Born in 1911 in Lithuania, at that time a Grand Duchy incorporated into Russia, Czesław Miłosz began life as a subject of the Tsar. Minor nobility, the family was Catholic in faith, Polish in nationality. Szetejnie, their manor in Lithuania, was built in the eighteenth century and expanded later. The adult Czesław claimed to have been bored by unvaried neighbors whose conversation was restricted to coats of arms, estates, and family trees, but a number of his poems have a lingering nostalgia for Szetejnie and the forests and river of its rural setting.

Miłosz: A Biography shows how an individual in such a place at such a time has had to march in step with history.1 At the outbreak of World War I, Czesław’s father, a squire by inclination and an engineer by profession, was conscripted into the Russian army. One consequence of the chaotic transformation of Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union was that Lithuania gained its independence. The family moved into the beautiful and historic city of Vilnius (Wilno in Polish) with its university and its Jesuits, Jewish scholars, and Radziwiłł Princes in their palace. According to someone who grew up with him, Czesław had an extraordinary sense of destiny. Hardly more than twenty years old, and still a student, he sent his poems to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, a famous poet in a Poland that has always taken poetry seriously. Early in the lifelong correspondence that followed between them, Czesław gives himself