Miłosz. Return.

Miłosz. Return. is a temporary exhibition project for The National Library. Palace of the Commonwealth in Poland.

The exhibition Miłosz. Return presented original manuscripts, books, photographs and objects that came to the National Library from the poet's home in Berkeley and his flat in Kraków. Together, they form a visionary journey through moments in the writer's life that are impossible to recall without poetry.

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a poet, essayist, translator and one of the most eminent writers of the 20th century. He was born in Szetejnie, not far from Kiejdany, in the Russian Empire, in the territory of the former Great Duchy of Lithuania. He spent his youth in Vilnius, a city within Polish borders at the time, where he completed his studies at the Stefan Batory University and published his first two volumes of poetry: A Poem on Frozen Time and Three Winters. In the second half of the 1930s he moved to Warsaw, where he remained during the German occupation. His third volume, Rescue, appeared in late 1945, a ground-breaking book for Polish poetry, while the poet gave his support to the new regime and was sent on a diplomatic posting to the United States. In 1951 he decided to break with the Communist authorities, one of the first intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc to do so. He settled in France and established a permanent relationship with the émigré monthly Kultura published by Jerzy Giedroyć. In 1960 he moved with his wife and sons to America and started teaching literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and, after years of being banned, his works began being appearing again in Poland. After 1989 he regularly returned to Poland and became one of the key figures in the country's cultural life. In the last decade of his life he split his time between Kraków and California. He died in his Kraków apartment on August 14, 2004, aged 93.