Responding to Shelley’s declaration that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” W. H. Auden tartly observed that it wasn’t the poets but the secret police that carried out such covert “legislation.”

I think Auden was right. And his disillusioning remark offers one point of entry into Ryszard Legutko’s reconsideration of Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind.

Legutko says that the question Miłosz sought to address in his 1953 book was why such a large proportion of the Eastern European cultural elite flocked to support the “unquestionably inhuman, mendacious, savage, and murderous” regime of Soviet totalitarianism. That was certainly part of what Miłosz was about in that curious and often convoluted book. But The Captive Mind is not only a book that seeks answers. It is also a journey that seeks absolution.  

Miłosz himself had fallen prey to the totalitarian temptation he anatomizes. Hence his explanation is also a search for expiation.

As Legutko notes, the appeal of totalitarian ideology has two distinct but interrelated aspects, the utopian and what he calls the “mundane.”