Ensayo de Milosz escrito para explicar porque deserto del bloque soviético. Explica bien la fascinacion. de los intelectuales, y de los compañeros de ruta con el Imperio Soviético. y describe la sociedad centro europea cuya cultura me es ajena y a la que describe el y Zweig en algunas de sus obras, ( )

An examination of the psychology of the Stalinist totalitarian system from the view of polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He names several types of self-delusion and describes the fates of some friends he knew who stayed in the Soviet Union. A very interesting and sharp analysis from a time in which it was not yet clear if Communism would fail in it's world-conquering ambitions. ( )

An examination of the psychology of the Stalinist totalitarian system from the view of polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He names several types of self-delusion and describes the fates of some friends he knew who stayed in the Soviet Union. A very interesting and sharp analysis from a time in which it was not yet clear if Communism would fail in it's world-conquering ambitions. ( )

Published two years after his definitive break with the post-war Polish state, this is the book where Czesław Miłosz investigates in detail how Stalinism affected the minds of people living in the parts of Europe that fell under Soviet domination after World War II. He looks in the abstract at a number of mental strategies he has identified for coping with totalitarian rule, and in the light of these he considers his own experience as a left-wing writer who lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw and also looks at four other Polish writers (coincidentally called Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta) who accommodated themselves, or tried not to, in various different ways.

In the final chapters, Miłosz looks at the way the unpredictable individuality of the human mind keeps on undermining the "scientific" assumptions of totalitarian ideologies, and he devotes some time to making sure that his readers are aware of the scale of the horrors inflicted on the people of the Baltic states after the Russian occupations of 1940 and 1945 and the Nazi occupation of 1941. If you're going to have a single political system based on a Russian Centre, you'd better be prepared to put up with mass deportations, he's telling us.

Obviously some of this is very specific to the situation Miłosz was in in the early 1950s, but there are also a lot of frighteningly clear insights into the way people behave under pressure in the real world. And some prescient moments when he talks about the likelihood that the countries of Eastern Europe will rise up against Stalin and be crushed one by one, and about Catholicism as the main threat to Stalinism in Poland. Interesting too how Miłosz, who had seen all this at first hand, praises the insight of George Orwell, who hadn't. ( )

Miłosz’s meditation on how people (for most of the book, academics) forced themselves to make an agonized peace with Soviet ideology in the aftermath of WW2 resonates today for readers who’ve seen friends and colleagues start speaking in strange tongues for favor in much smaller stakes.

The text slowed to a crawl in spaces where the context was obviously more immediate at its publication, but Miłosz’s poetic voice makes other passages of horror and humility deeply affecting, ringing throughout time. ( )