CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: THE YEAR OF THE HUNTER [2001].

Description

We present “The Year of the Hunter” by Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) – poet, prose writer, essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1980), one of the most outstanding and versatile authors of Polish literature in the 20th century . The publication was released in 2001 in Cracow by Znak Publishing House as part of the prestigious series “Collected Works of Czeslaw Milosz”.

“The Year of the Hunter” is Milosz’s last novel, completed by the author at the age of 90. The work is maintained in the convention of a diary, which the author conducts through the months of one year (from January to December). In his entries, Milosz revisits his childhood experiences spent in Lithuania (Szetejnie), describes his travels around Krakow, where he settled after returning to the country in 1993, and shares his reflections on old age, transience, literature and his own work. This is a nostalgic book, full of self-irony, and at the same time it is a testimony to the author’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic vitality, who continued to create until the last moments of his life.

The title of the book is ironic – the author himself was not a hunter. “Hunting” here is metaphorical: it is a search for the truth about oneself, the meaning of life and one’s place in history. Although the work was written as his last novel, it is also part of an extensive body of essays in which Milosz has for years grappled with difficult themes of identity, memory and obligations to the past. Parallel to The Year of the Hunter, he published volumes of poetry during the last years of his life, such as Second Space (2002) and Orpheus and Eurydice (2003), which demonstrates his extraordinary creativity.

It is part of the prestigious series “Collected Works” of the Znak publishing house. The copy is clean and preserved in very good condition. It is a must-have for a collector of Milosz’s works, a lover of his essays and a bibliophile looking for a representative edition of the Nobel Prize winner’s last novel. It is also a valuable source material for researchers of the poet’s late works.