HUMANITARIAN COMPONENT OF THE WAY OF LIFE AND THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL HERITAGE OF CZESŁAW MIŁOSH
Authors:   Institute of State and Law named after V. M. Koretsky National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv) Ukraine, Horbatenko Volodymyr 
Published: December 2023

The life path and literary and political heritage of the Polish poet, publicist and political thinker, Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz are studied from a political point of view. Emphasis is placed on the humanitarian component of his life activity and creative output. On the basis of mainly multi-genre, politically oriented works of C. Milosh, key social problems that have not lost their relevance for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, are revealed: the importance of the language issue for national development and creative self-realization of the individual; the need to identify the causes and consequences of totalitarian rule in the specified region; increased attention to the acute political and sociohumanitarian problems of the post-imperial development of the countries of the «other Europe»; extrapolation of the thinker’s humanistic reflections on the needs of overcoming evil in the modern world, the formation of the future harmonious coexistence of man and humanity. On the example of Czeslaw Milosz, a connection is established between the events of planetary significance that took place in the brutal conditions of the 20th century, and the life and creativity of an individual. The relationship between the current needs for the establishment of humanitarian policy and the intuitive humanism of the creative work of an outstanding poet and thinker is analyzed, and important aspects for the formation of a holistic value model of social development based on the establishment of relationships between politics and culture are proposed for consideration. The political «diseases» of the 20th century identified by C. Milosz are considered — machiavellianism, messianism, violence, hostility, extreme nationalism, and the possibilities of overcoming them in modern conditions are outlined. On the basis of the creative biography of Milos, the difficulties of the life of the people of the 20th century in the Eastern European space are understood, such as: the loss of the principles of the humanistic Western European worldview, connected with the recognition of the «secondary status» of a large part of the Eastern European peoples and the artificially formed border between the two Europes; the provinciality of culture and the painful desire to overcome a distorted cultural identity; the reign of individual and collective untruth, the transformation of human consciousness and the mythologizing of reality in a totalitarian society. It was concluded that living in Central-Eastern Europe gives its inhabitants a chance to create a special type of culture in modern conditions, which, perhaps, someday the rest of Europe will take as a model. The desire of the Polish thinker for the formation of a «family» Europe — as a collection of «small homelands», each of which carefully protects its identity — is shown as too close to Ukrainians. It has been proven that the end of the utopian chimera with the bet on the creation of a «new man» and demarcation from Europe by a protective wall depends on every Ukrainian.