28
PARTISAN REVIEW
determine, owing
to
the inadequacies of written sources and the
biased judgments of the Christians....And thus arose one of
Europe's strangest political organisms: the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. At the zenith of its development, it reached as far as the
environs of Moscow; on one side it touched the Ea! tic, on the other
the Black Sea, it even made a vassal state out of Eessarabia ....
Later, the Grand Duchy entered into a dynastic union with Poland and
became the very last country in Europe to renounce paganism. From then
on, it was as Catholic as Poland or Ireland, which probably means more
Catholic than the Pope himself. Lithuania fell under Russian sway at the
end of the eighteenth century, together with the greater part of Poland.
?zetejnie is "situated on the very border between two Lithuanian regions,
Zemaiciai (Zmudi) and Aukstaiciai (Auksztota). Tradi tionally, the river
Neveiis (Niewiaza, renamed Issa by Milosz) is considered the borderline,
which would leave Szetejnie on the AukstaiCiai side. AukStaiciai was the
core region of ancient heathen Lithuania, the breeding ground of the
knights and warriors glorified by Mickiewicz, those who hed established
their capital, Vilnius or Wilno, in that part of the country; ZemaiCiai was
more pastoral and more conservative. It also adhered more stubbornly to
Lithuanian language and customs. The coat of arms of AukStaiCiai was
fogon or Vytis, an armored knight on a horse; the coat of anns of
ZemaiCiai was a Bear, a grumbling and not easily subdued animal. One
hundred and fifty years ago, a Li thuanian poet, Simonas StaneviCius, wrote
a fable, "The Horse and the Bear," depicting the meeting of two heraldic
animals on the banks of Neveiis: one of them was hobbled and the other
was in chains. StaneviCius obviously had in Inind the occupation of the
Li thuanian lands by the Russian empire, which was still around when
Milosz was born but collapsed when he was six years old.
The Neveiis region was also mythologized by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the
first Polish Nobel Laureate. For Milosz, Sienkiewicz's toponyms, which
sounded mythical to most Polish adolescents, were the names of the
~dja
cent villages and townships. The direct descendants of Sienkiewicz's heroes,
often with the same old family names, still lived in the vicinity. Yet Milosz
rejected the Sienkiewicz myth, since he knew that Li thuania was a region
of heterogenei ty and polyphony, of overlapping languages and styles of life,
a land of difficult dialogue and not of monological Polish gentry culture.
Milosz's ancestors, at least on his mother's side, originally spoke
Lithuanian and, as did virtually the entire Lithuanian gentry, became
Polonized. The fanuly had used Polish as their first and only language for
several centuries. Yet from his childhood, Milosz understood at least some
