In many responses to the first days of Trump’s second presidency – the expression of anger denied the surprise shelter – the historical measurement is repeated: Is this what I felt a liberal progressive in Germany in Weimar on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was a specific advisor?
There is no perfect analogy, but a different historical moment that, for me, feels more urgent and more challenging as a reference point.
Prose book on czesław miłosz “Captive mind“It was published for the first time in 1953 (in the translation of Lujain Zilonko), which is still printed and reliable as it was, is the novel of the first person to be clinically observed, from the first person to how Polish poets and novelists- who lived through the Nazi profession- dealt with the regime Stalini, who started after the victory of the Allies in World War II.
Some of these writers and thinkers allowed to become customers in the system, not despite their mothers but because of them. In light of the normal stress of daily life in bad circumstances, imagination and enlightened feeling can become tools for rationalization. In Poland, the volatile degrees and the forms of repression, which reflect the deadly Stalin character, reinforced a kind of volatile surrender, by the captive mind, which was not imprisoned by bars or walls but because of his failure to condemn.
Many American writers and academics are unlikely to become a servant of right -wing bureaucracy. However, at a compressed time, can we maintain our best values in publishing and academic life without self -justification and insurance? And as important, can the act of resistance spoil the imagination? Myosz clarity about such questions is inspiring, more than that because his position in Poland of 1947 was very severe. For us, it may not be the direct threat, because we are facing horrific possibilities in the worlds of media and education, families, but frustration, a word that may seem very moderate, but its amazing radical meaning-and I think, that, I think this horrific moment literally describes.
In those first years that followed the war, the heart came out of many Polish writers. It seemed that the national culture that sponsored them, a tradition, worked to extend it and embody it, contained the seeds of its violent disasters. In a central example, the Polish society distinguished a bilateral – July and not a Jew – which it resisted but never defeated, and of course, it turned out that he fought beyond the imagination. The anti -Semitism had broken all the limits in the historical suicide confusion of European culture. In fact, the Stalinism, who knew the world of the “captive mind”, was a reason for frustration or heart failure.
In those years, CZESłAW Miłosz did not know what he was doing, whether in his initial writing, unstable or in his life. He was still naive, a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington. There were reasons for him to continue his life in his country under the doll government, and there were reasons for selecting exile. In 1947, in this period of self -doubt and uncertainty, he wrote “A song on Ceramic”, a poem about the scene after the war. The actual material scene in this poem represents the cultural terrain after the war, as what was previously destroyed by surrendering to brutality. While the “captive mind” is reflected in the failures of individual talented people, this poem dares to think indirectly, in Europe itself, and the traditional goods of its culture.
At eighty, when Mios and colleagues in Berkeley, I wrote this English version, based on a quick prose translation to me:
Song on the porcelain
The graves, the armored column, the sensitive colors in the wonderful and fragile material of porcelain – the “precious master’s dream” of civilization, the old and elegant imagination of the pastoral – all of this descends like “frozen swan” to “to”. Black underground stream. “The tanks that revolve around their business pass a deadly scene of memory, control, loss and repetition. (With regard to repetition, former KGB man Vladimir Putin and the former young man Victor UrbanBoth Trump’s allies, they could have been familiar species for Miłosz. Far from him?
