MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
29
Lithuanian. Today, his Lithuanian is good enough to translate Lithuanian
poetry, although he is shy to speak it and never writes in it.
Both Mickiewicz and Milosz share a centrifugal mentality which cel–
ebrates periphery. For Mickiewicz, the Lithuanian periphery was a space of
wild forests and magic lakes, a land of miracles and visions opposed to
pedestrian Poland proper. Milosz proposed a different symbolism. His cen–
tral image is the river, with its connotations of time-tlow, ritual cleansing,
and rebirth; the river is surrounded, in the physical as well as in the imag–
inary space, by villages where everyday life is ascetic but meaningful and
orderly, referring to stable values and subordinated
to
the rhythms of
nature. Instead of the slightly bizarre gentry world depicted in
Pan Tadeusz
and
The DellI,Qe,
Milosz's Lithuania is primarily a peasant universe, a domain
of tough work and primi tive spiri tuali ty, reminding one of the eighteenth–
century Lithuanian poet Donelaitis-or, perhaps, of Robert Frost.
The first world war seemingly did not affect this universe too much:
Four years of German occupation had not changed anything in
Lithuania. The days unfolded, just as they had for centuries, to the
rhythm of work in the fields, Catholic feasts, solemn processions, and
the rites of Christian-pagan magic. ... 1 entered into stunning green–
ness, into choruses of birds, into orchards bent low wi th the weight of
fruit, into the enchantment of my nJtive river, so unlike the bound–
less, dreary rivers of the Eastern plains.
Even the Nazi and the Soviet occupations did not destroy that world
entirely. Still, they were disastrous. The Jewish population perished almost
to a man, and with it a significant segment of local culture altogether dis–
appeared. A large part of the Polish population, including the entire
intelligentsia, left for Poland, not always willingly. And most Lithuanians
experienced profound psychological trauma from which they have not
recovered
to
this day.
Li thuanian national rebirth led to the establishment of the independent
state, simultaneous and parallel to Poland's. Both states became antagonistic
since both laid claim to Vilnius or Wilno, the ancient capital of the Grand
Duchy. Milosz's parents had to leave their Lithuanian country seat since, in the
opinion of the local authori ties, they became representatives of a hostile
nation. Young Czeslaw was sympathetic to Lithuanian national rebirth, and
the Lithuanian state granted him, and many other Poles, political asylum after
Poland's collapse at the beginning ofWorld War
II.
In 1921, the family moved
to Wilno, at that time annexed to Poland-a beautifill Baroque city with an
