Kings and Spirits in The Eastern European Tales [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 183-206]

KINGS AND SPIRITS
187
of certain 'states' which a few years before would only have aroused their
decision. Sceptical or cowardly before imprisonment, as prisoners they
led lives full of devotion, believing in a spiritual reality which surpassed
them even as it consoled and enabled them to endure.... [Today] they
are left with only the memory of the 'absolute,' along with the certainty
that it exists.... All of this magnificent experience is destined to be
lost.... The human ability to forget is boundless" [Mircea Eliade, Fragments d'un journal, Gallimard: Paris, 1973]
The situations in which men of the first half of the 20th century
learned that absolute values exist were extreme: the concentration camp,
prison, war. Death. This experience steered people like Solzhenitsyn or
the great and unappreciated Polish poet Alexander Wat, inmate of Lubianka
and author of the memoir My Century [English translation by Richard
Lourie to be published by University of California Press, 1988], towards
the questions and answers offered by religion. They were led towards faith
and towards theodicy (in the ideological sense as well).
For the generation raised in the embrace of the post-Yalta order, the
generation of Brodsky, Zagajewski, and Venclova, violence took on a different guise: it appeared as the verdict of history, as the bureaucratized reality
of everyday life with its workaday routine. Let us try to reflect for a while
on what kind of sensitivity and intellectual attitude arise when oppression
and enslavement are as ordinary, obvious and ubiquitous as the weather.
3
The experience of enslavement as commonplace, palpable, and even
"natural" fosters the belief, as Venclova puts it, that "we are living after
the end of the world." "The world was twisted, turned inside out and
maimed." ["A Dialogue About Wilno," Cross Currents 5, 1986]. A few
fragments from the past, haphazardly rescued from the catastrophe, bear
witness to the "real," vanished world. For Thomas Mann, Liibeck was
a way of life and thought. In Tomas Venclova's Wilno, only the spires of
baroque churches and the pure, classical facade of the cathedral recall
different measures, different aspirations: "In my Wilno only the enclaves
gave some semblance of that lost, normal world," writes Venclova.
The architectural aura of Wilno, its melange of styles, "was a link to
Europe": the city's topography suggested Rome, the vistas of FlorenceWilno led Venclova, who had been raised in the U.S.S.R. and had never
been to the West, to the capitals of European culture; without setting
foot outside Wilno, he came to know the monuments and architectural
layouts of Western cities better than many native inhabitants. When he
grew weary of these imaginary wanderings, he turned to translations. He
translated the best of recent European literature into Lithuanina, as well