Lithuanian Tradition of Political Poetics and the Discourse of the New Historicism

JŪRATĖ LaNDSBeRGYtĖ-BeCHeR Lithuania, Vilnius Lithuanian Culture Research Institute Lithuanian Tradition of Political Poetics and the Discourse of the New Historicism Lithuanian literature is deeply related to politics and history. Culture be- came a way for a nation to survive. Literature helped to raise national identity and to restore the rights for statehood and a valuable existence. In the era of So- viet occupation literature responded with literary expressionism of catastrophic modernism, metaphorical point of view and “lithuanisation of the world”. The last decades of Lithuanian literary discourse are dedicated to restore the nation’s rights and truth of history after the long-term ideological damage of alienation (deformation time). This literary stream could be named as the new historism. It strongly relies upon the scientific documentary research of collected memoirs, photographs and archives. The new historism opens up critical options not only for a literary discourse, but also for music, cinema, visual art, re-established nation’s Self, and sources for literary and political creativity. Key words: crushed tradition, literature, politics, treason, deportations, Mannerheim line, hybridisation, new historism, documentary, transcendental landscape. The Independence of the Baltic countries is the result of a long and dra- matic struggle and constant non-systemic breaks that string out as the signs with a special dramaturgical meaning. An exceptionally important role here is given to language and literature, which decodes the connecting space among prayer, psalm, image and word. These intercultural connections or codes embody the mind’s strategy for the restoration of statehood of the Lithuanian nation. Its essence is depicted in the words of the partisans’ song: “after losing the battle, how to win the war?” (CD “Brothers“, 2009). This creates a new tradition, formed by upheavals in history (Anuљauskas, 2012) and responds to such challenge – the political change of the new historism in literature. It visualises the metaphys- ics of landscape in the form of stopped time. It becomes the main motif for the 409 Baltic States’ political/poetical imagery, cinema, photography, literature and music historism. Culture connects with the destiny of a nation’s existence, restored memory and cleared space. Here one finds biblical depth of loss. Relation with its contexts opens an endless exposition of new sources for artistic dramaturgy: biblical self-sacrifice, suffering and the act of betrayal, expressed by real writers’ lives, deaths, deportation, exile and emigration. Here the motifs of literature’s reaction become reality: drama of resistance, mission of salvation. On the other hand, the ideological mystification of reality enters here in the form of renewed or mistaken Self and hybridisation or complication of a Self. The post-structural destruction happens here using relation to postmodernism and invoking the instruments of nihilism. Using the action in principle one basically oversteps a creative literature tradition. This can be named as the epoch of crushing of Europe’s traditions, referring to Anne Applebaum’s book “The Crushing of Eastern Europe” (Applebaum, 2012). In the Baltic countries, which are also attributed to the same category of crushed Europe, we confront an extremely dra- matic value of intersection of dictatorship and democracy, where the special-pur- pose internal cordons were erected to withstand the impact. Here it emerges – an internal, subtle, cultural, but essential “Mannerheim’s line”. This line becomes a paradigmatic horizontal, penetrating into the field of music – Baltic minimalism, and into archivistic photography and cinema, into a frozen landscape of deportations which irreversibly leads the times back and even further. Literature could not hide its reaction towards this destruction of the tradition of life value. Its response was: 1. Apocalyptic call from the depths. It is a landscape of catastrophic modernism in the literature of émigrés. 2. The “defeat” of apocalypse semantically inverting it into a different trans-cultural code – the mythological fairy-tale “salvation”; it is a metaphoric flight in time. 3. Belated return of history to a literary discourse in the form of documentary, a restoration of truth with archives (letters, diaries, memories, photography). 4. Actualization of exile as the other space, stopping the time, transcending the event through creative works. 5. Lithuanisation of the world, eliminating the syndrome of the nation’s loneliness and non-penetrability of the iron walls, when looking for the nation’s origins and relations. At first it is necessary to describe the crushing of the European tradition of ethics. It is a special literary-political crime that appeared in XX C, and can be named as the act of Nations’ Apocalypse or betrayal of minor Nations, which has become the depreciation of conscious individual behaviour and thinking; so a 410 level of discourse is sinking down to a low-level norm. Ideology of “norm” in literature is also called a Self censorship, which compromises its ancient traditions (unity of goodness, beauty and truth), demonises the act of creation (comparing it to a carnival and hybridizing its figurative process) and becomes the tradition of soullessness. Hence the reductive shifts of epoch of the greatest betrayals emerge as literature’s “grey zone” with its new prophets. It is an obvious act of treason in Lithuania by writers Petras Cvirka, Liudas Gira, Antanas Veclova, Kostas Korsakas, and the poetess Salomėja Nėris – this train of names of literary scholars was heading to Moscow to bring back “the sun of Stalin” to Lithuania in 1940... And it was followed by an endless chain of guilt, deaths, the way of non- redemption, and the silence, burdened with horrors from forests of Katyn and Rainiai. Here the heavy darkness of the night of literary anti-tradition oppresses tradition, which was being attempted to arouse only by the prayers and calls of the emigrant poets: “I call the nation! ”, “are you alive? ”, B. Brazdžionis wrote from America (Brazdžionis, 1991:5,122). And also there were the “shot songs” by the partisan writers. Correlation of Lithuanian literature and politics gains a new level of existential unity here: drama of religious suffering, life and death, which would be impossible to ignore nowadays after melting of cordons of de- formational time and the iron walls, and which would undermine the structure of a hybrid system itself, that is cracked not only in the sense of literary forms but forced by the space of Enlightening. Literature here existentially trends towards politics and finally merges with its fields, embracing religion and myth, becoming the cultural paradigm of the nation’s survival. And most importantly it tells about “the silence of history” like the frozen from horror landscape of national catastrophe. This also becomes a new cinematographic trend where the sequence of stagnated shots (stigmatised signals from the forests, white and black photographs in the films about resistance and deportation) dominates. In the extent of the Baltics one looks for compari- sons with the Shoah, human catastrophe and holocaust. The landscape of ruins in cultural reflections becomes the suggestion for modernism in painting and photography, non-secular architecture and encrypted transcendental visions for future restorations. In the silence of its darkness, in the muted crevices of loss the candle lights hover like impulses of light, the signs of “fields of sorrow” of the Baltic Self. Therefore signalling connections of the silent resistance, minimalism and modernism, call a new apocalyptical wave of chain reaction in creation aimed for the destruction of deformed system. The Baltic Self, as it is perceived now, is not possible without this contact with the darkness based on the concept of break. Literature together with its tradition of the new historism absorbs this source of darkness with all its essence. Here we can distinguish its several fields. 411 1. The wound of treason in literature. The Bunker. The crushed tradition. The playwright of the new historism catches the deadly trail of treason and this particularly painful wound, the poisonous train of betrayals, hiding in the depth of subconsciousness and its links to the partisan war: betrayal of brothers in arms. There was a wide range of reasons for this, sometimes related to torture, incredible pain and the matter of life and death of one’s family. In rare cases it was only based on the need of a desperate self and the greed to get the better life possibilities. In the historiography of the last two decades the facts about famous children poet Kostas Kubilinskas (1923-1962) emerge as a creator of the betrayal tradition. His verses touched the hearts of many children (“Lamb’s feet”, Vilnius, Vaga, 1956 etc.). We know now that his nickname as the agent of KGB was Var- nas, the Raven, the shadow of which grows over his writings. He is described as such: “on the 7th of March, 1949, 15 Lithuanian partisans died because of the betrayal of the agent of KGB, Varnas. The traitor himself, appeared to be a famous children poet, Kostas Kubilinskas, who mysteriously died in the sanatorium of Moscow suburbs just 13 years later “ (Lukљas, 2015.03.27: 10-11.). “Observing the poet’s career, the chekists perhaps decided that he would do anything for it... For the treason Kostas Kubilinskas was paid 7300 rubbles. He was also given a flat and a job, his verses were being published again but blood stained laurels didn’t bring luck. The task to kill former friends was given by the chekists only to a small number of agents, but only a few of them wanted to become like Judas voluntarily. The agent Varnas was one such“ (Lukљas, ibid.). V.V. Landsbergis’s drama “The Bunker” speaks about the tragedy of self-destruction of such impetu- ous person inspired by the estranged system (Landsbergis, 2010).

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