The Seizure of Power - Czesław Miłosz

The Seizure of Power by Czesław Miłosz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Published in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, "War is Obsolete," 17 November, 2022.

“I don’t know what kind of weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and rocks.” Albert Einstein

     The Seizure of Power by Cal Slavic Language Prof. Czesław Miłosz uses World War II and after in Poland through the lens of about half a dozen characters; one or two main ones followed closely, mostly males, but with pivotal women, a daughter and a lover especially, changing the course trajectories of some of the main characters. He uses short, descriptive chapters; a brisk third person and chronological narrative in Warsaw and Lodz Poland 1939 to about 1945 or so to tell his gripping, values-questioning “story.”

 (Photo: Interior of the Zamoyski Library in Warsaw, One of 70 burned by the Nazis before abandoning what was left of the 85% leveled city, with only 5% of the population remaining, to the Soviet army.)

     Every writer uses the images, dialogues, character possibilities, events and even plots from the lives and scenarios around them as “material;” and over the years (1955-2023), the gaps between Fiction, “Creative Nonfiction,” reportage, memoir and Nonfiction have narrowed. Nobel-winner Miłosz certainly used the world of Warsaw’s Nazi occupation, devastation, rebellion by the Home Army and nasty manipulations of a totalitarian Soviet takeover as his basic canvas, but the echoes to more recent authoritarian takeovers feel disturbingly familiar. 

(Destruction, central Warsaw 1945)
      Seizure of Power is both a brutal and poignant book because the time frame and incidents of military invasion, partisan rebellion against the Nazis and then anguish of choices surrounding the invading, “liberating” Stalinist Soviet military and political manipulations of lives, landscapes and livelihoods is so vivid in intimacy and broad in scope at the same time. 

(Lithuanian stamp of Miłosz, 2011)
    The ending few chapters are a little odd and feel slightly “pasted on” because Miłosz’ excellent characterizations, imagery, immediacy and passion in Seizure suddenly “wax political” in an intellectual, philosophical way that clatters the previously vibrant (and realistically violent, I must add) action and dialogues almost to a halt. Maybe he just couldn’t hold the tension of the national and personal breakdowns of the novel together any more than he could “hold together” his own life and loyalties rationally in light of his very tenuous and narrow individual escape to the relative freedoms of Paris and then the difficult contrasts of cold-war tensions of the United States.

     How much more of our earthly resources; human, spiritual, emotional, media and political parleying; will we abandon and devastate to keep thOur War Machine rumbling on? Is this really just “human nature,” or more like “the reptile brain?” How can we be clearer about the horrors of war in the face of the climate change, resource depletion and threat of nuclear disaster these ventures hang over humanity and Life On Earth? How can we slow these engines and personalities of destruction down? "Stop it! Just STOP IT!" Mother Earth cries...

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