Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (Chereya), then
Minsk Governorate,
Russian Empire, former
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day
Belarus, where he also spent his childhood. Oscar Milosz's father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was ethnically Lithuanian, nominally
Catholic, and for a time an officer in the
imperial Russian army. His mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was
Jewish, the daughter of a
Hebrew professor at the
University of Warsaw. The family spoke Polish at home. Oscar was baptized a Catholic on 2 July 1886, at
St. Alexander's Church in
Warsaw. In 1889, when he was 12, his parents placed him at the
Lycée Janson de Sailly in
Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting
Oscar Wilde and
Jean Moréas. After finishing at the Lycée, he enrolled at the
École des langues orientales, where he studied
Syriac and
Hebrew. His first book of verse,
Le Poème des Décadences, appeared in 1899. In the first years of the twentieth century, Milosz travelled widely in
Europe and
North Africa and explored many foreign literatures. In Jean-Bellemin Noël's phrase, "a European poet of the French language," Milosz was an excellent linguist and was fluent in French, Polish,
Russian,
English,
German,
Italian, and
Spanish as well as being able to read
Latin and Hebrew. Later in life, he would master written and spoken Lithuanian and studied
Basque. Milosz published his second poetry collection, the more accomplished
Les Sept Solitudes, in 1906. He then entered into a phase of literary experimentation during which he tried his hand at a novel, ''L'Amoureuse Initiation,
published in 1910, and three "mystery dramas," the most popular of these plays being (1913), a reworking of the Don Juan myth. During this time he also composed his third poetry collection, Les
Éléments'' (1911). On 14 December 1914, while saying his prayers at the end of an evening of intensive reading of the
Bible and
Emanuel Swedenborg, Milosz experienced an illumination that led him to proclaim the next day to a friend: "I have seen the spiritual sun." Influenced by this vision, his poetry became more profound. He began to study the
Kabbalah,
Renaissance and
Baroque alchemists, and thinkers like
Paracelsus and
Jacob Boehme. After 1916, the development of his metaphysics became his major poetic preoccupation. He began to develop a literary cosmogonic system in the tradition of
Lucretius,
Dante,
John Milton,
William Blake, and
Edgar Allan Poe and exposed it for the first time in the essay
Épitre à Storge, published in
La Revue de Hollande in 1917. In the early 1920s, Milosz convinced himself that his poetic cosmogony was supported by
Einstein's theory of relativity, still a subject of debate. During this period, after a flirtation with "occult" reading and friends, like the
numerologist René Schwaller de Lubicz, Milosz turned his back on these currents of thought and began to study
medieval science and thinkers like the English
scholastic Robert Grosseteste. Finally, in 1927 he took a
Father Confessor and became a practicing Roman Catholic, which he remained for the last twelve years of his life. In 1916, during
World War I, Milosz was conscripted to the
Russian division of the French army and was assigned to the
press corps. After the
Russian Revolution of October 1917, Čareja was seized by the Soviets. Suddenly, access to his family fortune was cut off and Milosz needed to earn a living. Around this time he learned about the growing movement for
Lithuanian independence. By the end of the war when both
Lithuania and
Poland were effectively independent again, Milosz chose to identify with Lithuania In 1939, shortly after retiring from his diplomatic post and ill with
cancer, he died of a
heart attack in a house he had recently purchased in
Fontainebleau. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau. Every year, around the time of his birthday on May 28, a group of admirers,
Les Amis de Milosz, commemorate his life and work in a ceremony at the grave site. He has also been commemorated with an artistic plaque on
Literatų Street, Vilnius, Lithuania, where a display of memorabilia is dedicated to notable writers who share connections with
Lithuania or its capital. ==Works==