Bogdan Czaykowski

February 14th, 2003

Czesław Miłosz and the So-called Polish School of Poetry

Bogdan Czaykowski is a historian, literary critic, poet, and
translator. He is a professor emeritus at the University of

British Columbia in Vancouver, where he began his career in 1962,
specializing in Polish and East European literature and

history.

His academic interests as a historian seem to have been shaped by
the meanders of his early life. He was born in 1932 on the

eastern outskirts of Poland. Deported with his family in 1940 to the
Soviet labor camps, he subsequently made his way through

Iran and India to postwar Great Britain. Later, he studied modern
history in Dublin and Polish and East European literatures in

London. In the early sixties he became the editor-in-chief of the
Polish émigré periodical Continents. His collected poems,

Wiatr z innej strony, were published in 1990; his more recent
poetry volume, Okanagańskie sady, appeared in

1998.

Professor Czaykowski’s academic work includes critical studies
of prominent Polish nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets

such as Mickiewicz, Norwid, Leśmian, and Miłosz. Last year he
published the masterfully edited Anthology of Polish Poetry

Abroad, 1939–1999.