Milosz's 'Traktat moralny' (The Moral Treatise), as a manifestation of the poet's proactive attitude toward the reality, cannot be made subject to rigours of a philological analysis. This Treatise is Milosz's most daring political work. The authoress' argument is that if the 'political-commentary' aspect of this poem is neglected, the piece gets deprived of its poetic vein. Hence, a course of reading should be sought for which would enable confrontation of various orders of meaning.
The Czesław Miłosz’s involvement in the natural sciences, and his longlasting argument with the theory of evolution has deeply penetrated his poetry and prose; hence the references to Darwin and Darwinism in many of his literary works. In my article, however, I focus on “a hidden presence” of Darwin in Miłosz’s writings, a continuous debate which underlines various attempts of the Nobel Prize winner to capture the situation of man in the modern world. Thus the Darwinism with its many social and philosophical consequences becomes one of the central points of the Miłosz’s anthropological project. Each of his books gives us a different perspective on the roots of what he calls “the European nihilism”, and a different analysis of the modern conflict between religious imagination and the image of man created by natural science.
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