Oscar Milosz

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz
Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz
Born	(1877-05-28)May 28, 1877 Čareja (near Mogilev in present day Belarus)
Died	March 2, 1939(1939-03-02) (aged 61) Fontainebleau
Cause of death	Heart Attack
Nationality	Lithuanian / French
Other names	Lithuanian: Oskaras Milašius
Education	École des langues orientales
Occupation	Poet, Playwright, Diplomat

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (Lithuanian: Oskaras Milašius) (May 28, 1877 – March 2, 1939) was a French-Lithuanian poet, playwright, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary career — as manifested through his many poems, two novels and three plays — passed from its beginnings in the late symbolist movement of la Belle Époque towards a highly personal and dense Christian cosmology comparable to that of Dante and Milton. A recluse and metaphysician, his poems were visionary and tormented, concerned with love and loneliness and full of alchemical imagery. He was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

I am a Lithuanian poet, writing in French

Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (near Mogilev in present-day Belarus). Earlier these lands had belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the time was part of the Russian Empire. It was here that he spent his childhood. He was baptized on July 2, 1886, at St. Alexander's Church in Warsaw. His father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was a former officer in the Russian army and his mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was a Polish Jew from Warsaw. His parents did not marry until Oscar Milosz was 17. In 1889, Milosz's 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.