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Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, intellectual, Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the greatest European and American modernist authors of the 20th century, he has been compared to Thomas Stearns Eliot and Ezra Pound. Sometimes called the Dante of the 20th century. He is the greatest writer who continued the narrative of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the modernist era.
Born in the house of his grandparents, the Lithuanian landowners Kunoti, in the Šeteniai manor near Nevėžis, near Kėdainiai. From this traditional nobleman's manor he took with him a strong sense of the natural, local, organic culture of Lithuania - a world whose later complexities and contradictions became one of the most enduring strands of Milosz's work and thinking. The life of the grandparents' estate was inextricably intertwined with different elements - the language of the Polish Lithuanian nobility, the patriotism of the Republic of Lithuania, the memory of the 19th-century uprisings, readings of Polish Romantic poetry from Vilnius, the Lithuanian countryside, the Lithuanian language spoken in the house, the old songs, the Catholicism steeped in the archaic faiths and the rebelliousness of Protestantism from the region of Kėdainiai, the distinctive landscape of the "Heart of Lithuania". Issa Valley depicts the grandmother's anger when her grandchild begins to be taught by a Lithuanian, a "Cham": "she refused to admit that there were any Lithuanians at all, even though a picture of herself could have been used as an illustration for a book on the people who had lived in Lithuania for centuries". Meanwhile, her husband, Miloš's grandfather, Zigmantas Kunotas, was known as a "Litvoman" landlord who hired a Lithuanian language teacher for the children of the surrounding villages, and was considered his own man. Miloš's mother, Veronika, also founded a school for peasant children on the estate. It is from her, from her lineage, that Miloš will derive the Lithuanian part of his identity, and in The Search for the Fatherland he will write about "a mother whose deep attachment to Lithuania still moves me today". After the First World War, when the independent states were established and the conflict over Vilnius erupted, her mother had two passports, one Lithuanian and one Polish, which she used interchangeably when she had to cross the blinding demarcation line between Vilnius and Kaunas. Her Lithuanian passport bears the Lithuanian form of her surname - Veronika Milošienė, and her son's name is also in Lithuanian - Česlovas. However, the family settled not in Lithuania, but in Vilnius, which was occupied by Poland between the wars (especially because of the views of the father, who was quite hostile to the Republic of Lithuania), and they enrolled their children in a Polish gymnasium.
The people who inherited the historical identity of the Lithuanian nobility, in which layers of Polish culture and Lithuanian patriotism were stacked on top of each other, had to make a choice at the beginning of the twentieth century: either - or. Modern nationalism and the military conflict between the two states demanded clear definitions of national identity. Neither side would allow a person of noble birth to describe himself as bilingual or as a dualist, as many a person of noble birth in Lithuania and Poland might have done. Later, Miloš said that he would feel most natural being a Polish poet in Lithuania, but history did not allow him to do so.
Miloš had to go through many trials of the mid-twentieth century, through ideological traps, difficulties of emigration, and the difficulties of not fitting in and loneliness, until the inherited core of his identity emerged in his own consciousness. Strange, old-fashioned and not understood by many (especially when living in the USA, on the Pacific coast), but it strengthened the poet's independent stance: "I consider myself a man of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; I would be happy to describe myself in the same way as my professor, Sukiennickis, who claims to be a Polish-speaking Lithuanian" (The Mysterious Self-Portrait of Czesław Miłosz. Conversations with Aleksander Fiut). This "irregular" identity in Miłosz's work, especially after writing the novel Issa Valley (1955), was as if raised to the "second degree" and became a support for an original imagination, a very rich poetic language, deep philosophical ideas, and the defence of human freedom. In other words, Miloš elevated the Principality to the level of universal values.
Paradoxically, his childhood in his grandparents' house in Šetenice, which Miloš called "the paradise of the earth", was quite short - the most significant years were 1918-1921, before the beginning of his education at the Vilnius Žygimantas Augustas Boys' Gymnasium, and a few subsequent summer vacations. Miloš's father, Alexander, was an engineer, a graduate of the Riga Polytechnic, and worked in the distant provinces of the Russian Empire, building roads and railways. So two-year-old Česlovas and his mother followed his father to the far east of Russia, where the family was detained by the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The five years of his early childhood spent in Russia, according to the poet, shaped his early Russian language skills, which were also needed in Vilnius, when the family settled on Pakalnės Street, where Česlovas played with the children of the Russian-speaking Jews of Vilnius. But also the years of the revolution in Russia were imbued with a sense of the collapse of the world, a sense of catastrophe, which would later constantly accompany Milosz's reflections on history.

Later, the poet found Russian useful for what he called his "socio-political purposes" - his interest in the origins of the ideology of communism and the impact of Soviet totalitarianism on human consciousness (his book Paverergtas protas (1953) has become a classic of world sovietology), and his interest in the Russian religious and existential philosophy, which he saw as the epicentre of the whole of Europe's spiritual drama. It is no coincidence that, in exile, he became a professor at Berkeley University in the USA and, alongside a course in Polish literature, he took a course on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer who, according to Milosz, set out to solve an "extremely complex philosophical equation, thought out in such a way as to leave no solution, no relief" (The Land of Ullo). The initial experiences of his childhood were cultivated into a very large thinking space.
Having dreamt of becoming a naturalist in his childhood (natural, carnal, erotic imagery is evident throughout his work), in 1929, after graduating from the gymnasium, Miloš enrolled at Vilnius Stephen Batory University to study law. He became involved in the university's young literary society "Sekcija Originaliosios twórrybos" (Original Creativity Section), as well as in the Academic Wanderers' Club, a democratic student gathering that opposed the snobbish nationalist student corporations to the libertine practice of "valkatstvo" - vagabond trips to Vilnius, Poland and Europe. These societies continued the tradition of student life at Vilnius University - the activities of the Philomathes, Philaretes, Shubravtsy, and Radiantes of the early 19th century. The atmosphere of the old university, the rebelliousness of the youth, and the fierce debates on worldview and modern creativity, as if by themselves, connected the generation of Miloš to a long chain of generations in the city - all the way back to Adam Mickiewicz. Słowo (Žodis), Żagary (from the Lithuanian word "Žagarai"), appeared, published by young avant-gardists, and became the centre of the new literary group. Miloš was one of the most active participants of this group, writing avant-garde texts for the publication (the titles of the texts are already expressive, e.g. "Sultinys iš nainių", "Eilėraščiai obsessiesiems", "Blusų teatras"). The group is very important in the development of Polish avant-garde poetry, and its individual members in post-war political history. Its members' paths led from the dormitories of Tauro and Bokšto Streets and discussions over cheap soup in the student canteen to the Nobel Prize (in the case of Miloš) or ministerial chairs in the government of socialist Poland. The distinctive feature of Žagari is catastrophism, a work close to expressionism and surrealism in its poetic expression, without cutting ties with Romanticism (especially Mickiewicz), emphasising the sense of a crisis of fundamental European values, the existential anxiety about the consequences of blind technical progress and totalitarianism, and the sense of Christianity's dying: the Last Judgement is coming, but with no salvation. The poem is a vision of a consciousness that is searching tensely for solutions, feverishly searching for solutions. It is a rather philosophical avant-garde that sought to combine the two wings of the modern worldview, the neo-Catholic and the Marxist; later these two wings diverged, but their union showed the strong intellectual charge of the group (Miloš would continue to be identified with intellectually strong Polish literature, and to emphasise the importance of intellectual life and philosophy in poetry). "The Žagari group was also distinguished by its emphasis on cultural liberality, the tolerance of the GDL, and its attention to the different traditions of the Vilnius region - Jewish, Belarusian, and recent Lithuanian literature, treating them not only as a regional exoticism, but also as partners in cultural dialogue. In 1934, the issue of Zagari, devoted to Lithuanian culture, was published (it included an excerpt from Metai by Kristijonas Donelaitis and the works of modernists such as, translations of the poems of the Modernist poets, such as Kazis Boruta). In the same year, the group split - some of its members followed the path of Marxism and cooperation with the underground Communist Party, while others increasingly distanced themselves from that path. In 1933, Miloš's first book of poetry, Poem on Stagnant Time (Poemat o czasie zastygłym) was published in Vilnius. However, Miloš considered his debut as an independent poetic voice, no longer following the programme of the left-wing avant-garde, to be the 1936 collection Three Winters (Trzy zimy). Miloš's texts begin to combine a very rich experience of reality, of the earth, of things, of the body, of eros, with philosophical insights that reveal the inner pain of man, the threat of history, the tension between the elements of evil and good. The poem is constructed as if it were a fundamental conversation, a dialogue of conflicting voices, a polyphony. After the publication of this book, Miloš was noticed as one of the most prominent catastrophists in young Polish poetry. In 1931, after reaching Paris during a disrupted canoe trip of the Wanderers' Club in Europe (Miloš's canoe was overturned by whirlpools at the rapids of the Rhine, and his backpack with all his money and documents sank in the foamy current), the student from Vilnius met his relative, the mystic poet, a diplomat from the Republic of Lithuania, Oskaras Milošius. Their further communication opened up other intellectual and creative horizons for the budding poet than the Vilnius avant-garde milieu, helped him to understand the conditionality of literary fashion, the traditions of European literature, and the role of poetry not only as a linguistic game, but also as an essential force of civilisation. The role that the poet, who received the Nobel Prize and was invited to Harvard University to lecture on poetry, described as "a passionate search for reality", a participation in the change of the consciousness of the whole of humanity.
Having returned from his studies in Paris, until the end of 1936, Miloš worked at Vilnius Radio, producing cultural programmes, until he was dismissed by order of the Voivode for paying too much attention to national minorities - Belarusians, Lithuanians and Jews. His move to Warsaw was accompanied by a feeling of inner emigration, and perhaps also a sense of cutting off his roots in future catastrophes. This is evident in the poem "In My Homeland", a farewell to the space of Lithuania, written in 1937 (it refers to Lake Alnų near Seinai, on the Lithuanian-Polish border, where the Krasnagruda estate belonging to the Milosz family was located, restored in 2011). Paradoxically, the authenticity of Miloš's work was definitively highlighted by the tragic events of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the poet had already been working for two years at Radio Warsaw. With a group of radio journalists, Miloš was caught up in the turmoil of the approaching front and found himself among the refugees in Romania. In early 1940, he returned to Vilnius, which had been regained by Lithuania, for a few months, hoping to find refuge there. He became a contributor to Naujoji Romuva magazine. However, when Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1940 he crossed the border into Nazi-occupied Poland, risking his life, wading through the wilderness at night, near Kalvarija, and reached Warsaw.

During the war, he worked as a porter in the library of the University of Warsaw, where the Nazi authorities had ordered the sorting of the library's books, learned English on his own, and began translating English poetry. He took part in the Polish underground cultural life: Miloš's 1940 underground collection of poems, signed with his great-grandfather's name Jan Syruć (Jonas Sirutis), was the first book of fiction published underground in Warsaw. At the time, Miloš wrote some of his most famous works, which have become part of the golden fund of world poetry, such as the poem "Campo di Fiori", which speaks of society's indifference to the Holocaust as a defeat of conscience. It is about carefree fun on a merry-go-round erected just outside the wall of the Warsaw ghetto, behind which, in the spring of 1943, a heroic Jewish uprising took place, brutally suppressed by the Nazis - the entire ghetto was burned. The poem responded directly to the reality of the event, but in it Milosz also accurately revealed what emerged after the war and is still relevant today - the problem of collective guilt and responsibility. The shocking reality of the Holocaust is seen from a universal perspective, as a repetition of the indifference of the Roman population after the burning of the astronomer Giordano Bruno at the stake.
The poems of Milosz's poems of the past two years achieve what modernist poetry seems to have rejected definitively - the connection between the poetic word and reality. The 1945 collection Rescue (Ocalenie) marked a new stage in the poet's work and biography, and is seen as a turning point in Polish literature. This book highlighted the search for the poem as a "more capacious form", which is characteristic of Milosz's entire oeuvre: the volume of the poem is expanded to encompass the complexity of reality and the human condition, history and thought, while at the same time maintaining clarity, precise form, and the firm rhythm of language. Catastrophic experience does not destroy language, but obeys it. Poetry no longer feels despair and the sense of the meaninglessness of words, but returns to the basics, to a simplicity that brings together the many and the diverse - like the head of a poppy or the flower of a peony. These are metaphors from Milosz's remarkable 1943 cycle "The World. A Naive Poem". Here, in the naïve voice of a child, the world is told in a child's voice about the harmonious world as it should be - the house, the garden, the father and the mother, children's books, the prairie and the sky, but what is really being witnessed to are the metaphysical truths, the great Christian triad of Faith, Hope and Love. A hidden theological treatise is supposedly conveyed in childish verse (the same description also applies to Issa's Valley). The poem was later hailed by critics as the equivalent of Mickiewicz's work in 20th-century Polish literature.

After the end of the war, as early as the end of 1945, Miloš became a diplomat of the People's Republic of Poland, and as a cultural attaché he went to the United States of America. In Washington, he sought to remain as politically neutral as possible, to work for Polish culture and to broaden his horizons. When he finally understood the threat of the ideology of Soviet totalitarianism, the perniciousness of the coercive state mechanism, and the impossibility of honest creativity, he decided to become a political emigrant, even though it was very difficult for him to cut off ties with his enslaved homeland and the Polish-speaking public. However, in 1951, when, summoned to Warsaw, the authorities tried to force Milosz to collaborate with them by promises and threats, risking his life and the well-being of his relatives, he applied for political asylum in France. He was hosted in Paris by a small community of Polish intellectuals, organised around the democratic and critical journal Kultura, edited by Jerzy Giedroyc (also spelled Jurgis Giedraitis), an intellectual and politician from the famous Giedraitis family of Lithuanian princes and bishops, who considered himself a true descendant of the GDL. But the Culture of Paris was a small island of like-minded people. Isolated from the leftist French literary milieu as a critic of the Soviet Union, banned in socialist Poland as a "traitor to the people", regarded as an impostor and suspected of espionage by the Polish emigration, separated from his wife Janina, who had stayed in the US, and his two young sons (a US visa was refused to a former Soviet diplomat), and attacked by both the left and right, Miloš went through one of the most complicated periods of his biography. It was at this time that he wrote a frank intellectual study of the impact of Soviet ideology on his own and his close friends' experiences, and the roots of collaboration, in the essay Subjugated Mind (Paris, 1953), which for the first time earned him international recognition (in many parts of the world, Miloš was for a long time known as the author of this essay in particular).
The poet was plunged into a creative impasse by his difficult life experiences, the loneliness of an emigrant attacked from all sides, and the drama of his isolated family - at the time he even thought he would not be able to write poetry. After recovering from his psychological crisis, he lived for a while in the Alps with the Ukrainian writer Stanislav Vincenz, who seemed to have the powers of a spiritual healer. In his chalet in the foothills of the Alps, he tried to treat Miloš with walks, observing nature, trees, touching the animals of the countryside (he advised him to look more often into the eyes of the horses), and picking mushrooms, because this "descendant of a Samogitian countryside", after all the experiences he had had in Paris, Warsaw, and Washington, needed just such a "hope therapy". The first text of the creative rebirth of the return to the land is the poem Mittelbergheim. In a medieval Alpine town, among old vineyards, where farm work still goes on in a perpetual circle, there is a return to unity with the bountiful earth and the power of the spirit - the earth appears as a palm, man as its slowly maturing fruit. The poem seems to be about a new covenant with a deity who has been with us since childhood, but who may have been forgotten, withdrawn, and whose presence has been doubted. This text in Milosz's oeuvre is like a prologue to the novel Isosos valėnis, which was also written for "therapeutic purposes", to return to the childhood spent in Lithuania, to the primary experiences that heal the wounded consciousness, can be read as an autobiographical account of the lost world of a small manor in the Nevėžis valley, but at the same time it is a philosophical reflection on the forces of good and evil at work in human nature, an attempt to understand why the drama of human fate is born, what forces from beyond or from the beyond determine it. A lot of realistic, folkloric material, which is reconstructed from memory (Lithuanian peasant customs, archaic beliefs, songs, court life, conversations, farm work, hunting). However, against this thick, vivid background, fateful individual dramas take place (Magdalene's tragic love, Balthasar's madness, Domcius' impiety). The name of the river Isa is the poetic equivalent of the Nevėžis, which Miloš searched for a long time for the title of the novel: he wrote down and mentally named the rivers of Lithuania, his native region of Kėdainiai, Samogitia, Prussia, Switzerland and France. Thus, the Isa is like a generic river name, and in its valley one can see what is not only local, but perhaps common to the whole of Europe, to the ancient oikumenē (Greek oikumenē - the living world) of man and nature that still remain there.
Interestingly, the beginning of the novel was different in the manuscript and was later deleted by the author. According to the original idea, the protagonist Tomas was a Lithuanian (Miloš gave him the surname Valionis in the manuscript), the child of rich Lithuanian peasants, born in the village of Giniai on the banks of the Isa River, who chose the path of a priest and later a bishop. The novel thus began with a plot of fate, typical of Lithuanian cultural personalities and major prose, reminiscent of Antanas Baranauskas, Maironis, Vaižgantas, and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas's novel The Shadow of the Altors. However, in the third chapter, Tomas's home is depicted as a Gini estate: a long avenue of lime trees, a low white house covered with wild grapes, dark portraits of ancestors in the dining room, a scratchy parquet floor in the drawing room, a mysterious room full of the smells of cinnamon, coffee and cloves, where one can even find a grinder for grinding almonds. It seems that, as the image of his childhood home emerged, the author felt that he would not be able to tell his world in a fully authentic way if he took a different path. The peasant house would not contain the objects that the writer's original experiences were connected to, they would be different. So the novel naturally evolved into a narrative reminiscent of Mickiewicz's Pon Tad - the world of the manor is depicted as a microcosm immersed in Lithuanian nature, and the people are surrounded and influenced by its mysterious powers. Zemė, Juozas Kėkštas, who was a translator of Miloš's poems in the inter-war period. After the war, Kėkštas found himself in Argentina, working as a road builder in the pampas, and again began translating Milosz's poetry into Lithuanian. In 1955, a Lithuanian collection of Milosz's work, Epochos sąmoningumas poezija, translated by Kėkštas, appeared in Buenos Aires, with an introduction by the author, and accompanying words by Kėkštas and Alfonso Nyka-Niliūnas. This was the first book of translations of Milosz's poetry published in the world before his international recognition as a poet. In the introduction, Miloš clearly emphasises the importance of the Lithuanian landscape for his poetic imagination: "My imagination was shaped by the Lithuanian village of Panevėžys and the forests and waters around Vilnius. Trakai, Žalieji Ezerai, Jašiūnai are magical names for me. My relationship with Mickiewicz was, and still is, very vivid. For me, there is no 'Lithuanian exoticism' at all, everything is my own". For the first time, the poet sets out to explain to Lithuanian readers his complex origins in the old Principality, an identity that does not seem to correspond to modern times: the current epoch is pushing people into a great masquerade, where they are ashamed or afraid to admit who they are. It highlights Oscar Milosz as an important authority, warns against the exaggerated cult of the West, stresses the need to reflect on the fate of the whole of central and eastern Europe, and to be conscious of one's own development. He expresses a fundamental point: poetry today should not be a political tool or "pure art", but an expression of the consciousness of the epoch. And he sends an important message to the Lithuanian audience: 'the poems in this book are not translated into a 'foreign' language. After all, I heard this language around me as a child. Juozas Kėkštas is returning to our common homeland what is largely its own".
1960. Miloš was invited to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and a year later decided to stay in America with his family. Here, a new phase of his work began, with the successive poetry collections Karalius Popielis i jiné poėraščiai (1962), Užburtasis Gučio (1965), Miestas bez vardo (1969), Kurur Sunka teka ir kur sundasi (1974) - one of the greatest peaks of his work. He wrote intensively in books of essays (e.g. the collections Speeches on San Francisco Bay, The Land of Urn, The Garden of Science, Starting from My Streets). The most significant of these is The Land of Urals (1977), the poet's distinctive intellectual autobiography, which reveals the horizons of his worldview in relation to the fractures in religion and civilisation that began several centuries ago and shaped the face of the modern age. Above all, the separation of the scientific and religious worldviews, the threat of modern ideologies and technologies to take over personal consciousness. In his search for solutions, Miloš reveals what he has called a "secret current" in his texts - an interest in core religious issues, in the mystical tradition, in the ideas of the Gnostics and Manichaeans, rejected by Christianity, according to which the world is a realm of evil, but in which "man is obliged to redeem all that is alive". This period also saw the birth of two Lithuanian-themed poems, two of the most important among Milosz's major works - "City without a Name" (1964-1965), about a missing Vilnius, and "Where the Sun Rises and Sets" (1974).
While teaching at Berkeley, Miloš met the famous archaeologist, Vilna-born Marija Gimbutiene, who in 1963 became a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. In his contacts with her, the poet was particularly interested in Lithuanian mythology and archaic culture. His relations with the Lithuanian diaspora in the USA, especially with its liberal cultural wing, were renewed - in 1964 and 1978 he participated in the congresses of "Santaros-Šviesa", became an honorary member of this organisation, and was in contact with the writers Marius Katiliškis, Liūne Sutema, Algimantas Mackus, Nyka-Niliūnas, Algirdas Landsbergis. In 1975, under the care of the latter, Miloš's application for the Nobel Prize was prepared and sent to him, and thus it was taken care of by both the Polish diaspora (the Parisian circle of Kultura magazine) and Lithuanians. A broad and textual history is the intellectual communication between Milosz and the poet Tomas Venclova, who emigrated to the USA in 1977. Their conversations about Vilnius turned into an essayistic dialogue "Vilnius as a Form of Spiritual Life", the first example of a discussion between a Lithuanian and a Pole about the city, open and mutually beneficial. Here, Miloš expressed a principled political stance: "if one wishes the city well, one must wish it to be the capital, which automatically nullifies any Polish claim to a 'Polish Vilnius'". This attitude, established by Miloš and his other friends, especially Giedroyc, became the cornerstone of Lithuanian-Polish relations after 1990, and helped prevent the resurgence of political conflict between the two countries at the time of the reconstruction of both states.
In America, Miloš consistently undertook translations and acted as a literary and cultural mediator, translating, with his assistants and collaborators, Polish poetry into English and English poetry into Polish. Already in his sixties, having mastered Hebrew and Ancient Greek, the poet undertook the enormous task of re-translating the Bible into Polish from the original (1979). In the 1980s, he translated the Book of Psalms, in the 1980s the Book of Job, the Books of the Five Scrolls, in 1982; the Gospel of Mark, the Apocalypse, in 1984, the Book of Wisdom in 1989).
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1980, Miloš spoke of the poet's unwavering fidelity to the principle of the search for reality, which is tantamount to a search for truth in the dramatic trials of twentieth-century history. He said "words of blessing" to his native land for the gifts of fate it had received.
After his emigration to the West, Miloš was banned in Poland and his books were not even available in libraries. After winning the Nobel Prize, the poet was also recognised in his homeland: after a thirty-year hiatus, his books are being published again in Poland, The Artful Self-Portrait of Czesław Miłosz, which publishes unofficially recorded conversations with the critic Aleksander Fiut, and, in 1981, the poet came to his home country in support of the fledgling democratic Solidarity Movement. In 1981-1982 he was invited to give lectures on poetry at Harvard University, which he published as a separate collection, The Testimony of Poetry.

In 1993 Miloš settled in Krakow with his second wife, Kerol (Carol). He was awarded honorary doctorates from the most prestigious universities in the USA and Poland, as well as the highest Polish and Lithuanian state honours. Until the end of his long life, he wrote and published poetry and essays extensively, winning prestigious literary prizes (in 2001, he even refused to be nominated for a second time for the highest Polish literary prize, the Niche Prize, in order not to be overshadowed by the other writers). The most important of his late books are the poetry collections The Undiscoverable Land (1988), Kronikos (1988), Ant the Bank of the River (1994), This (2000), Another Space (2002), Orfeo and Eurydice (2003); essays The Dog of the Packet (1997), The Alphabet of Love (1997), The Other Alphabet (1998). In the works of this period, too, one can see a relentless search for a "more capacious form", an effort to combine in the text simplicity of expression, concreteness of language, fidelity to the "truth of the five senses" and the depth of philosophical and theological thought, the clarity of wisdom gained in life's painful trials. The sense of one's own vocation as a mediator of memory, the fidelity to the people one has known in one's life, to the reality that has been lost, emerges again. And the constant wonder at simple things, nature and art, the never fading eros of reality.
Milošas followed very closely the beginning of the Sąjūd movement in Lithuania, the proclamation of independence and the processes of creating a free society. Immediately after the news of the events of January 13th in Vilnius, he initiated a public statement to the world community by three poets - himself, Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova - entitled "Poets for Lithuania", published in The New York Times on January 15, 1991: "We are three poets, friends, representing three languages: Lithuanian, Russian and Polish. We appeal to the world community - our fellow writers and all honest people - to condemn in a voice of protest the inhuman Soviet attack on the Lithuanian people. The events of recent days are a bitter reminder of the worst crimes of the Soviet state." Apparently, it was at that very moment that Miloš performed the symbolic act of translating the Lithuanian anthem, Vincas Kudirka's "National Anthem" into Polish. Tėvēnės ieškojimas (1992). This book became an important impulse to rethink the history of Lithuanian culture, to open up to its contradictory and fascinating complexity, and to renew the Lithuanian narrative about ourselves and other Lithuanian peoples. In this essay, Miloš acts as a mediator, creating a "connective tissue" between the historically disparate heirs of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and indeed his book has stimulated a rethinking of the culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the reborn Lithuania. The Search for the Homeland was for the author himself a distinctive "journey home" of his consciousness, and on that journey the most important influences of his biography, his spiritual cousins and the embodiments of the aristocratic values of the LDK - Adam Mickiewicz and Oskaras Milašius, whose descendants Miloš considered himself to be - emerged. The essay reveals the universal level of Lithuanianness, linking local, seemingly "provincial" phenomena of Lithuanian history with the great dilemmas of humanity's faith, mind and heart. In this way, a broader, more universal, more airy consciousness of contemporary Lithuanian citizens is cultivated.
The return to his native Šetenius was undoubtedly a part of Milosz's deepest experiences, and he hinted that he was returning to meet with the layers of time in his own consciousness, perhaps with the very essence of time itself. Speaking in Lithuania, he repeatedly stressed: I did not come here out of sentimentality, I know that the world of my past has already disappeared and that I am not here to search for it with nostalgia. However, for many years in France and America, he has constantly asked what the Shetens look like, what has been preserved there, he has waited with excitement for news, for photographs, and - as his letters reveal - he has vividly dreamt of his return (as if he were able to fly and, like a bird, to approach the trees of his homeland, which have grown to become enormous). The state of re-entry into the Nevėžis valley was therefore like walking into a deeply-held secret. 
Miloš's poems written after the journey (the impressive late cycle "Lithuania after Fifty-two Years") and the essay "Happiness" testify that something more was driving the poet in his liminal state. The elements that sustained his consciousness - the clear sky on a beautiful June day, the lushness of the vegetation - slowly spoke to his consciousness, and the saving power of memory finally responded. The person and his body remember the reality that nourished him, which means that it is there, it has not gone anywhere, and time has several unequal levels. In the flow of annihilating time a different, much stronger and more powerful, eternal flow appears, purifying the whole being. In the Nevėžis valley, among the same arches and hills, another, more powerful, unnamed river of Being flowed and flows. 
Miloš visited Lithuania three more times. In 1999, he opened the cultural centre named after him in Šetenis, a reconstructed one of the former buildings of his birthplace in the already landscaped park of the manor. The last time, in October 2000, he was in Vilnius, giving a speech at the Town Hall, when he told young Lithuanians to take care of this city's tradition and its multi-generational heritage.

He died at the age of ninety-three. He was buried in Krakow, in the crypt of the Skalka Monastery of the Pauline Fathers.