1. Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French language poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations.
12 Facts About Oscar Milosz
1. 2.
Oscar Milosz was born in Careja, then Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day Belarus, where he spent his childhood.
3.
Oscar Milosz began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde and Jean Moreas.
4.
In Jean-Bellemin Noel's phrase, "a European poet of the French language," Oscar Milosz was an excellent linguist and was fluent in French, Polish, Russian, English, German, Italian, and Spanish as well as being able to read Latin and Hebrew.
5.
Oscar Milosz published his second poetry collection, the more accomplished Les Sept Solitudes, in 1906.
6.
Oscar Milosz began to study the Kabbalah, Renaissance and Baroque alchemists, and thinkers like Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme.
7.
Oscar Milosz began to develop a literary cosmogonic system in the tradition of Lucretius, Dante, John Milton, William Blake, and Edgar Allan Poe and exposed it for the first time in the essay Epitre a Storge, published in La Revue de Hollande in 1917.
8.
In 1916, during World War I, Oscar Milosz was conscripted to the Russian division of the French army and was assigned to the press corps.
9.
Suddenly, access to his family fortune was cut off and Oscar Milosz needed to earn a living.
10.
Oscar Milosz's diplomatic career remains one of the more fascinating aspects of his legacy; his articles and correspondence in the service of the reborn Lithuanian state show a high level of nuance and rigor.
11.
Oscar Milosz has been commemorated with an artistic plaque on Literatu Street, Vilnius, Lithuania, where a display of memorabilia is dedicated to notable writers who share connections with Lithuania or its capital.
12.
Oscar Milosz has increasingly come to be considered an important figure in French poetry.