I want you to start with a mental image. Just,
you know, close your eyes for a second. Imagine
you're standing on a street corner in Warsaw.
It's a beautiful Sunday, spring of 1943. The
sky is that crisp, perfect blue. The wind is
warm, maybe carrying the scent of blooming lindens.
And right there in the square, there's a carnival.
A carousel spinning around, playing this jaunty
kind of mechanical tune. People are laughing.
Girls are catching their skirts in the wind.
Couples are, you know, flirting. And just beyond
that carousel, maybe 50 yards away, there's a
wall. And behind that wall, the Jewish ghetto
is on fire. The sky isn't blue there. It's black
with smoke. And pieces of ash, human ash, debris
from people's living rooms are floating down
like black snow. On to the writers. On the carousel.
And that isn't a hypothetical. That's not some,
you know, writer's invention. That is the exact
scene that was captured in the poem Campo de
Fury. And the man watching it, the man standing
right there between the laughter and the inferno,
scribbling the notes that would become one of
the most important poems of the 20th century.
That's Chesso Mios. Welcome back to the Deep
Dive. Today, we are not just doing a biography
of a writer. That's too simple. We're looking
at a man whose life is a complete cross -section
of the 20th century. If you want to understand
the modern world totalitarianism, war, exile,
the clash of ideologies, you really don't need
a whole stack of history books. You just need
to understand this one man. It really is the
ultimate case study, isn't it? Yeah. the west
at the absolute height of the cold war and it
doesn't stop there no then he watches the counterculture
explode in berkeley in the 1960s and he lives
long enough to see the berlin wall come down
and democracy returned to his homeland it's just
yeah it's the whole century it's staggering it's
not like he just read about these things in the
paper he was there he was a witness but the thing
that really gets me is the contrast you look
at his resume right nobel laureate righteous
among the nations For saving Jews. I mean, a
certified hero. But then there's this other part.
He was also a diplomat for a communist regime
before he defected. And a reluctant witness,
which is maybe the most interesting part. What
do you mean by that? Well, that's the tension
we're really going to explore today. Milos didn't
want to be a political poet. He wanted to be
a poet of nature, of contemplation. He wanted
to write about rivers and forests and the metaphysical
nature of being. But history, with a capital
H, kept grabbing him by the throat and forcing
him to look at the ugly stuff. He wanted to look
at the sky, but he was forced to look at the
blood in the mud. That's a perfect way to put
it. So our mission for this deep dive is to try
and unpack the toolkit he left for us. Because
he didn't just observe, he analyzed. He basically
wrote a manual on how the human mind gets seduced
by authoritarian ideas. And frankly, in our current
age of, you know, information warfare, polarized
narratives, echo chambers, that manual is more
relevant than ever. Absolutely. We have a massive
stack of sources today. His autobiography, Native
Realm, which is incredible. His poetry, obviously,
which is the core of his soul. And of course,
The Captive Mind, which is... I think you could
argue the best book ever written on intellectual
dishonesty and the, well, the seduction of totalitarianism.
So let's start at the very beginning, because
usually when we talk about a writer, we can say,
oh, he was Polish or she was American. With Mios,
it's just not that simple. If you asked him where
he was from, he wouldn't point to a country on
a modern map. No, not at all. He would say he
was a citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Which, for those of us who aren't, you know,
experts in Eastern European history, hasn't actually
existed for a very, very long time. Yeah. Oh,
deeply, deeply defunct by the time he was born
in 1911. But this is absolutely crucial to understanding
his psychology. He was born in a place called
Etiniai in what is now the Kadeniai district
of Lithuania. Yeah. But the culture he was born
into was this very specific borderland mix. The
sources describe it as a place where languages
and religions just. They overlapped almost seamlessly.
You had Polish nobility, Lithuanian peasants,
Jewish merchants, Russian administrators. It
wasn't this rigid show me your passport kind
of world. Right. It wasn't the kind of ethno
-nationalism that we see so much today where
it's Poland is for the Poles or Lithuania is
for the Lithuanians. The Grand Duchy identity
was about plurality. It was a civic identity,
not just an ethnic one. Mews grew up speaking
Polish. But he was hearing Lithuanian, Yiddish
and Russian every single day. He considered himself
a patriot of a vanished country. He actually
claimed he had a greater right than Adam Mikovic,
the great romantic poet, to say, oh, Lithuania,
my country. That is a bold claim. I mean, that's
like saying you're more American than Walt Whitman
or something. It is. But he felt it in his bones.
There's a great detail in the notes about his
family tree that really illustrates this. It
reads like a. Like a United Nations roster of
the entire region. Yeah, let's look at that.
His grandfather, Zygmunt Cunat, owned the estate
in Atenia. Polish nobility, but not the, you
know, wealthy, drinking champagne in Paris kind.
This was the squire class, connected to the soil,
managing the harvest, hands in the bird. And
then you have his paternal grandfather, Artur
Mios, who fought in the 1863 uprising against
Russia. So you have rebellion baked into the
DNA. Rebellion against empire specifically. Exactly.
But then it gets even more mixed. His grandmother
was a descendant of the Sirich family, which
was of Lithuanian origin. One of her ancestors
was a personal secretary to the king of Poland.
And his other grandmother was a doctor's daughter
from Riga in Latvia from a German -Polish family,
the Vanolls. And there's even a theory mentioned
by his biographer, Andrzej Franacek, that the
name Milos comes from Serbian roots way, way
back. So he's just a walking melting pot. He's
a child of Europe. And this is why he was so
allergic to the narrow nationalism that tore
Europe apart later. He couldn't hate the Germans
or the Russians or the Jews or the Lithuanians
without hating a part of himself or his neighbors.
He saw these divisions as, I don't know, artificial
overlays on a much more complex reality. His
childhood, at least at first, sounds almost like
a fairy tale. He wrote a novel called The Issa
Valley, which memorializes this time. And it's
just full of these descriptions of hunting and
beekeeping, devils living in the willow trees.
It sounds idyllic. It was in Eden. But like Eden,
it had a snake. And the snake was the 20th century.
He's born in 1911. By 1914, World War I starts.
He's three years old. And his expulsion from
paradise begins almost immediately. This is the
part of the timeline that just blew my mind.
His father was a civil engineer, right? Yes,
Alexander Mishvos. He was drafted into the Imperial
Russian Army to build bridges and roads for the
troops. And he didn't leave his family behind
in the safety of the estate. He took them with
him. Just try to imagine the logistics of that
for a second. You're a toddler. You are traveling
in what's essentially a wagon train right behind
the front lines of the Great War. It's a nomadic.
terrifying existence. They were in Vilnius when
the German army captured it in 1915. Then they
retreated with the Russian army deep into Russia
itself. They actually crossed Siberia. Siberia
as a child. Yes. The sources track their movement
through these vast swaths of the Russian empire
as it was collapsing. I mean, imagine a six -year
-old boy watching the entire Tsarist order just
dissolve into anarchy. Then, just as the war
ends in 1918, they trek all the way back to their
valley in Lithuania thinking, OK, we made it.
The nightmare is over. And the Polish -Soviet
war breaks out in 1919. There's that vivid anecdote
in his memoir, Native Realm, about being fired
upon during this return journey. Oh, it's a chilling
moment. It stayed with him forever. He and his
mother are traveling and Polish soldiers, his
own people, theoretically open fire on their
carriage. In the chaos of these border wars,
nobody knew who was who. So you have this young
boy realizing that identity won't save you. The
bullet doesn't check your passport. The bullet
doesn't care if you speak Polish. It was a lesson
in the absolute fragility of civilization. It
really explains why his later poetry is so focused
on how easily things just fall apart. He saw
the structures of the world, empires, borders,
safety, completely dissolved before he was even
10 years old. Exactly. He couldn't be a naive
romantic because his childhood was defined by
the collapse of order. And this followed him
right to university. He entered Stefan Batory
University in Ornel Vilnius in 1929. He studies
law, but his heart is in literature. And he co
-founds a poetry group. With a name that I absolutely
love, the Catastrophists. The group itself was
called Oogery, which means brushwood or kindling,
something that's ready to burn. But the critics,
they're the ones who labeled them the catastrophists.
And it wasn't just, you know, teenage angst.
It wasn't them wearing black and being moody.
It was a kind of prophetic intuition. What were
they prophesying? What did they see coming? Well,
you have to remember the context. It's the early
1930s. Most of Western Europe is trying to pretend
everything is fine. The Roaring Twenties are
over, but people are still hoping for peace.
But these students in Wilno, living on the fault
line between the rising Soviet Union and a rearming
Germany. They could feel the tremors. They just
knew. What was the poetry like? Dark. Very surreal.
Full of apocalyptic imagery. Visions of burning
cities, crumbling towers, anthills being destroyed
by a careless foot. They weren't writing about
unrequited love or flowers. They were writing
about the end of civilization. They sensed that
the fragile peace of the 1920s was about to shatter,
and they were screaming it in verse. And it wasn't
just poetry for Mios, right? He wasn't some passive
observer hiding in a library. There's a story
about him standing up to a mob that I think is
really important to understand his character.
This is vital, because Mios often accused himself
of being too passive later in life, of being
too intellectual. But here, as a student, he
was incredibly brave. Anti -Semitism was rising
in Polish universities, specifically this policy
of ghetto benches, where Jewish students were
forced to sit separately in lecture halls. It
was segregation, 100%. It was. And a mob formed
to attack Jewish students at the university.
Mios, who was a distinct physical presence, he
was a big guy. Thick eyebrows, very intense stare.
He physically stepped in. He threw punches. He
got in a fight. He fended off attacks. He defended
people. And this wasn't just a shoving match.
It was life or death. During that specific riot,
a student was killed by a rock thrown at his
head. So Mios was putting his life on the line
to defend these students. He chose a side, and
it wasn't the side of the nationalist. It shows
his moral compass was already set against this
kind of ethnic hatred. Around this time, he also
travels to Paris and meets a figure who seems
to belong to a different century. entirely. His
cousin, Oscar Milos. Oh, Oscar Milos is a deep
dive all on his own. He was living in Paris,
a diplomat for Lithuania, a French -language
poet, but primarily a Swedenborgian mystic. Swedenborgian.
That's esoteric. We probably need to unpack that
a little bit. Extremely esoteric. Emanuel Swedenborg
was an 18th century scientist who turned mystic,
claimed he could converse with angels, and mapped
out the spiritual structure of the entire universe.
Oscar was a devotee. And he taught Cesar that
the material world, the world of politics, wars,
economics, is not the only reality. He introduced
him to the idea that there is a spiritual hierarchy,
a vertical dimension to life. So you have this
young Cesar Esmios. On one hand, he's a catastrophist,
seeing the political doom coming, the horizontal
threats. And on the other, he's an apprentice
mystic, learning about the eternal soul, the
vertical hope. And that duality never leaves
him. For his entire life, he is always looking
at the mud of history with one eye and at the
heavens with the other. He refuses to give up
either perspective. Then the catastrophe arrives.
September 1st, 1939. Germany invades Poland.
The prophecy comes true. Mios is in Warsaw, working
for Polish radio when the bombs start falling.
The radio station is hit. He joins this huge
exodus of refugees fleeing east. He makes it
to Laos, then to Bucharest in Romania. And he's
safe. This is a really key moment. He's in a
neutral country. He has a way out. He could have
gone to France or England like thousands of others
and just waited out the war. But he turns around.
He goes back, back into the fire. And the reason
is love. Janina, his future wife, was still in
German Occupy Warsaw. He couldn't leave her there.
The route he took back sounds like something
out of a spy thriller. I mean, it wasn't like
he could just hop on a train. It's incredible.
He's in Bucharest. He needs to get to Warsaw.
He gets a Lithuanian identity document. He gets
a Soviet visa. He travels by train through the
Soviet occupied zone to Vilno. But just then,
Vilno is handed over to Lithuania. Then the Red
Army invades Lithuania. He realizes he has to
get to the German zone to reach Warsaw. He gets
fake papers. He walks a significant portion of
the way crossing the green border illegally.
He's risking execution by both the Soviets and
the Nazis just to get back to Janina. Talk about
a romantic gesture. Honey, I walked through two
totalitarian regimes to get to you. And when
he finds her... They spent the next five years
in what he later called the most agonizing spot
in the whole of terrorized Europe. Nazi -occupied
Warsaw. It is just so hard for us to truly grasp
what that meant. It wasn't just occupation in
the sense of, you know, enemy soldiers on the
street. It was a systematic attempt to erase
a culture and a people. Schools were closed.
Publishing was banned. Libraries were burned.
And then there were the random street roundups,
the Apanka. You'd walk out to buy bread. A truck
would pull up. Soldiers would shove everyone
on the street into the back. And you'd be sent
to Auschwitz or a forced labor camp. You never
knew if you would come home. So how did he survive?
How did he stay sane in that kind of environment?
By working. And by resisting. But his resistance
was unique. He worked as a janitor at the university
library, which gave him access to all these books
that were supposed to be locked away or destroyed.
And he participated in the cultural resistance.
Right. He translated The Wasteland by T .S. Eliot
into Polish while Warsaw was literally turning
into a wasteland. The resonance is just so powerful.
Think of the lines. I will show you fear in a
handful of dust. He was seeing that dust every
single day. Warsaw was becoming the surreal,
fragmented landscape that Eliot had written about.
Translating it was a way of making sense of the
chaos. He also published a clandestine poetry
anthology under the pseudonym Jan Siric. It was
typed on onion skin paper, stapled together.
If the Gestapo had found that on him, he would
have been shot instantly. But he believed that
preserving the language was a form of warfare.
But he did more than just write. We have to talk
about his designation as righteous among the
nations. This wasn't something that was widely
known for a long time, was it? No. Mias didn't
like to brag about his heroism. In fact, he often
felt guilty that he didn't do more. But the record
is clear. His brother, Andres, was very active
in the underground, smuggling Jews out of the
Vilnius ghetto. Andres here brought a Jewish
couple, the Trosses, to Warsaw. and Chessa took
over from there. And what did that involve? It
wasn't just like opening your door for a night.
Oh, no. It involved everything. Finding them
a safe apartment in a city where hiding Jews
was punishable by death for the entire household.
Getting them false Aryan papers. Bringing them
food. Paying for their rent. He was their lifeline.
He also helped another family, the Wukomiskas,
providing money and shelter. Tragically, the
Trosses didn't survive the war in the end. They
died during the Warsaw Uprising. Which was a
source of immense pain for Mios. But his actions
were verified, and Yad Bisham honored him. This
experience, though, brings us right back to that
image of the carousel that we started with, the
proximity of normal life to absolute horror.
That poem, Campo de Fiori, and another one, A
Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto, they feel
different from typical war poetry. They aren't
just saying war is hell. They're asking, what
does it mean to be a bystander? Exactly. In A
Poor Christian. Looks at the ghetto, he uses
this imagery of a mole burrowing underground,
listening to the bodies. He worries that he'll
be counted among the helpers of death, just because
he survived while others died. It's a profound
interrogation of survivors' guilt. He's patting
himself on the back for helping. He's terrified
by his own helplessness. He felt that watching
the Holocaust changed the very nature of what
it means to be human. Which leads us to maybe
the most controversial moment of his war years.
August 1944. The Warsaw Uprising. The Polish
underground army rises up to take the city back
from the Germans. It's the climax of the resistance.
And Musius, he does not fight. And this decision
haunted his reputation in Poland for decades.
You have to understand, the flower of Polish
youth, his peers, his friends, they all took
up arms. They fought for 63 days against tanks
and bombers with barely any weapons. The city
was leveled. 200 ,000 civilians died. And Yusha
stood aside. Why? I mean, was it cowardice? What
was the thinking? He would say it was realism.
He called the uprising a blameworthy, lightheaded
enterprise. He looked at the geopolitical map.
The Soviet Red Army was waiting right across
the river. He knew Stalin wouldn't help. In fact,
Stalin wanted the Polish resistance destroyed
so he could take over more easily later. Mios
believed the Polish leadership was sending an
entire generation to slaughter for a symbolic
gesture that had zero chance of military success.
So he saw it as a suicide mission. Yes, a beautiful,
heroic, but ultimately pointless suicide mission.
And he refused to commit suicide. He refused
to die for a gesture. But to the families of
those who died, that refusal could look like
arrogance or betrayal. It's a tension that never
fully went away for him. And he almost got killed
anyway, didn't he? Ironically, yes. In the chaos
of the uprising's collapse, he was rounded up
by the Germans and put in a transit camp. He
was destined for a concentration camp or a firing
squad. And then a miracle happens. A literal
deus ex machina. A nun, a complete stranger,
spots him in the holding area. and she somehow
manages to plead with a German officer. She claims
he's her relative or someone essential. We don't
know exactly what she said, but she talked him
out of the line. She saves the life of a future
Nobel Prize winner and then just disappeared
into history. That randomness that you live or
die based on the whim of a stranger or the mood
of a guard, that seems to be such a core lesson
for him. It stripped him of any belief in a benevolent,
orderly universe where good things happen to
good people. If you survive that, you can't believe
that everything happens for a reason. You survive
because of luck. Plain and simple. So the war
ends. Warsaw is a pile of rubble. The Soviets
march in and set up a puppet government. And
now Milosz does something that shocks his friends
even more than not fighting. He takes a job with
the communists. This is the Faustian Bargain.
From 1945 to 1951. Czesław Miłosz, the mystic
poet who hates totalitarianism, becomes a cultural
attaché for the People's Republic of Poland.
He gets posted to New York, Washington, D .C.,
and Paris. Why? I mean, this is the guy who hated
the catastrophe. Why join the people causing
it? It's the question everyone asks. The simple
answer is he wanted to be a Polish writer. He
was terrified that if he stayed in exile, he
would lose his language, his roots. He thought,
maybe I can work for the state without adopting
the ideology. Maybe I can help rebuild Polish
culture from the inside. He wanted to be printed.
He wanted to be read. He thought he could outsmart
the system. He thought he could wear a mask.
He was practicing Ketman. Okay, we need to stop
and define that. This is a concept from the captive
mind. It's so, so important. What is Ketman?
Ketman is an Islamic theological concept from
Persia that Mios adapted. Originally, It referred
to a believer hiding their true faith in a hostile
environment just to survive. In Mios' context,
it refers to the practice of paying lip service
to the ruling orthodoxy, using the communist
slogans, clapping at the speeches, while keeping
your true beliefs hidden in your heart. So it's
like high stakes faking it. It's more than just
faking. It's a survival mechanism where you actually
derive a secret pleasure. from your deception.
You smile at the party boss and you think to
yourself, I am smarter than you because I am
lying to you. Milos was practicing Ketman. He
thought he could serve the diplomatic corps while
remaining intellectually free. But the mask started
to eat into the face. It always does. You can't
live a lie for that long. Yeah. The breaking
point came in 1949. He visited Poland and saw
the reality on the ground. The post -war thaw
was completely over. Stalinism was clamping down
hard. Friends were being arrested. The socialist
realism doctrine was being forced on writers.
You couldn't just write a poem about a sunset.
It had to praise the tractor drivers and the
party. And his bosses were onto him. They were
suspicious. Oh, yeah. They wrote in a report
that he was ideologically totally alien, which,
to be fair, he was. Yeah. In late 1950, they
recalled him to Warsaw and took his passport.
He was trapped. He was moments away from being
thrown in a cell or just disappearing into the
gulag system. How did he get out? He had one
friend left in high places, the foreign minister,
Zygmunt Modzalewski. Modzalewski intervened and
got his passport back, sending him to Paris for
one last mission. Mears knew it was a one -way
trip. He knew if he went back again, he was dead.
So he gets to Paris, January 1951, and he jumps
ship. He goes straight to the headquarters of
Kultura, the famous Polish emigre journal run
by Jerzy Gietroyk. He just walks in and says,
I'm not going back. And this should be the happy
ending, right? Welcome to freedom, Chesav. But
it wasn't. It was a nightmare. The Polish emigre
community in London and Paris, they hated him.
They said, oh, now you defect. You were happy
to drink cocktails in the embassy while our friends
were being tortured for the last five years.
You're an opportunist. They shunned him completely.
And the leftist intellectuals in Parasarcha,
that whole crowd, they hated him too. For the
exact opposite reason. They were still in love
with the Soviet dream. They saw him as a traitor
to the revolution. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean
poet, wrote this scathing article in a communist
paper titled The Man Who Ran Away. Just bashing
him. He was totally isolated. And the Americans.
The Americans wouldn't let him in. The McCarran
Act was in full swing. Because he had been a
diplomat for a communist government, he was flagged
as a security risk. So he's stuck in France.
His wife and children are in the United States.
He's separated from them for years. He actually
missed the birth of his second son. He was suicidal.
But in that darkness, in that pressure cooker
of isolation, he wrote the book that changed
everything, The Captive Mind. Published in 1953,
it is an absolute masterpiece. And here is the
key insight for our listeners. This is the toolkit.
Mios explains that people don't just submit to
tyranny out of fear. They submit because of a
pill. The pill of Murtabing. Right. He borrows
this metaphor from a novel by a Polish writer,
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The pill of Murtabing
is a philosophical drug. If you take it, your
anxiety vanishes. You stop worrying about the
meaning of life or the complexity of the world
or all the contradictions. You accept the new
faith, which is communism. You become happy,
productive, and completely hollow. It's a metaphor
for historical necessity. Precisely. The intellectual
convinces himself that history is a train moving
in one direction, towards communism. If you stand
on the tracks, you get run over. If you get on
the train, you're part of the future. It's seductive.
It relieves you of the burden of individual conscience.
You don't have to decide what's right or wrong
anymore. The party decides for you. This is the
aha moment for me. When you see people today
adopting a really rigid ideology, whether it's
left or right, and suddenly they have a simple
answer for everything, and they treat anyone
who disagrees as a dinosaur or a monster, they've
taken the pill. They have. They've traded critical
thinking for certainty. And Niosh shows us how
smart people, brilliant people, rationalize this
lobotomy. He profiles four fellow writers in
the book. He calls them Alpha, Beta, and Alpha.
gamma and delta to protect their identities.
And he dissects how each of them sold their soul
to the system, not for money, but for a sense
of belonging and historical correctness. It's
a terrifying psychological study, but eventually
the West starts to listen. And in 1960, the McCarthyite
hysteria dies down enough that the U .S. finally
grants him a visa and he lands in. Berkeley,
California. From the frying pan into the hot
tub. He arrives in the Bay Area just as the 60s
are kicking off. I cannot imagine the culture
shock. He goes from the ruins of Warsaw and the
intense intellectual battles of Paris to sunshine
and hippies. He called it the land of Ulro. which
is a term he borrowed from the poet William Blake.
For Blake, Ulroa was the realm of spiritual desolation,
of cold science and materialism. To Muse, California
was terrifyingly flat. No history, no tragedy,
just sunshine, supermarkets, and people who were
obsessed with their own happiness. And he got
a job teaching at UC Berkeley. Yes, he got tenure
in two months, which is just wild. But he felt
invisible. Nobody knew who he was. To his colleagues,
he was just this grumpy professor of Slavic languages.
They had no idea they were having coffee with
one of the greatest poets of the century. And
then came the free speech movement, the protests
against the Vietnam War. You would think Miesch,
the rebel poet who defied Hitler and Stalin,
would love the students rising up against the
man. You would think so. But he despised it.
He looked at these students, well -fed, driving
cars, free to say whatever they wanted, and he
saw spoiled children of the bourgeoisie. Why
was he so hostile to them? Because he felt they
didn't understand the nature of reality. They
were playing at revolution. They were waving
Mao's Little Red Book around. Mews had seen what
Mao and Stalin actually did. He had seen the
bodies. To him, seeing American kids praising
communism was like seeing someone praising cancer
because they liked the shape of the tumor. It
was obscene to him. There's that legendary story
of him at a rally that I absolutely love. Oh,
it defines the disconnect. A student is giving
a speech about universal love and how we just
need to love everyone to solve the world's problems.
You know, very flower power. Mius, the old professor
with the thick accent, grabs the mic and he says.
Talk to me about love when they come into your
cell one morning. Line you all up and say, you
and you, step forward. It's your time to die,
unless any of your friends loves you so much
he wants to take your place. Boom. I bet you
could hear a pin drop in the quad. Absolute silence.
He was bringing the gravity of the 20th century
into their fantasy world. He was saying, you
think you're free. You have no idea what freedom
costs. You have no idea what human beings are
capable of when the thin veneer of civilization
is removed. Despite feeling like an alien, he
was productive there. He translated Polish poetry
into English. He published an anthology, Post
-War Polish Poetry, which actually changed American
literature. It really did. American poets like
Robert Haas and W .S. Merwin read this anthology
and were just blown away. American poetry at
the time was often very personal, very confessional.
And here were the Polish poets writing about
history, about irony, about the weight of civilization.
It injected a seriousness and a historical consciousness
into American poetry that it really needed. And
eventually the world caught up to Mios, 1980,
the Nobel Prize. It came out of nowhere for most
Americans, but the timing was just providential.
1980 was the year that Solidarity Solidarność
was born in the Gdańsk shipyards. The workers'
strikes against the communist government led
by Lech Waszczyk. Exactly. And suddenly, Mios,
who'd been banned in Poland for 30 years, his
name couldn't even be printed in newspapers,
his books were smuggled in like contraband, was
on the front page of every newspaper in the world.
He became the spiritual godfather of the revolution.
There's that incredible image of the monument
to the fallen shipyard workers in Gadesque. Three
massive crosses. And on the base, there's a quote
from Mios. From his poem, You Who Wronged. The
lines are, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born. The words
are written down. The deed, the date. That gives
me chills every time I hear it. The poet remembers.
It's the ultimate threat to a dictator. You can
control the army, you can control the police,
but you cannot control memory. It was a total
vindication. The man who refused to fight with
a gun in 1944 had provided the ammunition for
the final victory in 1980. The word proved stronger
than the sword. He returned to Poland in 1981.
It was a hero's welcome. Crowds literally carrying
him on their shoulders. He met Lech Wojtyla.
He met Pope John Paul II. It was a triumphal
return. But... And here's the classic Mios twist.
He didn't just settle into being a comfortable
national statue. He didn't just sit back and
accept the applause. He kept poking the bear.
Right until the very end. After communism fell,
he moved back to Krakow. He lived until 2004,
age 93. But even at his funeral, there were protests.
Protests at the funeral of a Nobel laureate and
national hero? That's insane. Right -wing nationalist
groups. They held signs calling him anti -Polish
and anti -Catholic. Well, why? On what grounds?
Because he refused to flatter the nation. He
criticized Polish antisemitism. He criticized
the narrow -mindedness of the church. He said
that being Polish didn't mean you were automatically
a martyr or a saint. He wanted Poland to be open,
tolerant, pluralistic, like the Grand Duchy of
his childhood. And for the nationalists, who
wanted a pure Catholic Poland, that was treason.
It's fitting, really. He started his life as
an outsider, a citizen of a lost country. And
he ended his life as an outsider, even in his
own homeland. He was always the man in the middle.
Between East and West, between faith and heresy,
between the carousel and the ghetto, he never
let himself get comfortable in any single camp.
So let's try to bring this all home. We've told
this story. But what's the philosophical core?
If you, the listener, take one thing away from
Yosu's worldview, what should it be? I think
it's the rejection of the grand narrative. in
favor of the specific individual human life.
Mios wrestled his whole life with the Hegelian
idea that history justifies suffering, that breaking
a few million eggs is okay if you make a glorious
socialist omelet. And he concluded, no, the terror
of a single child outweighs the entire Hegelian
dialectic. He champions the individual against
the system every single time. In his religious
view, you mentioned he was kind of a strange
Catholic. He was practically a Manichean. Can
you define that for us? Manicheism is this ancient
worldview that sees the material world as being
ruled by dark forces, by a demon, not by a benevolent
God. Mius looked at nature animals eating each
other, the sheer brutality of survival, and he
saw evil. He looked at history, the 20th century,
and he saw the demon at work. But, and this is
the beautiful, crucial part, he refused to give
up on wonder. Yes. or ecstasy. He loved the world,
the simple things, vodka, herring, the smell
of jam being made, the color of a river at sunset.
He believed that despite the devil ruling the
world, there were these moments of grace where
you could glimpse the eternal. His poetry is
this constant battle to praise the world, even
though he knows deep down it's a slaughterhouse.
There's a line from his poetry cycle, The World,
that comes to mind. Faith is in you whenever
you look at a dewdrop or a floating leaf and
know that they are because they have to be. And
that cycle was written in 1943 in Warsaw. While
people were being rounded up and shot in the
streets, Mios was writing these deceptively simple
poems about children seeing a bear in a picture
book or his father fixing a lamp. He was building
a fortress of innocence in the middle of hell.
And I think that's his legacy. You don't ignore
the evil you look at right in the eye, but you
do not let it consume your capacity for beauty.
Chessomuos, the witness who remembered. And the
poet who refused to take the pill. If you want
to dive deeper into this, the captive mind is
the place to start. I promise you, it will change
how you watch the news. Or... Just read the world
poems. They are short, they are simple, and they
are heartbreakingly beautiful. I couldn't recommend
them more. They're an antidote to so much. That's
it for this deep dive. We'll see you next time.