EN
The author presents Miłosz as a critic of modern writers (Balzac in the first place) analyzing in particular one of Miłosz’s wartime essays – The legend of monster-city. The author presents particular tropes used by Miłosz in his critical statements about modern artists and modernity itself. The poet repeats Tocqueville’s gesture and like the author of Democracy in America he is looking for a new language which could be used to describe the modern world and, in particular, literature which first tried to capture the new reality. For Miłosz the source of “critical vocabulary” is Balzac’s oeuvre itself as well as Baudelaire’s poetry and his essay The painter of the modern life. The “legend” about the 19th century “monster-city” reflects the process of emerging of the new critical discourse capable of describing both – the features of new literature as well as the emerging modernity itself.