The Experience of Exile in Lithuanian Poetry

The apocalyptic second coming of the Soviet armies to Lithuania in 1944 threw many Lithuanian intellectuals, professionals and writers into the darkness of exile. These people were, perhaps, even more anxious to escape Soviet rule than anyone else, because they remembered particularly well that the genocidal mass deportations of Lithuanians during the first occupations of 1940-41 were directed most of all against the educated classes.

This exodus created a paradoxical situation, where the gentle arts in the native land itself took decades to recover, not only because of political oppression, but also due to a shortage of writers and artists, while in exile literary life began a vigorous growth as soon as the war was over. Not only were schools reestablished in the Displaced Persons camps, but also literary journals, book publishing enterprises, literary prizes, theater and even opera.

On the other hand, it was of course impossible to continue with the previous literary trends and themes as if nothing much had happened. Something did happen: there was the enormous fact of exile, which made everything irrevocably different. In the descriptions of things and feelings the traditional artistic images lost their previous context in the alien land, and all familiar human concerns became transformed or subdued by the ever-present bitter knowledge of dispossession.

Lyric poetry, consisting as it does of brief statements of experience, was able to respond most quickly and sensitively to the fact of exile. Some poets reacted in simple and naive anguish, like small children awakened suddenly in an alien place. Of these, Kazys Bradunas (b. 1917) communicated most directly the physical sense of loss which overwhelms a farmer torn away from the familiar objects in his native house and field. His first book in exile, Alien Bread, (1945) is full of small painful vignettes of daily experience where the smell of a flower, a bend in the river, or the pale light of the morning would deceive and comfort the traveler by their intimate familiarity - only to shock him afterwards with the realization that the flower was not known at home, the river bears some strange German name, and the morning promises another day of hard labor for alien masters.

Another poet, Jonas Mekas (b. 1922), who later became known in the United States as the "granddaddy of the underground cinema", retreated from exile into the inner spaces of memory, where he reconstructed his simple native village in slow, fluid verses which sanctified and retrieved from time every detail of peasant life in the native land. His book The Idylls of Semeniškiai (1948) does not idealize that village as if it were some unreal Arcadia, but, rather on the contrary, it concentrates on the harsh, earthy aspects of peasant life through heat, mud, and biting cold. This life becomes lyrical and beautiful because it is suffused with the warm glow of the poet's love which transforms all physical details into symbolic and magic signs signifying the immortal bond of earth and man.

An older poet, Bernardas Brazdzionis (b. 1907), who had established his reputation during the years of independence as a Christian mystic in love with sonorous rhetorical cadences, reacted to exile with fiercely patriotic verse in which the outrage against the injustice to his nation and the defiance of tyranny were raised to a highly emotional, almost hysterical pitch. The stance he took in such works as Alien Mountains (1945), or The Northern Lights (1947), or again, The Great Crossroads (1953) was that of a poet and prophet, calling his people to persevere in prayer and hope and to testify to the whole world about the cruel fate inflicted on his nation. Over the years his poetry evolved into a kind of pilgrimage across the alien universe, toward the receding native shores of hope. Many of his poems centered around the image of a weary traveler with the burden of injustice on his back and the jewel of faith in his heart, calling to his God in all the crossroads of the world. This image was in essence a structural repetition, in a different, pathetic context, of his earlier basic imagery, where human life as such was basically conceived of as a journey toward a metaphysical home of the soul beyond the gates of death.

Jonas Aistis (b. 1904) added his prophetic voice to that of Brazdzionis, but in another key. Before the war, Aistis had become popular as an impressionist poet, mainly concerned with the sweet pain of love, who liked to experiment with new imagery and new rhythmic structures, at times almost forcing his poetic language to transcend itself, that is, to achieve a deep emotional meaning, even at the price of making very little sense grammatically. Strangely, Aistis experienced and expressed in his poetry the feeling of exile even before anything happened to his country. This was because he went to France before the war, from where he looked longingly at his beloved Lithuania until the Bolsheviks came, and he was stranded in Villefranche-sur-Mer. At the time when other exiled writers were overcome with the grief of dispossession, Aistis had already accustomed himself to this condition, and so, he spoke up in the stern voice of conscience, reproaching his compatriots for having forsaken their homeland in her hour of need. In the collections Longing for the Nemunas River (1947) and Sister Life (1953) Aistis' poetic devices returned to a more traditional mold, and the former romantic themes were supplanted by moral and philosophical ideas turning around his nation's tragic destiny.

Henrikas Radauskas has a good claim to be the greatest Lithuanian poet of any time. His extraordinary complex verse may be called modernistic in that it strains the inherent logic of language to its very limits in order to make each word carry a tremendous load of implied meanings, allusions and new semantic entities resulting from unexpected juxtapositions of images and concepts within the structure of a poem. Radauskas utilizes the entire heritage of universal mythology, as well as the achievements of man's intellect and of his religious passion, in order to construct a series of poetic statements which culminate in the creation of a verbal universe that in itself is much richer and implicitly more profound than the sum total of human experiences in ordinary reality, because it can juxtapose and relate to each other areas of thought and feeling which would have no relevance to each other outside of art.

The poet Alfonsas Nyka-Niliunas (b. 1919) goes beyond this yearned-for image of God, into a frozen void of meaningless eternity - the true home for the exile who calls himself man. His book of poems, entitled The Symphonies of Dispossession (1946) concerns itself with two of the basic illusions of man. One illusion is embodied in man's everlasting urge to seek far horizons, both physical and spiritual, as if there were an Eldorado, somewhere at the end of the world, where man can find his own fulfillment. The vague outlines of some kind of ultimate promise trouble the soul of man from the very dawn of consciousness, so that even his cradle, says Niliunas, resembles a ship of the conquistadors, in which the pale-eyed infant stands, yearning for something in the blue expanses of the sky, visible through the window. There is, of course, no Eldorado, and all the haunted travelers of the world never reach any particular reality; they are thus exiles by definition. The other basic illusion of man is represented by his yearning for the cosy fires of home - it is the dream of a lost wanderer who thinks that he has grasped a profound truth about the meaning of life, namely that Eldorado is really the one native spot on earth where we first open our eyes. The forsaken Home then begins to glow with wondrous hues of nostalgic remembrance, while in actuality, in the context of Niliunas' world as an exiled Lithuanian poet, that wondrous home is only a tortured, bloody land far away.

The beginning of the 1950's marked a kind of dividing line in exiled Lithuanian literature between the early sorrow of the Displaced Persons years in Germany and a search for new directions on the American continent. A number of writers, including the already mentioned Bradunas and Niliunas, grouped themselves in 1952 around a new journal call Literary Folios, which called for a rededication to craftsmanship in art, and for a creative effort to organize into new and coherent esthetic entities both the Lithuanian heritage and the new, cosmopolitan influences coming from world literature. Sometimes these writers were called the "Earth" (Zeme) generation, because of an anthology their published by this name, and also because in their work they began to elaborate the mythology of the native Lithuanian soil, against the framework of the universal myth of the earth as the ultimate mother in death, and as the womb of resurrection. This gave their yearning for the lost homeland a more philosophical and cosmopolitan cast.

Naturally enough, the dispossed farmer, Bradunas, was at the center of the new mythology. In several collections of poetry entitled Nine Ballads (1955), Marshland Fires (1958) and The Silver Bridles (1964) he elaborated the concept of man's existence as a sacrifice at the alter of life and thus also at the altar of both the pagan and the Christian God, in the native land, over the course of centuries. His poems retained a surface simplicity, a naive and charmingly personal wonder at the beauty of earth as a living organism, but they also became symbolic and complex in their implied references to the continuum of life through all the Lithuanian generations which had sacrificed themselves in order that their land should prosper green again and again.

Another poet belonging to the "Earth" group is Henrikas Nagys (b. 1920). His poetry is simpler and more romantic than that of Niliunas, because its character, imagery and meaning is controlled by a set of emotions which simplify the potentially innumerable complexities of human experience. The native land, the exile, the chaotic and ominous noises of the modern world - are filtered through the poet's feeling and come out as a sequence of romantic, even melodramatic images. Among basic emotions of Nagys as a poet one must count first of all the consciousness of the deathward flow of time. In his book November Nights (1947) time measures itself in the rhythmic beat of a bird's wings, in the ticking of the clocks, in the heartbeat of the poet, and even in the metaphorical transformations of landscape, where, as in one poem, the evening comes as a huge black cloud-coffin, carried on the bare branches of ancient oaks against the burning sunset. Another feeling is that of friendship: purified, made incandescent in the deadly flow of time is the intimate brotherhood of creative hearts, poets, seekers, rebels - the brothers of Nagys, treasured in intimate faith and love, coming from a variety of places and periods of history. Rebellion itself, or, rather, the restlessness of the seeker for truth, is another dominant emotion. Finally, underlying both time and friendship and juxtaposed against the catastrophe of exile, is the feeling of childish freshness and directness in the perception of reality. The yearning to recover this freshness, and with it, perhaps, that which is dear to the poet in his lost homeland, permeates all his books, including The Sundials (1959), and The Blue Snow (1960). Nagys' book Brothers the White Winged Spirits (1970) transfers this direct and innocent sense of reality into a mythical country, a timeless Lithuania, recognized as the inner core of all folksongs and all historical mythology.

The youngest born of the exiled writers in the group presently discussed, and the youngest one to die, Algimantas Mackus (1932 - 1964) was a poet most intensely dedicated to the theme of exile and death. His first, quite unsuccessful, book of poems, called Elegies (1950) contained standard patriotic sentiments a la Brazdzionis. Nine years passed before the appearance of his second book, His Is the Earth (1959), and in that time Mackus apparently understood the irrelevance of elevated poetic rhetoric to the true experience of exile. Consequently, in his second book, Mackus radically changed both his poetic language and his ideas to proclaim that exile is not merely something that happens to innocent bystanders in history, but that it is also something we must do - namely, absolutely to discard and reject all faith in the possibility of happiness and home in the universe. For him it became a question of honesty and precision in the creative use of words. Every time we use words with unrelenting integrity in today's catastrophic world, we see more and more clearly that everything that men usually believe has no substance to it at all. Thus, his second book, and also the following one, The Generation of Unornamented Speech and Its Words (1962) became a kind of funeral procession, burying first of all God, then hope, then the homeland, and finally, the poetic language itself. All poetic symbols and metaphors expressive of life: the black color of earth, the green fragrance of grass, the image of the Lord's guardian angel, life-giving water - everything was reversed to signify death and oblivion. The uncompromising honesty of Mackus' effort gives his poetry a dark and tragic grandeur - it becomes a stern judgment pronounced by a victim of contemporary civilization upon all the illusions of man which led him to the self-destructive holocaust of war. Mackus' final book, Chapel B, which is a tragic celebration of the death of Antanas Škema in a car accident, came out posthumously in 1965, after Mackus himself was killed in the same manner in Chicago.

In the end, it might perhaps be said that the experience of exile, traumatic and stultifying though it may have been in many ways, did not so overwhelm the creative powers of the Lithuanian writers as to reduce them to stunned silence, or else to inconsequential rhetoric. Rather on the contrary, it evoked a response from the creative imagination which in itself is unique and valuable on its own terms.

From Lithuania: In Her Own Words, edited by Laima Sruoginis (Tyto Alba, Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997)

Rimvydas Šilbajoras (born 1926) is one of Lithuanian literature's most respected, experienced, and prolific literary critics. He has published numerous critical essays on Lithuanian literature in English and Lithuanian. He has participated in the creation of several anthologies of Lithuanian literature, has written numerous critical articles in English, Lithuanian and Russian, is the author of several books of criticism, but is best known for his book Perfection of Exile: Fourteen Contemporary Lithuanian Writers (1970), which served to introduce to the West the generation of Lithuanian writers forced to flee abroad (along with Dr. Šilbajoras himself) after the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1944. During the post-war period Šilbajoris lived in Displaced Persons' camps in Germany, where he actively participated in the artistic and literary life of the camps, despite the utter poverty and desperation of the post-war period in Europe. Later Šilbajoris emigrated to the United States, completing his studies at Columbia University, and finally settling in Ohio. Presently Dr. Šilbajoras teaches in the Slavic Languages and Literature Department at Ohio State University.