Proceedings of The 7th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
[Fulltext]
The Histrionic Faces of History (III) Czesław Miłosz and Dissertation about Crypto Communism?
Alexandrina Popescu-Cruceanu, Izabella Łecka
ABSTRACT:
Since from its release, in 1953, the novel The Captive Mind. Essay on popular logocracies, by Czesław Miłosz, has been very well received, both by the critics, and by the Western public, having been rewarded, a few years later, in 1983, with the Nobel Prize for literature. Ever since then, the opinions, writings and reflections connected to The Captive Mind have not been stopped and still tries to analyze and decode the immensity of ideological representations transmitted through the auctorial voice of those few human archetypes. From the masterpiece’s internal pages, the main issues of novel are labeled by some critic voices as literal, by others as political treaty with ideological theme, more exactly socialist, or crypto-communist and by the author himself as autobiographical novel. Therefore, our goal is to find out in what degree The Captive Mind was written as a deliberate crypto-communist dissertation or, contrary, as a deliberate act of creation, an escape from reality, a unconscious way of compensation of creation’s drawbacks, a veiled or expressive demonstration or a way of adaptation to the ideology of the time. The key-concepts identified in the novel are the murti-bingism and the Ketman which represent, in fact, the main favorable factors of putting in practice successfully the new international reality, assumed also as a work of international arbitrary, at national level too, by the population mass, all of these in a metonymical sense.
keywords: autobiographical writing, fiction, escapism, cognitive process, mnesic process.