The Issa Valley

Miłosz's lyrical novel of boyhood follows Thomas, growing up on his grandparents' manor in the Issa valley of Lithuania in the years after the First World War, a world of forests, folk belief, hunting and the tangled loyalties of Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. He drew the valley from his own childhood at Szetejnie on the Nevėžis: the manor and its estate, the slow river and its meadows, the deep forests full of the old pagan spirits, and the village church.

The grandfather

The manor

Chapter 1

In the rambling manor house, among his gentle grandfather, his devout grandmother and the estate's servants and hunters, Thomas takes in a whole vanishing world of provincial gentry life. The house, warm and slightly decaying, is the fixed centre of a childhood Miłosz recalls with the precision of paradise remembered.

Chapter 1

inspired by Thomas is raised on his grandparents' manor in the Issa valley, drawn from Miłosz's own childhood estate at Szetejnie on the Nevėžis river; the manor is sited in that real Lithuanian valley near Kėdainiai.

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