Oscar Milosz

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a FrenchLithuanian poet, playwright, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary career as manifested through his many poems, two novels and three plays passed from its beginnings in the late symbolist movement of la Belle poque towards a highly personal and dense Christian cosmology comparable to that of Dante and Milton. A recluse and metaphysician, his poems were visionary and tormented, concerned with love and loneliness and full of alchemical imagery. He was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesaw Miosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

Oscar Milosz was born in areja . Earlier these lands had belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later to the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, but at the time was part of the Russian Empire. It was here that he spent his childhood. He was baptized on July 2, 1886, at St. Alexanders Church in Warsaw. His father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was a former officer in the Russian army and his mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was a Polish Jew from Warsaw. His parents did not marry until Oscar Milosz was 17. In 1889, Miloszs parents placed him at the Lyce Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde and Jean Moras. After finishing at the Lyce, he enrolled at the cole des langues orientales, where he studied Syriac and Hebrew.

Source: Wikipedia