BOOKS
655
Dialogue,
a poet who "has absorbed all the best to be found in the
neigh boring territories," that is, Russia and Poland. Born in the town of
Kleipeda in
1937,
Venclova left Lithuania in
1977
certain he would
never be able to return. Many Lithuanians of his generation regarded
"Moscow" with a sense of enmity; Venclova, now a professor of Slavic
languages and literatures at Yale, saw it as miserable but "oddly splen–
did, the city of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Sakharov." While Brodsky
claims that Venclova's biography provides few, if any, insights into his
poetry, the Baltic landscape that shaped Venclova's life is precisely the
territory he excavates in
Forms of Hope's
first eight essays, grouped
under the rubric of "Politics."
Writing admiringly of Czeslaw Milosz, Venclova explains that a poet's
task is to create poetry "adequate both for the disasters which are destroy–
ing culture and for that striking strength of cultures to survive. It can be
written only with a living sympathy for the cultures, and it is inseparable
from a living sympathy for people." Like Milosz, who also came from the
town the Lithuanians call Vilnius, the Poles call Wilno, and the Russians
call Vilna, Venclova remains haunted by the city of his youth, the focus of
several of his most poignant essays. In the invaluable, oft-reprinted
1979
epistolary exchange between these Polish and Lithuanian poets
(Cross–
currents,
Milosz's
Beginning With
My
Streets,
and Venclova's
Winter Dia–
logue),
who graduated from the same university a quarter century apart,
Venclova offers a pithy but compelling tale of his own early biography
woven together with a fascinating history of Vilnius, described by Milosz
as "a city of clouds resembling baroque architecture and of baroque
architecture like coagulated clouds." Venclova reminds Milosz that for
the Poles, Wilno was an important but provincial cultural center on its
eastern border, but for Lithuanians it has served, Jerusalem-like, as a
symbol of continuity and historical identity. "Lithuania without Vilnius
is an ephemeral nation, but with Vilnius its past and its historical
responsibility are secured."
Venclova's masterful analyses of the moral and artistic responses of
writers to totalitarianism exhibit the same formidable intelligence and
sensitivity deployed in his biography of the Polish writer Aleksander
Wat
(Life and Art of an Iconoclast).
In an impassioned review of John
and Carol Garrard's
Inside the Soviet Writers' Union,
Venclova notes
how what the Garrards dubbed this "bizarre world of privilege and
menace," where writers were expected to eulogize the status quo, not
only blurred the border between writers and apparatchiks but produced
cronyism, corruption, and provincialism, "a flood of mediocrities that
virtually submerged one of the leading literatures of the world."
