COMMON HISTORI CAL ROOTS
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in Russian, meant in one of the Finnish languages "a sort of swampy
landscape." Since then there are many languages that have disappeared or
were somehow affected by neighboring languages, Russian included.
In
this way the Finnish languages disappeared from the linguistic map. Yet
claims are being made in their name . As for me, now when I am in
Moscow, I am supposed to remember that I am a conqueror, an impe–
rialist, that I came and took this wonderful St. Petersburg, with all its
rivers, beautiful houses, gardens, and all the culture that is exhibited in its
museums, from some poor Finnish tribes that lived in huts and caught
fish. I took all this from them. Along this way of thinking, then, all of
what was added to the culture of Moscow, what was created from
nothing, can just be dismissed . Such notions as, "This was our mud, this
was our swamp, this was our air filled with mosquitoes," become very
important. It is the culture that is dismissed: your culture is not to be
valued because you created it by stealing it from us. That's the real point.
I myself think that it is a very destructive position, and I don 't want to
contribute anything to these ideas.
So when I have to choose between being a nationalist or an imperi–
alist, I try to choose the lesser of two evils, and of course, I prefer to be
an imperialist. I wouldn't say that it's more comfortable; I would say
that it's more productive, because it adds to culture. The idea of re–
turning pieces of art like paintings and so on, objects that were removed
many years ago, to each country, to place them in national museums, is
ridiculous, because this hair-splitting will neve r end. For example: if
someone with a French moth er and an English father was born in
France, then moved to Italy, and Italy didn't exist at the time but rep–
resented ten different states fighting with each other, and this poor per–
son somehow ended up in Portugal, and he managed to make a beautiful
object - then to whom does this object belong? I think that the exis–
tence of a world culture is somehow dependent on what some people
would call imperialism; let it be that way.
Susan Sontag:
Thank you. Norman Manea.
Norman Manea: I
will speak on foreignness. The increased nationalism
all around the world, the dangerous conflicts among minorities in East–
ern Europe , and the growing xenophobia in Western Europe emphasize
again one of the main contradictions of our time, between centrifugal,
cosmopolitan modernity and the centripetal need (or at least nostalgia)
for belonging. These topics remind us again and again about the very old
and always new question of the
foreigl1er,
the
sfrarlger.
It
seems that although he is taught to love his neighbor, man fails
both to love his neighbor as he loves himself and to love the stranger
