Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (Lithuanian: Oskaras Milašius; Polish: Oskar Władysław Miłosz) (28 May 1877 or 15 May 1877[1] – 2 March 1939) was a French language[2][3] poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations.
[3] His literary career began at the end of the nineteenth century during la Belle Époque and reached its high point in the mid-1920s with the books Ars Magna and Les Arcanes, in which he developed a highly personal and dense Christian cosmogony comparable to that of Dante in The Divine Comedy and John Milton in Paradise Lost.
I am a Lithuanian poet, writing in French[5]Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (Chereya), then Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day Belarus, where he also spent his childhood.
He then entered into a phase of literary experimentation during which he tried his hand at a novel, L'Amoureuse Initiation, published in 1910, and three "mystery dramas," the most popular of these plays being Miguel Mañara [it; pl] (1913), a reworking of the Don Juan myth.
On 14 December 1914, while saying his prayers at the end of an evening of intensive reading of the Bible and Emanuel Swedenborg, Milosz experienced an illumination that led him to proclaim the next day to a friend: "I have seen the spiritual sun.
He began to develop a literary cosmogonic system in the tradition of Lucretius, Dante, John Milton, William Blake, and Edgar Allan Poe and exposed it for the first time in the essay Épitre à Storge, published in La Revue de Hollande in 1917.
During this period, after a flirtation with "occult" reading and friends, like the numerologist René Schwaller de Lubicz, Milosz turned his back on these currents of thought and began to study medieval science and thinkers like the English scholastic Robert Grosseteste.
Milosz's diplomatic career remains one of the more fascinating aspects of his legacy; his articles and correspondence in the service of the reborn Lithuanian state show a high level of nuance and rigor.
[10] In 1939, shortly after retiring from his diplomatic post and ill with cancer, he died of a heart attack in a house he had recently purchased in Fontainebleau.
Every year, around the time of his birthday on May 28, a group of admirers, Les Amis de Milosz, commemorate his life and work in a ceremony at the grave site.