The Captive Mind
How intelligent people talk themselves into a totalitarian order, written in 1953 by a poet who had watched friends do it.
Milosz wrote this in 1953, having left Poland and having watched friends, writers as gifted as he was, talk themselves into the new order. He gives four of them pseudonyms and traces the reasoning. The book’s power is that it takes the collaborators seriously as intelligent people rather than dismissing them as cowards, which is also why it made him enemies on both sides.
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Anne Applebaum
The Captive Mind isn’t a straight memoir. Although Milosz is writing about his own life and his past, he is also grappling with a larger subject: How his generation of liberal intellectuals came to collaborate with, and work alongside, the Communist party. And he is trying to understand his own behaviour: Why did I act that way?
Timothy Snyder
It’s an interesting argument because it gives people an alibi, which is what Milosz’s publisher in Paris – Jerzy Giedroyc, also a very important Polish intellectual – recognised. He felt that this was all bunk – that people collaborated because they were scared and needed money, and that what Milosz was arguing was just superstructural nonsense.
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