BETWEEN ARCADIA AND INFERNO - EXILE IN THE POETRY OF JOHANNES BOBROWSKI AND ALFONSAS NYKA-NILIŪ N AS

SUMMARY

This study deals with the theme of exile in the lyrical work of two Central European poets of the second half of the 20th century: a German, Johan- nes Bobrowski (1917-1965) and a Lithuanian, Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (b.1919). The goal of the investigation is to reveal how the event of exile is represented in the poetry of two authors who belong to different na- tional literatures and to give an analytical and exhaustive description of literary exile. Exile - an involuntary departure of a person or a group of persons from a native place - is one of the oldest phenomena of human exist- ence. It acquires major dimensions in the modern age and, accordingly, in modern literature. Exile seems to play the most significant role in the гол century literatures of Central Europe which in certain periods could develop without restriction only in foreign countries. In the last decades exile and emigration acted as a stimulus not only to the appearance of literary creations but also of theoretical concepts (e.g. postcolonial literary theory, Deleuze/Guattari philosophy of nomadismus). This study is the first in-depth research of Bobrowski where he is treated as a representative of exile literature. Many interpreters have ob- served that exile is an important theme of his lyrics, but so far there was no study devoted specifically to this subject. Although literature written by exiles constitutes an important part of modern Lithuanian literature, there were only a few attempts to deal with the exile literature on a theoretical level. In the case of Niliūnas, too, a study which would encompass his entire lyrical opus does not exist. Furthermore, his poetry which expresses the condition of exile most pro- foundly in Lithuanian literature has never been considered in the transna- tional context and approached from a comparative perspective. This research was inspired by several authors and theoretical schools. First of all, it is the tradition of hermeneutics, as represented by the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Peter Szondi, and George Steiner. Other thought-provoking impulses came from cultural semiotics (Jury Lotman) and discourse analysis (Dominique Maingueneau). The ques- tions raised in the study were also influenced by two thinkers of history, society and ethics - Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas (both of whom experienced exile as well). The first chapter of the study Many-faced exile deals with the first textually recorded cases of exile and distinguishes two types of exile nar- rative: communal and individual. The first type is best represented by the history of the Jewish nation, the second - by the exile of the Roman poet Ovid. The story of Ovid is exemplary due to the political circumstances of his exile as well: deported from Rome by the orders of the emperor, he remained his subject even in exile. Such examples of imperial exile one finds in the European history up to the present day, especially in the Rus- sian Empire and the Soviet Union. But in the modern age one is more frequently exiled beyond the borders of the country. Moreover, one departs from it not voluntarily, but at the same time not by the act of force of the authorities. Such a transiinpe- пл/form of exile begins to prevail from the French Revolution onwards. For a person exiled to Western metropolises exile turns into an encounter with a different cultural environment, with modernity. In the zoth century departure from the native country acquires even more varied forms: besides political exile there appears economic orprofes- sionalemigration, diaspora communities grow in significance, and the term inner emigration comes into use. In the study I discuss points of resemblance between exile and adjacent phenomena. Every emigre can experience and describe his/her situation as exile. Thus works of writers, who from a bio- graphical point of view are voluntary emigres, can be treated as belonging to exile literature (for example, James Joyce). On the other hand, in the imagination of emigres it is not the images of the loss of the native place but .rather, images of the new place and the new identity that prevail (as in the writings of some American expatriate writers of the early 2.0th century, for example, T. S. Eliot). Inner emigration (In some European languages - inner exile) means the opposition of the writer living in a totalitarian regime to government policies, which finds expression in his/her withdrawal from an official literary life. An important feature of the literature of inner exile is the Aesopic language, an allegorical technique of encrypting the forbid- den theme (which can be of political, moral, historical or religious nature) in the image, and this encryption is recognized and valued only in a given sociopolitical environment. I argue that both the term "inner emigration" and the kind of literature denoted by it can be properly understood only against the background of the more varied and more ancient phenomena of the "real" literature of exile. The literature of diaspora can be defined as the one written by the authors who have accepted the culture of their adopted country as primary, and in this context they re-imagine aspects of their identity which involve their native country or that of their an- cestors. A telling (though not exclusive) indicator of diaspora literature is the language used: for example, one could attribute the work of Antanas Šileika or Raymond Philip who write in English but on Lithuanian top- ics to the Lithuanian diaspora literature of North America. In a linguistic and thematic respect diaspora literature marks the end of exile literature. A recent development similar to diaspora literature is postcolonial literary movement which adheres to the principle of hybridity. Postwar Lithuanian emigration is in many ways paradigmatic in the modern history of exile. The exodus of the intelligentsia to the West '97 before the approaching Soviet Army is the most important wave of mass emigration in Lithuania in the 20th century. Its impact on moderniza- tion of literature and culture is universally acknowledged. This wave of exile carried along with it Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, a poet, critic and translator, who departed for West Germany in 1944 and for the United States in 1949. In Germany the most important period of exile is dated from 1933 to 1945, the years of Nazi dictatorship. For a long time this period was considered to be the German literature of exile. However, this approach tended to ignore authors of the postwar exile (including Nelly Sachs, Erich Fried, Michael Hamburger, Peter Weiss, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Paul Celan) who also made a significant impact on German literature. In this study the poet and prose writer Johannes Bobrowski is treated as belonging to the postwar German exile literature. Born and raised in Eastern Prussia, a soldier in World War II, after the war Bobrowski lived in East Berlin until his early death. The exile Bobrowski did not change his linguistic and, partly, cultural environment, thus his exile acquires a milder form, which in the 20th century was most common in the Spanish- speaking countries (e.g. Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico). Yet Ger- man literary critics, albeit noting the importance of the exile theme in his poetry, were reluctant to classify him as an exile. The main reason for this was the moral climate of postwar Germany, where the loss of Eastern ter- ritories and the deportation of their German inhabitants were considered to be a retribution for waging the atrocious war. Only in the last decades has the situation changed, and the interest in the German past in Eastern Europe has surfaced again, albeit coupled with the recognition that what has happened is irreversible. The example of Bobrowski shows that when defining the literature of exile the crucial element is not the sociocultural context but the representation of exile as such in the literary texts. There is one more question to be raised: can Bobrowski, who lived in totalitarian •98 East Germany, be called an author of inner emigration? I claim that in his short literary career Bobrowski kept a cautious distance from the ideology of the GDR, but did not abstain and was not banned from participating in the official literary life. There he was paradoxically facilitated by his great exilic theme.

In the theory of literature the primary focus lies on the negative aspects of exile. Exile is characterized as rupture, shock, or trauma. Indeed, the texts of exile contain not only a number of testimonies of this negative experience but show marks of its impact on conceptual and formal levels as well. However, if the sense of loss is too acute it can affect the quality of writing, turning it solely into a document of individual therapy. Such a state (which Thomas Mann called a "heart asthma of exile") is a permanent companion of exile, and the creative literature of exile comes into being by struggling with it. If a writer overcomes the initial challenge, his/her texts can acquire a new quality. ~Withdrawal-And-Return is the term of the cultural historian Arnold Toynbee used to denote a situation when in order to create a new order, the artist has to break away from society. Dominique Maingueneau speaks about the paratopy of a writer, i.e., his/her inherently ambivalent relations with social and literary institutions. Exile can be seen as a radical form of paratopy. When the habitual sociocultural institutions disappear, the representation of the "paratopical situation" in the texts written be- comes the only tie which connects the writer with the "literary field" of his/her native country. On the other hand, in most cases exile manifests itself as a conse- quence of extcrnalyorar majeure. According to Jury Lotman, a rupture, an "explosion" is an inevitable condition of development of each system. The conceptualization of exile as explosion and as a moment of bifurcation urges an interpreter to pay special attention to the initial moment of the formation of the poetic system and explains why one is confronted with such a wide spectrum of individual biographic and artistic choices when '99 exploring the literature of exile. Another permanent topos, that of "the imaginary homeland", points to the notion of the utopianism of exile literature. It is by and large not a po- litical utopia: what the exiled authors are seeking is the ideal relation with the Other. In this respect the utopianism of their work can be outlined as an attempt to describe such conditions of cultural and social environment, pri- marily the conditions of coexistence of the subject and other persons, which would be contrary to the condition of exile or which would render exile impossible. With reference to genre, utopianism is most closely connected with the idyllic-bucolic tradition. However, the relations of exile literature with this genre paradigm can be best characterized as ambivalent: loss in- scribes its marks even in the most exalted evocations of the venerated place. In the literature of exile a dipolar space structure prevails: one pole is a place of plentitude, the other - a dystopian place. This structure distin- guishes it both from travel literature, which is dominated by the constantly changing forms of space, and from diaspora literature, in which the alterity of the subject reveals itself against the new geographic and cultural back- ground. The mode of representation of both poles differs as well: the space of the homeland is depicted with a plethora of sensual details, whereas the space of exile appears as an abstract, non-semantic phenomenon. In this respect exile interconnects with a modern ėpistime, characterized by the split between a phenomenological space that is experienced sensually and an abstract, physical space. A historicalVector in the literature of exile manifests itself by refer- ences to past artifacts, stories or figures which hold analogies to the present situation of exile. Such a mode of representation widens the temporal scope of references and "defamiliarizes" most intimate, personal aspects of exile experience. The poets analyzed in the study make frequent use of the "great stories" andfigures o f exile, both from mythology and history, and also from the repertoire of the local and recent exilic images. 100 In the chapter Johannes Bobrowski - a map of utopia I try to un- earth historical and aesthetic tensions which arc present in the seemingly idyllic image of Sarmatia land and to highlight their source, the writer's experience of exile. The early poems of Bobrowski are thematically and stylistically very different from his mature "Sarmatian" lyrics which was formed by the exilic rupture. Bobrowskis' Sarmatia is at the same time an imaginary and a real land, located roughly in the European East. In the spatial representation of Sarmatia the figure of the plain prevails; it plays a role not only on the thematical, but also on the compositional level (e.g. in the poem "Die Sarmatische Ebene"), and influences the whole "geopoetic" concept of Sarmatia. Such a modeling of space shows traces of a premodern perception of space, anchored in the Protestant culture/ of Eastern Prussia. Another archetypal Sarmatian figure - a river - is represented most vividly in the texts about the river Nemunas (Memel). The historical semantics of the Nemunas as a border between Lithua- nia and Germany, East and West, culture and exotics, rooted in German consciousness, is reflected in the poem "Die Memel". Here the Nemunas functions as an especially pregnant element, both connecting and divid- ing the two parts of Bobrowskis' artistic universe - a native Eastern Prus- sia and an acquired Central Eastern Europe. The crossing of the Nemu- nas, which appears in this and many other poems, has two biographically grounded meanings: it allows the subject to experience Sarmatia and also exiles the subject from it. The most frequent historical reference in Bobrowskis' poems is a reference to prehistoric times. They are represented most powerfully by the Baltic imagery, which the poet uses in one of the earliest "Sarmatian" poems "Pruzzischc Elegie". Bobrowski draws a parallel between prehistory and the present. The war which gives rise to the instincts of predation and aggression eliminates cultural and moral competences and precipitates the humanity back into the primeval nomadic state. Another recurring motif is a comparison of the place of exile with Babilon and a labyrinth. Bobrowski creates numerous portraits of exiled writers and artists by us- 101 ing an ingenious strategy - he depicts the persons in rncdias res, speaking in their own voice, reinterpreting facts of their biography, paraphrasing their texts. These poems circle around one question - in what way is poetic creation possible in exile? In this respect the most important figures for Bobrowski are Paul Celan and Adam Mickiewicz. Especially the latter emerges as the poetic ideal who has achieved the goal which Bobrowski is aiming at as well - creating a lasting picture of the lost land ("Mickiewicz"). Utopian hope in Bobrowskis' poetry comes forth where he contemplates the principles of human coexistence. Most of such texts envision a concrete addressee, an inhabitant of Sarmatia. Bobrowski endows the Sarmatian with the fea- tures which his own culture is lacking. This is especially pronounced in the Jewish figures of his poems. In the texts depictingjews a bond between fathers and sons is emphasized. Being a son (or, as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts it - acknowledging the antecedence of the Other on the basis of biology) becomes for Bobrowski a metaphor of an authen- tic intersubjective relation. The attentionofthepoet to the minority nations - Prussians andjews, Gipsies and Sorbs - could be interpreted as an attempt to create a Utopian alternative to the real course of history. Bobrowski reads history "against the grain" (Walter Benjamin), poetically vindicating humiliated nations. However, the historical formation which has most influenced the Utopian aspects of Sarmatia is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The map of Sarmatia, which Bobrowski outlines in his famous comment, practically coincides with the territory of this country of the past; fur- thermore, the ideals Bobrowski fosters in his poetry - the traditionalisdc culture, which is predicated by the close bond of fathers and sons, and by a coexistence of Christian, Jewish and Pagan elements could be read as a kind of homage to the "Sarmatian" ideological and artistic stream which was influential in the Commonwealth. I suggest that the medium of this 101 worldview could be a long poem of Mickiewicz, "Pan Tadeusz" (defined by critics as an example of "romantic sarmatism"), which, according to Bobrowski, he knew very well. Mickewicz also appears in Bobrowskis' ode "Wilna", which sums up the Utopian characteristics of Sarmatia. The chapter Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas: between Arcadia and In- ferno begins with the interpretation of "Berlin Improvisations" (written in 1944) which reveal the shock of exile in the most telling way. In the literary context of the time the position of Niliūnas stands out by the sober acknowledgement of the loss of homeland, and by the stress not on social and political, but on personal and metaphysical questions. This position is facilitated by the idea of gain in the loss which Niliūnas put forward already in his earliest poems. Niliūnas conveys the condition of exile through the imagery of empty and hostile spaces, as he puts it, of a "treacherous infinity". Such an understanding of space in his poems corresponds to the modern conception of space, with the role of "the Copernican revolution" in this case being played by the event of exile. Spatial configurations de- pend on the position of the subject too, who is shown moving (most often walking) between two extreme points, the native place and the cosmic space. This trajectory takes shape of a road, street or alley, and is used on the compositional level as well (e.g. in the "Symphony of Loss"). In some texts the action of walking is substituted for by an act of seeing. Niliūnas gives a detailed account of his land of exile, the USA. He depicts American culture as a parody and profanation of European culture. American mass culture conquers the whole world, destroying religious and cultural systems, assimilating nations; on the other hand, this process is inevitable, and only passive resistance is possible ("New York"). A place of exile is also imagined as hell, but in this case it is not the metropolis, but his native town, which, as in Dante's "Hell", is pictured as a surreal mirror-like inversion of the real town Utena. This theme reaches its climax in scenes where religious symbols and narratives appear grotesquely distorted. It testifies to the influence of a medieval tradition which was transmitted by 1O3 the Catholic environment of the poet's formative years. The main historical narrative of Niliūnas' poetry could be called a story about a raid of barbarians. I analyze the most prominent example of it, the poem "Barbarians", and compare it with the cognate texts of modern poetry - "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Constantinos Cavafis and "A Legend" by Czesław Miłosz. I draw a conclusion that the historical vision of Niliūnas emphasizes the decay of culture and the cyclic nature of history. Historical (mostly Classical, but also Near Eastern and Byzantine) plots function as allegoric parables too, encoding the events of postwar Lithuanian history. Niliūnas contemplates the dilemma of resistance and collaboration, heroism and betrayal, emphasizing the tragic tie between the hero and the traitor. The pessimism of the poet becomes especially pronounced when meditating on the future of the exile literature and Lithuanian exilic community. He expresses his disillusionment, similarly to Paul Celan s late poems, by images of silence and entropy, taken not from human but from natural history. In the early lyrics of Niliūnas the most importantfigure o f identifica- tion is that of the Prodigal Son. The poet interprets the Biblical story as a means which allows the subject both to gain the knowledge of the world and to be able to return home. The Prodigal Son is used not only as a po- eticfigure bu t also as an expression of an aesthetic program and position- ing in the literary field. I find traces of this narrative in the poems about Vergil, whom Niliūnas portrays as the epitome of a creative poet. In his later poetry (starting from the Sixties) the circle offigures o f identification changes; now it is Ovid or Marcus Aurelius. This expresses the growing conviction of the poet that not only a real, but also a literary return to the homeland is impossible. The subject of the later poems reincarnates into animals marked by physical impairments (a penguin, a mole), which became the emblem of the spiritually impaired exile. The poet also senses i04 the fictitiousness of these identifications, thus the motif of the mask, con- cealing the anonymous subject, gains strength in his poems. The place which is contrary to the exile place is depicted with nu- merous specific details referring to the poet's native house and town. On the conceptual level the Utopian place is established by the symbiosis of the subject and the environment which is expressed through thefigures o f the sensual contact (primarily auditory and tactile), of the synesthesia of senses and the dissolution of the subject in the environment. Another important analogy which is characteristic of the place of non-exile is the symbiosis of the natural world and the art, which is emphasized by constant refer- ences to bucolic painting and poetry. Niliūnas asserts that Arcadia, which he reads as an allegory of ars gratia artis principle, could appear only in a specific historical and cultural continuum, i.e., the Western civilization. The primacy of the sensual experience in the discourse of Niliūnas is shown by thefigure o f mother. An instinctive, organic tie binds mother both with the Utopian nature and with the subject; she turns into an ar- chetype of authentic intersubjective relation. Thus the ethos of Niliūnas' poetry can be defined as the ethos of loyalty to specific persons and specific chronotopos.

CONCLUSIONS

Exile is a key theme in the poetry of Johannes Bobrowski and Alfonsas Nyka- Niliūnas. It marks a break not only in the lives of the writers but also in their lyrical work. The exile brought about separate elements, which can be iden- tified in the texts written before exile (Bobrowskis' images of destruction and primeval nature, Niliūnas' motif of home and of paradoxical relations between loss and gain) into a structure, that is, mature lyrics of exile. The experience of exile is represented in the poems of both writers by similar conceptual devices. First of all, this is a binary spatial model. Bobrowski creates a complex image of the lost land of Sarmatia, deliber- i05 atcly keeping silent about his present place of exile. The reminiscences of the native land in Niliunas' poetry are supplemented for by the expressive picture of the land of exile, America. In the work of both authors one notices an interesting process which could be called a historical regress of the spatial perception: they react to the shock of the loss which opens up a perspective of the empty spatial infinity by having recourse to the premodern conceptions of space. The similarities of the spatial imagination of the two poets - a Ger- man and a Lithuanian - are revealed by the specific figures of landscape. In this respect an analogy can be drawn between the river in Bobrowskis' poems and a road in Niliūnas' poetry. Both images help to represent the worldview of an exile. Thusfigures o f the road and river are pregnant with fundamental ambivalence: the river is at the same time a sign of Sarmatia - it puts its separate parts into a whole - and a symbol of the unsurpassable boundary, of exile; in the same manner the street or the road, which goes back to the native land or at least leaves the sight of it open, acquires com- pletely different semantics as an avenue in an American metropolis - that of an abstract tangent leading nowhere. Parallels between Bobrowskis' and Niliunas' poetry can be found on the narrative level as well. Both poets use a similar historical allegory: the loss of the homeland is represented as a return to the prehistoric, barbarian state, marked by aggression and predation. Congruencies can be observed even with respect to individualfigures: wolve s which accompany the barbar- ians of Niliūnas play an important role in Bobrowskis' repertoire of images. These images and narratives point to one of the most important problems in the self-understanding of an exile - the question of the meaning of history. Thus the prehistoric imagery in the lyrics of exile expresses not the modernist admiration of the archaic but conveys a tragic historical experience. The element of allegory is inherent in both poets' set of characters. Searching for a similar experience, Bobrowski constantly probes volumes of history, art and literature. Niliūnas finds his narrative of the Prodigal Son very early. Unlike Bobrowski, who incarnates into figures of the re- cent past, mostly artists or writers, Niliūnas chooses characters of Classi- cal history or mythology. In respect of the poetic ideal Bobrowskis' Mick- iewicz corresponds to the Vergil of Niliūnas. This strategy also shows the dialogism of aesthetics of both poets: they talk to the artists from whom they expect to get answers to the fundamental questions about their condition. The ethos of exile, which is present in the texts of Bobrowski and Niliūnas, is at odds with the stereotype of a nostalgic and conservative exile. Writers understand exile as a challenge which can be properly re- sponded to not by political or ideological but by literary means. The main task of their work turns out to be not only the commemoration of the lost place, but also the contemplation of the ethical principles which would render exile impossible. The endemic trait of the literature of the second half of the 20th century is distrust of the representation of ideal values, which are thought to be pathetic and naive; the experience of exile, how- ever, enables a vision which overcomes the quotidian relativism. Both poets create a rather traditional agrarian utopia. But it is not exactly a conservative utopia, which would negate modernity at large. For both poets in the centre of this Utopian condition lies thefirst com - munity - the family. The choice of different persons (in the case of Bo- browski -the father, in the case of Niliūnas - the mother) stems not only from the biographical background but from their conceptual positions. Bobrowski stresses the importance of ethical principles which are better conveyed by thefigure o f father; Niliūnas is above all concerned with the problematics of sensual ties and loyalty which he inscribes into the image of mother. It is to be observed that Bobrowski does not reason about the essence and destiny of art, whereas Niliūnas is very much concerned with this question. In the regained Bobrowskian Sarmatia both nature and hu- man relations will be absolutely transparent and intelligible, so art will not be needed any more. On the contrary, the Arcadia of Niliūnas arises 107 precisely from the sensual-aesthetic experience. The literary representation of exile is an important paradigm of Central European literature of the second half of the zo4 century. In the first place it is determined by the historical circumstances - World War II and totalitarian dictatorships which all Central European countries had to experience. On the other hand, this study tried to show that exile itself determined important aesthetic kinships. Among other things, the poetics of both authors can be defined as non-avant-garde modernism (albeit us- ing some achievements and devices of the avant-garde). It is precisely this position which, according to Milan Kundera, is the epitome of modern Central European literature.

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