"Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century, in no small part because he very much lived the events and ideologies of that century. Born into a Polish family in what was then the western fringe of the Russian Empire, and what is now Lithuania, a young man Milosz found his life upended by the First World War and his father's conscription in the Russian army. In the Second World War, he provided aid to Jews...