Na przełomie. Miłosz i inni
The Breakthrough. Miłosz and Others

Summary/Abstract: A discussion of the affiliation of Modern Legends, War Essays and other texts written in the 1930s and 1940s in the face of the threat facing European culture, and predominantly The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt and writings by Walter Benjamin. Arendt and Miłosz share a critical attitude, comprehended here synchronously with premises of the Frankfurt school, a theme recently broached by Mateusz Werner in a sketch on the relations between Modern Legends and The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer. An attempt at saving European culture by seeking in the language residues of meanings that could serve for building a new truth and a joint sense is quite possibly even more important than the critique of culture; this attempt is parallel to Benjamin’s theory of “drilling” in deconstructed texts so as to reach the essence of meaning. The intellectual perspective of Modern Legends is excellently summed up in title of this collection. ‘Legend’ originates front the Latin lego (‘gather’ and ‘pick’) and reflects the two-track activity pursued by Miłosz: the critique of European myths and the effort of extracting from them certain truths offering hope for the future.

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