We can see [men reconciling themselves to Communism] in "The Seizure of Power," but we can also see something that is both more comprehensible and more terrifying—the dreadful erosive effect of misery and despair. In this brief, episodic novel, Milosz carries a group of characters from the summer of 1944, when the Red Army had pushed the Wehrmacht back to the Vistula, to the summer of 1945….

In "The Captive Mind" and now, even more powerfully, in "The Seizure of Power," Milosz appeals to the West to try to understand the people of Eastern Europe. Having lived in the United States, he knows how impossible it is for Americans to imagine the agony of Warsaw. In this unpretentious, unemotional, carefully fashioned little novel, he has managed to suggest not, of course, the actual agony but, somehow, the quality of the experience. It is an amazing and heartbreaking achievement.

Granville...