Polish · 1900–1967
Wat founded Polish Futurism at nineteen with a volume of nonsense verse, became a committed Communist in the 1920s, and edited the Party's literary monthly in Warsaw. In 1940 the NKVD arrested him in Lwów and moved him through fourteen prisons, including the Lubyanka, where he shared a cell with a range of the Soviet system's victims and lost his belief in it entirely. He was deported to Kazakhstan with his wife and son, and returned to Poland after the war a Catholic-inclined ex-Communist whom nobody could place. In 1953 he suffered a stroke that left him in continuous, untreatable pain for the remaining fourteen years of his life. In Berkeley in 1965, Miłosz put a tape recorder in front of him; the transcript is My Century. He took an overdose in Paris in 1967.