Czeslaw Milosz: 'The Captive Mind', London, Secker & Warburg...

Hammer

£60

Czeslaw Milosz: 'The Captive Mind', London, Secker & Warburg, 1953, 1st UK edition, translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko, original cloth gilt, dust wrapper (slightly worn with some small part losses, 18s price intact). Very scarce first English language edition of the 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Written soon after the author's defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951, the book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, its adherents' thought processes, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the postwar Soviet Bloc. The book is described by historian Norman Davies as a "devastating study" which "totally discredited the cultural and psychological machinery of Communism", and has been compared to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four