresses suddenly stood still. Their eyes widened; they turned towards the radio. One of them softly began to sing along with the march now blaring across the room. But how did she, born a dozen years after Poland’s communist regime banned them, know those words and that melody? ‘My, Pierwsza Brygada’ – ‘We, the First Brigade ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin​ was on his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago. It was the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short journey back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the day with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on Stalin’s orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers ...”

“... The geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is described by Czeslaw Milosz, for example, as a Central European city. But if Poland – let alone Lithuania – is really in the centre of Europe, what is the east? Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the same writers – Milan ...”

“... Europe. The notion of ‘Central Europe’ – as expounded by spokesmen like Milan Kundera or Czeslaw Milosz – designated Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, extending on occasion to Lithuania. Its function was, on the one side, to draw a cultural line demarcating this zone from such truly East European (viz. backward) countries as Romania or ...”

“... serious option is there, other than this sort of decent reconsideration? Edward Said New York What Czeslaw Milosz said of the last century is unfortunately already true of the one just starting: woe to those who think that they can save themselves without taking part in a tragedy, without purifying themselves through historical suffering. Millions of ...”