Tomas Venclova, Nelyginant šiaurė magnetą: Pašnekesiai su Ellen Hinsey, vertė Laimantas Jonušys, Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2017, 534 p., ISBN 978-609-8205-04-6

Algis Kalėda, Kornelijaus Platelio kūrybos kontekstai, arba tarp Dioniso ir Apolono, Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016, 245 p., ISBN 978-609-425-178-8

In Latvian literature, there is a dream (or vision or some other subconscious process) about Latvianness and Latvian national identity, which has repeatedly appeared for more than a few decades. The hero of this dream meets the Other and this confrontation allows him to recognize and understand himself, something that is difficult to achieve in a state of consciousness. The Other is not always a Black Knight in armour reflecting upon the life of an ordinary peasant; he can also be another Latvian, usually an (im) migrant – someone who sees the nation from a very different perspective.This article focuses on several literary works depicting this kind of extraordinary meeting while asleep or unconscious (the space of a dream, a projection, a fairy-tale or a fantasy journey) with a variously understood Other, including Wannem Ymanta (1802) by Garlieb Merkel, the epic Lāčplēsis (The Bear-Slayer, 1888) by Andrejs Pumpurs, Lāčplēsis trimdā (Lāčplēsis in exile, 1958/1986/1990) by Dzintars Sodums and Latviešu sapnis (Latvian dream, 2002) by Agnese Bule. All of these books were very important at key turning-points or difficult moments in Latvia’s history – the process of national awakening and identity-building always involved depicting the other face of the Other.

The author of this article interprets the surrealist narratives of Saulius Tomas Kondrotas and Šarūnas Sauka as signs of both a crumbling empire and the rebirth of human dignity in late Soviet-era literature and art. A sense of epochal shift provides a common background of allegorical narration in both Kondrotas’s and Saukas’s narratives, protecting them from flat politicising and encouraging us to read their work as an encounter between the human and the eternal.Countering Soviet values, Kondrotas and Sauka place the universal rebellion of the artist against an ideology that imprisons the individual at the core of their work, making it possible to draw a connection to the imagination of the medieval alchemist, as they too concentrate their attention on the search for God and the resulting visions-projections.Kondrotas’s and Saukas’s works are characterised by oniric, surrealist stylistics, an understanding of the world as a dangerous place, and the human-godlike-animal matrix. The end of the world, the collapse of foundational hierarchies of values, and a feeling of moral ambivalence are common to both, leading them to search for solutions in response to human moral decline. Kondrotas and Sauka both speak about human rebirth, one of the oldest of human archetypes and one central to the alchemical imagination.

-

From a theoretical perspective, literary anthropologists (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, Clifford Geertz) view poems, letters, and social behavior as cultural documents that are valuable in their own right; their careful reading can unpack a certain image or trope that functions as a self-interpretive concept in a culture. Reading Martinaitis’s text in this way reveals the poet’s sociocultural and aesthetic stance. The author of the article proposes that this stance can be seen as an instance of anthropological poetics, which she defines as poetry’s synergistic working on aesthetic levels and within social life. She sees poetry, on the other hand, as one of numerous and equivalent cultural modes of being which are capable of compensating for actual social practices.The images of woodworking, carpentry, and craftsmanship appear repeatedly in Martinaitis’s text. Martinaitis crafts his poetic world like an ensemble of wooden sculptures or a collage of objects. The author comes to the conclusion that Martinaitis’s poetry functions as a substitute for an inherited cultural movement – the practice of craftsmanship. This enables her to discuss Martinaitis’s cultural stance using Hannah Arendt’s concept of homo faber.

Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu (kolektyvinė monografija, sudarė Dalia Satkauskytė), Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015, 520 p., ISBN 978-609-425-143-6

-

The author of this article analyzes how Soviet national policy and Jewish culture’s lack of legitimacy impacted the career paths of Jewish writers living in Lithuania and their relationship with the Lithuanian literary field. The article examines the careers of five Jewish writers – Hiršas Ošerovičius, Jokūbas Josadė, Ichokas Meras, Mykolas Sluckis, and Grigorijus Kanovičius – and their different relationships to the Lithuanian literary field. The author applies an interdisciplinary approach, examining these writers’ strategies within the contexts of Soviet ethnic policy and national processes. Building on previous studies, the article opens up a broader perspective on Jewish writers’ options, constraints, and choices both within Lithuania and at the union level.These examples of Soviet-era Jewish writers’ career paths reflect the considerable tensions felt by writers not belonging to the dominant culture when experiencing Soviet ethnopolitics. Writers experiencing a lack of cultural legitimacy had to maneuver: they had to blend into the Lithuanian literary field, participate in it episodically, or be involved in several literary fields simultaneously. It is possible to single out writers’ participation only within the Lithuanian literary field (Meras, Sluckis); their totally or partially articulated strategies of assimilation; their participation within the Lithuanian literary field and within rather fragmented “islands” of Yiddish literature (Josadė, Ošerovičius); as well as (drawing increasingly on the thematics of Jewish history) their active maneuvering between the Lithuanian and Russian literary fields (Kanovičius), which offered artists greater possibilities for recognition. Kanovičius’s model of the Jewish writer/artist’s participation in the empire is the most marked embodiment of the Soviet-era Jewish intellectual’s multi-layered identity.

-