Captive Mind

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Jane Zielonko, 251 pages

In his 1953 book The Captive Mind, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz describes the place of an intellectual under socialism, a situation he compares to that of a violinist in a concentration camp.  Through a series of essays he analyzes the seductiveness of the System, especially in the East, where the world wars had thoroughly wiped away the past and the Soviet way seemed the only path to the future.  He vividly exposes the tragedy of thought under an ideology which not only prohibits opposition but demands approval, necessitating a thoroughgoing dissimulation which approaches schizophrenia.

Naturally, a book like The Captive Mind could never have been written under communism, and indeed Milosz wrote it following his defection to the United States in 1951.  He evocatively describes the tragedy of a poet living in isolation from his linguistic community, so that the book serves simultaneously as a justification for his own decision to leave and an explanation for the decisions of others to stay.  At the heart of the book are Milosz's biographies of four typical writers - a Catholic, a cynic, a Communist, and a nationalist - and the self-mutilation they must perform to survive under Stalinism.