Czesław Miłosz’s Vilnius

For many years, our family lived at number five Pakalnės Street. The house was rented out, and we had an apartment on the ground floor…

For me, the most important street in Vilnius was probably Portowa. Not even a street, because it had very few houses, and everything else was grassy slopes and hillsides reaching the street. For many years I walked along Portowa Street to school, turning up Tauro Hill or some other way.

That was the year I lived in a dormitory on Tauro Hill. <…> It was a new dormitory. I had a tiny room: a bed, a table – everything you need to be happy.

The gymnasium was located on the corner of Tauro Hill and Mala Pohulianka; an eighth-class state grammar school for boys <…>. Our school chose Sigismund Augustus as its patron, a figure that is particularly suitable for this place.

<…> In my case, of course, there are distortions, because a child grows up in one place, surrounded by a certain environment, a certain atmosphere, with little exposure to other aspects of the city. On my horizon were, say, the King Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium and the Tomasz Zan Library.

Vilnius was a city of theatres, especially when Osterwa’s ‘Reduta’ came to Vilnius. So, around the middle of my school years, very early by the way, I had already started going to the theatre on Didžioji Pohulianka Street to the Reduta theatre, where ‘Le Cid’ was being performed.

It was very difficult to get any kind of job in Vilnius. As it happens, my friend Byrski was working at ‘Radiophone’, and I was accepted there.

<…> Sometimes I would give lectures on the radio, and occasionally my poems were read.

A street with a special name, heterogeneous, different every few steps, and at the same time, ecumenical – Catholic-Jewish.

On Vilniaus Street, in the ‘artisan’ part of the street, from the courtyard side you could enter a book reading room, where the membership subscription was paid by grandmother Miloszhowa from her modest pension. I used to go there a lot when I was twelve or thirteen years old, sent by her to pick up books.

I came here many times, countless times over the years, because I almost always lived in a new part of the city, I mean, behind Pylimo and Vilniaus Streets, and it was precisely Liejyklos Street that led to Napoleon Square and on to the university or the busy Didžioji Street.

Vokiečių Street in Vilnius was the street that was most similar to those found in big cities. <…> I used to visit Vokiečių Street at various times in my life – first of all, as a small boy, with my grandmother Milosova.

<…> Before I graduated from university, I started to make contact with her again, coming to performances of touring Jewish theatres performing in Yiddish, or visiting small restaurants on side streets with Franciszek Ancewicz.

The Vilnius branch of the Polish Writers’ Union wasn’t located in just any old place – its premises were in the Basilian Monastery, where Mickiewicz was imprisoned in the Philomat era.

With a maid’s wicker basket and a prayer book, the mourning Barbara returns to Romeris house on Bokšto street from the Lithuanian mass at Saint Nicholas’.

How radiant! There’s snow on the Hill of the Three Crosses and on Bekešo Hill

The mountain – it will not be dissolved by the breathing of short-lived people

In 2011, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, the stairs leading from Bokšto Street to Maironio Street were named in honour of Czesław Miłosz.

Bokšto Street was a very old, dark, narrow street; horribly potholed and in some places no more than two or three metres wide. <…> As Bokšto St. was so close to the university, almost opposite the corner of Didžioji St. and St. John’s, it was important in student life because Mensa was located here – not a canteen, not a tavern, not a snack bar, not a collective canteen, but specifically Mensa.

<…> I’m renting a room in a house with walls maybe two metres thick, in a narrow street paved with rough stones and famous for its antique shops. The name is dear to me today, but it is eerily symbolic [for a literary man] – Literatų.

In the autumn of 1929, I enrolled in Polish Studies at Stepono Batoro University and started attending lectures. <…> We had special caps of the Stepono Batoro University, decorated with wolf’s teeth – the symbol of our university. 

We wanted our own publication. The editor Stanisław Mackiewicz hospitably suggested that we publish a literary supplement to his ‘Slowo’ <…>. So, in the spring of 1931, ‘Žagary’ was launched.

There were kayaks in Vilnius – not so many, but there were some, which we particularly liked in the Valkatų Club*. <…> The Neris is a fast flowing river, and we used to leave from the AZS pier and have a hard time paddling against the current. It was possible to paddle upstream and reach Verkiai…

*the name of a prevalent bohemian academic society that loosely translates as ‘The Vagabond Club’.

The Eastern Europe Science and Research Institute was founded in the 1930s as a three-year higher education institution to train specialists in Baltic, Belarusian, and Russian issues. <…> Bujnicki was secretary there from the beginning of the school. <…> I used to visit Bujnicki every few days in the building of the institute, which was on the corner of Arsenalo and Žygimantų (known then as Paupio) Streets.

<…> I used to visit house No. 6 in the middle of Arsenalo Street all the time from my primary school years onwards because my relatives – actually quite distant, the Pavlikovskis – lived there <…>.

I felt at home at 6 Arsenalo Street, and since it was in the centre of the city; I used to go there a lot, just to stretch out on the sofa. I also wrote a couple of poems there that I still like. I spent my last night in Vilnius in that apartment, before my journey to Warsaw across the border frontier in 1940, which was more dangerous than I would have liked.

The only headquarters of society was Rudnicki café on the corner of Mickevičius Street and Cathedral Square, where, of course, the whole world of literature, journalism, and professorship sat and sipped coffee. There, I was a kind of snob, but not others towards me. That Vilnius café was so harmless, so homely…