Inside Czeslaw Milosz’s Secret Zone CONVERSATIONS WITH CZESLAW MILOSZ <i> by Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut; translated by Richard Lourie (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $27.95; 370 pp.) </i>

Czeslaw Milosz cuts a haunting if idiosyncratic figure in the world of letters. The survivor of two world wars and witness to the collapse of Polish culture as he knew it has built a mighty and multifaceted literary career and canon, crowned in 1980 by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this polished volume of conversations, Milosz reflects--at times exuberantly, at times testily--on his work, the Poland of his youth and of today and the literary crosscurrents circulating in his imagination. A naturalized American who still writes in Polish, Milosz has managed to stave off survivor’s guilt, overcome bouts with writer’s block and negotiate the tricky course of expatriotism to achieve international acclaim.

Although Milosz, 76, is best-known for his poetry, he has published novels, essays, criticism and, in 1953, “The Captive Mind,” a well-received political analysis of post-war Poland (which improbably made him a hero in Indonesia for its anti-totalitarian stance). In 1969, he published an annotated history of Polish literature, now the authoritative text in the field.

Throughout this book--a kind of extended Paris Review interview--Milosz comes as close as he is willing to letting down his hair, offering a few choice locks, not the whole head. “I wouldn’t have had these conversations with you five years ago,” he tells his two skilled and knowledgeable interviewers (who occasionally best the great man in citing his own work.

Milosz resists the role of messenger from his exotic pocket of Western civilization--Polish-speaking Lithuania--preferring to be considered a “philosophical poet,” pigeonholed by neither time nor place. But what he does allow about his background, particularly his childhood can only enhance a reader’s feel for his work.

At age 2, young Czeslaw rode the Trans-Siberian Railway with his parents and nursemaid to Siberia; by 7, he was fluent in Russian and Polish, and he soon became attuned to the movement for Lithuanian statehood. His father was an engineer, but his eccentric grandparents lived on a country estate in Szetejnie near the Niewiaza River, the setting for his 1955 novel, “The Issa Valley.” He visited there frequently while growing up, spending long, solitary hours reading and roaming. “In the coach house in Szetejnie were various vehicles that were never used: carriages, the most bizarre vehicles, made of leather, wood,” he says. “Naturally, they were all from the 18th Century--not even the 19th.”

Milosz came of age during the country’s heady, 21-year, between-the-wars period of independence. Partitioned Poland and later the nation-state (restored in 1918) were culturally heterogeneous, an ethnic mosaic composed of Crown Poles, Lithuanians, Ukranians, Byelorussians, Germans and Jews. In Wilno, Milosz’s hometown, “Each street and each ethnic group lived a life unto itself,” he says. “The various Wilnos were rather isolated zones, and I was one of the few who attempted to cross the borders.”

Milosz makes the surprising admission that he cheated in high school math and flunked a critical Roman law exam at Wilno University. But he remains curiously silent about his personal life. When queried about the fate of his manuscripts during the Warsaw Uprising in August, 1944, Milosz mentions--in passing and for the first time--his wife, who, during a lull in the shelling of their street on Warsaw’s outskirts, snuck in to collect her mother and his manuscripts. (The house was destroyed shortly thereafter.)

Holding his privacy dear is a philosophical--and literary--position for Milosz. “There’s a secret zone, a closed zone, where a person lives his life,” he says. “I recently found the same idea in Goethe--that a person should not reveal what he knows and should be superficial when relating to others.”

Because of its inherent “exhibitionism,” Milosz asserts that the novel is an inferior form to poetry, which “presupposes immense transformation.” “Pick up any novel, open it to any page, and you say to yourself: ‘I’m not going to read this undistilled self-involvement.’ You can see right through it to the paltry personality of an author who hasn’t found his voice as an artist.” Milosz chastises Dostoevsky for putting his real mother’s tombstone inscription to bizarre fictional use in “The Idiot.” “I find that horrifying, absolutely awful. How could he do it?”

Milosz does not even spare his own novels--especially “The Seizure of Power”--dashed off in two summer months in 1952. “It’s conceptual; it makes extracts of people’s standpoints,” he says. “The book should be cursed by all sides.” He is easier on “The Issa Valley,” written as “an attempt at therapy.” It “can be interpreted as standing at the boundary of my poetry and intimately connected with it,” he says, in its defense.

Some of his earlier poetry likewise displeases him. “Now, of course, they’re digging up prewar poetry of mine,” he says, “Some of it can make you feel rather stupid.”

Among the most affecting passages here are Milosz’s recollections of Poland in the ‘20s and ‘30s and its evolution from miraculous rebirth to the “ominous” atmosphere after Gen. Jozef Pilsudski’s death in 1935 and prior to the Nazi invasion in September, 1939. Milosz lived in Warsaw during the occupation, publishing the first volume of underground poetry in the city (“run off on a duplicating machine”). To earn his keep, he worked as a janitor at the closed-to-the-public University Library and read voraciously.

Milosz does not shrink from highly charged subjects. All too often, Poles have been simplistically dismissed as anti-Semitic, he says, while Jewish anti-Polishness is seldom addressed. “The truth is that in prewar Poland the leftists were mainly Jews,” says Milosz, who himself flirted with socialism at the time. “There’s no racial mystery in that. They simply had an international outlook, whereas since the 19th Century, Poles had had a very strong tradition of fighting for independence. The Poland that had reappeared on the map of Europe seemed so precious to them that the very idea of any end to the unique arrangement that allowed Poland to exist was unthinkable.”

Despite his acumen in analyzing history, literature and even his own work, Milosz chooses not to turn these critical powers onto his own life. Though we may yearn for even more candor, “Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz” opens the door to his closed, secret zone, giving us a tantalizing glimpse of the man. But the real Milosz, in all his colors, can only be found one place: his work, the entire, unexpurgated body.