The "memory" of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004.(Notebook)

I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know.

As if I were sent so that whatever takes place Has meaning because it changes into memory.

--Czeslaw Milosz, "Consciousness"

Among the many enduring literary monuments that have been left to us in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the demise of the international Communist movement, and the end of the Cold War, none has proven to be more profound in its comprehension of the evil character of Soviet power that Czeslaw Milosz's Captive Mind (1953). Written at the height of the Cold War and at a time when elite intellectual opinion on both sides of the Atlantic-but most emphatically in Western Europe--was aggressively promoting a craven detente with Stalin's slave-labor empire, The Captive Mind was a good deal more than a political polemic. It was a detailed and devastating analysis of the morally corrupting and intellectually bankrupt character of Soviet culture, and all the more powerful in coming from a poet of world-class distinction who had first-hand knowledge of the blight that had been visited upon Russia and his native Poland by the yoke of Stalin's tyranny.

The Captive Mind was something else as well: an elegy for the civilization that had already been destroyed wherever Soviet power reigned, and a visionary, indictment of the "New Faith" that was rapidly supplanting the surviving remnants of that civilization--a Faith in which even the memory of the non-Communist past was held to be a punishable heresy, if not indeed grounds for political murder.

There are many good reasons to honor the memory of Milosz, who died in August at the age of ninety-three. He was not only a writer of multiple achievements but also a prophet of liberation for whom the individual exercise of disabused memory came to constitute a spiritual vocation. So let us, as a tribute to his memory and his elevation of memory to a moral imperative, recall some of the key passages from The Captive Mind.

 
   "The development of a new man" is the key 
   point in New Faith's program. Demands 
   made upon Party members are exceedingly 
   harsh. One exacts from them no small degree 
   of abstinence. As a result, admission to the 
   Party is not unlike entrance into a religious 
   order; and the literature of the New Faith 
   treats this fact with a gravity equal to that with 
   which Catholic literature speaks of the vows 
   of young nuns. The higher one stands in Party 
   hierarchy, the more attentively is one's private 
   life supervised.... Hence the upper brackets 
   of the Party are filled by ascetics devoted to 
   the single cause of Revolution. 
 
   It is hard to define the type of relationship that 
   prevails between people in the East otherwise 
   than as acting, with the exception that one does 
   not perform on a theater stage but in the street, 
   office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room 
   one lives in. Such acting is a highly developed 
   craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. 
   Before it leaves the lips, every word must 
   be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that 
   appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is 
   not all it should be can occasion dangerous 
   suspicions and accusations. Even one's gestures, 
   tone of voice, or preference for certain 
   kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of 
   one's political tendencies. 
 
   Mayakovski's suicide in 1930 marked the end of 
   an era distinguished by the ...