Introduction: Magnetic North, Iron and Grace

Summary

In the prelude to his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, the Nobel Prize Laureate Czesław Miłosz underscored the fact that the twentieth century—” perhaps more protean and multifaceted than any other”—changed not only according to one's viewpoint, but also according to the volatile coordinates of latitude and longitude, a “point in the geographic sense as well.” Miłosz continues: “My corner of Europe, owing to the extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there, comparable only to violent earthquakes, affords a peculiar perspective. As a result, all of us who come from those parts appraise poetry slightly differently from the majority of my audience, for we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind's major transformations.”

Tomas Venclova, who came of age under the same sky as Miłosz and attended the same university, albeit in the rebaptized Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, could easily have written these lines. The “peculiar perspective” that Miłosz somewhat obliquely refers to is, of course, a nearly eight-hundred-yearold intellectual tradition, with its distinct, rich, and complex identity and history. And while, as John Donne reminds us, the globe—like a tear—is a perfect sphere, it remains a human curiosity that certain loci on the earth are perceived as being further from “the center,” even if, paradoxically, their magnetic ore has endured some of history's most violent earthquakes. Such a state of affairs—compounded by the systematic silences of totalitarianism—has resulted in the necessity of writers from the “borderlands” of Eastern Europe to elucidate its topography and attempt to shed light on the contours of this critical cultural and geopolitical point in space. In this, poetry has indeed been an essential witness and participant.

Such a task was given to Venclova precisely because his life has passed through some of the twentieth century's darkest seismic movements. Born in 1937 in Klaipėda, Lithuania, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Venclova's early childhood was first spent in Kaunas at the beginning of World War II, and later in Freda, a nearby suburb, in the home of his maternal grandfather Merkelis Račkauskas.