Czesław Miłosz was born in Šeteniai in 1911, a small village in Lithuania. Her he spend his early years. In 1955 Czesław Miłosz published book On the banks of Issa where memory of the lost childhood’s places has been repeatedly conformed by the author and became one of the most fames his books. In highly autobiographical story of childhood the main character Tomas are discovering of the real drama of life and death. He is penetrating into mysterious world of animals, forest and marches and at last little Tomas makes his introduction to the cruelty as much as beauty. In 1994 Czesław Miłosz dedicated a cycle of poems to his native region. One of them was entitled Sateniai. It was read on the day of his funeral in Krakow in 2004. The images of childhood’s land follow after him to another world.

For a long time, the exiled Milosz was in search of a homeland. The first step of this search was the land of his childhood. He mentions it in contradictory terms. In his novel Les Zborowski there is a decedent and desolate Lithuania. He states: “I am the son of a dead homeland.” Yet in poems written in the same period appears another homeland. Illuminated and consoling, he speaks of a lost paradise. The second part is different. In 1918, Milosz choses to be Lithuanian and becomes the first representative of the independent country. He has at last found the true homeland. In the beginning, since in due time Milosz feels limited in this role, becoming an initiated prophet, and the reality of a country all too relative. He discovers another homeland. The third part is that of spirituality. After the emotional homeland of his youth, after the homeland of politics and diplomacy, Milosz reaches “pure spiritual reality” and discovers a “liberated life”, free of space and time, free from the torments of exile. Now he writes “Homeland” with a capital “H”.

In the treatment of Mickiewicz’s poetical and scholarly works during the XIXth century and through the strenuous exertion of his son Ladislas (d. 1926) in the way of editing, translating, and biographizing, particular stress was laid on the depiction of an Edenic or Paradisaical landscape as an “improved” picture of the native land. How was this picture received in France, how could the French readers form for themselves an ideal view of Lithuania from Mickiewicz’s poetry: such is the subject matter of my paper.