Miłosz: A Biography
By Andrzej Franaszek, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker,Harvard university press, £30
Near the outset of this new biography of Czeslaw Miłosz, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner, is a beguiling depiction of a time of peace in rural Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), where Miłosz was born in 1911. For its harmony between inhabitants and nature, and between the social classes, it might be the Shire. The world, young Miłosz learned, could be “a homely place, blessed by human toil and care”.
