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

202
BARBARA TORUNCZYK
8
The world of Milosz, Vincenz and Kundera, just as that yearned for
by Venclova, Brodsky and Zagajewski, is experienced through history,
change, and an acceleration of civilization. It would be a mistake to seek
out conservative inclinations in this sensibility. These longings extend
above and beyond the goals set by politics. When referring to our guides,
can one speak of a conservative sensibility?
Kundera's world, admittedly, is tinted by a love for anachronism.
He resents the West because it has changed, Russia becuase it has truncated
the vitality of Czech culture and put Eastern European life into a deepfreeze. Changes dismay him. He idealizes the past. There remains-at this
late date-only this: the propagation of culture, the writing of books, seeking
haven in story-telling. Given Kundera's low opinion of cultural life in the
West and of the direction of cultural development in the East, this is not
a conservative program. To the contrary, whatever theme Kundera has
encountered in recent years is transformed under his pen into the proclamation of a small revolution. Western culture and the novel must be reformed and purged of the miasmas of Russian psyche. The Bulgarians must
be excluded from Central Europe and the Austrians brought in. This for
starters. Even in these initial proposals, the element of rebelliousness, rancor,
impatience and resentment predominates over any desire to conserve. And
let us not forget such trifles as the need to overturn Yalta and return Central
Europe to the West.
Tomas Venclova has the real makings of a Tory, preferably of the
pan-European sort. It is true that he writes about Europe partly from a
proverbial Lithuanian conscientiousness, perhaps only comparable to that
of the Swiss, and partly from a characteristic Lithuanian nostalgia for
Greece (the ancient one, of course)-from a longing for the sources of
European culture, its pure, distilled, mythical shape. This nostalgia as well
as his gift of seeing life through the eyes of an Odysseus lend him an
affinity to Kundera. But the differences are enormous. Venclova's talent
for mythical fabulation derives from intuitions that are primordial and
infallible-dictated by the natural senses and beyond him, as it were. His
images are marked by fire, simplicity and archetypal purity. Rooted by
instinct and taste in classicism, he is distinguished by a rich and highlycondensed symbolism that recalls Mandelstam.
The post-glacial landscape of Venclova's poetry, where one can hear
the lapping of oceans and where the law of entropy is in effect, is illumined
by the glimmer of faith in moral principles, raised almost as before the
altars of ancient Lithuania. The scenery of these poems is shrouded
"Antarctic fog"; "history's worn away, like a copper coin"; a "glacier comes
knocking", "the continent lies sprawled on its back" or "unexpectedly,
a ridge arches from the sea." Ash, stone, and blocks of granite are the first