The parallax view: Visions of Russia in the writings of Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz and his points of contact with Russia is the subject of the present study which was undertaken in hopes of gaining an insight into the formation of cultural stereotypes. If we follow Jung's assumption that the subconscious is dependent on telluric conditions, the geographical architectonics of Milosz's birthplace and his epiphany-like encounter with Russia gain the status of the cartography of cultural belonging and of the constant evaluation of the self as well as of explaining one's life, and ultimately of finding one's way "home" and of restoring the sacred dimension. Despite abundant scholarship on Milosz, there is not a single study, which would address Milosz's mental meanderings concerning Russia. He is most often treated as a poet and when he is analyzed as an essayist or a prose writer, he loses his complexity because he is treated exclusively as one or the other: as a writer with an autobiographical slant or as an author of a political science genre. The interdisciplinary approach, employed in this study, supports a vision of Russia that is, indeed, multi-farious and constantly shifting. Milosz's vision of Russia is characterized by duality which is closely bound to an internal split within Milosz---the man who is balancing between being alienated from and being reconciled to the human condition. However, this non-univocal quality is a function of the biblical legend of the Fall which in Milosz's interpretation becomes a metaphor for human spiritual disinheritance. Atrophy of the religious imagination is clearly named by Milosz as a culprit in the downward spiral of the disintegration of self-hood found in the excesses of Stalinism. A life destroyed by communism is re-created in Milosz's writings as his tools for reconfiguring a meaningful insight into another culture are reinvented.