Miłosz, Czesław

Czesław Miłosz, poet, essayist and Nobel Laureate, was born on June 30, 1911 in Šeteniai (Szetejnie), Lithuania and died on August 14, 2004 in Kraków, Poland, at the age of 93. He married Janina Dłuska (1909-1986) in 1944 and they had two sons: Anthony and John Peter. His second wife Carol Thigpen, whom he married in 1992, died in 2002.

Miłosz grew up in Lithuania amid diverse languages and ethnicities (including Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and Jewish) yet retained a strong attachment to his native country and language throughout his decades of life in Western Europe and the United States. As a child and young adult, Miłosz lived under an unstable series of governments and regimes, witnessing the political and social upheavals of the two world wars and rise of the Eastern Bloc. Miłosz studied law at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius (also known as Vilnius University). It was during this time that he published his first poetry in the University publication Alma Mater Vilnensis (1930), and later in a slim printed collection Poemat o czasie zastygłym (1933). He also co-founded the literary group and journal Żagary in Vilnius. While traveling to Paris in the 1930s he met a distant relative, Oscar V. de Lubicz Milosz, who was to be an important lifelong influence.

...