Oscar Milosz

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a poet, playwright, novelist and essayist who wrote in French and also served as a representative of Lithuania. Born in 1877 in Czareja in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he was educated in Paris from the age of twelve and published his first poems in 1899. His mystery play Miguel Mañara reworked the Don Juan legend, and after a spiritual illumination in 1914 his writing turned to a dense Christian cosmogony, developed in the books Ars Magna and Les Arcanes in the mid-1920s. He was appointed Lithuania chargé d affaires in Paris in 1920, took French nationality in 1931, and died in Fontainebleau in 1939. He was largely neglected in his lifetime, and is a distant cousin of the Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.