Czeslaw Milosz, Poland's Nobel Prize-winning emigre poet and symbol of opposition to totalitarianism, died today at his home in the southern Polish city of Krakow at the age of 93.
Milosz received the 1980 Nobel Literary Prize for his lifelong poetic achievements amid the heady atmosphere of the Polish Solidarity movement's bold challenge to Soviet-style communist rule.
"He was a member of the betrayed generation unable to defend freedom and dignity," Solidarity founder and former Polish President Lech Walesa said of Milosz. "But he kept on fighting, proposing, encouraging and we finally achieved (these goals)."
Born in what is now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, he was initially a supporter of Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime after World War Two. He served in Poland's diplomatic corps between 1945 and 1950 before becoming disillusioned.
After defecting to France in 1951, he said: "I did it at the moment when Soviet models became obligatory for Polish writers."
In 1953, his "Captive Mind", a scathing attack on Polish writers who collaborated with the regime, sent shock waves across the Soviet bloc and the West's leftist intellectual establishment.
In 1960, Milosz moved to the United States, where for many years he taught literature at the University of California in Berkeley and continued to write poetry.
His highly intellectualised poetic works often dealt with the contemporary world's spiritual crisis or polemicised with Poland's national traditions.
"Nobody reached as deeply into our literary culture and nobody was able to speak about what we had encountered in the past like Milosz," said Stanislaw Lem, a renowned Polish science fiction writer.
When when receiving his Nobel Prize in 1980, nine years before communism collapsed, Milosz seemed to foresee the impending changes: "Despite the horror and dangers, our times will be remembered as an inevitable phase of labour pains before mankind crosses a new threshold of awareness."
In addition to translating Polish literature into English, he also produced Polish translations of works by such masters as Shakespeare, Milton and T.S. Eliot.
Milosz was the third Pole to receive the Nobel Prize for literature after novelists Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905 and Wladyslaw Reymont in 1925. In 1996, poetess Wislawa Szymborska became Poland's fourth Nobel literary laureate.
In the 1990s he returned to Poland and settled in Krakow.