Reading "Native Realm" [Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography] when it first came out in 1968, one recognized that, politics and Europe apart, [the author's] life was radically different from anything an American or even West European could know. In sensibility and memory he was profoundly connected to that strip of land where Poland and Lithuania meet, a patch of Eastern Europe neglected by both modern history and industrial civilization. (p. 3)

Being an East European—though very much not a Russian!—meant for Milosz that even in Europe he felt himself to be an "outsider."… Susceptible to the myths of his native realm yet soon learning to despise the claustral nationalisms [of Eastern Europe, Milosz] … somehow survived the war as an underground writer in Poland and like other sensitive people of his generation, turned politically to the left, but not to the Communists.

This embrace of politics, his book makes clear, derived...