On Tomas Venclova and Vilnius

I've long been reading Lithuanian writer, Tomas Venclova, and his collection of essays, Forms of Hope, I've returned to again and again over the years.

I read over the weekend his book Vilnius: a Personal History which, again, I found very easy to read and engaging. Not very aptly named, though, the book is light on personal details or history and very much an objective look at the history of Venclova's native city from its founding, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond...

I first discovered Venclova through the work of another writer I admire, Czeslaw Milosz, and their letter exchanges on the city of Vilnius make up the last section of this book (and other books by Venclova and even in some of Milosz own work).

I spent a week in Vilnius years and years ago and found it one of the most interesting and beautiful cities I've ever visited. My trip there cemented my love of Milosz (who also spent many years there as a young man) but also led me to other literary discoveries.

The city of Vilnius is interesting because of its long history as a centre of cosmopolitan culture, learning and language. For years it was nearly made up of half Jewish residents, the other half being largely Polish-speaking and Belorussians. Lithuanian speakers made up just a fraction of the population for much of the 19th and 20th centuries (at least until the middle part of the 20th century) though this changed when the Soviet Union annexed the republic and absorbed it into the USSR. Almost 95% of the Jews of Vilinius perished at the hands of the Nazis during WWII and the few remaining were shipped off to Siberia under Stalin.

These vicissitudes of history also meant that the linguistic situation flip-flopped: from a primarily Yiddish and Polish-speaking city in the early part of the 20th century to a mainly Lithuanian-speaking population today. The city has long served as an antidote to the idea that language must determine nationalistic temperatures (many Poles consider themselves Lithuanian and the Jews largely did too). As has been pointed out by many historians, the notion that language somehow determines nationality is a relatively recent notion and for much of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, there was absolutely no contradiction in a state being a motly collection of all kinds of languages and ethnic groups. Lithuania generally and Vilnius particularly was an interesting symbol for that almost anachronistic idea (though nationalism in general is largely passe in most Western democracies).

Venclova explores all this and more, giving his reading a moving and more than passing glance of this city which has seen so much horror and oppression. Largely forgotten now, Vilnius exists at the edge of Western democracy (it's an EU member now), just a stone's thrown from Belarus (practically a dictatorship) and, of course, Russia. Lithuanians watch with alarm at Russia's growing dominance and assertion of power and more than one politician and intellectual saw portentous signs when Russia annexed Crimea. The West doesn't have a good track record in coming to the aid of small nations when faced with the might of a big (if corrupt) power like Russia.

Venclova, long a Slavic Literature professor at Yale, is one of Central Europe's most respected poets and it's a shame that he is so little known outside of that region, given how incredibly famous he is in the Baltics, Poland and even Germany. His collection, Winter Dialogue, is another favorite book that I take down and disappear into several times a year.

Vilnius, Lithuania

PRESCRIPTION by CZESLAW MILOSZ

Prescription

Everything but confessions. My own life
Annoys me so, I would find relief
In telling about it. And I would be understood
By those wretches -- how many! -- who wobble
In the streets of cities, drugged and drunk,
Sick with the leprosy of memory and the guilt of living.
So what restrains me? Shame
That my misfortunes are not picturesque enough?
Or contrariness. Wailing has become fashionable,
Unhappy childhoods, trauma, all the rest.
Even had I been ready for a Job's complaint,
It is better to keep silent, to praise the immutable
Order of things. No, something else
Forbids me to speak. Whoever suffers
Should be a teller of the truth. Should? How,
With all the disguises, comedy, self-pity?
Falseness of feeling results in a false phrase.
I value style too much to take the risk.

Arvo Pärt, our sins, and Für Alina

Doing research this week, I came across this really wonderful piece from a few years back on the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, in discussing his perhaps best-known piece, Für Alina :

I replied that this suggested another metaphor, because the tintinnabuli style - especially in the simple form in which it exists in "Für Alina" - consists of two lines. The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking. The second line underpins each note of the melody with a note from a harmonizing triad (the fundamental chord of Western music) that is positions as close as possible to the note of the melody, but always below. You could imagine this accompaniment to be a mother with her hands outstretched to ensure her toddler doesn't fall.

Pärt grabbed my own hand with excitement. "This is the whole secret of tintinnabuli," he exclaimed. "The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say - it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken - that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins."

Last work of a great talent: Joseph Roth

When writer Joseph Roth was dying in Hopital Necker in Paris in 1939, none of his nurses or doctors knew that he was perhaps one of the 20th century's best writers. To them he was just another poverty-stricken drunk with the tremors and an incoherent babble. But in the space of just over half his life (he was 44 when he died), he had written more than a dozen novels and hundreds of journalistic pieces for some of the best newspapers in Europe. For a time he was the highest paid journalist working in Europe. He predicted the rise of Hitler as far back as 1922 and knew in his bones that it would end badly. When Hitler was appointed chancellor, he left Germany for good and settled (off and on) in Paris. This was a challenge in terms of his writing career and money was always a problem for Roth.

His last story "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" , published in Three Novellas, captures the struggle that Roth was experiencing in his last few weeks of life. It's a stunning achievement, I think, and captures both the spirit of the secular city man of the early 20th century and the religious nature and superstition he can't quite let go of. The story is tragic, wry, ironic and hilarious. It features dishonest women, a famous football star, a Polish chancer, lots of waiters and little St-Therese, the one action the protagonist can't quite complete. It's one of those rare stories that as soon as I finished, I flipped back and re-read the entire thing again.

One thing has struck me since I started re-reading Joseph Roth: in every single bookstore I've been inside in North America, the shelves are full of Philip Roth but none has had a single work by Joseph. His books include The Radetsky March, Job, The Anti-Christ, What I Saw, and many others. He lamented for a past that would never be again: for the fall of the Hapsburg Empire when he suddenly found himself a subject of Poland, a newly created country which was cobbled together from the rubble of a collapsing Europe; for his mentally ill wife who was institutionalized in Vienna (and would later be "euthanized" by Hitler's henchmen as many mentally ill people were); for a future that he knew he would never live to see.