Miłosz. Return.

Miłosz. Return brought together manuscripts, books, photographs and personal objects received by the National Library from the poet's home in Berkeley and his flat in Kraków. Together, these materials traced moments in a life whose recollection is inseparable from poetry.

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), poet, essayist and translator, was born in Szetejnie, in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His formative years in Vilnius, including his studies at Stefan Batory University and the publication of his first two poetry collections, were followed by a move to Warsaw in the late 1930s. He remained there throughout the German occupation. Rescue, published in 1945, became a landmark in Polish poetry.

After a diplomatic posting to the United States, Miłosz broke with the Communist authorities in 1951 and settled in France, establishing a lasting relationship with Jerzy Giedroyć's émigré journal Kultura. In 1960 he moved to California to teach literature at Berkeley. The Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1980, accompanied the renewed circulation of his work in Poland after years of suppression.

Following 1989, Miłosz returned regularly to Poland. He spent the last decade of his life between Kraków and California, and died in Kraków on 14 August 2004. The exhibition approached this geography of departure and return through the surviving material traces of his life.