Milosz and the Problem of Evil

While scholars have chronicled Czeslaw Milosz’s engagement with religious belief, no previous book-length treatment has focused on his struggles with theodicy in both poetry and thought. Milosz wrestled with the problem of believing in a just God given the powerful evidence to the contrary in the natural world as he observed it and in the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Poland. Rather than attempt to survey Milosz’s vast oeuvre, Lukasz Tischner focuses on several key works--The Land of Ulro, The World, The Issa Valley, A Treatise on Morals, A Treatise on Poetry, and From the Rising of the Sun--carefully tracing the development of Milosz’s moral arguments, especially in relation to the key texts that influenced him, among them the Bible, the Gnostic writings, and the works of Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Scho­penhauer. The result is a book that examines Milosz as both a thinker and an artist, shedding new light on all aspects of his oeuvre.

LUKASZ TISCHNER is an assistant professor in the department of Polish literature of the twentieth century at the Institute of Polish Philology, Jagiellonian University, in Krakow.

STANLEY BILL is a lecturer in Polish studies at the University of Cambridge.