When Czesław Miłosz’s book about the enslavement of consciousness by totalitarian powers was published in 1953, translator Jane Zielonko, working closely with Miłosz, rendered its English title as The Captive Mind. There is no question that the title was effective, particularly as the book came to be considered a classic of anti-Stalinism—perhaps the work closest to rival the status of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Unlike Arendt, though, Miłosz had actually defected from an increasingly Stalinist Poland, and he wrote from the perspective of a poet rather than that of a historical and political thinker. As a result, his book offers something different from hers—not an analysis of the mechanisms by which repressive regimes consolidate power, but the experience of a creative individual living under such repressive regimes, both the Nazi occupiers of Warsaw during World War II and the Communist Party after the war. One way of appreciating what makes his book unique—and relevant to historical periods beyond his own—is looking at the semantic nuances of its original Polish title.
For someone familiar with Slavic languages, Miłosz’s Polish title—Zniewolony umysł—has particular etymological associations. The base word wola, free will, is negated by nie—so that it can alternately be read as unfreed. When something is captive, it has been caught by something. When it’s enslaved, something has made it a slave. These emphasize what the thing has become. But when something is unfreed, the emphasis is on its former state, its lost freedom—not the state into which it was put by an outside power, but the state in which it existed before this power appeared. Miłosz’s title, in Polish, can be read as being not only about the mind that is captured and enslaved, but about the mind that was recently free.
The second word in his Polish title, umysł, is less ambiguous in terms of its translation into English—it is the Polish word for mind. But, again, its Slavic etymology reveals a wider spectrum of associations. The base word myśl, means thought, so that the mind can be understood as the object that thinks—the seat of thought. In fact, when considering the idea of thought in an abstract sense, the words myśl and umysł can be synonyms. It’s the substance of the mind that is at stake—its function as the organ of thought and reason with which we navigate our reality. The form of our navigation is what makes us unique as individuals. It’s not just a question of our intelligence. It’s how we put our intelligence to use.
The difficulty of reading the book today is that its conclusions are couched in the Stalinist context. But we see from the Polish title that the book is not only about the mind falling captive to one ideology, but rather about the mind’s potential, under particular circumstances, to continue thinking even when its thoughts lack the quality of freedom. This makes the book about a lot more than Stalinism or even totalitarianism or indeed any other specific form of political oppression. It’s about our capacity to think, as it were, unfreely under the influence of repressive forces—even while remaining convinced of the integrity of our thoughts. Read with this understanding, the book is not a warning against Soviet methods of repression alone—as intended—but also a warning against any and all repressive regimes that may yet appear in forms not yet familiar to us.
The Captive Mind is rooted in a single person’s experience as a poet and diplomat in a Stalinist regime. But the book’s ongoing relevance comes from Miłosz’s ability to describe broader principles that underlie the dynamics of living under social and political repression. In his first essay, he argues that one of the core conditions placed upon creatives in repressive regimes is that they cease “to think and write otherwise than necessary.” Repressive regimes undermine the very conditions for creativity by making artists doubt “the wisdom of resistance,” thereby rendering them powerless. A collective despair—one portrayed as a paradoxical “aura of strength and unhappiness, of internal paralysis and external mobility”—sets in, serving a litmus test for repression. If you are a sensitive person and find yourself or others sensing this “aura,” there is a good chance you are already living under a repressive regime.
Our initial response to discovering that we live under repression may nevertheless be to use our individual or collective voices to speak up against the regime—to “resist” despite its being “unwise.” Yet there is an implicit warning in the book against becoming what the second-to-last essay calls a “reactionary.” A “reactionary” is usually thought to be a conservative who opposes progressive ideals and policies. In this book, though, “reactionaries” are people who are incapable of grasping how repressive regimes produce unfree thinking. “The reactionary,” Miłosz writes, “cannot grasp movement.” Their “old-world logic” leaves them with “empty words and phrases.” In today’s terms, the reactionaries are often those who believe in democracy, the “liberals” rather than the “conservatives,” people for whom words like “freedom” and “honor” retain meaning but whose constituencies have “rejected them as too general, too ill-defined, too remote from reality.” These voices become powerless to change anything on the ground. They are too far removed from reality to be effective. And so “the feeling of fatalism” grows stronger. Resistance is proved not only unwise but futile.
At this point, creative people who resign themselves to the futility of external resistance may nevertheless maintain a sense of internal resistance, which is the subject of the third essay. Internal resistance leads, in Miłosz’s words, to “self-realization against something” through different forms of “dissimulation” and “cynicism.” He refers to the “mental acrobatics” needed for “survival” in such conditions. “Internal revolt,” he adds, “is sometimes essential to spiritual health, and can create a particular form of happiness.” Yet such internal gymnastics can also lead one to question whether one has “an internal core”—a personal essence independent of the pressure of repression. How people answer this question comes, in many senses, to define their creative lives.
Miłosz answers this question by suggesting that “one can live without outside pressure” and “create one’s own inner tension”—a move he says that amounts to “an act of faith.” But to effect this act of faith, he had to step outside the pressure itself, defecting to France in 1951. But what about those who remained living under repressive regimes? Since The Captive Mind was meant for readers on the western side of the Iron Curtain—exposing the repressive reality of the Soviet “Imperium” for European Communists while upholding many aspects of Eastern European intellectual criticism of European and American capitalism—it never directly addressed the status of creative people remaining under the pressure of repressive regimes. But there are hints of an answer for those who are willing to read between the lines.
Miłosz’s clearest statement on creativity comes toward the end of the second-to-last essay: “The creative act,” he writes, “is associated with a feeling of freedom that is, in its turn, born in the struggle against an apparently invincible resistance.” It is not in the struggle itself that creative capacity is born but in one’s insistence on freedom in the face of this struggle. The reason this is hard to achieve, however, appears elsewhere, in the third essay, where he puts it fairly starkly: “Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void.” When faced with repression, it is not only a fear of survival that takes away our creative abilities but fear of the void, which, in its turn, strips our thinking of the quality of freedom. Once we can face the unknown—once we can harness a sense of faith—we can regain our creativity even under repressive regimes.
In the end, The Captive Mind also speaks to those left on the other side of the curtain, warning them against letting the tension of their political reality replace their own internal tension—acknowledging their captive times but maintaining the inner life that animates their loves, fears, and fantasies. Miłosz cautions the artists and writers living under repressive regimes not to let the outer pressure determine their inner core. The times may be captive, but the thinking has to remain free.