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A classicist with left-wing sensitivities and Marxist leanings, Rex Warner never was a Communist party member. In this, he closed ranks with such non-party and non-doctrinaire writers of the twentieth century as Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz came all the way down from a young left-winger to a conservative and religious thinker and poet, although this never came at the expense of his liberal sensitivities. Like Warner, Miłosz was able to successfully accommodate his pivotal moral and political sensibilities never losing the grounds or betraying his belief, whether religious or secular, in human self-worth and dignity. Like Mikhail Bulgakov and Simone Weil, he had never accepted Christian/Augustinian or modern liberal concept of evil. Miłosz's self-confessed variety of modern Manichaeism, no matter if taken as an Eastern/Central European idiosyncrasy or as an aspect of totalitarian modernization of Eastern and Central Europe, calls for a separate study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the impact of the thought of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1911) on several Polish emigré writers, including Józef Czapski and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, but first of all Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and Aleksander Wat (1900-1967). Miłosz' approach oscillated between early fascination through an unjust rejection during the war, due to the 'appropriation' of Brzozowski's thought by the right wing publicists, to the new phase of fascination after the war, culminating in the publication of a book on Brzozowski ( A Man Among Scorpions, 1962) and prolonged in several important articles till the very end of his life. Wat's approach shifted from the communist practice of 'overcoming' Brzozowski through the affirmation of his criticism and rejection of catholic obscurantism to the process of the internalization of the catholic faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]