You don’t say…
The Captive Mind, by Czesław Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind is complete unto itself. He tells the story of Stalin’s chamber of propagandists – those who told stories, during the 1940s and 1950s, to Eastern Europeans about themselves, their leaders, their history, their superior fitness to survive. Milosz was a chamber deputy until he walked away from the need to tell lies as part of his day job. I left The Captive Mind feeling Milosz had fully shared the evidence on the case at hand and crafted just sentences that convey reluctant resignation rather than stern rebuke.
Milosz investigates how self-deception and self-regard were conscripted to fabricate compelling counterfeits, deceptive Potemkin fables. In Stalinist Russia, words were enveloped in a hackneyed story even before they were written or spoken. Instead of convention proving the spur for creative departures great and small, under totalitarian regimes convention becomes the destination for imagining. Writers must represent the cul-de-sac of ideology as a freeway, the only way. The writer’s task is to confirm and buttress the status quo, to paint the shabby as glorious. They have no licence to wield words that provoke scepticism. Those who gambled truth against power – Solzenhitsyn, Akhmatova, Pasternak – had their licences revoked.
Milosz was luckier – as a Polish diplomat serving in Paris, sanctuary was a short walk away at the US embassy. He walked. He kept his licence and endured a less violent suffering than those who were silenced in their own homes, or worse, in the gulags. As a political refugee in France and then America, Milosz had no culturally engaged audience for his poems, written in Polish and telling of his niche in Europe. He was silenced by language and ideology: unpublished in English, unpublishable in Poland. The Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him in 1980, was probably a poor salve for his cultural exile.
There is a great prose passage in The Captive Mind: sixteen pages comprising a chapter titled ‘Delta, the Troubadour’. Its virtuosity is inspiring. So good it might inspire a reader to write. Milosz describes Delta, an alias for a Cold War Rabelais, and his social and political context. I read with disbelief at first. Surely Delta is too Dickensian to be flesh and blood. He must be imagined. Yet I took Milosz at his words, conceding that Delta is no less likely to have walked among us than someone like Samuel Johnson, implausibly eccentric, energetically intelligent, and deliberatively empathic though he was.
With no plan in mind other than my preference to have three books on the go at any one time, as I read The Captive Mind I also read The Fat Years – a novel by Chan Koonchung. Chan tells a tale of love and politics in an economically resurgent and self-absorbed China. This is government as theatre, where the impresarios are the censors and the political set designers are creative beyond measure. But suspend your disbelief and have some sympathy: after all, what’s a one party government to do if it’s to hold on to power?
Chan offered me all manner of asides: observations of no direct pertinence to the story but which somehow made the story more attractive to me. Milosz offers no asides: everything in The Captive Mind is fiercely, reflectively relevant. Both authors tell us our shared realities – multilayered, corrugated, oblique – are smitten flat and rendered unreal on the anvil of authoritarian political logic.
The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz, 1990, Vintage International Edition. (First published in 1953.)
The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung, translated by Michael S Duke, 2011, Doubleday.
I wrote this post some time ago; sadly it seems apropos to share it now given Russia’s deluded, immoral, vulgar, shameful invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.