Czeslaw Milosz was born on 30 June 1911 in his family's former manorial village of Szetejnie, on the banks of the Niewiaza River, in what was before the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His family was of the Polish-speaking gentry, a class that was politically and economically ruined by the time of Milosz's birth, but whose grand heritage nonetheless persisted in collective memory. Milosz counts himself among the last of the Polish Lithuanians, recalling, "We were something else, Lithuanians, but not in the accepted twentieth-century sense, which says that to be a Lithuanian you have to speak Lithuanian." (taken from "Conversations With Czeslaw Milosz").

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