The Model of a Non-Totalitarian Society in Czesław Miłosz's Biohistory

Abstract This article presents the record of twentieth-century historical experiences contained in the poetry, essays, and letters of Czesław Miłosz. The author of the article shows the etiology of Nazism and communism set out in them, as well as the method of analyzing history and its expression in Miłosz's poetry. Three dimensions of Miłosz's view of the world are discussed: nature, theology, and history. The course of their synthesis into Manichean-Gnostic bio-historiosophy is shown. The author isolates a specific component of this bio-historiosophy: a theological inversion that implies an image of the world and human beings as the work of and under the sway of an evil demiurge, the Destroyer. This image is reflected in Miłosz's specific poetics: that is, a biopoetics that uses motifs of animalization, especially entomology. The claim is made that Miłosz's poetry offers an image of the totalitarianisms born in the incubator of European Darwinian-Hegelian thought, and at the same time a “model of a non-totalitarian society” thanks to its antinomic nature. That is, it contrasts Darwinism with anthropocentrism, Hegelianism with the philosophy of freedom, and gnosis with Arcadian traditions of imaging the world.