With Miłosz among Animals

Abstract

Czesław Miłosz used to say that he is a failed naturalist. As a child, he raised various animals (including an eagle owl), studied flora and fauna, and later began reading Charles Darwin's followers. At the same time, he immersed himself in the arcana of hunting. As he explained, his infatuation with nature went through a crisis when he discovered that it was filled with pain and suffering, as it was regulated by the mechanism of natural selection. Miłosz's work is full of images of various animals, from domesticated ones like cats to wild ones like grouses and beavers. The author of the article highlights the paradoxicality of Miłosz's thought, in which enchantment with nature clashes with disgust at its “soullessness” and “anti-humanism,” love for birds competes with the instinct of the hunter, attachment to specific animals struggles with the feeling that they belong to a hierarchically inferior world. These aporias are illustrated by the example of selected works—The Issa Valley, A Treatise on Poetry, From the Rising of the Sun, and finally, his lecture The Naturalist—in which the writer thematizes his attitude to animals. Miłosz's view on animals is strikingly linked to his theological convictions. What is puzzling, however, is that he doesn't openly include the faunal world in his poetic vision of apokatastasis.