Czesław Miłosz was born on 30 June 1911, in the village of Šeteniai (Polish: Szetejnie), Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kėdainiai district, Kaunas County, Lithuania).

On his mother's side, his grandfather was Zygmunt Kunat, a descendant of a Polish family that traced its lineage to the 13th century and owned an estate in Krasnogruda (in present-day Poland).

Having studied agriculture in Warsaw, Zygmunt settled in Šeteniai after marrying Miłosz's grandmother, Jozefa, a descendant of the noble Syruć family, which was of Lithuanian origin.

In these works, he described the influence of his Catholic grandmother, Jozefa, his burgeoning love for literature, and his early awareness, as a member of the Polish gentry in Lithuania, of the role of class in society.

[26] Returning to Wilno, Miłosz's early awareness of class difference and sympathy for those less fortunate than himself inspired his defense of Jewish students at the university who were being harassed by an anti-Semitic mob.

[30] After only one year at Radio Wilno, Miłosz was dismissed due to an accusation that he was a left-wing sympathizer: as a student, he had adopted socialist views from which, by then, he had publicly distanced himself, and he and his boss, Tadeusz Byrski [pl], had produced programming that included performances by Jews and Byelorussians, which angered right-wing nationalists.

[31] In summer 1937, Miłosz moved to Warsaw, where he found work at Polish Radio and met his future wife, Janina [pl] (née Dłuska; 1909–1986), who was at the time married to another man.

After the Red Army invaded Lithuania, he procured fake documents that he used to enter the part of German-occupied Poland the Germans had dubbed the "General Government".

For example, with higher education officially forbidden to Poles, he attended underground lectures by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, the Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics.

[41] Once freed, he and Janina escaped the city, ultimately settling in a village outside Kraków, where they were staying when the Red Army swept through Poland in January 1945, after Warsaw had been largely destroyed.

The volume also contains some of his most frequently anthologized poems, including "A Song on the End of the World", "Campo dei Fiori [it]", and "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto".

[44][45] He moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., and finally to Paris, organizing and promoting Polish cultural occasions such as musical concerts, art exhibitions, and literary and cinematic events.

Instead, he wrote articles for various Polish periodicals introducing readers to British and American writers like Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, and W. H. Auden.

[51] Toward the end of 1950, when Janina was pregnant with their second child, Miłosz was recalled to Warsaw, where in December 1950 his passport was confiscated, ostensibly until it could be determined that he did not plan to defect.

After three months in hiding, he announced his defection at a press conference and in a Kultura article, "No", that explained his refusal to live in Poland or continue working for the Polish regime.

[59] That same year saw the publication of The Captive Mind, a nonfiction work that uses case studies to dissect the methods and consequences of Soviet communism, which at the time had prominent admirers in the West.

The book brought Miłosz his first readership in the United States, where it was credited by some on the political left (such as Susan Sontag) with helping to change perceptions about communism.

Thousands of people lined the streets to witness his coffin moved by military escort to his final resting place at Skałka Roman Catholic Church, where he was one of the last to be commemorated.

[86] Protesters threatened to disrupt the proceedings on the grounds that Miłosz was anti-Polish, anti-Catholic, and had signed a petition supporting gay and lesbian freedom of speech and assembly.

[108] In 1989, Miłosz was named one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, in recognition of his efforts to save Jews in Warsaw during World War II.

[130][131] Miłosz's birth in a time and place of shifting borders and overlapping cultures, and his later naturalization as an American citizen, have led to competing claims about his nationality.

[25] Public statements such as these, and numerous others, inspired discussion about his nationality, including a claim that he was "arguably the greatest spokesman and representative of a Lithuania that, in Miłosz’s mind, was bigger than its present incarnation".

[136] But in The New York Review of Books in 1981, the critic John Bayley wrote, "nationality is not a thing [Miłosz] can take seriously; it would be hard to imagine a greater writer more emancipated from even its most subtle pretensions".

[137] Echoing this notion, the scholar and diplomat Piotr Wilczek argued that, even when he was greeted as a national hero in Poland, Miłosz "made a distinct effort to remain a universal thinker".

[141] Miłosz expressed some criticism of both Catholicism and Poland (a majority-Catholic country), causing furor in some quarters when it was announced that he would be interred in Kraków's historic Skałka church.

[143] While Miłosz is best known for his poetry, his body of work spans multiple other literary genres: fiction (particularly the novel), memoir, criticism, personal essay, and lectures.

At the outset of his career, Miłosz was known as a "catastrophist" poet—a label critics applied to him and other poets from the Żagary poetry group to describe their use of surreal imagery and formal inventiveness in reaction to a Europe beset by extremist ideologies and war.

[152] Having experienced both Nazism and Stalinism, Miłosz was particularly concerned with the notion of "historical necessity", which, in the 20th century, was used to justify human suffering on a previously unheard-of scale.

Nathan and Quinn summarize Miłosz's appraisal of historical necessity as it appears in his essay collection Views from San Francisco Bay [pl]: "Some species rise, others fall, as do human families, nations, and whole civilizations.

[155] His writing is filled with allusions to Christian figures, symbols, and theological ideas, though Miłosz was closer to Gnosticism, or what he called Manichaeism, in his personal beliefs, viewing the universe as ruled by an evil whose influence human beings must try to escape.