Mightier than the sword

Legends of Modernity

Essays and Letters From Occupied Poland 1942-1943

Czeslaw Milosz

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 270 pp., $25

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IN his later years, Czeslaw Milosz sometimes made laconic but highly provocative pronouncements about the relationship between literature and history. "I hold Whitman responsible for World War I and Darwin responsible for World War II," he once said, with neither a laugh nor even a grin. Behind that comment was the knowledge that Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, had been a passionate reader of Walt Whitman's poetry, and that the Nazis were enamored of eugenics and biological theories of race.

Readers acquainted with Milosz's poetry know well his enormous love of Whitman; also, as a young man, Milosz studied biology and evolution and was something of an amateur naturalist. Did he really hold Whitman and Darwin responsible for such great catastrophes?

A simple answer was not possible. Instead, Milosz offered "Legends of Modernity," his effort to understand what led Europe to the disasters -- Nazism and Stalinism -- it found itself in and then to consider what possibilities, if any, lay ahead for a new foundation of faith in humanity.

The late Nobel laureate is chiefly remembered for his poems, essays and books such as "The Captive Mind," his famous 1953 study of thinkers in a totalitarian state. Here is one of his earliest sustained works of literary criticism, for the first time translated into English, by Madeline G. Levine. The book offers essays on a variety of writers -- Tolstoy, Andre Gide, William James, Stendhal, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Defoe, Marx and Nietzsche -- as well as epistolary essays to Milosz's friend and fellow writer Jerzy Andrzejewski.

Milosz, when he was in his early 30s, wrote "Legends" during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. His output was extraordinary, given the wartime conditions. At the same time, he collected and published "Invincible Song," a legendary underground volume of resistance poems. He also published -- in mimeograph form -- his own sequence, "The World: A Naive Poem," which in part portrays art and literature heroically (even if his ultimate intent was ironic):

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A high forehead, and above it tousled hair

On which a ray of sun falls from the window.

And so father wears a bright fluffy crown

When he spreads before him a huge book.

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