O. V. de L. Milosz

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (Lithuanian: Oskaras Milašius; Polish: Oskar Władysław Miłosz) (28 May 1877 or 15 May 1877 – 2 March 1939) was a French language poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary career began at the end of the 19th century during la Belle Époque and reached its high point in the mid-1920s with the books Ars Magna and Les Arcanes, in which he developed a highly personal and dense Christian cosmogony comparable to that of Dante in The Divine Comedy and John Milton in Paradise Lost. A solitary and unique twentieth-century metaphysician, his poems are visionary and often tormented. He was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

Life

I am a Lithuanian poet, writing in French

Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (Chereya), then Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day Belarus, where he also spent his childhood.

Oscar Milosz's father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was ethnically Lithuanian, nominally Catholic, and for a time an officer in the imperial Russian army. His mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was Jewish, the daughter of a Hebrew professor at the University of Warsaw. The family spoke Polish at home. Oscar was baptized a Catholic on 2 July 1886, at St. Alexander's Church in Warsaw. In 1889, when he was 12, his parents placed him at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde and Jean Moréas. After finishing at the Lycée, he enrolled at the École des langues orientales, where he studied Syriac and Hebrew.