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THE CAPTIVATED MIND: TWO STUDIES OF MIŁOSZ 193Aleksander Fiut's The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, whichwas published a year before Nathan's and Quinn's The Poet's Work: An Introductionto Czesław Miłosz, enjoys the distinction of being the first book-length study ofMiłosz's poetry in English. This distinction, as Nathan and Quinn lose no time inpointing out, is qualified by the fact that the Fiut book is a translation of a Polishstudy published originally in 1987 and, as such, was obviously written with the Polishreader in mind. If one wonders why it took so long for a study of Miłosz's poetryto appear in Polish, given the much greater recognition among Polish readers of hisachievements as a poet, the political realities have to be taken into consideration. Asa former defector and as the author of such anticommunist and anti-Soviet works asThe Captive Mind and The Seizure of Power, Miłosz was denied official recognitionin Poland until the time of the Solidarity movement. In 1981 he returned to Polandfor the first time since his defection thirty years earlier. The year 1981 marked, infact, a kind of watershed in Mitosz's career. His return to Poland within a year ofreceiving the Nobel Prize, which catapulted him to international fame, paved theway for the publication of successive volumes of his poetry in that country. Beforethen, few of his works were allowed to be published and he was relegated to thestatus of a former defector-émigré writer dependent on émigré presses in Englandand France for publication. It was also in 1981 that his Nobel Lecture was publishedand that Miłosz was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at HarvardUniversity.The crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland notlong after Mitosz's visit in 1981 again raised obstacles to the further disseminationof his oeuvre in the country. However long it may have taken Mr. Fiut to write hisbook, it was published only in 1987 and then, significantly, not in Poland but inParis, by the Polish émigré house Libella. Open access to Mitosz's works in Polandcame again only with the collapse of the communist regime. Thus, circumstanceslargely beyond his control conspired to delay the appearance of substantive studiesof his literary work, in Polish as well as English, for a relatively long period of time.The paucity of translations of his poetry denied American critics that most importantdimension of his career, while in Poland the obstacles were primarily of a politicalnature.Time has now rectified the situation. Only initiative stands in the way of Miłoszscholarship in Poland, and the bulk of his published work—prose and poetry—isavailable in English translation. The appearance in 1990 of Aleksander Fiut's book,in English translation, and publication the following year of the work of LeonardNathan and Arthur Quinn at last bring Miłosz the next logical stage of recognitiondue him.As critical introductions to Mitosz's work in English, the Fiut and the Nathan andQuinn books cover much the same ground, albeit from different perspectives and indifferent ways. Both are fairly small books: Fiut's offers 189 pages of text, Nathan'sand Quinn's, 163 pages. Moreover, Fiut deals only with Mitosz's poetry; Nathanand Quinn encompass the prose as well, although their interest in poetry is definitelykeener. Both books read well. Nathan and Quinn, as American critics intent on introducingMiłosz to the literary-minded American reader who has heard of Miłosz but