He wrote his poems here, next to the bust of his wife Carol Thigpen
My visit to beloved Kraków last month was very short – so brief and tightly packed I didn’t have a chance to return to the apartment at No. 6 Bogusławskiego, where Czesław Miłosz spent the last years of his life. Fortunately, our roving photographer-reporter Zygmunt Malinowski made the journey from New York City, accompanied by our mutual friend, Prof. Aleksander Fiut. Here’s Zygmunt’s report:
Not far from Wawel Castle in Kraków and behind Planty, the park encircling the Old Town, is a street named Bogusławskiego. It’s a very short street, lined with trees on both sides seemingly closed off by perpendicular streets on either end.
Number 6, Bogusławskiego Street
The three-story gray masonry buildings with tall doors and decorative pediments over high windows give an aura of permanence. Aesthetics rather then economics dictated this nineteenth-century architecture. Among several entrances, one shows the address as Number 6. The hall inside leads into a sunny courtyard.
In the center of the courtyard there is a round enclosure with plants and lush vines that cover the entire building wall. To the right of the hall, a wide wooden staircase with railing leads to the second floor where Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz, “one of the greatest poets of 20th century, perhaps the greatest,” according to fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, lived and worked from 1996 to 2004, as the plaque on the other side of the arched entrance door notes.
His shoes and slippers are still there
I am here with Prof. Aleksander Fiut, a longstanding friend of Miłosz (they met in Paris in 1976) and author of several books about him, to visit and photograph the poet’s former apartment. As one enters through a high door there is a short corridor with a small wooden bench on the side – the poet’s shoes and slippers are still underneath, and his canes lean against the corner. At the end of the corridor a canvas tote bag is hanging on a hat and coat stand with Miłosz’s printed likeness and a quotation from his 1985 poem, “A Confession”: “My Lord, I loved strawberry jam…”
Behind, inclined against the wall is a framed front page news clipping with headlines from The Washington Post: “American Czesław Miłosz wins Nobel Prize for Literature” and The New York Times: “Polish Poet in US gets Nobel in Literature.”
“My Lord, I loved strawberry jam…”
To the left there is a small room with a desk opposite the window – a bookcase; file folders; and cartons of books, mostly unopened and sent by publishers. Author copies are stacked on the floor. This was the office of his wife, Carol Thigpen, who died in 2002. On the opposite side across the corridor, I enter the spacious living room (rather high ceilings add to this perception), which served as work space, library, and sleeping quarters. Soft upholstered sofas, a small glass-top table, and large bookcases crammed with books occupy three walls. Several paintings and lithographs are on walls, including ones by Józef Czapski and Jan Lebestein, friends from his Paris years.
My attention is immediately drawn to the right corner. A small antique wooden desk, with the computer he used in his later years, with large fonts to accommodate his failing eyesight. Two chairs offer a view of the courtyard and vine-covered wall. This is where he worked and wrote poems.
On the right, the books that he authored are arranged in the bookcase so they are closest to his desk. On top of it, some small framed photographs: his mother; Miłosz with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican; beautiful Erin, his granddaughter, whom I met in New York City; Prof. Fiut with Miłosz. To the left of his desk, hanging on the center wall, are photographs of his father, his first wife Janka, a small painting of the aunt that he admired, and his father in a group picture on the deck of a ship with Fridtjof Nantes, the famous Arctic explorer (Nantes visited Siberia in 1900s). A bust he commissioned of his second wife Carol Thigpen dominates the room. The people closest to his heart were closest to his desk.
It’s a bit unnerving to be here. It seems as if the inhabitants have only left for an outing and will soon return, and once again this place will be full of life…
I am grateful to Anthony Milosz and Prof Aleksander Fiut for the opportunity to visit the apartment, also to my friends in Kraków for their help. All photos copyright Zygmunt Malinowski.
Tags: Aleksander Fiut, Czeslaw Milosz, Fridtjof Nantes, Jan Lebestein, Józef Czapski, Pope John Paul II, Zygmunt Malinowski