The poet, writer and literary scholar Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had been a member of the faculty of Slavic Languages and Literatures since 1960.

Cz. Miłosz was born in Šeteniai, the modest estate of Zygmunt and Jozefa Kunat, née Syruć, the parents of his mother Weronika, on June 30, 1911, and was baptized in the church of the nearby village of Šventybrastis. In the churchyard is the burial site of the family of his grandfather, Symon Siruć. His father Aleksander Miłosz from the nearby estate of Serbinai graduated from the Riga Polytechnic Institute as a highway and bridge construction engineer. The poet’s grandfather Artur Miłosz was a leader of the 1863 uprising against the Russian empire and barely avoided exile in Siberia.

Šeteniai is located on the east bank of the river Nevėžis in the district of Kėdainiai, about 70 kilometers north of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania. Cz. Miłosz spent a part of his childhood there, and the people and landscapes of the river valley often manifest themselves in his poetry and prose, especially in the semi–autobiographical novel “The Issa Valley”, published in Paris in 1955 and translated into several languages since then.

Cz. Miłosz moved to the city of Vilnius (Wilno in Polish) in 1920. There he attended the Zygmunt August gymnasium (secondary school) and studied law at the Stefan Batory University. He published his first volume of poetry in 1933. After graduation in 1934 he visited Paris, where he met his distant relative, the writer Oscar Miłosz (1877-1939), who made a deep impression on the young poet.

In 1937 Cz. Miłosz moved to Warsaw and spent the war years there. After the war, he served in the diplomatic service of Poland in New York and Washington. He was deeply distressed by the growing oppression in Communist Poland, and after being transferred to Paris, he asked for political asylum in 1951. He spent most of the next decade in France as a free–lance writer in Paris. His book “the Captive Mind” was published (in Polish and French) in 1953. It was translated into English, German and other languages. The book brought him both wide recognition and denouncement by left-leaning French intellectuals infatuated with Soviet communism.

While his writings and his courageous stand for the freedom of nations enslaved by the Soviet Union are admired throughout the world, four countries most directly share his creative efforts: Lithuania, Poland, France and the United States of America, specifically the San Francisco Bay area of Northern California, where he had lived, worked and taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. Since the mid 1990's he spent much time in Krakow, Poland, where he died on August 14, 2004.

His relationship with Lithuania and Poland is best described by his own words from the Nobel Lecture delivered to the Swedish Academy on December 10, 1980:

“It is good to be born in a small country where Nature was on a human scale, where various languages and religions cohabited for centuries. I have in mind Lithuania, a country of myths and of poetry. My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English; so I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian, poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me.”

Cz. Miłosz returned to his native Lithuania after an absence of over fifty years on May 26, 1992. During the visit he received the Doctor Honoris Causa degree from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, was declared an Honorary Citizen by the Supreme Council of the independent Republic of Lithuania, and visited his birthplace – Šeteniai. The land of the estate had been annexed by the local kolkhoz (collective farm), and only an abandoned park and an over a hundred years old granary building had survived the destructive neglect of the new masters.

However, the unique beauty of the river valley remained alive in Šeteniai until the poet’s return. A preservation effort was started soon after his visit and the ownership of Šeteniai was returned to Cz. Miłosz during his visit in September, 1997. He immediately donated Šeteniai to the non-governmental, non-profit Czesław Miłosz Birthplace Foundation. The Foundation has restored the old granary as a small conference center dedicated to the promotion of Miłoszian thought and of creative interactions between scholars, writers, and students from Lithuania, Poland, and other neighboring countries.

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