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Product Description
Book Description
The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.
From the Publisher
A central text in the modern effort to understand totalitarianism. --The New York Times Book Review
"As timely today as when it was written."--Jerzy Kosinski
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Price of Intellectual Servility,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Captive Mind (Paperback)
The late great Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote a set of critical essays about the totalitarian state around the time the Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin died in 1953 and just months in advance of his own death. In these character sketches, Milosz describes a number of political mindsets and compromises that emerged during the Stalinist years. The people represented here have attitudes that reflect in one form or other what may appear to be a calculated selling out to the Marxist state in order to avoid or survive persecution. By adopting a slavish or seemingly cunning mind, many of these tragic figures thought they had outwitted the state, only to realize latter that they had inadvertently sacrificed their relationship with society at large. What makes this collection so poignant is that the profiles represent intellectuals - mainly writers and poets - who allowed the events of history to dictate how their souls would respond positively to the suffering of their fellow beings. There are those of Milosz's colleagues who readily accepted the false claims of dialectical materialism, or cleverly danced around the dicta of the state, or played the role of the prophetic fools, or became cynical in their political commentary. In the end, cutting a deal with the devil, Faustian-style, while politically smart in the short-term, amounts to a cultural and spiritual betrayal in the long-run. For instance, Poland and the Baltic states were basically subsumed by the Soviet state and their national identities driven underground by censorship and ruthless oppression. As for the people who made their bed with the enemy, none seemed to have succeeded in securing their future personal interests. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning how the ideology and practice of Marxism can be viewed in its impact on modern intellectualism and nationalism. The results aren't pretty.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Devil's Arguments, In His Own Language,
By
This review is from: The Captive Mind (Paperback)
In the forward to this remarkable book Milosz writes that he wants to give the totalitarian point of view "in his own words, from his own point of view." The result is this ambitious, fascinating tour of the human mind twisted by the lies of the culture that surroundes it. It's a schizophrenic place that resembles the scarier novels of the noir writer Jim Thompson. There's nothing solid to cling to; everything dissolves into fear and loathing. Milosz turns his poetical gifts to the case studies of several Polish intellectuals who became entangled with the Communist party. Milosz doesn't name them but one is clearly Tadeusz Borowski, the author of the Holocaust short story collection "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen." The title of that book in Polish was "The Stony World", which reflected how Borowski, an Auschwitz survivor, came to see the world--as dominated by force, without effective moral constraint. Milosz depicts Borowski as a man who sought shelter under the protection of the strongest earthly power available--the Communists--but was unable finally to justify the price of that loyalty (he committed suicide.) What keeps someone from succumbing to "Ketman" (the two-facedness that Orwell called "double-think?) Milosz implies the answer is religious faith, which allows one to trust in an objective truth beyond the lies and terror of the stony world (he was a devout Catholic.) This book is a must read for anyone who wants to keep the world from stealing his soul.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moral equivalence ...,
By
This review is from: The Captive Mind (Paperback)
... This book speaks of the horrors of communism, a crime against humanity that killed tens of millions and a crime that many of the perpetrators still haven't been called to account for. Instead, we get "anti-war" rallies sponsored by these same butchers....... one quick reading will explain more of the statist, leftist, absolutist "logic" than anything else - and show why [destruction], enslavement, and denial of all liberties was CENTRAL to its survival.
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