Tomas Venclova: A Man from the Other Side

Summary

If something connects us, as it had in the past—it is simply those contrary voices which do not agree with the world received.

—Tomas Venclova

“Dubrovnik? Prague? Kraków? Perhaps Sejny?”—the former dissident, emigrant and globetrotter asked himself those questions aloud, trying to establish the place of his life's nesting on the map of his spiritual peregrinations. “Maybe Kraków … other places are more or less the same … although not really … it's not worse, Kraków, maybe even a bit better … actually, it’s completely fine.” He spoke with a Vilnius accent, in this peculiarly tender language of his that was able to blunt the sharpness of singular truths, that cared about modesty, that left room for the Other and that mocked certainties. We were sitting in the spacious living room of an American apartment, overlooking the vast campus of Yale University, in a building whose entrance was guarded by a perfectly dressed and effusively polite black doorman.

Professor Tomas Venclova, with a permanent university position and guaranteed lifetime status of emeritus, did not even mention the possibility of staying in New Haven. Nothing could have kept him here. And yet at one point he could have said, quoting Mickiewicz: “Happiness he knew not, because he was absent from his homeland.” But it was Venclova's Lithuania that first broke free from the Soviet empire to regain its longed-for independence sooner than he could have imagined in his wildest dreams. And yet—he did not mention returning to Vilnius. In the young democratic Lithuania there seemed to be no place for him. He searched for his place in the closeness of the neighboring country [Poland—ed.], as if afraid of losing the distance and independence that guaranteed freedom of critical thought. The closeness was determined not only by architecture and common cultural heritage, but also by a certain community of historical experience, the experience of enslavement by a totalitarian empire and struggle against it.