EMIGRANT ABOUT EMIGRANTS. OSKAR MIŁOSZ AND JOSIF BRODSKI’S FLAWLESS PORTRAITS

Abstract

This article is an analysis of associations between the portraits of other poets created by Czesław Miłosz, namely Oskar Miłosz and Josif Brodzki, and his self-portraits. The starting point is the experience of emigrant life treated as an unusual existential challenge. Miłosz’s biography, created by him in exile as a “biography of a great national poet” and simultaneously “the biography of a world poet” demands context of similar life-histories: emigrant poets from Eastern Europe successfully forming their literary careers out of homeland. However, the most important connection between those poets is – in Miłosz’s writing – “the hierarchy”, interpreted as a resistance against relativism and as an inflexible belief about the necessity of differentiation between that which is high and that which is low.