The Experiences of Lithuanian Exile: Between Loss and Discovery

The Experiences of Lithuanian Exile: between Loss and Discovery DALIA KUIZINIENĖ The experiences of exile culture can be, and sometimes have been, integrated into the space of Lithuanian culture. What does it mean to be a creative artist in the arena of global culture? From their first days abroad, some representatives of Lithu anian exile culture, especially the writers, have been thinking about their identity and about the positives and negatives of their relationship to the surrounding world. The opposition between local and global space, between national tradition and Western culture, as well as the fusion of these opposite ele ments, has found the most varied formal and thematic expres sion in the work of artists working in several distinct media. It is the purpose of this paper to look at Lithuanian exile culture of the first postwar decade as it expressed itself in relation to space and identity. Emigres In analyzing Lithuanian exile culture of the 1940s and 1950s, two important tendencies become apparent. Some cre ators enclosed themselves in a ghetto of national traditions and values, choosing a kind of isolation, while others were open to the world around them and extended the boundaries of the national tradition through their work. In general, Lithuanian writers and artists living in West ern Europe could not, and did not, seal themselves off from Western cultural influences. A new environment and new con ditions for living and creating forced them to rethink their re- Dalia Kuizinienė teaches literature at the Kaunas's Vytautas Magnus University and is a Senior Scholar at the Lithuanian Emigration Insti tute. She specializes in the history of Lithuanian diaspora literature and culture as well as in the theory and practice of literary criticism. She has written a book on Lithuanian literary life in Western Europe from 1945 to 1950, and has published roughly a hundred scholarly papers. 48 lationship with tradition and to reflect creatively on their own identity. In comparing Lithuanian literary processes with the tendencies of universal literature, Algirdas Landsbergis could not help but remark that "every true writer's passport should contain, beside his first nationality, the inscription 'world citi zen.' For the sake of his country and of its literature."1 In one of his texts, Adolfas Mekas (brother of Jonas Mekas and himself an author) poses a question full of rhetorical pathos, directed at himself and his generation: "Weltbürger. I don't know who that is: am I one - or am I not?"2 Expanding on this question, he both asks and answers it: "How can I be a Weltbürger if I cry when reading Aleksandriškis?"3 In this text, the author expresses the doubts and sentiments of someone who ends up abroad and experiences the eternal tension between one's home and the world. The literature of that period is dominated either by the space of the home that one has left or by the space that one is still looking for. This search was perhaps given its very best name by Jonas Mekas, who published the diaries that he wrote while still living in Europe under the title / had Nowhere to Go. Thus the first postwar decade was marked by a very clear attachment to one's former home or by the experience of nei ther having nor finding it. Writers romanticize the Lithuanian village and the details of its landscape, they lovingly hark back to something that exists only in the past. This 'philotopy'4 also suffused the work of the visual artists, as evidenced in wood cuts and engravings of the ubiquitous village well sweeps and Pensive Christ images, and in paintings by their colors so char acteristic of the Lithuanian landscape. Lithuanian magazines were illustrated with pictures of the most important national symbols. On the other hand, artists began to look for more mod- 1 Landsbergis, 1948, 49. 2 Mekas, 1949, 3. 3 lbid- 4 The term is used by Arvydas Šliogeris in his book Būtis ir pasaulis (Vilnius: Mintis, 1990). 49 ern forms of expression as their artistic worldview changed in response to newly encountered Western influences. Having settled in Paris, the painter Adomas Galdikas felt increasingly drawn towards abstractionism; and the same tendencies be came apparent in the graphic arts, as can be seen in the work of an already mature Viktoras Petravičius, a maturing Zibuntas Mikšys, or in the amateurish yet provocative illustrations that Vytautas Leonas Adamkevičius (Leonas Lėtas) created for Jo nas Mekas's magazine Žvilgsniai. Literary texts lost a consis tent plot line; only fragments thereof remained. Inspired by a reawakened existentialism and expressionist tendencies, writ ers experimented with form, deformed the literary depiction, transformed the well-known classical plot lines, and playfully stylized them. These changes in visual and literary creativity were due not only to external influences, but also to a chang ing sense of national identity felt by individual writers and in many cases applying to an entire generation. For example, Ju lius Kaupas called the generation of writers that was just com ing into literature during the first post-war decade the genera tion of "the third brother" (of fairy tale fame), a generation that was always searching for something: There's an endless multitude of magic castles and kingdoms richer than those on earth, of inner worlds wider than the earth, but you can't inherit them or buy them with all the gold in the world-you can only discover them, conquer them, conjure them up for yourself."5 In Lithuania itself it was, perhaps, only Juozas Erlickas who later would talk of "the third brother" in his texts. Similar tendencies became apparent in domestic Lithua nian culture after 1986-1988, with the start of the reform process leading to the opening of the wall to the West and the resultant blast of fresh air coming from it, finally culminating in the re- establishment of independence in 1990. The period from 1986 to 1996 might be called a period of making new acquaintances and of digesting new experiences; it was remarkably similar to 5 Kaupas, 470. 50 the first decade of postwar exile culture. Writers again tried to work out their relation to tradition and to formulate their cre ative positions. In this respect, Jurgis Kunčinas, Ričardas Gav elis, then Sigitas Parulskis, Aidas Marčėnas, Kęstutis Navakas, and a little later Marius Ivaškevičius and Herkus Kunčius were especially vocal and articulate. Visual artists coalesced into groups, organized common exhibits, and took their stand (for example, Robertas Antinis and his "Post Ars" group). During the last few decades, both Lithuanian exile cul ture and that of Lithuania was marked by a provocative atti tude towards space. Ricardas Gavelis in his novels creates a unique symbolic image of Vilnius as a world city, making it into a persona alongside the others with sacral and vulgar con notations side by side. Jonas Mekas in his writings and films erases the boundaries between spaces and cultures, tying them into a common existential problematic. His concept of space is highly individualized. The Lithuanian village of Semeniškės becomes the axis and center of the world; New York becomes a big village;6 and eventually Mekas abjures any and all iden tification with a specific place and instead comes to regard the entire world of culture as his home: "I travel a lot. So people ask me: Where are you from? I tell them: I was born and raised in Lithuania, I live in New York, and now my country is cul ture."7 The graphic artist Audrius Puipa provides interesting transformations of space by placing both everyday and eter nal objects in a kitchen or workshop. In his photomontages, Mindaugas Navakas makes known edifices of Vilnius contigu ous with his own sculptures. Robertas Antinis's monument to Romas Kalanta in Kaunas is a conceptual highlighting of the spot where he set himself on fire. How relevant are questions of national identity, and of the relation between local and global spaces, to creative artists working today? Raymond Filip and Irena Mačiulytė Guilford, 6 In Iiis film "Laiškai iš niekur" shown on Lithuanian National TV in 1997. 7 Mekas, 1997,11. 51 two authors of Lithuanian descent writing in English, do deal with the contrast or clash of two cultures, two spaces, and two languages in their work. Lithuanian writers living abroad inevitably find them selves surrounded by several cultures and at least two lan guages. Thus, again inevitably, they come face to face with the problem of their own national and sometimes even generation al identity - a problem that does not necessarily find a complex expression in their work. Algirdas Landsbergis, who wrote mainly in Lithuanian, but also in English, talked without feeling greatly traumatized about exile, bilinguality, and multiculturalism, finding in all this rather a gift than a loss.8 Živilė Bilaišytė, a poet and literary critic who was born and raised in exile, has accurately described the attitude mem bers of her generation have towards their national identity and the Lithuanian language: When for an entire generation - my generation - the Lithuanian language no longer is the language through which we meet and experience reality, then for a writer of that generation the historical national Lithuanian heritage becomes an impediment in the search for meaning, a hindrance to investing everyday reality with meaning. Under those circumstances writing poetry in Lithuanian becomes in a certain sense a hermetic endeavor that one might compare with writing medieval poetry in Latin, which was not the everyday language of the people... That brings forth a desire to write poetry in English, even though the Lithuanian language was once your first language and even though by origin and in your heart you consider yourself a Lithuanian.9 Thus during the last decade the situation among writ ers of Lithuanian descent and living outside Lithuania may be summed up as follows.

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