George Gömöri

Czeslaw Milosz's "Antigone"
and the 1956 Revolution

The Polish Nobel-laureate Czeslaw Milosz's entire poetry is based on dichotomies. He is torn between the truth of "classicism" and that of "realism" -at least this is my reading of what he said in one of his Harvard lectures. According to him, in the moment of creation every poet has to make a choice between the contradictory commands of poetic language and the demands of reality. Moreover, in the collection Poznawanie Milosza (Getting to Know Milosz, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow-Wroclaw, 1985) the critic Tomasz Burek defines Milosz's fundamental dilemma as "the impossibility of settling... either on the 'historical' or the 'eternal'." Add to this the Manichean tendencies discovered by more than one critic in Milosz's philosophy and you have not one, but a whole list of dichotomies.
This constant but fruitful struggle can be followed throughout Czeslaw Milosz's creative career. Generally speaking Milosz tries to avoid the stance of a Zeitdichter, a poet who follows the fashion of the day or fulfils the expectations of society; he prefers to tackle eternal subjects. All the same, he is repeatedly forced to react to the twists and turns of history which plunged his homeland
into crisis: first the German occupation from 1939 to 1945 and then the Soviet liberation which soon led to one-party dictatorship and the complete subjugation of Poland to Soviet interests. Milosz, who witnessed the Warsaw uprising, found himself in a difficult situation after the Second World War. He could become a valued "fellow-traveller" of a new regime which lacked social consensus, and was desperately seeking for intellectuals of a pre-war reputation who would give it support. Like a number of other writers, Milosz was offered a diplomatic post in 1947-first in Washington and then in Paris-but as time passed and the Communists eliminated the Polish Peasant Party and with it the last vestiges of formal democracy, his unease also grew. The last straw was the introduction of Socialist Realism in Poland at the Szczecin Congress of Writers in December 1949. A few months later Milosz decided to cut his ties with the Communist regime, and from 1951 he began to publish in the emigré journal Kultura. The Captive Mind, in which he explained the self-hoodwinking mechanism of Polish intellectuals supporting the Communists, was published in 1953, but his previous collaboration with the Soviet puppet regime in Poland was not forgotten by most right-wing emigrés, who would have no truck with Czeslaw Milosz.
Antigone was apparently written in 1949 but without the hope of publication. In the earlier collection Ocalenie (Rescue, 1945), the censor had not crossed out the following lines from the poem 'In Warsaw': "You swore never to touch / The deep wounds of your nation / So you would not make them holy... But the lament of Antigone / Searching for her brother / Is indeed beyond the power / Of endurance" (The Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 76). In the fragment which he wrote four years later, Milosz goes further: while avoiding taking any side as to who should rule Poland, the poet makes it clear that he supports Antigone's moral integrity against Ismene's acceptance of compromise and silent submission. Not paying respect to the fallen is Creon's mistake-it is a mistake which one day will undermine his throne. In Sophocles, Antigone's brother is one of those who attack Thebes; in Milosz's poem the unburied fallen happen to be defenders of the city, they are heroes of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The "falsification of history", mentioned in Antigone's last but one speech, was taking place before Milosz's eyes: the young men who, as members of the Home Army, fought the Germans, were now vilified as anti-Soviet "agents of the London government in exile" and in most cases were imprisoned by the Communist authorities. Milosz's protest therefore is specifically aimed against the "new Creons" who think they are strong because they have power, but in fact they are weak, for the spirits of the dead are against them. Moral protest is here turned into political prophecy, foreseeing the victory of the disrespected and unrepresented dead at some undefined time in the future.
Milosz locked his poem in the drawer in 1949, but after his defection to the West he could not have it published-he might have been accused of antedating the poem in order to curry favour with the nationalist exiles. The first (and perhaps the only) propitious time to publish Antigone arrived in 1956, when the Hungarian revolution once again made half-forgotten grievances and protests topical. As Milosz always fought Polish nationalism and the tendency to blame foreign powers for all of Poland's troubles, this was a moment when he could show sympathy with the traditional rhetoric of 19th century Polish Romanticism.
Although the poem uses a classical topos and to some extent a classical diction, it is the protagonists' passion that makes it truly Romantic. And as this
poem was not "mainstream" Milosz, he probably felt uneasy soon after its publication. Did he commit the sin of compromising his artistic autonomy by fitting in for a moment with the tradition of the great Polish Romantics? I don't think he did; but he never included this poem in any of his later (English or Polish) selections. I reprinted the original twice in my anthology Polscy poeci o wegierskim paz'dzierniku (Polish Poets on the Hungarian October) in 1986 and 1996. Milosz must have been happy to liberate his poem from the drawer with a dedication to the Hungarians; later he showed considerable interest in matters Hungarian. In 1960 Wegry (Hungary) was published by the Instytut Literacki in Paris-this was a small anthology, comprising two political essays, one by the Hungarian exile Péter Kende and another one written under the pseudonym "Hungaricus" (Sándor Fekete), as well as eight poems by young Hungarian poets. Milosz translated the essays from the French, and as he knew no Hungarian, asked
the Hungarian exile Éva Faragó to help translate the poems into French. These poetic translations of Czeslaw Milosz are, unfortunately double paraphrases; still, the fact that a well-established Polish poet, such as himself, would translate young Hungarians, none of whom had ever published a single book of
poetry, is remarkable in itself. In his introductory notes to the book Milosz shows the source of his symphathy: "The Hungarian tragedy [i.e. the suppression of the revolution] created shock in Poland and it was felt as the Poles' own tragedy... There is hardly any Polish poet who would not have devoted at least one poem to the revolution, using more or less transparent allusions." Antigone makes clear allusions to the abuse of power for which the Creons of the
twentieth century were ultimately punished just as the Creons of antiquity had been. I, for one, would not hesitate to place it amongst Milosz's most impressive poems.