Tributes paid to Nobel Prize-winning emigre poet

Czesław Miłosz, Poland's Nobel Prize-winning emigre poet and symbol of opposition to totalitarianism, died at his home in Kraków on Saturday at the age of 93. He made his literary debut while studying law in 1933 and remained a prolific poet, essayist and writer. He became a diplomat with postings in Paris and Washington for the post war government but broke his ties in 1951 when he sought political asylum in France. In 1961 he became a professor of Slavonic languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years his works like the famous "Captive Mind" were not officially issued in the communist Poland. Miłosz received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 amid the heady atmosphere of the Solidarity movement's bold challenge to Soviet-style communist rule. After 1989 he began to visit Poland regularly and finally settled in Kraków. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said: "Miłosz was until today the most distinguished Polish poet of the twentieth century." Stanisław Lem added: "Polish culture has suffered a great loss, an irreparable one, since no one else has delved so deep into our literary culture and no one could speak so well about what happened to us in the past." (Rzeczpospolita, pp. A1, I-IV, Gazeta Wyborcza, pp.1-8) E.B.