Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past the terrible crucible of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Poland, and finally into postwar political exile after he broke with the Communist government and his own socialist tendencies. When Native Realm was first published in 1959 (the English translation dates to 1968), his long and fruitful years in California were ahead of him, as was his Nobel Prize. The Communist yoke seemed firmly settled on Poland. Milosz could see where it fit poorly, but even he could not see it being loosened. Twenty-one years after Native Realm was published in English, Poland held its first semi-free elections since World War II; every Communist candidate who was on the ballot was voted out. Milosz eventually returned to his native country, dying in its ancient capital of Krakow in 2004.

The beginning of Native Realm is far from that, in so many ways. At Milosz’s birth in 1911, the area where his family lived was part of the Russian Empire. The Great War came and upended much in that part of the world, not least because it was soon followed by war between Soviet Russia and a Poland that returned to Europe’s map for the first time since 1795.

The process that was taking place in Eastern Europe, more or less simultaneous with the building of the railroads, was not paralleled in other parts of the continent; it is closer to what happened in the American South after the Civil War. It was not accidental that I mentioned Faulkner earlier. Poles find the atmosphere of his novels considerably more familiar than that of Balzac’s or Zola’s. In Poland as in the American South, the equilibrium of a whole community was disrupted by a sudden shock. The impoverished gentry fled to the cities, but their former customs and habits did not altogether disappear. Far from it. They left their stamp on all classes; thus, the Polish proletariat, not to speak of the intelligentsia, which maintained close ties with the surviving members of the nobility, inherited many of the gentry’s characteristics. (p. 31)

That attachment to the values of the nobility — Poland’s was an elected king, and the electorate of the time was a larger share of the populace than the share of the British people who could vote for Parliament — made many Poles keen on democracy even during long years of Communist oppression. Milosz shows how other values from the old Polish gentry, namely disdain for money and commerce, could also open people to the changes promised by the government the Soviets installed after the war. Many paragraphs, throughout Native Realm are like this one: ranging forward and backward to trace connections, relating art to politics and daily life, supporting sharp judgments, and offering details from Milosz’s own background to illustrate all of the forgoing elements. They make the book a delight to read actively, to argue internally with Milosz, or just to consider his perspective and the many unexpected notions he brings.

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