Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics 2020058152, 9789004398399, 9789004457713

Table of contents :
Contents
Editors' Preface
Notes on Contributors
Nation-Building Canons: Historical and Methodological Considerations
Part 1: The Shaping of National, Cultural and Literary Identities
Classicists and the Classics: The Polish Literary Canon in Academia (1800–1830)
The Concept of Lithuanian Literature in the 19th Century
Towards an Unofficial Canon: Striving to Strengthen the Lithuanian Cultural Community under Russian Domination in the Mid-19th Century
The Concept of Lithuanian Folk Song in Lithuanian Folklore 1800–1940
``Who Are You? A Little Pole'': The Vision of the Nation and Nationality in the Polish Literary Canon for Children on the Threshold of Independence (around 1918)
State-Building and Nation-Building: Dimensions of the Myth of the Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939
Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923)
``The Experience of Change'': Hungarian Literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic
Part 2: Literary Canonization: Case Studies
Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary
A National Epic from Below: Kalevipoeg in the Writings of Grassroots Literati
The Polish Theater Canon and Comedy – A Complicated Relation
Constraints of Canon Constructing: Research into the Paradoxes of Reception of Józef Baka's Poetry in Polish Literature and Literary Studies
The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis
The Making of the Lithuanian National Poet: Maironis
Cultivation of New Readers in the Early Criticism of Žemaite's Works (1895–1915)
Postmodernist Representation of the Central European Multiethnic Milieu: Marek Piacek
Index of Names

Citation preview

Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics

National Cultivation of Culture Edited by Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam)

Editorial Board John Breuilly (The London School of Economics and Political Science) Katharine Ellis (University of Cambridge) Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa) Patrick J. Geary (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University) Anne-Marie Thiesse (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research)

Volume 24

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc

Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics 19th to Early 20th Century

Edited by

Aistė Kučinskienė Viktorija Šeina Brigita Speičytė

The realization of this book was partly funded by the Research Council of Lithuania and the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (in 2019). Cover illustration: Monument of Adam Mickiewicz in Warsaw after its unveiling, 24 of December, 1898 (photography by Aleksander Karoli). Source: Tygodnik Ilustrowany, no. 1 (1899): 4. Language editor: Violeta Kelertas. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020058152

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1876-5645 ISBN 978-90-04-39839-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-45771-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Editors’ Preface vii Notes on Contributors

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Nation-Building Canons: Historical and Methodological Considerations Viktorija Šeina

1

Part 1 The Shaping of National, Cultural and Literary Identities Classicists and the Classics: The Polish Literary Canon in Academia (1800–1830) 27 Helena Markowska-Fulara The Concept of Lithuanian Literature in the 19th Century Brigita Speičytė

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Towards an Unofficial Canon: Striving to Strengthen the Lithuanian Cultural Community under Russian Domination in the Mid-19th Century 64 Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn The Concept of Lithuanian Folk Song in Lithuanian Folklore 1800–1940 Jurga Sadauskienė

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“Who Are You? A Little Pole”: The Vision of the Nation and Nationality in the Polish Literary Canon for Children on the Threshold of Independence (around 1918) 107 Krystyna Zabawa State-Building and Nation-Building: Dimensions of the Myth of the Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939 118 Jagoda Wierzejska Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923) 135 Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev

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“The Experience of Change”: Hungarian Literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic 152 Judit Dobry

Part 2 Literary Canonization: Case Studies Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary 165 Gergely Fórizs A National Epic from Below: Kalevipoeg in the Writings of Grassroots Literati 183 Katre Kikas The Polish Theater Canon and Comedy – A Complicated Relation Anna R. Burzyńska

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Constraints of Canon Constructing: Research into the Paradoxes of Reception of Józef Baka’s Poetry in Polish Literature and Literary Studies 215 Paweł Bukowiec The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis Vaidas Šeferis The Making of the Lithuanian National Poet: Maironis Aistė Kučinskienė

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Cultivation of New Readers in the Early Criticism of Žemaitė’s Works (1895–1915) 273 Ramunė Bleizgienė Postmodernist Representation of the Central European Multiethnic Milieu: Marek Piaček Apolloopera – A Melodrama about Bombing for Choir, Actor and Trombone 295 Renata Beličová Index of Names

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Editors’ Preface The last couple of decades have witnessed a growing interest in regional approaches to research on literary canons; the collections of articles, Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia (2015) and The Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures (2000) could be mentioned as examples. Even though the formation of national canons is specific for each country, similar conditions of historical and political development in different places reveal common tendencies in canon formation, due to the fact that this process always relies on links between the literary field and the spheres of national, class, and other group interests. The cultural distinctiveness of Central-Eastern Europe was shaped by similar historical trajectories and today it is widely recognized and intensively researched (the multi-volume series History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe is an especially important resource for studies of this region’s literary specificities). Since this collection seeks to examine the processes and interaction between modern nation-building and the national literary canon-building in the 19th century, it delimits a somewhat narrower regional scope than the usual approach of East-Central European studies. Because of their differing historical and cultural circumstances, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not included here. The Baltic countries are positioned as a separate region that has similarities both with East-Central Europe and with the Northern countries as well. Although all national movements rely on the national language and its literature as arguments for national identity and cultural maturity, in the 19th century, when the countries of Central Europe and the Baltic region were politically and culturally dominated by Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, national languages gained a specifically considerable symbolic power for bringing the national community together. The creation of literature in the national language and the establishment of an own literary canon for the empire’s non-dominant nations became a means of cultural emancipation (i.e., dissociating from the language and culture of the empire) and legitimization (i.e., to prove to themselves and to everyone else that they have a long-standing cultural tradition distinguishable from that of other nations). Only a few of the small nations (as termed by Miroslav Hroch) of the region had their own state in the past and could refer to their own historical narrative (for example, the Poles, Serbs or Hungarians). Others could only refer to their national language and its oral and written tradition as the strongest factor in ensuring the integrity and historical continuity of the community. This explains why the national languages in Central Europe and the Baltic region became the main

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marker1 of the distinctiveness of the national community, and the bards of the national movement, who raised the prestige of the national language and awakened the historical memory of the nation as well as predicted its revival, were considered the most important cultural heroes. The national community interpreted their biographies as stories of sacrifice or even martyrdom and, after their deaths, these national poets were turned into the objects of quasireligious worship.2 All the articles in this collection are connected by a general theoretical approach to actualize the cultural nature of national movements and nationalism as an ideology by studying the formation of the national literary canon as one of the practices of nation-building. The investigations published in this book cover a wide historical period (from the national movements that founded modern nations in 19th century to the creation and consolidation of national states in the first half of the 20th century). According to the conclusions, literary canon did not forfeit its function of nation-building after Lithuanians, Poles or Romanians established their statehood. The cultivation of national culture through the mechanism of the literary canon was practiced throughout the aforementioned period until World War II. Since the end of the 20th century, theoretical deliberations on the canon constantly raise the idea that the general processes of canon formation require detailed empirical research, without which discussions about the national canon (including the memorialization of specific writers) would remain speculative and superficial. This collection of articles attempts to bring together and present in English the barely studied process of interaction between the literary canon and the nation-building in Central Europe and the Baltic region, taking into account various possible research angles. The so-called minor literatures of the region receive little attention outside their cultural area, so even in neighboring countries literary researchers are not familiar with the specificities of the national literature of other countries. We hope that this collection of articles will help historians of literature and nationalism in Central Europe and the Baltic States to better understand the interaction between the formation of the literary canon and nationalism in the region, not only considering the era of nationalism (formation of national movements and national states) but also including the present situation. 1 Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10. 2 John Neubauer, “Introduction,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 4: Types and Stereotypes, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004), 16–18.

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This publication opens with Viktorija Šeina’s article in which she discusses the methodological assumptions for researching the formation of the national literary canon as a method for nation-building. The modern nations of Central Europe and the Baltics established themselves through various cultural practices, one of which was the national literary canon, which defined the community’s cultural and national identity. Thus the nation established its canon, and the canon established the nation. In her article, Šeina presents a theoretical framework and methodological tools for conducting descriptive research of canons, and proposes to apply these to studies of nationalism. The first part of the collection is devoted to the issue of the national literary canon as a means of shaping identity. A survey of established national literary canons in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century permits an analysis of the phenomenon of nationalization of literature characteristic for this period, namely, the close relationship between the concepts of literature and nation, and the role of institutions that disseminated literature. These institutions include educational offices, their networks, publishing houses, and the periodical press, and should be considered in the context of the role they played in employing the literary canon for processes of nation formation. The dominant perspective in studies of nationalism is that the modern nations of Eastern and Central Europe formed according to a model of ethno-cultural nationalism. However, the research on the formation of literary canons in the context of nation-building shows that this process was by no means a unanimous founding of ethnic nations, but rather a site for tensions and interactions between different ideas of nationality (as well as of what constitutes literature). This aspect of the region’s literary culture is revealed in the contributions of Helena Markowska-Fulara, Brigita Speičytė and Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn which address the formation of the literary canon and the ways that it functioned in the land of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 19th century. In the article “Classicists and the Classics: The Polish Literary Canon in Academia (1800–1830)” Markowska-Fulara analyzes two literary models – the “French” one and the “German” one – which competed in Vilnius and Warsaw university curricula and in the literary studies which were becoming more professional at the start of the 19th century. These models laid the foundation for the early conceptions of the Polish national literary canon as well as influenced the selection of texts, their evaluation, and reading attitudes. Together they correlated with various civic and ethnic concepts of nationality that were characteristic of Polish political thought for that time and encouraged visions of an alternative Polish cultural community. The author evaluates the different literary models as orientation points for the modernization of the Polish nation that appeared at the start of the 19th century, and which

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mark the boundary between the universalism of the Enlightenment and the valorization of ethno-cultural uniqueness. The first section of this publication concludes with Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev’s article, “Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923),” which reveals that these hallmarks of modernization and the tension between them continued to function in the later era of modern nation states albeit in different forms: the author discusses the opposition between the cultural and national homogenizing tendencies, characteristic of Romania’s literary avantgarde during the interwar period. In a similar way, Speičytė’s article, “The Concept of Lithuanian Literature in the 19th Century,” addresses how the idea of Lithuanian literature, and its different modelings that were formed by intellectuals of Warsaw, Vilnius, and Königsberg universities at the start of the 19th century relate to concepts of civic and ethnic nationhood. The spread of the “new” national literature in the 19th century allows one to see the essential mechanisms of canon formation and nation-building processes. The case of Lithuanian literature shows that the “new” literature, which had functioned in a premodern multi-linguistic cultural context, received nationalizing impulses not only from the Herderian idea of an ethnic nation and culture, but also from the memory of recently lost statehood. The author shows that the tendencies for canonizing bilingual Lithuanian literature were stronger in the first half of the 19th century and were associated with the notion of civic nationalism, and thus fit in with Okulicz-Kozaryn’s analysis of the spread of Polish literature of Lithuania in his article “Towards an Unofficial Canon: Striving to Strengthen the Lithuanian Cultural Community under Russian Domination in the Mid-19th Century.” Yet the efforts lacked institutional support to become fully established, especially once the Russian imperial powers shut down Vilnius University in 1832, and the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities in 1865 which had functioned for just one decade as a center for preserving the civic national culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The ethno-cultural model for the nationalization of Lithuanian literature took root only at the end of the 19th century as a reaction to the repressive politics of the Russian empire toward national and religious minorities. Okulicz-Kozaryn discusses the important role of the reader, and the reading practices and institutions that organize them under conditions of repressive imperial politics by analyzing the Polish literary field of Lithuania in the middle of the 19th century. The author argues that, at that time, the Polish literature of Lithuania functioned to a certain extent as a separate cultural formation. This formation is linked with the historical memory of the Grand Duchy

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of Lithuania, which was upheld and disseminated by the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission, established in 1855, and the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities. A certain “unofficial canon” of this literature took shape in the Lithuanian reading community, and its central figure was the author Adam Mickiewicz, who had been banned by the Russian imperial censorship. In the literary panorama of Central-Eastern Europe, this body of literature, discussed by the author, arises as a case of unrealized historical potential: a canon, which was not supported by the political-institutional power and thus never became “official.” Okulicz-Kozaryn’s research on Lithuania’s cultural context, where literary activity was linked to the notion of civic nationalism, is supplemented by Jurga Sadauskienė’s article “The Concept of Lithuanian Folk Song in Lithuanian Folklore 1800–1940” which concentrates on the parallel process of consolidation and efforts to conceptualize an ethnic Lithuanian culture according to the philosophical and anthropological ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder. In the region’s formation of a national literary canon and in processes of nation-formation, oral folklore was considered to be a national “pre-literature,” a source of inspiration for literary works as well as a representation of national culture. The author reveals an attitude common among Lithuanian folklorists in the 19th century who considered the folk song as a resource that had retained “archaic” linguistic expressions and historical memory in the lowest rungs of society; hence, the main aim of publishing and disseminating folk songs was to propagate the public use of the Lithuanian language. However, from the start of the 20th century, folk songs along with authored poetry become more actively involved in the process of national formation and come to be considered no longer as a representation of just one social group, but rather of the entire national community’s culture. The author discusses how the performative power of the literary canon in nation formation processes was reinforced by amateur and professional musical choir cultures, which also included arranged folk songs in their repertoires. Krystyna Zabawa’s article, “‘Who are you? A little Pole’: The Vision of the Nation and Nationality in the Polish Literary Canon for Children on the Threshold of Independence (around 1918)” and Jagoda Wierzejska’s “State-Building and Nation-Building: Dimensions of the Myth of the Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939” analyze the role of the literary canon in national identity politics of the state. The authors discuss the children’s literary canon (Zabawa), established in the restored Polish Republic (1918–1939), as well as the symbolic narrative and literary myth (Wierzejska) of the Polish literary canon at the time of the struggles for independence (namely the defense of Lviv in 1918). The authors reveal to what extent the political interests of

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a nation state empower the formation of a national identity based on difference, and how the literary canon contributes to this as it is reinforced through state-published books and the educational system. In this way, images central to identity are established (in contrast to the previously mentioned case of the “unofficial canon”), and endure for a long time. Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev’s article presents analogical tendencies of cultural homogenization in interwar Romania, which can be detected in the practices of literary canonization. This can be seen in historical examples where the national literary canon is “sterilized” by removing any multiethnic traces. However, in this case the author concentrates on the opposition that formed in response to this dominant tendency – an avant-garde group of Romanian Jewish writers who gathered together around the journal Contimporanul. This research encourages a consideration of the extent to which avant-garde movements in Central and Eastern Europe may have been influenced by aesthetic “imports” and general processes of societal modernization in Europe, yet at the same time may have also been affected by the canon formation and the tribulations of nation formation characteristic of the region, namely by the tensions arising from the identity politics of the nation state and multiethnic society. Judit Dobry’s survey of Hungarian literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic (“‘The Experience of Change’: Hungarian Literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic”) concludes this section by including the perspective of national minority literature into the purview of research on canons. The second part of the collection is dedicated to case studies of concrete literary canonizations. As is well known, the criteria according to which canonical texts are chosen and interpreted vary depending on the historical period and cultural context: they are influenced by shifts in concepts of art, literary debates as well as general cultural and social transformations. Even though there exist institutions which deliberately undertake maintaining the canon (the most striking example being school or university literature curricula), but there are also canon-makers, who contribute to the constellation of the canon without much self-reflection (for example, publishers and book stores, libraries, theaters and cinemas making use of literary texts). The canonizing institutions are those that participate in processes of selection and transferal of canonical objects to younger generations, and that thereby they influence the formation of the literary canon (school, university, literary criticism, theater repertoire, the literary marketplace, libraries, monuments, museums, etc.). The second section analyzes various canonizing institutions and their practices for establishing the canonical position of particular texts, authors, and genres, or by refusing to grant them such status.

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Studies of the institution of the national poet have formed a separate field within the research on canons. The category of national poet arose in the era of nationalism as the understanding of community hierarchy changed (although some of the writers who were included in this category had long been dead by then). Instead of a monarch as a symbolic figure crowning a strictly hierarchically structured society, there arose a need to create a pantheon of worthy national heroes who were equal in their rights and duties to all other citizens, yet surpassed them in their achievements and patriotic merits.3 A necessary condition for becoming a national poet is the author’s consciously accepting the duty to express collective experiences and to speak in the name of the nation. Thus the preconditions for the status of national poet were not only formed by the very nature of his creative work (the self-representation of the poetic subject as the nation’s poet), but also by canonizing structures (literary criticism, schools, theater, etc.) that declare and establish such a poet. Having one’s own national poet in the era of nationalism had become one of the conditions for the nation’s legitimation: the poet founded the local community’s self-image as well as that community’s image in a global context. Strategies for the making of the national poet are analyzed in the articles by Gergely Fórizs (“Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary”), Vaidas Šeferis (“The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis”) and Aistė Kučinskienė (“The Making of the Lithuanian National Poet: Maironis”). The latter two researchers examine the (self)canonization practices of two early Lithuanian national poets, Kristijonas Donelaitis and Maironis. Marijan Dović has argued that in the context of East-Central Europe the Baltic countries stand out because the cults of local national poet were never intensely forged here.4 Such an impression may have stemmed from the comparatively late nationalization process of literature in the Baltic countries. These nations mostly developed their poets’ cults during the interwar period, when they could engage the resources of their newly founded states. Yet perhaps the most important reason why so little is known about this region’s canonization of national poets is the lack of research publications in English. In this collection, the articles of Šeferis, Kučinskienė, and in part Katre Kikas (“A National Epic from Below:

3 Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Die ‘Genese des Panthéons’ – Nationalliterarische Kanonisierungsund Ausgrenzungsprozesse im Frankreich der Spätaufklärung und der Französischen Revolution,” in Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und Übersetzung, ed. Andreas Poltermann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 127. 4 Marijan Dović, “National Poets and Romantic (Be)Longing: An Introduction,” Arcadia 52, no. 1 (2017): 4.

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Kalevipoeg in the Writings of Grassroots Literati”) markedly contribute to filling this gap. In his article, Šeferis analyzes an especially specific phenomenon: how Lithuanian and German receptions of the East-Prussian writer Donelaitis enter into conflict in the era of nationalism. Kučinskienė analyzes how Lithuanians consecrated the popular writer of patriotic poetry Maironis as their national poet during the years of national awakening. The poet himself played a role in this process by making the central figure of his works a creative persona who dedicates himself to the homeland. Fórizs analyzes the Hungarian situation of national poet creation and questions the applicability of the term “nation-building” to the region of CentralEastern Europe. In his article he argues that the mechanistic and voluntarist aspects that are characteristic of this term are only applicable to research of the political nation formation of newly established ex-colonial states (such as the USA). In contrast to the latter, the modern nations of Central Europe, according to Fórizs, did not have a state equivalent in the 19th century (some had one only in the distant past) and understood themselves not as forging their national unit here and now, but rather as a primordial community seeking “revival.” For this reason, Fórizs considers the ideologues of this region’s nationalism not as builders of a nation with a clear plan of action (like America’s Founding Fathers), but rather as handymen (bricoleurs) who take to molding a nation, without a clear plan, out of the previously existing political formations, patchworks of recollections, or remains of mythical narratives in that territory. As an example of such a nation-bricolage Fórizs presents the publishing and translation practices of Gábor Döbrentei and István Széchenyi. Wherever Dániel Berzsenyi’s text did not coincide with the modern Hungarian ideology of nationalism, it was edited according to the will of the translator or else re-interpreted according to the understanding of the publisher. Fórizs considers such practices of nation-bricolage by the Hungarian literati to be a manifestation of cultural nationalism specific to the region of East-Central Europe, and compares this with the compilation of the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg. Kikas examines the contradictory nature of the reception of this Estonian national epic at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The merit of this article is that the author expands the public discussion of the Estonian cultural elite about Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s epic through research of manuscript texts that revealed the often publicly unrepresented attitudes of poorly educated members of society toward this work. Ramunė Bleizgienė in her article “Cultivation of New Readers in the Early Criticism of Žemaitė’s Works (1895–1915)” also writes about the poorly educated community of readers at the end of the 19th century in Lithuania. However, her article focuses not on the readers themselves, but rather on the Lithuanian cultural elite’s

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self-assigned mission to train the writers to write “correctly” for the folk, so that literature would be of greater use to “our little brothers.” Through the case of the metaphysical 18th-century Polish poet Józef Baka, Paweł Bukowiec (in his article “Constraints of Canon Constructing: Research into the Paradoxes of Reception of Józef Baka’s Poetry in Polish Literature and Literary Studies”) reveals the problematic evaluation of the pre-nationalist heritage in the era of nationalism. According to Bukowiec, it was the ideological, more so than the aesthetic, “deficiencies” which led Polish literary historiographers to position the work of this poet beyond the borders of the national canon (there was no way that Baka’s texts could be construed as correlating with the aims of the Polish national movement). In her article “The Polish Theater Canon and Comedy – a Complicated Relation,” Anna R. Burzyńska analyzes the influence of 19th-century Polish national independence ideas on the theatrical canon. This research reveals a paradox of Polish culture: even though the origins of the national theater of Poland are closely linked with the flourishing of comedy, starting in the middle of the 19th century, when more “serious” genres become central to the national canon and were prioritized by the Romantics, comedy came to be considered a genre unfit for staging at the National Theater. The collection of articles concludes with Renata Beličová’s publication “Postmodernist Representation of the Central European Multiethnic Milieu: Marek Piaček.” This article, on one hand, outsteps the chronological boundaries of the volume: it analyzes the power of postmodern musical pastiche to deconstruct the national historical narrative by foregrounding events and participants that had not been given a place in it. On the other hand, this point is illustrated through a discussion of Marek Piaček’s Apolloopera, which is a heteroglossic libretto composed of excerpts from canonical texts of various peoples that lived in Bratislava during the interwar period, so the main focus lies on the reinterpretation of the history of early 20th century. The present collection of articles expands the current interest in research on Eastern and Central European national literatures, and contributes to it through a specific perspective on the national literary canon. The cases analyzed by the authors of this collection concerning the interplay of the literary canon and nation-building show that the research of cultural nationalism practices in this region has a great potential and can offer weighty contributions to the analysis of the historical and political development of nationalism. Currently, as the ideologies of nationalism are again becoming stronger in the region of Central Europe, various aspects of this research remain pertinent because they can help to better understand processes occurring in this area. We are especially grateful to the Research Council of Lithuania and the Institute

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of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore for partially funding the publication of this collection and providing an opportunity to disseminate this work. Translated by Vaiva Aglinskas

Bibliography Dović, Marijan. “National Poets and Romantic (Be)Longing: An Introduction.” Arcadia 52, no. 1 (2017): 1–9. Kamusella, Tomasz. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Die ‘Genese des Panthéons’ – Nationalliterarische Kanonisierungs- und Ausgrenzungsprozesse im Frankreich der Spätaufklärung und der Französischen Revolution.” In Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und Übersetzung. Edited by Andreas Poltermann, 121–143. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. Neubauer, John. “Figures of National Poets: Introduction.” In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 4: Types and Stereotypes. Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 11–18. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004.

Notes on Contributors Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Romance Philology at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). Her research interests lie mainly in the problematic of modernism in Romanian culture and literature. Author of the monograph Tożsamość niejednoznaczna. Historyczne, filozoficzne i literackie konteksty twórczości B. Fundoianu/Benjamine’a Fondane’a (1898–1944) [Reconstructing Identity: Historical, Literary and Philosophical Contexts of B. Fundoianu’s / Benjamin Fondane’s works (1898–1944)] (2018). Renata Beličová is an Associate Professor and a long-term member of scientific team at the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication at The University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra (Slovakia), which is the base of so-called Nitra Aesthetics. She specializes in the aesthetics of music, especially the current problems of methodology, with special regard to reception aesthetics as a current alternative of traditional aesthetics of music. Her main publications are Recepcná hudobná estetika. Teória [The Theory of Reception-Aesthetics of Music] (2003), Music in the Culture of the European Middle Ages (2006) and Reception-Aesthetics of Music and its Nomenclature (2008). Ramunė Bleizgienė is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Vilnius, Lithuania). She has published the monograph Privati tyla, vieši balsai: Moterų tapatybės kaita XIX a. pabaigoje–XX a. pradžioje [Private Silence, Public Voices: Women’s Identity Dynamics in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century] (2012). Her academic interests are the history of women’s writing, literary history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and history of emotions. Paweł Bukowiec is a literary scholar, habilitated doctor and Assistant Professor at Katedra Kultury Literackiej Pogranicza [Chair for literary culture of border regions], Department of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland). Author of the following monographs: Dwujęzyczne początki nowoczesnej literatury litewskiej [Bilingual Beginnings of Modern Lithuanian Literature] (2008), Metronom: O jednostkowości poezji “nazbyt” rytmicznej [Metronome: On the Singularity of “Too” Rhytmical Poetry] (2015), and Różnice w druku: Studium z dziejów wielojęzycznej kultury literackiej na XIX-wiecznej Litwie [Differences

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in Print: Study in the History of Multilingual Literary Culture in 19th-century Lithuania] (2017). Anna R. Burzyńska is an Adjunct Professor of theater at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). Her main interests are contemporary European theater, Polish and German drama of 19th–21st century, and the relationship between literature and medicine. Her book publications include Mechanika cudu (2005; about Polish avant-garde drama), The Classics and the Troublemakers. Theatre Directors from Poland (2008), and two books about Stanisław Grochowiak’s work: Maska twarzy (2011) and Małe dramaty (2012). Judit Dobry is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (Slovakia). Her academic interests focus on Hungarian literature in the former Czechoslovakia and Slovakia, literary reception, and translation of Hungarian literature in Slovakia. Gergely Fórizs works as a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Literary Studies in Budapest (Hungary). His main academic interests involve the 19th-century Hungarian literature and the history of aesthetics. His book publications include: Angewandte anthropologische Ästhetik. Konzepte und Praktiken 1700–1900 = Applied Anthropological Aesthetics. Concepts and Practices 1700–1900 (2020), Anthropologische Ästhetik in Mitteleuropa 1750–1850 = Anthropological Aesthetics in Central Europe 1750–1850 (2018) (both co-edited with Piroska Balogh), and “Álpeseken Álpesek emelkednek.” A képzés eszménye Berzsenyi elméleti szövegeiben [“Alps on Alps Arise.” The Idea of “Bildung” in the Theoretical Works of Dániel Berzsenyi] (2009). Katre Kikas is a PhD student of Literature and Cultural Research at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and is currently working at the Department of Folkloristics of Estonian Literary Museum as a researcher. Her interest lie on vernacular (grassroots) literacy, nationalism and modernization in the 19th-century Estonia. Aistė Kučinskienė is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Vilnius, Lithuania) and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philology

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at Vilnius University (Lithuania). She has recently published the monograph Kultūrišku keliu: Juozo Tumo-Vaižganto laiškai [In a Cultural Way: Letters of Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas] (2020). Her main academic interests are the history of Lithuanian literature, epistolary theories, and theories of translation. Helena Markowska-Fulara works at the Department of Poetics, Literary Theory and Methodology of Literary Studies in the Institute of Polish Literature, Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw (Poland). Her academic interests revolve around literature and literary studies in the periods of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Author of the monograph Odnajdywanie języka dyscypliny Literaturoznawstwo wileńskie i warszawskie 1809–1830 [In Search of the Discipline’s Language. Literary Studies in Vilnius and Warsaw 1809–1830] (2020). Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn is a Professor at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland) and cooperates with the Department of Baltic Studies. His most recent academic output includes the following books: Gest pięknoducha. Roman Jaworski i jego estetyka brzydoty [Gesture of the “Schöngeist.” Roman Jaworski and His Aesthetic of Ugliness] (2004), Litwin wśród spadkobierców Króla-Ducha. Twórczość Čiurlionisa wobec Młodej Polski [A Lithuanian among the Heirs of King-Spirit. Čiurlionis’s Works and the Young Poland] (2007), The Year 1894 and Other Essays on the Young Poland (2012), and On the Trail of the Great Bell Brotherhood. Essays on Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century (2018), written together with Małgorzata OkuliczKozaryn. Jurga Sadauskienė works as a Research Fellow at the Department of Folk Songs at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Vilnius, Lithuania). Her main academic interests are Lithuanian folklore and traditional culture of 19th and 20th centuries. She published the monograph Didaktinės lietuvių dainos: Poetinių tradicijų sandūra XIX–XX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian Didactical Songs: Interaction of the Poetic Traditions in the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Century] (2006). Brigita Speičytė is a Professor at the Department of Lithuanian literature, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University (Lithuania). She is a researcher of multilingual Lithuanian literature of the 19th century. Author of two monographs: Poetinės kultūros formos: LDK palikimas XIX amžiaus Lietuvos literatūroje [The Poet-

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ics of Culture: The Heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Literature of the 19th century] (2004) and Anapus ribos: Maironis ir istorinė Lietuva [Beyond the Limit: Maironis and the Old Lithuania] (2012). Editor of the anthology Lietuvos literatūros antologija: Šviečiamasis klasicizmas, preromantizmas, 1795–1831 [The Anthology of Lithuanian Literature: Classicism and PreRomanticism 1795–1831, vol. 1–2] (2016). Viktorija Šeina is the Head of the Department of Modern Literature at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Vilnius, Lithuania). She has published the monograph Laikinoji sostinė lietuvių literatūroje [Temporary Capital in the Lithuanian Literature] (2014), she is also author of many academic publications on the subject of literary canon in Lithuania. Her main research interests include literary canon, nationalism, and literary education. Vaidas Šeferis works as an Associate Professor at the Department of General linguistics and Baltic languages at the Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), where he leads the Baltic studies program. He is also a co-worker at the Department of Textual Studies of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Vilnius, Lithuania). His main fields of academic interests are the old Lithuanian literature (Kristijonas Donelaitis) and its contemporary theoretical approaches (interpretative semantics). Author of the monograph Kristijono Donelaičio “Metų” rišlumas [The Cohesiveness of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s The Seasons] (2014). Jagoda Wierzejska is an historian of contemporary literature and culture, Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature of the 20th and 21st century at the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw (Poland). She is the principal investigator of the international project “(Multi)national Eastern Galicia in the Interwar Polish Discourse (and in Its Selected Counter-Discourses)” founded by National Science Centre, Poland (2019–2022, no. 2018/31/D/HS2/00356). Her current publications include a collective volume Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Legacy in East-Central European Discourses since 1918 (coedited with Magdalena Baran-Szołtys, 2020). Krystyna Zabawa is a Professor and the Head of the Literary Studies Department in the Modern Languages Institute at Jesuit University in Kraków (Poland) where she teaches English literature and children’s literature. Her fields of interests include lit-

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erature of the turn of the 19th century and early 20th century, especially poetry, female writers, children’s and YA literature. Her first monograph (1999) discussed Polish poems in prose in Młoda Polska period (1890–1918). In 2013 she published the monograph entitled Rozpoczęta opowieść. Polska literatura dziecięca po 1989 roku [A Tale Begun. Polish Children’s Literature after 1989 with regard to Contemporary Culture] and in 2017 – Literatura dziecięca w kontekstach edukacyjnych [Children’s Literature in Education].

Nation-Building Canons: Historical and Methodological Considerations Viktorija Šeina

Der Kanon ist ein Prägewerk der Identität, ob man dies will oder nicht, ob man dies anerkennt oder nicht.1 Aleida Assmann

∵ In literary research, the influence of social, political and cultural processes on the development of literature and on specific texts is not infrequently analyzed. However, there is a relatively small amount of investigations on the ways that literary texts themselves act on readers’ self-awareness as well as their perceptions of the world, how texts form models of thought and behavior, and how they instill ethical and aesthetic convictions. This article aims to outline the historical and methodological landmarks for researching the mutual interaction between the literary canon and nation-building. The interdisciplinary nature of literary canon studies and the advances made in that field are introduced as potentially applicable to the study of nationalism. The cultural turn that occurred in the humanities and social studies in the 1970s relied on a methodological presumption that it was impossible to explain any social processes or transformations while ignoring the role of culture within them.2 Accordingly, the studies of nationalism, which until the 1980s

1 “The canon is a tool of identity formation [regardless of whether] you want it to be or not, whether you recognize it or not.” Aleida Assmann, “Kanonforschung als Provokation der Literaturwissenschft,” in Kanon Macht Kultur. Theoretische, historische und soziale Aspekte ästhetischer Kanonbildung, ed. Renate von Heydebrand (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1998), 59. 2 Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21–23; Herbert Grabes and Margir Sichert, “Literaturgeschichte, Kanon und nationale Identität,” in Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 298.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_002

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were traditionally dominated by an analysis of political and social assumptions, finally returned to the cultural roots of this phenomenon. The essential impetus for this was the idea expressed in Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking book Imagined Communities (1983) that 19th-century intellectuals imagined modern nations while relying on concrete cultural and historical elements of ethnic communities.3 Over the last few decades, increased attention to the cultural roots of nationalism and / or its modes of dissemination in the studies of nationalism can be perceived (of note are the works of Miroslav Hroch, Anthony D. Smith, John Hutchinson). On the other hand, in most of the works of theorists of nationalism there is still a division of two types of nationalism: political and cultural. In the periodization of nationalism created by Hroch and broadly accepted by contemporary scholars of the subject, the interest of intellectuals in ethnic culture and their ambitions to revitalize, preserve, and disseminate it is considered to be an early phase of nationalist movements, which then pave the way for “real” political nationalism.4 The types of cultural and political nationalism are identified not only by the chronological evolution of the ideology, but also by the functions and nature of the activities of the individuals who take part in it. It is believed that in the stage of cultural nationalism, intellectuals and artists engage in creating the identity of the national community, the narrative of its past as well as of its historical destiny, while in the phase of political nationalism, public figures who have taken over the initiative seek political autonomy for the community. Nevertheless, some theorists question the difference between cultural and political nationalism. Hutchinson admits that the ideology of nationalism always retains a cultural dimension that does not disappear when the national community secures political legitimacy in the form of statehood; but it can even become stronger, particularly when the community must rally in the face of external threats or an internal crisis.5 If we recognize that nationalism always utilizes cultural arguments (national language, ethnic symbols, customs, collective memory) in defending the uniqueness of the nation and its right to an autonomous political existence, then what is the point of dividing nationalism into two separate – cultural and political – categories? Observing nationalism

3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006), 4. 4 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 22–24. 5 John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 41–42.

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studies from the perspective of a cultural historian, Joep Leerssen states that “nationalism stands out amidst other ideologies in that it formulates a political agenda on the basis of a cultural ideal; following Hroch, we may point out that in its historical gestation, too, nationalism is always, in its incipience at least, cultural nationalism.”6 Cultural processes have become equally as important as the political and social elements in nationalism studies developed in the scholarly series National Cultivation of Culture, initiated by Leerssen and his like-minded colleagues.

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The Construction of National Culture

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) laid the foundation for culture’s central role in the definition of national identity. He identified the specific national community’s culture as an essential characteristic that connected the members of that community and distinguished them from other groups. In Herder’s theory, an individual’s belonging to a specific linguistic cultural community is considered innate and therefore natural, and each national community is regarded as unique and valuable.7 The argument of cultural uniqueness subverted the concept of one global civilization, dominant during the Age of Enlightenment, which portrayed the world as a dichotomy: the civilized vs. the savage. In this fashion, Herder’s philosophy of culture provided an opportunity for those ethnic communities that were previously considered uncivilized to be legitimized and essentially transformed the concept of social groups and their identities, offering a completely novel vision of political community.8 Inspired by Herder’s ideas, intellectuals and artists of the 19th century ventured to revive the collective individuality of Europe’s ethnic communities by collecting and publicizing the sources that reveal the unique origins of their provenance and history, as well as their cultural, social and political practices.9 Even if that unique national culture was “lost” or “forgotten” over the course of the ages, they sought to find or “remember” it.10

6 7 8 9 10

Joep Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 562. F[rederick] M[echner] Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 45–46. Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 20. Idem, “Re-Interpreting Cultural Nationalism,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 3 (1999): 394. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 27.

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In creating a modern nation based on the ethnic community’s culture (language, customs, oral and written traditions, costume), 19th-century philologists and historians viewed themselves as creators and interpreters of national identity. They transformed everyday folk culture into a sacred essence that must be valued and preserved. In the process of conceptualizing national culture, intellectuals imbued it with new emotional content and symbolic capital, along with standardizing it. In doing so, they created its idealized models and established its hierarchy: this is how standard language was created from diverse dialects, how folklore was classified into a hierarchy of genres in terms of their cultural value, and how national literary canon was established. Thus, the construct is not just the nation itself, but also its national culture. “In its most basic form, national culture is not a primordial, ontological feature of human beings, but a product of the human necessity to classify and to differentiate one set of objects, people, and ethnic groups from another set.”11 One of the examples of the construction of national culture is the publication of folklore. In contemporary folklore studies there is an even greater emphasis placed on recording folklore and the formation of its collections, i.e., on the transformation of the oral texts into written ones. We have in mind here the manner in which oral performance is transformed into its written representation which will later be read, interpreted, and analyzed as a written, and therefore a literary, and not an oral text.12 As an act of representation, the textualizing and rendering into literature is comprised of various types of editorial decisions and selection preferences. Commas, semi-colons, indentations, and capitalization are just a few easily recognizable instances of a myriad of literary devices.13 Documents of oral tradition reach readers not only in written form, but they are also organized into collections, and the formation of those collections is always subjective. In other words, there is a mediator standing between the audience and the oral performance: this individual who wrote down the text, who decided what to write or not to write, and who wrote it down in a particular way and not another, and finally the one who provided the written texts with titles and who arranged them in a collection in a distinctive manner.14 Hence, folklore studies created the supposed “national texts” through which ostensibly the nation itself speaks.15 11 12

13 14 15

Ibid., 70. Pertti Anttonen, “Oral Tradition and the Making of the Finnish Nation,” in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century (National Cultivation of Culture, vol. 4), ed. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 325. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 327–328. Ibid., 330.

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A classic example of this is the definition of folk songs as a genre in the works of Herder. According to Renate von Heydebrand and Simone Winko, when, in 1773, Herder used the term “folk song” (Volkslied), he immediately imparted a positive evaluation to it.16 Different from contemporary folklorists who view the folk song as a singing genre, Herder and his disciples viewed this genre as textual (literary). And if they spoke about music, it was only when they had the musicality of the text – the way it sounded – in mind.17 Herder did not attempt to clearly define the concept of the folk song; he did not have the goal to thoroughly characterize the historical context of this genre. The amalgam of aesthetic attributes and values, which he attributes to folk songs, serves Herder as an example of a new aesthetic, while the concept of the “folk song” expresses an ideal, and not a historical reality. Herder polemicized with the aesthetics of the baroque period: the literary criticism at the time devalued oral, sung poetry, from the 17th century this genre no longer belonged to the literary discourse of the educated and could not be evaluated according to the criteria of that discourse. Herder radically inverted this judgement: he advanced oral poetry as primordial (initial) and naïve (unacademic and unscholarly), and set it as an example for written poetry.18 Herder’s idealized view of song did not fully match the real existence of the folk song in any one country or at any one time, and it certainly did not fit the condition of the German folk song neither during the period of its flourishing (15–16th centuries), nor during Herder’s own lifetime. Various non-aesthetic values are concealed in this idealized vision: the folk song can be easily disseminated throughout the nation; it expresses the common needs of the nation, its memories, its values that derive from the nation’s nature and experiences; it expresses the “dark, unfathomable” spirit of the nation; the primordial nature and freedom of the nation and its songs.19 Comparing German folk songs with those of other nations, Herder asserts that they are inferior because, as is characteristic of the German disposition, they are too didactic, and therefore the nation’s voice in them is low and not lively enough (“die Volkstimme niedrig und wenig lebendig”). It is for this reason that when preparing the collection of folk songs Volkslieder

16

17 18 19

Herder conceptualized the folk song genre in his articles “Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker” (1773) and in the notes in his folk song collection (1778–1779). Renate von Heydebrand and Simone Winko, Einführung in die Wertung von Literatur: Systematik – Geschichte – Legitimation (Padeborn: Schöningh, 1996), 164–1790. Ibid., 165. Herder contrasted folk songs as the innate poetry of old nations (“Naturpoesie” der “alten Völker”) with the “artificial poetry” of his time (“Kunstpoesie”). Ibid., 179. Ibid., 183.

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(1778, later known as Stimmen der Völker in Liedern), Herder omitted anything that was contrary to the axiological principles of his new aesthetic from the corpus of German folk songs that he was presented. In doing so, Herder started the practice that became common in the 19th century to recast folk songs and created an example of this genre for their assessment.20 Together with the folk song, another genre that was intensively exploited in the nation-building of modern Europe was the national epic. Starting in the 19th century, this term was used to refer to the fragments of old mythological stories preserved either in oral or written form which philologists had meticulously begun to publish from remaining manuscripts or, running out of written sources, to recreate them from the remains of the foundation from the oral tradition. Finnish folklorist Lauri Olavi Honko calls epics tales of identity because they are “comparable to identity symbols and able to convey extratextual meaning to those groups who recognize them as ‘our story.’”21 Therefore, epics are valuable for a specific community not only for their artistic qualities, but mostly for their function in establishing “a set of values, symbols, and emotions joining people, through constant negotiation, in the realization of togetherness and belonging, constituting a space for ‘us’ in the universe (as well as distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’”).22 Traditional oral epics are comprised of numerous diverse variations and there are no objective criteria to distinguish one model as an example. Since the time when Homer’s epics were recognized as the paradigm of the great epic, the entirety of the European cultural and literary view of epics was set against these exemplary texts. Philosophers and philologists of German Romanticism such as the brothers Schlegel, Hegel, Herder and Jacob Grimm played a significant part in espousing this view. They declared the epic as the very source of literature, as the earliest literary genre, and they considered its formation to be not only the birth of literature, but also that of the very nation.23 Adhering to the classical model of the epic, in the 19th century, the cultural elite of European nations chose only one of the dozens of versions of oral epic specific to a certain region, and established it on a national scale. The epic that up until that point had reflected local identities in the Romantic

20 21 22 23

Ibid., 184–185. Lauri Honko, “Epic and Identity: National, Regional, Communal, Individual,” Oral Tradition 11, no. 1 (1996): 21. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 29.

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era of nationalism became a global symbol of the nation and moved from the cultural periphery to the center of the canon of literary genres.24 A specific text can only become a national epic when the community of readers acknowledges it as a narrative that establishes the group’s identity. In other words, the reception of the epic is an important part of its generic definition.25 The national cultural elite had a decisive role in the canonization of national epics. It initiated the search for, selection, documentation, and publication of old mythical narratives; it formed the interpretation of the epics and created their symbolic capital. Despite the fact that the old epic narratives that had survived in manuscripts (like Beowulf or La Chanson de Roland) were forgotten for centuries and had no influence on the evolution of a specific literary tradition, and up until the 19th century the epics that survived in the oral tradition usually were only known in a specific region and not on a national scale,26 a notion formed (viable up until now) in the literary historiography to consider the national epic as the historically earliest creation, which marked the beginning of that particular literature and characterized its nature. In the Romantic era, texts that had been forgotten for centuries were newly resurrected (or created) and became the source of national literatures. They also became an ideal prototype though which in later ages authors’ creative works were measured.27 19th-century philologists and writers who were consumed with the search for, publication, and interpretation of old vernacular texts and the heritage of oral tradition not only created the concept of a national epic, they radically transformed the hitherto European self-image and historical consciousness: due to their efforts, European culture cradled in classical antiquity splintered into innumerable distinctive national cultures, each rooted in the nation’s vernacular and tribal origins.28

24 25 26

27

28

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 22. According to Honko, the Kalevala epic survived in the 19th century in the oral tradition of the Karelians and the Finns living near the eastern border of Finland. The edition of the epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot was disseminated and became known throughout Finnish society only after the establishment of the Finnish education system. Ibid., 31. Joep Leerssen, “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures,” in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe (European Studies 26), ed. Dirk van Hulle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 25. Idem, “Literary Historicism: Romaticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past,” Modern Language Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2004): 221.

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The Nationalization of European Literatures

The very fact that the origins of nationalism in Herder’s philosophy are inseparably connected to the rudiments of the concept of national literature forces us to pay more attention to the role of national literatures and their canons in the process of nation-building. Herder not only identified nations with linguistic communities, he also emphasized that each one is different from other communities in its distinctive vision and in its mode of thinking, i.e., Nationalcharakter, which manifests in all of the fields of the nation’s activities, both in customs and in writing. However, poetry is the field where the national spirit is the least restricted and therefore is expressed the most freely.29 So, from the very beginning, national literature (and folklore – because Herder did not draw an essential distinction between oral and written literature) acquired a privileged status with respect to other areas of the nation’s activities as ostensibly the most authentic medium for the expression of the national spirit. The concept of a national literature, which was created by Herder and German philologists who upheld his ideas, spread throughout Europe in the 19th century and radically transformed the concept of literature that had existed up to that point. Until the end of the 18th century, literature was viewed as the common corpus of Europe’s written heritage, the reservoir of cultural achievement in written form, with no national differentiation. And if there was a difference, then only a distinction between the literature of classical antiquity and that of modern times.30 Pascale Casanova has called the period between 1820 and 1920 in Europe the era of the nationalization of literary tradition or the Herderian revolution.31 The outcome of this revolution is that 29

30

31

“Wie ganzen Nationen eine Sprache eigen ist, so sind ihnen auch gewisse Lieblingsgänge der Phantasie, Wendungen oder Objekte der Gedanken, kurz, ein Genius eigen, der sich, unbeschadet jeder einzelnen Verschiedenheit, in den beliebtesten Werken ihres Geistes und Herzens ausdruckt. Sie in diesem angenehmen Irrgarten zu belauschen, den Proteus zu fesseln und redend zu machen, den man gewöhnlich Nationalcharakter nennt und der sich gewiβ nicht weniger in Schriften als in Gebräuchen und Handlungen der Nation äuβert: dies ist eine hohe und feine Philosophie. In den Werken der Dichtkunst, d. i. der Einbildungskraft und der Empfindungen, wird sie am sichersten geübet, weil in diesen die ganze Seele der Nation sich am freiesten zeiget.” [Johann Gottfried Herder], “Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität,” in Herders Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 5, 6th Edition (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1982), 160. Joep Leerssen, “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures,” 15; Idem, “Introduction: Writing National Literary Histories in the Nineteenth Century,” in Nation Building and Writing Literary History (Yearbook of European Studies 12), ed. Menno Spiering (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), xiii. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M[alcolm] B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–81, 103–108.

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all literatures become national, and the very idea of categorizing literature according to national groups is then considered as natural and self-evident. The national character of literature is used to define the entirety of the supposedly distinctive whole of the features of that nation.32 A sustained prominence of written culture was a key component of Western culture in the modern era. During the Age of Enlightenment, the very fact of the nonexistence of a written tradition was an important criterion in the evaluation of the degree of civilization and intellectual capacity of certain communities: prominent Western philosophers speculated about the intellectual shortcomings of a certain race because it had no ancient written sources or its own literary tradition.33 In the Romantic era, the transition from a common Western literary tradition – where Latin and then later the French language dominated – to the literary traditions created by vernacular languages, played an important role in the legitimization process of modern nations. As stated by Raymond Williams, “the sense of ‘a nation’ having ‘a literature’ is a crucial social and cultural, probably also political, development.”34 According to the popular view at the time, a cultivated national language and the sophisticated literature written in it gave the specific linguistic community the status of a civilized, and therefore a full-fledged nation. The flourishing national literature in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller became for their German contemporaries an indication that the German language is as perfectly suited for the subtlest spiritual and intellectual expressions as the French language which had dominated European literature until that time. This also advanced German national pride, because [f]or any individual in a community, the greatness of the nation is also capable of conferring individual greatness: “I am great, because I belong to a nation which has generated Goethe. […] It simply “pays” to be member of such a nation, and this bonus becomes a very powerful factor in strengthening and nourishing the sentiment of “belonging.”35 By way of analogy, the professionalization of literary works written in national languages noticeably contributed to the strengthening of self-awareness in 32 33 34 35

Ibid., 105. Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Cultural Wars (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 61. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 185. Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Role of Literature in the Making of the Nations of Europe: A Socio-Semiotic Study,” Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée 1, no. 1 (1996): 53.

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Central and Eastern European nations that had experienced the political and cultural dominance of large (imperialist) nations and to the prestige of their vernacular language. For example, the formation of the “classical” national literature served to symbolize the expressive capabilities of the Slovene literary language. “The belles-lettres proved their ‘cultural capital’ (eloquence and education) in the best possible way: with their imaginary worlds, evocation and construction of national past, and wealth of folk traditions they provided for confident comparisons with the richer and generically more complete repertory of German texts.”36 Leaders of the Lithuanian national movement used the fact of a literary tradition of belles lettres to prove the legitimacy of their national community in their arguments with the Polish-speaking nobility of their region, who did not recognize the autonomous status of a Lithuanian nation.37 Literature played an important and even a central role in the reinforcement of modern European nationalism from its very beginnings in the 18th century. Literary works in various genres participated in the process of projecting images of national communities, i.e., in a conscious shift from belonging to distinct social groups (peasants, artisans, nobility) to being members of one national community. Literature not only formed a national self-image, but also played a key role in the creation of a “typical” national landscape and fictional characters, and formed national symbols and lieux de mémoire.38 Because of its exclusive status in 19th-century society, national literature was held to be one of the most effective methods of mass nationalization. German philologists, just as those of other modern European nations, regarded literature as the most significant cultural expression of national identity, which is why there was a concerted effort to connect the teaching of national literature in the classroom with national identity and nation-building objectives.39 Ac36

37 38

39

Marko Juvan, “Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary Canon: The Topoi of Parnassus and Elysium in the Slovene Poetry of the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Neohelicon 31, no. 1 (2004): 118. Viktorija Šeina, “Die Konzeption der litauischen Nationalliteratur (von den 1890er bis zu den 1930er Jahren),” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 67, no. 2 (2018): 200–201. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Die ‘Genese des Panthéons’ – Nationalliterarische Kanonisierungs- und Ausgrenzungsprozesse im Frankreich der Spätaufklärung und der Französischen Revolution,” in Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und Übersetzung, ed. Andreas Poltermann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 121–122. Hermann Korte, “Innenansichten der Kanoninstanz Schule. Die Konstruktion des deutschen Lektürekanons in Programmschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in “Die Wahl der Schriftsteller ist richtig zu leiten.” Kanoninstanz Schule: Eine Quellenauswahl zum deutschen Lektürekanon in Schulprogrammen des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Korte, Ilonka Zimmer, and Hans-Joachim Jacob (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 34–41.

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cording to Casanova, the nationalization of literature determined the relationship between literature and politics: not only did literature become politicized, but the development of the history of literature became a political or at least an ideological activity: “Literary institutions, academies, school syllabuses, the canon – all these things now having become instruments of national identity.”40 In Leerssen’s and Ann Rigney’s view, the link between literature, canonization, and the emerging nationalization of Europe remains one of the most intriguing and complex aspects of 19th-century cultural history until today.41

3

The Concept and Functions of the Canon

The shift in perspective that occurred in post-structuralist literary studies – from the implicit reader in the text to the texts inside of the readers, from the internal connections of signs of the text or intertextual connections to the relationship between the text and the individual in social contexts – uncovered a field that had not garnered much attention by literary scholars up until that point – that is the role of literature as a medium in the shaping of gender, social, national or cultural identity.42 The very concept of a canon refers to a group or a community because it inevitably begs the question “canonical for whom?” A text that is canonical for a European may not be for a person from Asia, not to mention the national canons of specific communities. Therefore, a canon always exists within the boundaries of a particular culture. The literary canon as a phenomenon (but not as a concept) has existed almost as long as literature itself. As an example, we present the Sumerian civilization where the literary canon through socialization at school served as social consolidation and in the service of ensuring the power of the political elite.43 The long-lived history of the literary canon attests to the fact that

40 41

42 43

Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 105. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, “Introduction: Fanning out from Shakespeare,” in Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever, ed. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. Thomas Anz, “Einführung,” in Kanon Macht Kultur, 6; Assmann, “Kanonforschung als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,” 50. “Most importantly, by establishing and consolidating schools (é-dubba) as an institution of power, Sumerian culture also introduced the socio-semiotic institution of the canon. Both school and canon served to organize social life basically by creating a repertoire of semiotic models through which ‘the World’ was explained by way of a cluster of narratives, inter alia, which were naturally tailored to the liking of the ruling groups. These narratives turned out to be very powerful in imparting feelings of solidarity, belonging and ultimately submission to law and decrees which consequently did not need to be

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every community needs foundational texts, that the literary canon acts as the cultural memory which concentrates the community and as an ethic and aesthetic model of collective identity.44 An important stimulus for the analysis of the canon emerged in the 1970s when scholars of feminist criticism, a socalled minority discourse, Marxists, and post structuralists initiated the debate about the academic literary canon in the United States. They not only sought cultural pluralism in academia, but also raised questions about American national identity.45 The earlier Euro-centric and male author dominated canon no longer reflected the new cultural self-image of society in the United States. By treating the canon as a construct forced by the people in power in the past on contemporary society, its critics sought to liberate culture and society from the orthodox worldview preserved by the canon.46 The canon was criticized as reflecting the norms and values of the group in a position of power (wealthy white males) and, in turn, is used as an instrument of power – it works as a scale or filter for the acceptance or rejection of new texts. So, one of the essential reasons for criticizing the canon was connected to its function in defining community self-awareness and identity. In seeking to democratize culture, critics of the canon focused on marginalized and underprivileged literary manifestations: women’s literature, racial, ethnic minority, and working class literature.47 Still after the demystification of the so-called Canon with a capital C, the canon as a socio-cultural phenomenon did not disappear, and it does not seem to be in danger of disappearing anytime soon. The proposition by several radical critics to eliminate the canon as something that conflicts with social democratic principles (arguing that the canon is a mechanism of censorship in that it rejects everything that is in opposition to the integrity of its established tra-

44 45 46 47

enforced by physical means alone. Thus, Sumerian culture was the first society to introduce both textual activities as an indispensable institution, and the utilization of this institution for creating socio-cultural cohesion.” Even-Zohar, “The Role of Literature,” 42. Renate von Heydebrand, “Kanon Macht Kultur – Versuch einer Zusammenfassung,” in Kanon Macht Kultur, 622. Gates, Loose Canons, xi. Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991), viii–ix, 1. Erk Grimm, “Bloom’s Battles: Zur historischen Entfaltung der Kanon-Debatte in den achtziger Jahren,” in Literarische Kanonbildung (Sonderband Text + Kritik. Zeitschrift für Literatur), ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Hermann Korte (München: Text + Kritik, 2002), 47–48.

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dition)48 is futile because the canon is based on judgement; therefore, wherever there is an assessment of literature, the canon is being (re)established there.49 The need for value reference points and authority arises from society itself.50 Lately the more we talk about the death of literature, the end of the canon, the dissolution of culture, the more we see the top ten, the 100 most important, relevant and other most-something lists of books in public.51 This demonstrates that all communities need normative reference points, authorities, and hierarchies.52 The Greek word κᾰνών has Semitic roots, the primary meaning was rod or bar with which one measured straightness and length.53 Therefore, what we now call scale; in a figurative sense stands for a rule, an ideal, a model, a norm. The canon as a concept in antiquity was used to identify various norms, for example, ideal proportions in the representation of the human body (the Polykleitos canon), or the philosophical principles of “truth” (the Epicurean canon). In this sense, canonization is considered the formation of tradition, granting someone authority, i.e., acknowledging a standard, a rule, a guideline.54 Only in Christian theology there appeared something characteristic for contemporary understanding of the canon, the significance of a collection of exemplary texts, i.e., parts of the New and Old Testaments were chosen by the Church

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

Sigrid Löffler, Wer sagt uns, was wir lesen sollen? Die Bücherflut, die Kritik und der literarische Kanon (The 2002 Bithell Memorial Lecture) (London: University of London School of Advanced Study, 2003), 17–19. Ricarda Schmidt, “Der literarische Kanon: ein Organ des Willens zur Macht oder des Gewinns an Kompetenzen?”, in Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung, ed. Nicholas Saul and Ricarda Schmidt (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 10. Renate von Heydebrand, “Probleme des ‘Kanons’ – Probleme der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik,” in Germanistik, Deutschunterricht und Kulturpolitik (Vorträge des Augsburger Germanistentages 1991, vol. 4), ed. Johannes Janota (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 3. Klaus Zeyringer, “Die Kanonfalle: Ästhetische Bildung und ihre Wertelisten. Literatursoziologischer Essay,” LiTheS: Zeitschrift für Literatur- und Theatersoziologie 1 (December 2008): 74. Heydebrand, “Probleme des ‘Kanons’ – Probleme der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik,” 8; Zeyringer, “Die Kanonfalle,” 74; Philipp Löffler, “Introduction: The Practice of Reading and the Need for Literary Value,” in Reading the Canon: Literary History in the 21st Century, ed. Philipp Löffler (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017), 4. Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. 4: Ins-Loc, ed. Jürgen Mittelstroβ, 2nd Edition (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2010), 144; Hermann Korte, “K wie Kanon und Kultur: Kleines Kanonglossar in 25 Stichwörtern,” in Literarische Kanonbildung, 27; John Guillory, “Canon,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia et al., 2nd Edition (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 233. Korte, “K wie Kanon und Kultur,” 27.

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and officially proclaimed as the foundation of Christian faith. The Church’s very decision to identify certain texts as canons inevitably meant that some of the texts were rejected, left behind the margins of the canonical. In this manner, canonical books or the Holy Bible created an opposition to the apocrypha as texts of secondary import. The term “canon” was first used in the 18th century in reference to secular literature when speaking about works of antiquity.55 The aesthetic Western canon (as a phenomenon, but not a concept) was developed during the Renaissance. From the very beginning it was supra-national, and only later national classics appeared as the national canon was formed around them. In the 19th century the new emerging historiography of national literature provided the stimulus for this.56 The concept of a canon was applied to only in the 19th century both to the corpus of world literature and the best works of national literature. The historical relationship between the concept of a literary canon and the biblical canon is more detrimental than helpful for the understanding of the essence of the literary canon. According to John Guillory, the problem in the academic debate in the United States of the 1970–1980s was that the critics who called for the deconstruction or even the total rejection of the literary canon treated it as though it were the biblical canon, i.e., like some sort of concrete literary institution (like for example the Church in the case of the biblical canon) which would select exemplary texts at the time and for all time, essentially leaving all of the other works beyond the boundaries of the canon.57 However, unlike the biblical canon, aesthetic canons are neither closed nor compulsory for the reading public. Variable valence is one of the essential characteristics of the literary canon, and its normative judgement is noticeably more insignificant than the religious canon. No literary canon is established once and for all time, just like there is not one specific institution that is responsible for the formation of the canon.58

55

56

57 58

The first to apply the concept of the canon to secular literature was a professor of Classical philology at Leiden University (Netherlands) David Ruhnken (1723–1798) (Harmut von Hentig, “Kanon – contra,” Neue Sammlung. Vierteljahres-Zeitschrift für Erziehung und Geselschaft 45, no. 1 (2005): 129). Heydebrand, “Kanon Macht Kultur – Versuch einer Zusammenfassung,” 622; Lothar Ehrlich, Judith Schildt, and Benjamin Specht, “Einleitung,” in Die Bildung des Kanons: Textuelle Faktoren – Kulturelle Funktionen – Ethische Praxis, ed. Lothar Ehrlich, Judith Schildt, and Benjamin Specht (Köln: Böhlau, 2007), 11. Guillory, “Canon,” 234. Ibid., 237.

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In the late 20th century, following the canon wars, there came a time for theoretical research based on historical analysis that led to an essentially new conception of the literary canon. It is illustrated in the title of the collection of essays about the canon compiled by Renate von Heydebrand in Kanon – Macht – Kultur (1998), which can be read in two ways – Canon – Makes – Culture or Canon – Power – Culture. In keeping with the ambivalence of the title, this collection of analyses of the canon signaled a new stage when there was a conceptualization of a deeper theoretical glimpse into the phenomenon of the canon itself: not just as a mechanism for the control of cultural meaning, but also as a mechanism for the creation of meaning.59 In the 1990s, the new theoretical analyses of the canon that appeared both in the United States and in Germany (Guillory, Winko, von Heydebrand, Korte) enabled one to view the phenomenon of the literary canon as the cultural condition (kulturelle Bedingung) of any community and created the necessary terminology and methodological instrumentation for the study of the canon.

4

The Canon as a Communal Value System

The canon is a corpus of texts that a specific community considers valuable and is interested in passing on to future generations.60 In this sense, the canon differs from individual literary preferences: in order for the canon to perform its function as a cultural norm, it has to be acknowledged and accepted by members of the community and preserved in the collective consciousness of at least a few generations. We can only reasonably talk about the canon when it becomes possible to distinguish the support group and its recognized representatives who promote and defend the best literary texts and / or authors.61 The canon forms us as a community in a specific historical moment by defining our collective identity shaped by the corpus of texts, which at the same time establishes and reflects the value system of the group, is the premise of evaluation and its result, is constantly changing, and also has a tendency to

59 60

61

Leonhard Herrmann, “Kanon als System. Kanondebatte und Kanonmodelle in der Literaturwissenschaft,” in Die Bildung des Kanons, 22. Heydebrand, “Probleme des ‘Kanons’ – Probleme der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik,” 5; Simone Winko, “Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung,” in Grundzüge der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering, 4th Edition (München: Deutschen Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 585. Heydebrand, “Probleme des ‘Kanons’ – Probleme der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik,” 5.

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universalization.62 Although the reading preferences of each member of the community varies, there is still a base corpus of texts that a majority of the members of that community spanning several generations are more or less familiar with (thanks to educational institutions). Thus, the meanings, value systems, images and symbols of canonical texts settle imperceptibly into the consciousness of the members of the community. When this corpus of texts becomes a part of the collective cultural consciousness of the community, it enables the aligning of common experiences and underlying attitudes and draws links of commonality between members of a concrete group, and becomes the basis for their communication. Another important characteristic of the canon is that it establishes the community’s collective memory, performs the function of a storage location of cultural information.63 A multitude of individual texts becomes the usable past, i.e., a form of collective memory that meaningfully connects the present to the past, only by being in the canonical paradigm.64 Therefore, the canon draws a thread not only between the members of the contemporary community, thanks to the canon all generations of the past are united starting from the mythical genesis of the community (which is why nation-building narratives and epics of legendary origins acquire such gravity) and the path to the future is outlined (through the ethical ideals of the community and the texts that postulate its historical mission). Von Heydebrand identifies three essential cultural symbolic functions actualized by the canon: (1) the self-image of the group or community and the establishment of social identity (the canon represents the group’s norms and values that brought that particular group together); (2) the validation and dissociation of the group from other groups (legitimization function); (3) orientation of activities (the canonized texts are those which encode clear forms for knowledge, aesthetic norms, conceptions of morality, and rules of behavior with which the members of the group or community can align). Anthony D. Smith in his book The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) identifies those same functions in describing the application of culture in nation-building. According to him, the leaders of national movements in the nation-building process purposefully select cultural elements of

62

63 64

Clemens Ruthner, “‘Das Neue ist nicht zu vermeiden.’ Der Literaturkanon zwischen Ästhetik und Kulturökonomie – eine Theorieskizze,” in Der Kanon – Perspektiven, Erweiterungen und Revisionen (Stimulus: Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Germanistik), ed. Jürgen Struger (Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2008), 37. Ilonka Zimmer, Uhland im Kanon: Studien zur Praxis literararischer Kanonisierung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 34. Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 87–88.

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an ethnic community (ethnie) that (1) help rally the community and (2) distinguish that community from others. Usually, according to Smith, the community’s distinct language and religion are selected, but customs, law, folklore, architecture, clothing, food, music, and art are also used to emphasize the community’s uniqueness from the others.65 We may also add literature to this list. It is not by chance that the formation of a national literary canon occurred in tandem with the formation of modern European nations and nation-states. The national canon allowed the social group that dominated society and culture to instill a collective identity by using the corpus of the most significant texts of the national literature as a value system that strengthened national self-awareness and in this way gave the national self-identity symbolic expression and highlighted the uniqueness of the cultural community within the context of other communities.66 The need for self-identification and a normative value system for a community determines the internal structure of the canon, which can be conceived as a narrative based on unique social rules.67 To put it simply, the formation of the canon is based on the totality of various authors and texts, and not on separate texts and authors. A certain value-driven code determines the internal construction of the canon; as the code changes, so does the actual canon itself. The code is not an absolute, or an ahistorical norm, rather it is the totality of criteria that ensures the stability of the canon throughout historical evolution, and also its flexibility.68 Ideally, literary canon research should be conducted on the principle of a hermeneutical circle: examining how one text entered the canon (or, in contrast, was pushed out of it) in an attempt to understand the common mechanisms of canon formation that led to the adoption (or rejection) of that particular text. Conversely, only by understanding the criteria for canon formation, its inner hierarchy and narrative, is it possible to explain the reasons for the inclusion or expulsion of a specific text into or out of the canon. Guillory underscores that the canonicity of a certain work is determined by its relationship with other works in the internal structure of the canon: individual works are pulled into this system (preserved, disseminated, taught) and presented to the public as already canonical.69 The school as an institution 65 66 67 68 69

Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 26. Korte, “Innenansichten der Kanoninstanz Schule,” 34. Herrmann, “Kanon als System. Kanondebatte und Kanonmodelle in der Literaturwissenschaft,” 28–32. Ibid., 39. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55.

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establishing the canon subordinates the historic specificity of an individual work for the ideology of the canonical form (the code), and this subordination is recognized in pedagogical practices as the homogenization of the dogmatic content, presenting universal truths found and discovered in great works.70 The literature curriculum can assimilate rather dangerous heterodoxies expressed in certain works by applying homogenizing methods for mastering of the texts, by using institutional structures of symbolic power. It is only in this manner that it is possible to explain the introduction of the same canonical work to different generations of students while different and even incompatible ideologies prevail.71 (One example of an author who preserved his canonical status in the German literary canon through antithetical significance is Schiller.)72 The homogenizing mechanisms within the structure of the canon are enabled by the polysemy of the canonical texts which allows different communities at different points in time to read the same texts with a different interpretation. Even when the same authors endure in the canon throughout the centuries, extreme changes can occur within this structure, both in terms of meaning and function.73 Canonical texts can retain their indisputable position for a long time primarily because they are multilayered and can thus be associated with various semantic contexts and value judgements.74 As in all literature, the canon embodies a great variety of values: cognitive, ethic, aesthetic, emotional, hedonistic, etc. However, the canon retains these values in itself only in potentia. Concrete values are conveyed to the community in the form of a catalog of criteria and canonized meanings. This is why von Heyebrand distinguishes the concepts of the “material canon” and the “interpretative canon” (Deutungskanon). The material canon (the concrete corpus of texts or authors) in itself does not have a normative power; this is granted by the valuations (Wertvorstellungen) of literary historians, critics, scholars. It is only through their determinations that the material canon works as a norm. The concept of the “material canon” refers to a fixed fund of texts of the literary canon as well as to a group of authors who at a certain time were endowed with canonical status.75 The “interpretative canon” defines canonical methods and interpretations and according to its criteria the material canon of a corresponding time period is interpreted and evaluated. This is how the

70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 57. Ibid., 63. Korte, “K wie Kanon und Kultur,” 26. Heydebrand, “Kanon Macht Kultur – Versuch einer Zusammenfassung,” 616. Winko, “Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung,” 598. Zimmer, Uhland im Kanon, 37–38.

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sum of fixed meanings of a specific text is established, ensuring the prevailing understanding of a text or an author; and in doing so, it fulfills the stabilizing function in the process of canonization.76 The flexibility of the interpretative canon poses a significant opposition to the relative stability of the material canon. This explains the fact that while the same texts are read and interpreted repeatedly, those interpretations, which ascribe certain meanings to these texts, differ. In this way, the canon can meet the society’s needs both for cultural stability and for transformation.77 Social and cultural fluctuations are closely related to the phases of literary decanonization. Decanonization is neither a phenomenon of quickly changing fashions and tendencies nor is it a symptom of the decline of a culture. It is an indicator of a vitally important renewal of the canon, which performs a stabilizing function in the system of the canon.78 The restructuring of the canon, the decanonization of various authors and works, is an important phase of the renewal of a canon and is vitally important for its survival. The general corpus does not collapse during the course of history, only certain parts are replaced by others. According to Guillory, the revision of the canon in school curricula usually manifests itself as a shift of the center from old works to contemporary ones, because the community needs new social identities that are established by new writers. Essentially, the tendency to modernize at the cost of old works is endemic to the history of school curricula. For example, in the English school system of the early 18th century, the classic curriculum espousing vernacular works corresponded with the cultural needs of the rising bourgeoisie, and consequently most of the Greek and Roman works were abolished from the teaching plan.79 Although the importance of school as a form of canon socialization is indisputable, even a child’s understanding of the canon is based not just on the impact of the educational system but also on the influence of his or her parents and nearest cultural environment. Literary socialization at home and at schools adjusts one’s individual assessments with cultural standards and consensuses on literary value criteria, if not common for a society as a whole, than

76 77

78 79

Winko, “Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung,” 597. Thomas Anz, “Einblicke in die literaturwissenschaftliche Kanonforschung: Von der Vorschrift zur Beschreibung – und zurück,” in Warum wir lesen, was wir lesen: Beiträge zum literarischen Kanon, ed. Olaf Kutzmutz (Wolfenbüttel: Bundesakademie für kulturelle Bildung Wolfenbüttel, 2002), 24–25. Korte, “K wie Kanon und Kultur,” 25–26. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 15.

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at least shared between specific groups of people.80 Literary criticism, literary salons, museums, celebration practices, etc. also perform the function of socialization. However, as much as socialization of the canon is important for its establishment, von Heydebrand emphasizes that the spread of the canon is not the same as its recognition.81 In the strictest sense, only a system of normative literary values, recognized and accepted by readers, can be called canon. The power of readers is significant: canon is only valid for as long as readers accept it and actively transmit it from generation to generation. Hence only when canon is valid can it develop cultural power. It manifests itself as sort of reading “glasses,” i.e., influencing the perception and evaluation of other texts. In addition, canon creates its own “programme” for future text production.82 According to von Heydebrand, proof of the validity of the canon is the greatest challenge for canon research. Without such proof, talks about the power of the canon remain abstract and unfounded. The effectiveness of the canon is potentially demonstrated by its representation in literary history, anthologies, as well as the programmes of educational institutions, and long-term representation of texts in the literary market. However, the actual validity of the canon manifests through its articulation in the autonomous literary system: various types of intertextual references, from dedications to parodies.83

5

Conclusion

The connection between the community and its literary canon is bilateral. During its formation, a modern nation establishes itself through various cultural practices, one of which is the development of a literary canon. The canon defines the cultural and national identity of the community, establishes a system of common ethical and aesthetic values for the members of the community, and shapes a historical narrative. In constantly restructuring, but all the while preserving the unchanged constellation of the core, the literary canon develops its cultural power for the community’s future generations: it links multiple generations of the same national group into a common collective.

80 81 82 83

Simone Winko, “Literatur-Kanon als invisable Hand-Phänomen,” in Literarische Kanonbildung, 16. Heydebrand, “Kanon Macht Kultur – Versuch einer Zusammenfassung,” 615. Ibid., 618. Ibid., 621.

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Canonical texts establish the tradition and generate forthcoming literary production (not necessarily as examples to follow, but as a pivot point for the further development of literature), and preserve the historical narrative that unifies the community. Thus, the nation builds its canon, while the canon creates the nation. As long as nations endure, their canons will exist. The history of the canon’s formation, its revisions, and debates provides valuable material for scholars of nationalism in explaining cultural practices that were used to establish and still are used to support, and unite national communities. In the theoretical field of literary sociology, an advanced methodological apparatus of canon research has been used predominantly by scholars of German studies in reconstructing the interaction between the national literary canon and the establishment of the German nation. Scholars researching East-Central European literatures could make use of these methodological instruments as well, especially bearing in mind that in this specific region vernacular language, oral tradition, and / or the literary heritage all play an essential role in nation-building. Translated by Ada Valaitis

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Augsburger Germanistentages 1991, vol. 4). Edited by Johannes Janota, 3–22. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Honko, Lauri. “Epic and Identity: National, Regional, Communal, Individual.” Oral Tradition 11, no. 1 (1996): 18–36. Hroch, Miroslav. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Hutchinson, John. “Re-Interpreting Cultural Nationalism.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 3 (1999): 392–409. Hutchinson, John. The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Juvan, Marko. “Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary Canon: The Topoi of Parnassus and Elysium in the Slovene Poetry of the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Neohelicon 31, no. 1 (2004): 113–123. Korte, Hermann. “Innenansichten der Kanoninstanz Schule. Die Konstruktion des deutschen Lektürekanons in Programmschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In “Die Wahl der Schriftsteller ist richtig zu leiten.” Kanoninstanz Schule: Eine Quellenauswahl zum deutschen Lektürekanon in Schulprogrammen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Hermann Korte, Ilonka Zimmer, and Hans-Joachim Jacob, 17–111. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005. Korte, Hermann. “K wie Kanon und Kultur: Kleines Kanonglossar in 25 Stichwörtern.” In Literarische Kanonbildung, 25–38. Leerssen, Joep, and Ann Rigney. “Introduction: Fanning out from Shakespeare.” In Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. Edited by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, 1–23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Leerssen, Joep. “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures.” In Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and NationBuilding in Nineteenth-Century Europe (European Studies 26). Edited by Dirk van Hulle, 13–27. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 559–578. Leerssen, Joep. “Literary Historicism: Romaticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past.” Modern Language Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2004): 221–244. Leerssen, Joep. “Introduction: Writing National Literary Histories in the Nineteenth Century.” In Nation Building and Writing Literary History (Yearbook of European Studies 12). Edited by Menno Spiering, ix–xv. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Löffler, Philipp. “Introduction: The Practice of Reading and the Need for Literary Value.” In Reading the Canon: Literary History in the 21st Century. Edited by Philipp Löffler, 1–22. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017.

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Löffler, Sigrid. Wer sagt uns, was wir lesen sollen? Die Bücherflut, die Kritik und der literarische Kanon (The 2002 Bithell Memorial Lecture). London: University of London School of Advanced Study, 2003. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Die ‘Genese des Panthéons’ – Nationalliterarische Kanonisierungs- und Ausgrenzungsprozesse im Frankreich der Spätaufklärung und der Französischen Revolution.” In Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – kultureller Text: Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und Übersetzung. Edited by Andreas Poltermann, 121–143. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. Mittelstroβ, Jürgen, ed. Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. 4: InsLoc, 2nd Edition. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2010. Ruthner, Clemens. “‘Das Neue ist nicht zu vermeiden.’ Der Literaturkanon zwischen Ästhetik und Kulturökonomie – eine Theorieskizze.” In Der Kanon – Perspektiven, Erweiterungen und Revisionen (Stimulus: Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Germanistik). Edited by Jürgen Struger, 31–60. Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2008. Schmidt, Ricarda. “Der literarische Kanon: ein Organ des Willens zur Macht oder des Gewinns an Kompetenzen?” In Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung. Edited by Nicholas Saul and Ricarda Schmidt, 9–21. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Šeina, Viktorija. “Die Konzeption der litauischen Nationalliteratur (von den 1890er bis zu den 1930er Jahren).” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 67, no. 2 (2018): 196–224. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press, 1988. Winko, Simone. “Literatur-Kanon als invisable Hand-Phänomen.” Literarische Kanonbildung, 9–24. Winko, Simone. “Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung.” In Grundzüge der Literaturwissenschaft. Edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering, 4th Edition, 585–600. München: Deutschen Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001. Zeyringer, Klaus. “Die Kanonfalle: Ästhetische Bildung und ihre Wertelisten. Literatursoziologischer Essay.” LiTheS: Zeitschrift für Literatur- und Theatersoziologie 1 (December 2008): 72–103. Zimmer, Ilonka. Uhland im Kanon: Studien zur Praxis literararischer Kanonisierung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009.

Part 1 The Shaping of National, Cultural and Literary Identities

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Classicists and the Classics: The Polish Literary Canon in Academia (1800–1830) Helena Markowska-Fulara

Directly after the fall of the independent Polish-Lithuanian state in 1795, redefining national identity became an urgent necessity. In the context of political and cultural changes the role of literature as a tool of education and modernization needed to be reconsidered as well. The Romantic tendencies which spread through Europe at that time emphasized the local and the historical, which provided a strong impetus for a transformation of the concept of “literature.” Work on the development of national canons was a natural consequence of these changes. In former Poland this work was carried out not only by the young Romantics, but also (and most importantly) by the then literary establishment, by acclaimed writers and experts on literature, who represented eclectic views on artistic work derived for the most part from Classicism and Sentimentalism.1 An analysis of the concepts that underlay their decisions concerning literary models seems worthwhile for at least two reasons. Firstly, it provides an insight into the processes by which the canon of Polish literature and research into its early period came into existence. Secondly, it can be viewed as a lesson concerning the complex mutual interdependencies between the concepts of literature and nationality, and the collection of texts considered canonical. These interdependencies concern not only the literary and ideological spheres. The processes in question should also be considered in the institutional context of literary studies, developing as an academic discipline different from poetics and rhetoric – the two arts that in European education

1 According to the tradition established by the Polish Romantics, they were called “the Classics” [“klasycy”] or “pseudo-Classics” [“pseudoklasycy”], in order to emphasize the negative view on their writings. I refer to this group of authors as the “Classicists” to distinguish them from “canonical authors” – “the classics.” However, Classicism was not the only aesthetics that inspired them, as demonstrated by 20th-century studies. Cf. Teresa Kostkiewiczowa, Klasycyzm, sentymentalizm, rokoko. Szkice o prądach literackich polskiego Oświecenia [Classicism, Sentimentalism and the Rococo. Sketches on literary trends in the Polish Enlightenment] (Warszawa: PWN, 1975); Zdzisław Libera, “Problem późnego oświecenia” [The problem of the Late Enlightenment], Wiek Oświecenia [The Age of Enlightenment] 1 (1978); Piotr Żbikowski, Klasycyzm postanisławowski: doktryna estetycznoliteracka [Classicism after Stanisław II Augustus: The aesthetic and literary doctrine] (Warszawa: PWN, 1984).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_003

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were traditionally connected with the artistic use of language. In the case of research on the Polish thought of that period, academia as a specific environment for shaping literary notions has not become an object of studies to date. Writings on literature have been considered first and foremost as a source of knowledge on the aesthetic ideas related to the opposition between Classicism and Romanticism. Without denying the importance of literary trends of that period for the development of literary studies, it needs to be observed that the literary judgements were influenced by a methodological debate, which was, in turn, conditioned by institutional changes. Situated at the meeting point of the institutional and the intellectual, the universal and the local, the past of literary studies appears as entangled in all those spheres. Entangled as in entangled history, is one possible translation of Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s histoire croisée.2 The name serves as a handy metaphor opening up a research field in which the objects of our attention are not stable domains – in fact a construct established by interpreting “the entangled” – but the entanglement itself, the knot.3 After a slight reinterpretation, this concept may be adapted as a convenient instrument used not only to examine interdependencies between cultures (important for the humanities interested in the global and the postcolonial), but also between events and their contexts, between the individual and the collective, private and public, theory and practice, and finally – the object and its research. The said approach does not promise to untangle history and select from it a singlethreaded causative sequence. On the contrary, it recognizes this promise as naïve and demands that we point out the “knots”: events, objects or people, which are the pivots that assemble4 many threads of different phenomena. With reference to the selected field of study, the word “literature” and the concept that it refers to may be viewed as such a knot.

2 As the source of this term, they point to Shalini Randeria’s writings. Cf. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, “Beyond Comparison. Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 31. 3 Werner and Zimmerman write about an “intercrossing.” I would like to emphasize the complicated and intellectually challenging character of the interaction of different spheres, which not only intersect, but are also entangled in one another. One interesting term concerning history as an unclear sphere that influences the researcher’s discourse is the – untranslatable – żmut, introduced by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz and taken from the regional Polish dialect used in Lithuania, where it meant “a tangle” or even “scrofula.” 4 The word ‘assemble’ may in that context look back to Bruno Latour’s approach. Cf. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). It is worth noting that in Polish translation ‘reassembling’ becomes ‘splatając’– which means ‘intertwining’ rather than ‘putting together.’

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The Early 19th Century in Polish Literary Studies

This period is particularly interesting for a student of the history of literary studies for several reasons. It was then that Polish historical and theoretical literary studies developed into a discipline that aspired to academic status. Its emergence is usually associated with the anti-Positivist breakthrough or discussed in the context of Positivist philological practice. However, it may have originated almost a century earlier.5 It emerged in the very first decades of the 19th century, particularly in connection with the activity of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning (from 1800), the reform of Vilnius University (1803)6 and the foundation of a university in Warsaw (1816). Literary studies were becoming more and more professional, which was related to the development of philology (the classics, German Altertumswissenschaften) as an academic discipline. Its father was Friedrich August Wolf,7 teacher of Feliks Bentkowski, who wrote the History of Polish Literature, the first Polish book conceived as a national literary history.8 Another trend or movement postulated by Herder9 and others, important already in 18th-century Europe and influential for work on the literary canon, was the quest for historical monuments of national literatures. This movement is usu-

5 Galin Tihanov discusses some of the reasons why literary studies emerged in Central and Eastern Europe earlier than in the West. Cf. Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why It Is Dead Now?),” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2004). 6 Cf. Daniel Beauvois, Szkolnictwo polskie na ziemiach litewsko-ruskich 1803–1832 [Polishlanguage education in the Lithuanian and Ruthenian territories in 1803–1832], vol. 1: Uniwersytet Wileński (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 1991). 7 According to a biographical legend, Wolf was the first to sign in the matriculation book of the University of Göttingen as studiosus phililogiae. See Alfred Gudeman, Grundriss der Geschichte der Klassischen philology (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1907). 8 As key models for Bentkowski’s works, researchers mention the publications by German authors: Ludwig Wachler, Versuch einer allgemeine Geschichte der Litteratur (Lemgo: Meyer, 1793–1801), his teacher Christoph August Heumann, Conspectus reipublicae literariae (Hanover: Foerster, 1718), Johan Gottfried Eichhorn, Geschichte der Literatur (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1805–1812), and Erduin Julius Koch, Compendium der deutschen Literatur-Geschichte (Berlin: Königl. Realschulbuch, 1790–1798). Stanisław Makowski, “Feliks Bentkowski,” in Z dziejów polonistyki warszawskiej [From the history of Polish philology studies in Warsaw], ed. Janina Kulczycka-Saloni (Warszawa: PWN, 1964), 118; Helena Choraczyńska, “Geneza Historii literatury polskiej Feliksa Bentkowskiego” [On the origins of Feliks Bentkowski’s History of Polish Literature], Folia bibliologica 55/56 (2013/2014): 218. 9 See Zygmunt Łempicki, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 389–404.

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ally associated with recording oral folk traditions (as in the case of James Macpherson’s forgery and the studies conducted by the Grimm brothers), but it also involved broader-scale encyclopedic research. The movement undoubtedly sprang from a fascination with the culture of the lower classes, but also, even primarily, from the emerging concepts of nationality. Both these tendencies (the professionalization of arts and science,10 including philology, and the call to explore the history of national literatures) are of crucial importance for an understanding of the debates then taking place in Poland, which concerned both literature (the famous dispute of the Classics and the Romantics)11 and literary studies. The latter include less commonly discussed polemics such as the one related to the publication of the already mentioned first History of Polish Literature, by Bentkowski, as well as to the choice of persons to whom the posts of professors of literature were offered at Polish universities.

2

“French” and “German” Literary Studies

The above-mentioned debates12 helped distinguish two ways of studying literature that were practiced at that time and were directly related to the concepts of the canon and to the lists of texts that were deemed canonical and submitted to analyses. Jan Śniadecki, vice-chancellor of Vilnius University, was the first one to label those two methods “French” and “German.” In his intention this distinction was not neutral, as Śniadecki – a representative of Polish French-oriented Enlightenment – was an implacable opponent of all the “German” tendencies in culture, especially of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and literary Romanticism. In literary studies also he speaks for the “French” method. In the “French” sense, Śniadecki claimed, literary studies “are like the

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More on the process in: Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). The body of texts dedicated to this dispute in Polish studies is enormous. Let me mention just one recent publication: Tomasz Jędrzejewski, Literatura w warszawskiej prasie kulturalnej pogranicza oświecenia i romantyzmu [Literature in Warsaw’s cultural press in Late Enlightenment and Early Romanticism] (Kraków: Universitas, 2016). This study is particularly important for me since it presents the dispute as a debate on national literature rather than a struggle between literary coteries. While Jędrzejewski focuses on press articles, I concentrate on academic literary studies. More on the polemic about Bentkowski’s History of Polish Literature as “entangled history” in: Helena Markowska-Fulara, “Historia splątana. Przypadek Historii literatury polskiej Feliksa Bentkowskiego” [Entangled history. The case of Feliks Bentkowski’s History of Polish Literature], Śląskie studia polonistyczne 2 (2018): 221–245.

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delectable and expert «carving» of model writers so as to discover the principles of order, power and beauty and to pass useful judgments on their art of writing.”13 The “German” approach was applied in History of Polish Literature (publ. 1814) by Bentkowski (the author admitted this influence himself in response to Śniadecki’s questions). In the introduction we read: “[T]he aim of literary history is to represent the state of learning and of ability as faithfully and systematically as possible.”14 He also writes that the history of literature “describes not only the gradual progress of education and of scientific competence, but of each discipline in particular.”15 It should be added that the aim of Bentkowski’s monograph was “to represent what we have in each field of learning and ability written in our own language and by our compatriots.”16 What, then, is the difference between the two approaches? According to Śniadecki’s “French” method, the aim of literary studies is to study the principles or rules that govern the structure of a literary text. These rules allow us to pass judgements on texts and point to those that we consider as ideal models and part of the canon. With reference to the age of Classicism, those rules were usually viewed as norms that defined a given genre. One should remember, however, that they were not arbitrary but depended on the function ascribed to the given type of utterance. In this approach, therefore, a literary work is first and foremost a certain use of language. For Śniadecki, the aim of literary studies and reading is “to make men more perfect in speech and thought.”17 This is achieved by studying the art of writing, which allows us to understand why we read some texts with pleasure. By “«carving» the model writers” we “train our attention” and “form our tastes.” Most importantly, however, we learn “the purity, power, flow and ornaments of our na-

13 14 15 16 17

Jan Śniadecki, “O literaturze” [On literature], in his Wybór pism naukowych [Selected academic writings], ed. Zdzisław Libera and Stefan Drobot (Warszawa: PWN, 1954), 100. Feliks Bentkowski, Historia literatury polskiej [History of Polish literature], vol. 1. (Warszawa: Zawadzki, 1814), 1. Ibid. Ibid., VII. Śniadecki, “O literaturze,” 97. These two spheres were considered as directly interdependent, and governed by the rules of Logic. This assumption was expressed probably most clearly in the most famous Enlightenment-age grammar: Grammaire générale et raisonnée by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, known as the Port-Royal Grammar. Cf. Zygmunt Kloch, Spory o język [The debate on language] (Warszawa: IBL PAN, 1995), 29–44; Maria Renata Mayenowa, “Wstęp” [Introduction], in Ludzie oświecenia o języku i stylu [Writers of the Enlightenment Age on language and style], vol. 1, ed. Maria Renata Mayenowa (Warszawa: PIW, 1958), 12.

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tional tongue.”18 In the “German” view, on the other hand, as represented by Bentkowski’s work, the text is a document of the given nation’s intellectual culture.

3

Academic Practice: “Comparative Literature” and “Polish Literature”

The differences of approach presented above resulted in different concepts of what texts deserved to be read and analyzed, as well as selected for syllabuses. This methodological distinction is an interesting aspect of lectures on literature delivered at the University of Warsaw. Our choice of the early 19th century as a key period for the formation of modern literary studies in Poland is closely related to the changing ways in which this subject – traditionally referred to as “poetry and rhetoric,” and later as “literature” – was taught at universities. It is symptomatic that in Vilnius (where a suitable chair of studies had already been established before the partitions of Poland) both the academic post and the subject were designated by that former name, whereas in Warsaw (where a new university was set up in 1816) a Chair of Polish Literature was created.19 Establishing the Chair resulted in the necessity to define “literature” as the object of literary studies. First head and professor of the Chair was Ludwik Osiński, already known both for translations and for his own writings.20 In 1822 the need to provide students with a sufficient number of hours of classes in literature21 led to the appointment of a second professor to that Chair – Kazimierz Brodziński. The preserved syllabuses demonstrate the differences between the two university courses. From the moment of their introduction, Osiński’s lectures were referred to as comparative literature and Brodziński’s – as Polish literature.22

18 19

20 21 22

Śniadecki, “O literaturze,” 102. Apart from historical and methodological ones, there is of course a political aspect to those names. Vilnius was part of the Russian Empire, whereas Warsaw was the capital of Congress Poland, dependent on Russia, but formally separate. He was the author of Classicist odes and translations of the tragedies by Pierre Corneille and Voltaire. Osiński’s lectures were very popular among the higher strata of Warsaw’s society; unfortunately, they were held only once a week. Józef Bieliński, Królewski Uniwersytet Warszawski [The Royal University of Warsaw], vol. 3 (Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolf, 1912), 318.

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At first glance what differentiates the two courses (later published23) is the organization of material. Osiński discussed literary works by genre, Brodziński – chronologically. This resulted directly from the two different concepts of literary studies. Osiński treated the texts selected for discussion as “models,” the French bons modèles, and therefore in each genre only discussed those texts that he considered perfect or nearly perfect and thus worthy of imitation. Brodziński directly criticized this approach: “[I]t is a common concept of those who start their study today only to read model texts by some perfect writers.”24 He himself took a different stance. He explained why his lectures also discussed texts that could be considered to be of poorer quality or even boring: “in the history […] of Polish literature we only study one nation, not in order to point out models of good taste, but to acquire comprehensive knowledge of this nation; not so much to form judgements about its texts, but about the nation itself.”25 The same passage emphasizes one more difference between the two courses: Osiński analyzed works of European literature and only sometimes mentioned Polish translations, while Brodziński dedicated his entire course to Polish literature. Osiński’s French method based on “good models” seems obviously canoncentered and resonates with Śniadecki’s definition of literary studies as the “«carving» of model writers.” However, the postulate to read only “perfect” writers might spring from different reasons. While Śniadecki emphasized the practical aspect of reading and analyzing literary works as a school of good writing and thinking, Osiński took a more theoretical stance. In the introduction to his lectures he names two procedures that should be used by the literary scholar: comparison and analysis.26 Consisting of two steps, this method makes his research traditional and innovative at the same time. It is traditional because it operates on the texts of acclaimed writers; it is also based on acclaimed sources, mostly on Lycée ou Cours de littérature (1799) by JeanFrançois de La Harpe. At the beginning of the 19th century it was traditional also because French culture was the established model for Polish Enlightenment elites. On the other hand, placing comparison at the heart of his method

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Ludwik Osiński, “Wykład literatury porównawczej” [Lectures in comparative literature] in his Dzieła [Works], vols. 2–3 (Warszawa: Nakład wdowy po autorze [Under the imprint of the author’s widow], 1861); Kazimierz Brodziński, “Literatura polska” [Polish Literature] in his Pisma [Writings], vol. 3 (Poznań: Gebethner i Wolf, 1872). Brodziński, “Literatura polska,” 217. Ibid., 472. Osiński, “Wykład literatury porównawczej,” vol. 2, 1.

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links Osiński’s lectures to the most recent “French” ideas – those of comparative literature, which led for example to Able F. Villemain’s Cours de la littérature française (1828–1829). The procedure of analysis and comparison resulted from an aspiration to make literary studies more scientific.

4

Models and Nationality

This does not mean, however, that only the stance represented by Osiński in his academic practice was normative and aimed to establish a canon, or that only Brodziński was interested in the national formation of his audience. With reference to the former issue, one should note that Brodziński did not refrain from passing judgements, either. He effectively proposed a hierarchy of authors, speaking most favorably of those who – in his opinion – best reflected the spirit of the nation. They ought to write in a “pure” Polish language, without sprinkling it with Latinate phrases – a practice which the writers of the early Polish Enlightenment had already opposed. What is more, literary works ought to reflect the character of the nation, which Brodziński understands (after Herder) as shaped by a quiet rustic life dedicated to tilling the soil.27 As for the latter aim (that of national formation), Osiński’s program defined two aims of teaching literature: the ability to assess, but also – to write new literary texts. The Enlightenment Age universalism of this approach did not mean, however, that the final aim of reading model texts was any other but to form Polish writers. One could repeat after Śniadecki that reading the “classics” develops the powers of attention, taste, and the skill of expressing one’s thoughts. Osiński’s other contributions as translator and director of the national theater who staged serious plays there (those which, he believed, represented a suitable model of tragedy) also aimed to form Polish society as a community of enlightened people capable of recognizing and creating valuable works, products of the intellect. For instance, in the final section of a passage dedicated to Polish drama, Osiński expressed the hope that his successors – professors of literature – would already be able to discuss the principles of art on examples taken from Polish texts.28

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His theory of the bucolic tale as the genre that best reflects Polish national character was presented by Brodziński in his most famous treatise, O klasyczności i romantyczności [On Classicist and Romantic qualities], published in 1818. Osiński, “Wykład literatury porównawczej,” vol. 3, 225.

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The Canon: Two Orders of Assessment and Its Justification – The Case of Jan Kochanowski

I particularly emphasize here the principles of selecting important texts that served the aims of either of the two professors – since this is the essence of canon-making, and the bodies of works listed in most texts from that period as worth reading are surprisingly similar. All the records of academic lectures I have analyzed give Jan Kochanowski – a representative of the Renaissance and the “father” of Polish poetry – pride of place among poets. His consistent placement in the pantheon of Polish poets proves the lasting impact of aesthetic hierarchies inherited from the so-called Stanislaus August Enlightenment (named after Poland’s last king). It also reflects the idea of the Renaissance, the times of kings Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus, when Kochanowski lived and worked, as the “golden age” of Polish culture. Still, a careful reading of the passages dedicated to this poet by Brodziński and Osiński reveals differences in the justification of this placement. In Osiński’s writings, Kochanowski is one of the few Polish authors to be mentioned several times. Osiński praised his “substance, thought, aptness and abundance of imagination, fervor and passion,”29 as well as the simplicity and purity of his language. Interestingly, apart from such general praise he also compared Kochanowski to eminent Western poets – to whom he was senior, which – for Osiński – not so much proved his originality as it justified his mistakes, resulting from the lack of suitable models.30 Brodziński also made similar comparisons, but his purpose was to demonstrate that Polish poetry attained a high artistic level earlier than its Western counterparts. Brodziński discussed Kochanowski’s oeuvre at considerable length, also quoting arguments which do not directly concern the ars poetica. For him, Kochanowski was original,31 and reflected his soul fully in his poetry,32 so that – when we read his works – we can see the man, but we forget the poet.33 Kochanowski also represented “a truly national taste.”34 Characteristically, Brodziński did not discuss Kochanowski’s translation of the psalms in detail, since he claimed that the psalms were not part of Polish poetry – and clearly separated the poet’s original works from his renderings of other texts, whereas in Osiński’s

29 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid., 333. Ibid., 215. Brodziński, “Literatura polska,” 16. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 25.

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writings it is the translations that took pride of place.35 What Osiński valued highly in Kochanowski was the nearly perfect form, which could rival the works of foreign poets. Brodziński, on the other hand, praised his sincerity and originality.

6

Language and Two Models of Nationalism

Both scholars dedicated much space to Kochanowski’s poetic language, which also played a major role in their critical opinions concerning other writers and works. Also in this respect, apparent agreement between the two conceals a characteristic difference of focus. Osiński, like Śniadecki, emphasized the “purity” of Kochanowski’s Polish language as promotion of good models, which consequently improved the overall level of education and thus made the nation more uniform, as it were – through a top-down process of unification. For Brodziński, language was important as an expression of the national spirit. It is their approach to the question of language that allows us to distinguish – within the two concepts of literary studies – also two different concepts of nationality. The “French” approach represents a “state” model in which the nation is established by shared institutions, and the previously multi-ethnic society is consolidated by political rights and by a model of culture (an “enlightenment”) embraced by progressively wider social strata. The “German” concept is that of an ethnic-cultural community which – for lack of one shared state organism – is brought together primarily by the language. Both of them, as Andrzej Walicki36 demonstrated, coexisted in the Polish political thought of the period – the former inherited from the last years of the Polish state’s independence, the latter – gradually developing in the early 19th century. And both find their surprisingly fitting equivalents in “French” and “German” literary studies. The question concerning literary canons and their being rooted in more general concepts of what literary studies are all about, therefore proves to be doubly correlated with the issue of how a nation is formed. The performative dimension of the canon as a community-building factor turns out to be but the final product of the need to develop a system for assessing literary works that will reflect the researcher’s concept of the nation and the place of literature in that concept. The latter system of assessment is the second dimension of the

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Osiński, “Wykład literatury porównawczej,” vol. 3, 248. Andrzej Walicki, Naród, nacjonalizm, patriotyzm [The nation, nationalism and patriotism] (Kraków: Universitas, 2009), 36–45.

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canon. In the early 19th century, questions concerning specific literary texts and literature in general were formulated in the context of another question: Where should Polish academic research and Polish society look for models of modernization? The same questions also seem worth considering today in the context of contemporary Polish and global debates concerning literary canons. Whether or not those canons will influence future generations is indeed debatable. What is certain is that behind each of the proposed concepts of the canon we can find a specific vision of the postulated national community.37 Translated by Tomasz Zymer

Bibliography Beauvois, Daniel. Szkolnictwo polskie na ziemiach litewsko-ruskich 1803–1832 [Polishlanguage education in the Lithuanian and Ruthenian territories in 1803–1832], vol. 1: Uniwersytet Wileński. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 1991. Bentkowski, Feliks. Historia literatury polskiej [History of Polish literature]. Warszawa: Zawadzki, 1814. Bieliński, Józef. Królewski Uniwersytet Warszawski [The Royal University of Warsaw]. Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolf, 1912. Brodziński, Kazimierz. “Literatura polska” [Polish Literature]. In Pisma [Writings]. Poznań: Gebethner i Wolf, 1872. Burke, Peter. A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Choraczyńska, Helena. “Geneza Historii literatury polskiej Feliksa Bentkowskiego” [On the origins of Feliks Bentkowski’s History of Polish Literature]. Folia bibliologica 55/56 (2013/2014): 33–51. Eichhorn, Johan Gottfried. Geschichte der Literatur. Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht. 1805–1812. Gudeman, Alfred. Grundriss der Geschichte der Klassischen philologie. Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1907. Heumann, Chriftoph August. Conspectus reipublicae literariae. Hanover: Foerster, 1718. Jędrzejewski, Tomasz. Literatura w warszawskiej prasie kulturalnej pogranicza oświecenia i romantyzmu [Literature in Warsaw’s cultural press in Late Enlightenment and Early Romanticism]. Kraków: Universitas, 2016.

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This paper is presented as a part of Project no. 2017/27/N/HS2/00395 “In Search of the Language. The Birth of Polish Literary Studies in the Context of European Ideological Changes (1795–1830),” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland.

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Kloch, Zygmunt. Spory o język [The debate on language]. Warszawa: IBL PAN, 1995. Koch, Erduin Julius. Compendium der deutschen Literatur-geschichte. Berlin: Königl. Realschulbuchh, 1790–1798. Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa. Klasycyzm, sentymentalizm, rokoko. Szkice o prądach literackich polskiego Oświecenia [Classicism, Sentimentalism and the Rococo. Sketches on literary trends in the Polish Enlightement]. Warszawa: PWN, 1975. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Łempicki, Zygmunt. Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968. Libera, Zdzisław. “Problem późnego oświecenia” [The problem of the Late Enlightenment]. Wiek Oświecenia 1 (1978): 89–106. Makowski, Stanisław. “Feliks Bentkowski.” In Z dziejów polonistyki warszawskiej [From the history of Polish philology studies in Warsaw], 111–126. Edited by Janina Kulczycka-Saloni. Warszawa: PWN, 1964. Markowska-Fulara, Helena. “Historia splątana. Przypadek Historii literatury polskiej Feliksa Bentkowskiego” [Entangled history. The case of Feliks Bentkowski’s History of Polish Literature]. Śląskie studia polonistyczne 2 (2018): 221–245. Mayenowa, Maria Renata. “Wstęp” [Introduction]. In Ludzie oświecenia o języku i stylu [Writers of the Enlightenment Age on language and style], vol. 1. Edited by Maria Renata Mayenowa. Warszawa: PIW, 1958. Osiński, Ludwik. “Wykład literatury porównawczej” [Lectures in comparative literature]. In Dzieła [Works], vols. 2–3. Warszawa: Nakład wdowy po autorze, 1861. Śniadecki, Jan. “O literaturze” [On literature] in his Wybór pism naukowych [Selected academic writings]. Edited by Zdzisław Libera and Stefan Drobot. Warszawa: PWN, 1954. Tihanov, Galin. “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why It Is Dead Now?).” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2004): 61–81. Wachler, Ludwig. Versuch einer allgemeine Geschichte der Litteratur. Lemgo: Meyer, 1793–1801. Walicki, Andrzej. Naród, nacjonalizm, patriotyzm [The nation, nationalism and patriotism]. Kraków: Universitas, 2009. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmerman. “Beyond Comparison. Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. Żbikowski, Piotr. Klasycyzm postanisławowski: doktryna estetycznoliteracka [Classicism after Stanisław II Augustus: The aesthetic and literary doctrine]. Warszawa: PWN, 1984.

The Concept of Lithuanian Literature in the 19th Century Brigita Speičytė

The modern literary canons that came into being in 18th–19th-century Europe are, broadly speaking, culturally contextualized and constantly reconsidered answers to the question: What is literature? The discussions regarding the extent, limits, ways of dissemination of the canon are also negotiations about the concept of literature, its structural features and functions. Establishing the various connections between the concepts of “literature” and “nation” in the literary discourse and cultural communication as the specific goal of these negotiations emerged at the time when the modern canons were being created. During this process of nationalization of literature, the “national” and “global” or “international” literary systems and their mutual interaction became established.1 The nationalization of literature also meant that literature became political, since the emergence of the national canons was related to the requirements of self-creation of the modern nations, and primarily with the need for communities to define their identities. In this period, the creation of the literary tradition can be especially prominently observed as a “communal technology”:2 being a nation and having a (national) literature became imperatives of cultural, social and political activity that triggered one another. Since “the possibility of creating a literary tradition is the most powerful communal technology,” the aesthetic aspects of the newly conceptualized “literature” in the era of emerging modern nations became inseparable from cultural, and potentially also from political values within a particular national community. For instance, Romanticism saw the prevalence of the expressive function of literature over the mimetic one, a greater emphasis on the originality of a work as opposed 1 See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M[alcolm] B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 103–115; Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 52–59; Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, “World Literature beyond Goethe,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96–121. 2 Cf: “The possibility of creating a literary tradition is the most powerful communal technology,” Algis Mickūnas, Estetika: Menas ir pasaulio patirtis [Aesthetics: Art and the world’s experience] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2011), 132.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_004

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to its orientation towards canonical models, which correlated with the goals of expressing a person’s subjectivity and his unrepeatable inwardness, but also a nation’s “character,” its level of “civilization,” its cultural uniqueness and cultural memory; eventually, also with the demands of personal and the community’s cultural autonomy and civic liberty. Within this complex and multifaceted process of the nationalization of literature, I shall focus on the emergence and usage of the term “Lithuanian literature” in the 19th century, concentrating on the initial situation of this process at the beginning of the century. The appearance of terms like “Lithuanian (or some other nation’s) literature” in the texts indicates the need of the participants of the discourse to define and motivate the connection between “literature” and “nation” in terms of the language (the material of the literature), the sources and limits of the literary tradition, the community of authors and readers of literature, the aesthetic and cultural values of the texts. Hence, the concept signals the need of the participants of the cultural discourse to create and shape a national literature, at the same time expressing their sense of belonging to a nation. The term “Lithuanian literature” started being used from the beginning of the 19th century – this chronological starting point of the history of the term as well as the result of the historical process (the Lithuanian literary canon became accepted in the 20th century) corresponds to the typological map of the development of modern European literatures. Lithuanian literature is one of the “new” Central and Eastern European literatures whose formation has various shortcomings in relation to the “old” ones: it did not have significant secular fiction, or a printed corpus of writing in the vernacular language from the early modern period; the socio-cultural sphere of the use of its language was limited; its process of language standardization came late.3 This type of modern national literatures were encouraged to transform their disadvantages (first of all, the lack of “literary capital”) into advantages by “Herder’s revolution”4 – the influential aesthetic and anthropological ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, who suggested an alternative connection between the concepts of “literature” and “nation,” encouraging the inclusion into the field of “literature” not just the written (printed) form, but also oral folk creation, especially the genres of singing folklore that Herder described as Volkspoesie. In the context of nationalism studies, and especially within the modernist paradigm, the formation of such literary canons seems like a form of “inventing tradition” as

3 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 78–79. 4 Ibid., 75–77.

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is typical of modern nationalism.5 But the geography and cultural / political context of using the concept of “Lithuanian literature” makes the typological distinctions between the phenomena of national literatures and nationalism somewhat complicated. Until the end of the 19th century, the term “Lithuanian literature” was used in the German and Polish languages in the cultural discourse of Königsberg, Prussia6 and Vilnius, which was then part of the former territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; after the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was annexed by the Russian Empire. Thus, the process of consolidating Lithuanian literature also expressed the cultural aspirations of an ethnic minority in a multinational empire typical of Central and Eastern Europe, but at the same time it was fueled by the memory of the recent loss of statehood. Therefore, the connection between literature and nation was motivated by the arguments of both ethnic as well as civic nationalism. One of the first iterations of a theoretical formulation of the connection between “literature” and “nation” in Lithuania foresaw precisely this ambivalence. In 1816, in the Vilnius weekly newspaper Tygodnik Wileński, Vilnius University classics professor Gottfried Ernst Groddeck (1762–1825) published the article “O znaczeniu, celu, i osnowie literatury w powszechności” [On the public significance, goal and fundamentals of literature], in which he introduced a two-fold concept of “the literature of one nation.” In his view, literature in the broad sense consists of the whole of any nation’s writings in the native or a foreign, a living or a dead language “throughout the politically dependent or independent existence of a nation”; literature in the broad sense includes a nation’s writers “both residing in the same country and the same state, and those scattered around various countries and states.” Literature in the narrow sense is the nation’s belles lettres (in the fields of poetry and rhetoric) and academic (historiographic and “popular philosophy”) work in the vernacular

5 Lotte Jensen, “The Roots of Nationalism: Introduction,” in The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600–1815, ed. Lotte Jensen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 11–12. On the constructivist theory of nationalism also see Miroslav Hroch, European Nations: Explaining Their Formation, trans. Karolina Graham (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 11–12. 6 There was a Lithuanian ethnic minority in Prussian Lithuania, the eastern part of the Prussian kingdom, which was called a Lithuanian province. Since the 16th century, a unique Lithuanian religious (Protestant), philological, ethnological and later literary tradition developed there; its publishing centre was in Königsberg. The spread of Lithuanian writing was highly influenced by the Lithuanian language seminar that was located at the University of Königsberg during 1718–1944. Before 1935, it was primarily intended for future pastors of the Lithuanian parishes in Prussia. Before the 1920s, it was the only institution of higher learning teaching the Lithuanian language.

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language, “as it most profoundly reveals the true spirit of the epoch and of the nation.”7 Groddeck’s broad formulation is aimed at combining both the multicultural state of the premodern nation, its multilingual writing (of course, the author also has in mind the multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had disappeared from the map of Europe two decades ago), and the inclusion of the modern criterion of national linguistic self-expression – the idea of the “spirit of the nation” in Herder’s sense. In Lithuania (the part of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Russian Empire) this ambivalence was essential to the process of emerging Lithuanian literature and the nationbuilding itself. The solution to such a situation posits viewing the Lithuanian case of nationalizing literature from a perspective that is close to the traditionalist paradigm of nationalism studies, which in the process of modern nation-building encourages concentrating more attention on cultural and political continuities between premodern and modern nationalism, because “nations are not products of modernity as nations and nationhood existed before modernity.”8 The issue of continuities is very pertinent in this study as well as the previously mentioned individualist aspect of need, intention, aspirations and the emotions accompanying them: when the process of creating “new” literature is viewed from objectivist positions of lack and invention, it seems (and seemed to quite a few people of that time) unfounded.

1

Treatise by Ksawery Bohusz: The Idea of Lithuanian Literature without the Concept

The first to suggest the idea of a Lithuanian literature, without using the term itself, was Ksawery Bohusz (1746–1820), a Lithuanian and Polish intellectual from the Enlightenment era, an honorary member of Vilnius University and visitor of Lithuanian schools, in his O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego [Treatise on the beginnings of the Lithuanian nation and language], published

7 [Gottfried Ernst] Groddeck, “O znaczeniu, celu, i osnowie literatury w powszechności,” Tygodnik Wileński 1, no. 12 (1816): 189–190. 8 Jensen, “The Roots of Nationalism: Introduction,” 13. The distinction between the modernist (constructivist) and traditionalist paradigm of nationalism studies is also echoed in the attitude towards the instance of the shaping of a national literature in another article in this volume, see Gergely Fórizs, “Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary,” 165–182.

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in 1808,9 presented at the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning10 in 1806. Bohusz’s Treatise is one of the “in defense of a language” texts that were characteristic of the era of nationalization of literature. It discusses the situation and the potential usage of a vernacular language that is on the outskirts of public life – in this case, Lithuanian. The story of how the Treatise came to be is also significant; it clearly indicates how interest in the Lithuanian nation and language stemmed from the tradition of the statehood of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its civic national identity as well as from 18th-century ideas of antiquarianism and Ossianism that promoted interest in oral sources of history. The Treatise was commissioned by the Polish-Lithuanian politician and education ideologue, Tadeusz Czacki (1765–1813), who after the decline of the state became immersed in studying the legal history of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and published the two volumes of his work, O litewskich i polskich prawach, o ich duchu, źrzódłach, związku i o rzeczach zawartych w pierwszym Statucie dla Litwy 1529 roku wydanym [On Lithuanian and Polish laws, on their spirit, sources, relationship, and on things presented in the First Statute of Lithuania issued in 1529 AD] (Warsaw, 1800–1801). In his explorations of the legal sources of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Czacki presented the hypothesis that this law as codified in the Lithuanian Statutes of the 16th century (which were still partly in effect in the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Russian Empire) could have been based on Lithuanian oral customary law, traces of which may be found in the usage of the Lithuanian language, folklore texts, comparable to similar traces remaining in the epic poems of Ossian published by James Macpherson.11 Thus the Lithuanian language and the texts written in it were of interest to the cultural elite as potential sources of historical study, and as traces of the history of the state. Czacki himself, originally from what is nowadays Ukraine, looked for native-speaking experts from the ethnic Lithuanian lands12 in order to introduce the Lithuanian language as a source of study of state his-

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Ksawery Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego (Warszawa: w Drukarni Gazety Warszawskiey, 1808). Towarzystwo Warszawskie Przyjaciół Nauk, a community of former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth intellectuals, was active in Warsaw 1800–1832. Tadeusz Czacki, O litewskich i polskich prawach, o ich duchu, źródłach, związku i o rzeczach zawartych w pierwszym Statucie dla Litwy 1529 roku wydanym, vol. 1 (Warszawa: w Drukarni J. C. G. Ragoczego, 1800), 14–15. See Giedrius Subačius, Žemaičių bendrinės kalbos idėjos: XIX amžiaus pradžia [Ideas about Samogitian as standard language: The beginning of 19th century] (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 1998), 69–76; Vincas Maciūnas, Rinktiniai raštai [Selected works] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003), 348–349.

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tory, and Bohusz was such an expert, even though his Lithuanian was rather mediocre. However, in this case the author clearly was emboldened to take on such a historical-philological study not so much by his expertise, but by his civic-mindedness. Czacki’s and Bohusz’s historic study initiatives, as well as the activity of the Warsaw Society of Friends and Learning in general, came in response to the identity crisis after the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was felt in the society. It was a reaction to the need of the members of the former civic nation13 to replace the political framework of the lost “Polish” and / or “Lithuanian” identity with cultural contents, and developing such contents became a vitally important task for the society. The reception14 of Bohusz’s Treatise indicates that the author’s statements that were most important to the readers were the ones in which he (to an extent with some basis) argued that the Lithuanian language is distinctly separate from the ancient Greek, Latin, Slavic (in spite of the common political history with the Ruthenians and the Poles)15 and other languages, and systematically connected the situation of the Lithuanian language with the history of Lithuanian statehood. Bohusz considered the Lithuanian language to be the main differentiating mark of the Lithuanian nation, however, he thought that the Lithuanian nation was a nation-state, thus he understood its cultural selfexpression as limited to the written culture created (or missing) by the citizens of the state, the social elite. One of the most influential of Bohusz’s claims was that in the Middle Ages, the Lithuanian language was the spoken language of the Lithuanian state and of its politics (the Lithuanian Grand Dukes spoke it), and namely such public usage allowed for its “development” – the formation of a coherent linguistic structure and the collection of the lexical resources, in 13

14

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At the end of the 18th century the identity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was more and more widely perceived and referred to as Polish (similarly as the British-English civic identity), even though the self-perception of the Lithuanian nobility continued to maintain a certain element of Lithuanian identity, related to the political and cultural tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania all the way to the early 20th century. By the way, the defender of Lithuanian language, Bohusz refers to himself as “Polish” in the Treatise in precisely this historical civic sense (Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 81). The Treatise made using Lithuanian “fashionable,” it provided an impetus for the development of Lithuanian literature and the first ideas of standardization of the Lithuanian language in the Lithuania of the 1810s–1820s. Along with other sources, the Treatise had a great influence on the ideology of the early stage of the Lithuanian national movement. See Vincas Maciūnas, Lituanistinis sąjūdis XIX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian movement at the beginning of the 19th century] (Kaunas: Varpas, 1939), 136–137; Subačius, Žemaičių bendrinės kalbos idėjos: XIX amžiaus pradžia, 77–84. Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 82, and further.

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other words, the shaping of the language as a tool of community life.16 However, the same political sphere and its processes – the statehood of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had annexed the eastern Slavic lands of presentday Belarus and Ukraine, the circumstances of its acceptance of Christianity in the 14th century and the union with Poland – destined that the tool was not really employed, the Lithuanian language was removed from public usage, an elite written culture was not produced using it. Thus Bohusz was the first to observe the paradox that was essential to the 19th-century Lithuanian national consciousness and inspired various interpretations: the inconsistent Lithuanian political life and the uneven cultural self-expression in the Lithuanian language in the past. The Lithuanian language and its history, connected to the political sphere in the past, determines the prestige of the language and, to borrow a term from literary sociology, constitutes the “cultural capital” of the Lithuanian nation, however, it was never put into circulation. Bohusz’s idea of Lithuanian literature was grounded in this logic of unemployed and in many ways undiscovered, underappreciated cultural potential. At the end of the Treatise the author emphasized the contrast between the perfection of the Lithuanian language as “proven” by himself and the absence of Lithuanian literature. He confesses to being unable to recommend “not a single Lithuanian writer, and none of their works”17 to his readers, since thus far the Lithuanian writers (“pisarze Litewscy”) “wrote according to fashion,” i.e., “in order to be understood not just by their own people, but by foreigners too, they wrote in Latin or in Polish.”18 Bohusz’s view is obviously not Herderian: since he considered literature to be the written and printed works of the 16

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18

By arguing about the lexical “wealth” of the Lithuanian language, the author is clearly contradicting the view that it was and is used only by peasants and presents precisely the lexical examples that cross the boundaries of the merely agrarian sphere from the fields of the military, trade, crafts, science, art, and philosophy (Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 118–145). Thus the author’s position is close to that of Herder’s early philosophy of language: that language is a human creation, created by social usage (see Nicholas Robinette, “The World Laid Waste: Herder, Language Labor, Empire,” New Literary History 42, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 193–203). However, it is also apparent that Bohusz, unlike Herder, considers the social elite to be the main locus of language creation and improvement; according to him, the main users and shapers of the Lithuanian language in the past were the Grand Dukes of Lithuania. Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 200. The earliest works of Lithuanian fiction were published later: The Seasons, a hexametric poem by the Prussian Lithuanian author Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780) was written around the 1760s–1770s, but discovered and printed in Königsberg in 1818 (to be discussed later); the first Lithuanian poetry collection, Giesmės svietiškos ir šventos [Secular and sacred songs] by Antanas Strazdas, was published in Vilnius in 1814. Ibid., 206.

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social elite, he did not include in his concept of literature the Lithuanian folklore that he quoted in the Treatise, anonymous manuscripts, clerical literature, didactic publications for the instruction of the simple folk or unpublished translations of fragments of ancient Latin texts that he used to argue the “perfection” of the Lithuanian language, and its literary and cultural potential. According to Bohusz, this is why in Lithuania there are Lithuanian writers whose texts are accessible to both their own people and foreigners, there is even a language suitable for creative writing, but there is no Lithuanian literature. Which means that the author of the Treatise observed the multicultural status of a premodern nation as well as the multilingual character of the writings of the Lithuanian authors related to it, which in the full context of the Treatise may be understood to be an effect of Polish cultural colonization. At the same time, having emphasized the connection between the broad cultural usage of the native language and a literature in it, he raised the expectation to see such literature in the future. In fact, the author hoped that surviving manuscripts of past literature would be discovered (while proudly condemning the temptation to falsify them, by the way),19 however, according to the logic of the nationalization of literature, the expectations directed towards the literary heritage are or soon become expectations of future literature as well. The author of the Treatise did not define a particular program for the development of the Lithuanian language and literature. He appears to have had a quite realistic and pragmatic view of the situation of the Lithuanian language and writing, and the best he hoped for was, to paraphrase Aleida Assmann, “the birth of cultural memory from the spirit of decay,”20 i.e., he expected that they would become an object of scholarly study and its source. He suggested that Vilnius University engage in the academic study of this language, and expressed the hope that he might encourage the scholars to look for “ancient Lithuanian monuments” (“zabytków starożytności litewskiey”).21 However, as the reception of the Treatise indicates, the author’s rhetorical gesture of calling the absence of Lithuanian literature a historic “misfortune,”22 also challenged the readers’ ambition to overcome the loss of the possibilities of political life by engaging in literary creation in one of the languages of the former state, since the cultural “misfortune” (especially in the early 19th century) was more

19 20

21 22

Ibid., 196–202. Aleida Assmann, “Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses,” in Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin, New York: Der Gruyter, 2004), 50. Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 3–4, 207. Ibid., 3.

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readily overcome than the political catastrophe. Bohusz’s treatise indirectly encouraged the view that Lithuanian literature in the Lithuanian language next to or instead of (it was never considered an option at this stage) other previously “fashionable” languages of the country is a possible stage of the cultural development of the historic multilingual Lithuania. In the context of the Treatise the idea of Lithuanian literature was connected to the need for cultural memory of the Lithuanian nation that had lost its statehood, and creative writing in the language that was once used in the Lithuanian state was judged a possibility to fulfill the cultural potential of a language that was not “native” or having emerged on its own, but had accumulated in the political life of the nation and had not yet been employed. Thus in the early 19th century the idea of Lithuanian literature emerged in the circles of the Lithuanian cultural and social elite (without the initiative of the imperial government) and was connected to the history of Lithuanian statehood as well as to the identity of civic nationality that had shaped it. The material of Lithuanian literature, the Lithuanian language, here was treated as a trait of the civic nation, linked to its history (and thus, to the history of the state) rather than to the ethnic “character.” The fact that the Lithuanian history of statehood was both politically and culturally intertwined with the histories of the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish ethnic peoples was, along with the ethnic minority policies of the Russian Empire, the determining factor of the complicated history of the selfcreation of the Lithuanian nation, and the spread of Lithuanian literature in the 19th century.

2

Ludwig Rhesa: The Philological Concept of “Lithuanian Literature” and Its Reception in Lithuania

As the ideas of Bohusz’s Treatise were disseminating in the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a prominent alternative emerged in Prussian Lithuania. The term “Lithuanian literature” (and its variant “literature of the Lithuanian nation”) was first conceptually used in Königsberg in the German language: in 1818, Ludwig Rhesa (1776–1840), a professor at the University of Königsberg, a philologist and the director of the Lithuanian language seminar, published Metai (The Seasons), the narrative poem by Kristijonas Donelaitis, the 18th-century Lutheran minister also from Prussian Lithuania. Until then it had remained in manuscript form. Rhesa translated the poem into German and prepared a lengthy introduction, in which he mentioned that he had accidentally found the poem in Valtarkiemis with the minister Johann Gottfried Jordan, Donelaitis’s friend, when he had first gone to collect Lithua-

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nian folk songs and search for others interested in this work among the clergy of Lithuanian parishes.23 Thus Rhesa was primarily interested in Lithuanian folklore, but he also discovered literature – an epic work written in ingenious hexameter (which was adapted for the Lithuanian language). Unlike Czacki, who searched for the sources of Lithuanian history in the Lithuanian oral tradition, Rhesa became interested in the Lithuanian folk song to a great extent because he was a poet who wrote in German and, inspired by the then-popular style of Ossianism, imitated the sung Lithuanian folklore.24 Thus for Rhesa, the oral Lithuanian tradition was a resource for his own original work as a poet. Rhesa’s publications, which appeared in the German cultural environment, constituted a Lithuanian instance of Herder’s project of cultural anthropology and literary theory. The Donelaitis’s poem and the Lithuanian folk songs, in Rhesa’s view, represented Lithuanian poetic culture, and were presented to the German audience as the “literary products” (“literärische Produkte”) of the Lithuanian nation that were created by the “genius of the nation” (der Genius einer Nation).25 They were assigned canonical values like the perfection and originality of the Lithuanian linguistic poetic expression (the editor emphasized that Donelaitis in his poem “had no Greek or Roman example before his eyes,” and his poem “contains nothing borrowed from foreign literatures,” even though the more recent scholars have discovered otherwise).26 In addition, for Rhesa, the poem as well as the folk songs express the “spirit of noble morality” 23

24

25 26

Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt Donalitius, in gleichem Versmaass ins Deutsche übertragen von D. L. J. Rhesa, Prof. d. Theol. [The seasons in four cantos, an epic of the country, written in Lithuanian by Christian Donaleitis, named Donalitius, translated into German in the same versification by D[octor] L[udwig] J[edemin] Rhesa] (Königsberg: Hartungschen Hofbuchdrukkerei, 1818), XXI. Rhesa published his collection of Lithuanian folk songs a few years later: Dainos oder Litthauische Volkslieder [Dainos, or Lithuanian folk songs], gefammelt, überfeßt und mit gegenüberstehendem Urtext herausgegeben von L. J. Rhefa, Dr. d. Theol. und Phil. ordentl. Professor d. Theol. und Dir. des Litthauischen Seminars auf d. Universität zu Königsberg. Nebst einer Abhandlung über die litthauischen Volksgedichte (Königsberg: Druck und Verlag der Hartungschen Hofbuchdrukkerei, 1825). A lot of his poems in this style were published in the collection L[udwig] Rhesa, Prutena, oder Preussische Volkslieder und andere Vaterländische Dichtungen [Prutena, or The Prussian folk songs and other poems of the homeland] (Königsberg: gedruckt bei Heinrich Degen, 1809). As Albinas Jovaišas has aptly observed, “the whole of Rhesa’s work as a folklorist is permeated by the accompaniment of Ossianism.” Albinas Jovaišas, Liudvikas Rėza (Vilnius: Vaga, 1969), 206. Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, V. Ibid., VI–VII; cf. Dalia Dilytė, Kristijonas Donelaitis ir Antika [Kristijonas Donelaitis and antiquity] (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2005).

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and thus reveal “the character” and the “good taste” of the nation.27 Thus, the concept of Lithuanian literature in Rhesa’s publications was connected with the Romantic aesthetics of expressive literature and through that, with the linguistic criterion that is essential for the category of an ethnic nation, which includes both the folk or oral usage and the written one. The source and the audience of the linguistic creation is the nation, and the cultural potential of its “literary products” is defined by the two main criteria of the canon – the values of linguistic skill and moral example (i.e., the civilizing influence that develops human nature). The emphasis on originality in terms of “foreign literatures” is also significant, pointing to the exclusive gesture of shaping of the canon.28 It might seem that Rhesa’s Herderian project of Lithuanian literature smoothly inserts itself into the process of the emergence of national literatures in Central and Eastern Europe, in which, according to John Neubauer, the metaliterary narratives “claimed time and again and from country to country that they offered a history of the national soul.”29 However, the problem with this concept of Lithuanian literature was that it was not unambiguously accepted in Lithuania (the former lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Russian Empire), where the largest share of the potential addressees of the “literary products” published in Königsberg lived. In the public discourse of Lithuania, the term “Lithuanian literature” coined by Rhesa was first used in Polish (“literatura litewska”) by the Polish (-Lithuanian) poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), but he essentially changed the semantic context of this term. He mentioned Rhesa’s publication of the Donelaitis’s poem as one of the “monuments of Lithuanian literature” (“zabytki literatury litewskiej”) in the commentary to his own historical poem Grażyna, published in the second volume of his debut collection Poezje in Vilnius in 1823.30 Like Rhesa, Mickiewicz used the term “Lithuanian literature” to describe literary works in the Lithuanian language, however, the lexical shift in Mickiewicz’s commentary is significant: Rhesa referred to the Lithuanian folk 27 28 29

30

Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, VI, XX; Dainos oder Litthauische Volkslieder, 332. Also see Vaidas Šeferis’s article in this volume “The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis,” 230–255. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 3: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 347. Poezye Adama Mickiewicza [Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz], vol. 2 (Wilno: Drukiem Józefa Zawadzkiego, 1823), 76.

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and authorial creation as “literary products of the Lithuanian nation,” whereas Mickiewicz borrowed the word “monuments” used by Bohusz in his Treatise in a similar context. Thus, the author of Grażyna linked Lithuanian literature not to the nation’s linguistic self-expression and actual circulation, but to the functioning of cultural memory.31 Mickiewicz describes the field of cultural memory, including “Lithuanian literature,” as the “history of the homeland,” and in the commentary several ambiguities regarding the connections between “literature” and “nation” surround this concept. Evidently Mickiewicz understood nation as a participant and owner of the “history of the homeland,” but as the civic nation of the former Polish-Lithuanian state, which is why in the commentary he delineates the distinction within the audience of “Lithuanian literature” between “us,” the “compatriots” (“rodacy”) and the “stranger” (“cudzoziemiec,” i.e., Rhesa, subject of the Prussian kingdom, which he presumably considered to be German): “Thank you to the honorable man, who, though a stranger, shames the compatriots, who care so little for the history of their homeland.”32 However, to the compatriots of the former PolishLithuanian state the ethnically “Lithuanian Donelaitis” and his work feel like their own, they demand appropriate attention which is encouraged by the appeal to a strong sense of shame due to their indifference. Thus, Mickiewicz’s commentary denotes the ambivalent gesture of nationalizing “Lithuanian literature,” determined by the relationship between the premodern civic national identity and the ethnic origin and its cultural substrate. Since the civic Polish-Lithuanian nation politically and culturally connects different ethne, its cultural field also contains “Lithuanian literature,” characterized by such ethnic attributes as the vernacular language and representation of folk customs. Nevertheless, the indicated attention to “Lithuanian literature” from a region that never belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian state is a sign that language as a marker of ethnos is becoming more prominent in the process of modernizing national culture. Bohusz in his Treatise mentioned that even the Lithuanians in Lithuania, who do speak the language, are ashamed to use

31

32

Rhesa also used the word “monument” (“ein Denkmal”) in the beginning of his introduction to the Donelaitis’s publication, but in a slightly different sense of an ideal of linguistic and cultural expression: not every “literary product” is a “monument,” only a work of special value, which expresses the uniqueness of the nation’s “language, customs, spiritual culture and character,” and according to him, Lithuanian literature of the day still contained none of those (Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, V). In Mickiewicz’s commentary, the very instance of using the Lithuanian language in the work and the distance from the present day turns the work into a “monument.” Poezye Adama Mickiewicza, vol. 2, 76.

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it,33 whereas Mickiewicz is already shaming his compatriots for their lack of interest in “Lithuanian literature” – most likely also including ones like himself, who could hardly speak the Lithuanian language even at Bohusz’s level. To Bohusz, “Lithuanian writers” were those who belonged to the civic Lithuanian (Polish-Lithuanian) nation and wrote in “fashionable” languages, even though they theoretically could, but did not want to write in Lithuanian, whereas for Mickiewicz a Lithuanian work could be included in the cultural interests of the civic nation, even if it was created by the subject of another state. Of course, such nationalization of “Lithuanian literature” by including it into the horizon of the civic nation dominated by Polish culture, raised problems of communication. Although for Mickiewicz Lithuanian was not a strange “foreign” language, he most likely read The Seasons by Donelaitis in German translation. Therefore, the audience for “Lithuanian literature” – the native speakers and those who do not speak the language – are, in Mickiewicz’s point of view, united by the “history of the homeland.” The literary context of the commentary – the plot of the historical poem Grażyna – indicates that the history of the homeland he refers to is the history of the state (the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), and the texts in the Lithuanian language are part of that history, its “monuments.” It is namely history, and not a common language that allows the perception of texts in various languages to belong to the culture of the same national community. History permits connecting Mickiewicz’s poem written in Polish with Donelaitis’s work in Lithuanian, which is paradoxically both familiar and inaccessible because of its language. Thus the Herderian philological concept of “Lithuanian literature” as developed by Rhesa in Lithuania was modified into a historical one, linked to the category of a civic nation: “Lithuanian literature” is perceived to be a part of the linguistically heterogeneous culture of a civic nation united by a common (state) history and a monument to that history.

3

Historical and Philological Concepts of “Lithuanian Literature”: Negotiations and Competition

The further usage of the term “Lithuanian literature” essentially is the scene of competition of these two concepts – the philological and the historical one – in the process of forming national literature up until the end of the century. In

33

Bohusz, O początkach narodu i języka litewskiego, 3.

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the late 1820s, Rhesa’s philological concept of Lithuanian literature was taken up in Lithuanian by the philologist, folklorist and poet Simonas Stanevičius (1799–1848), who published Donelaitis’s fables alongside his own in Vilnius.34 However, this initiative did not find sufficient support and was not continued, the philological concept of Lithuanian literature was too innovative for the realities of the Lithuanian literary life of the day, dominated by the Polish language and authors writing in Lithuanian as well as their readers being bilingual. Furthermore, apart from Donelaitis’s work, this vision of Lithuanian literature as linguistically and culturally autonomous did not have any significant “literary capital” and lacked an institutional network (a Lithuanian press, a Lithuanian language and study center, which was planned, but never established at Vilnius University before it was shut down by the Russian government in 1832) to concentrate and develop it. Thus in the literary life of Lithuania at the time, Lithuanian literature could not compete with Polish literature on equal terms as the means of cultural expression of the nation, especially once the talent of Mickiewicz arose. True, Stanevičius’s work does contain signs that he might have had the idea of the cultural unity of Baltic nations,35 which could have strengthened the ethnic “background” of the philological concept of Lithuanian literature (one might remember the analogy of the cultural unity of the Czechs and the Slovaks around a similar time in the era of national revival). However, in spite of the linguistic kinship of the Lithuanian and Latvian languages, the barriers formed by their religious and political history separated the nations in a much greater way than the linguistic difference of Polish culture in Lithuania. Thus in the 1830s–1850s the historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” became dominant in Lithuania, not so much as a deliberate conceptualization and program, but as one suitable for the status quo of the literary life. In this stage of nationalizing “Lithuanian literature,” using the term in Lithuanian public discourse points towards the need to define the relationship between the Lithuanian and the Polish literatures of the Lithuanian lands. Different variations of this relationship are revealed in the first essays on the history of Lithuanian literature that appeared at that time. Their publishing environment differs not by accident: translator and ethnographer Ludwik Adam

34

35

Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa [Six tales from Simonas Stanevičius, Samogitian. And six others from Kristijonas Donelaitis, Prussian] (Wylniuje: Spaustuwoj’ B. Neumana, Metuse 1829). Cf. the image of “Lietu-szalys” (Letonian, i.e., Baltic lands) in the poem “The Samogitian glory” (“Szłowy żemaycziu,” in Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa, 10).

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Jucewicz (1813–1846), who was originally from the region of ethnic Lithuania, educated at the Roman Catholic Theological Academy of Vilnius, in 1837 published an article, “Kilka słów o języku i literaturze litewskiej” [A few words on the Lithuanian language and literature], as an introduction to a small collection of Polish poetry in translation, Wyjątki z nowoczesnych poetów polskich, tłumaczone na język litewski [Fragments from the new Polish poetry translated into Lithuanian];36 whereas historian and publicist Michał Baliński (1794–1864) discussed Lithuanian literature in the chapter of his 1846 history work, Ancient Poland, titled “The Duchy of Samogitia.”37 Jucewicz’s book is the only bilingual literary publication in 19th-century Lithuania; its structure is particularly interesting: having presented the Lithuanian translations of three Polish poets of the latest generation, the translator wrote an introduction in Polish discussing not Polish, but Lithuanian literature. Such a decision of the editor and translator permits thinking that literature in Lithuanian and in Polish in the publication is perceived as phenomena of one common Lithuanian culture. The structure of the publication is motivated by the attitude towards the Lithuanian nation as the old nation-state with a multilingual culture: Jucewicz presents it in his introduction, citing the aforementioned works by Czacki and Bohusz, with an emphasis on the latter’s focus on the disrupted history of the Lithuanian political and cultural life.38 He regretfully mentions the effects of the disruptions at the end of his introduction: “Unfortunately, nowadays even the Lithuanian Wajdeloci do not write in Lithuanian!”39 The Romantic image of wajdelota (national bard, prophet) employed by Jucewicz indicates that the Polish poets that he translated – Mickiewicz, Antoni Edward Odyniec and Bohdan Zaleski – are considered to be the poets of the old Lithuanian nation-state, the ones that express and create the national culture, but already in a different language.

36

37

38 39

[Adam Ludwik Jucewicz], Wyjątki z nowoczesnych poetów polskich, tłumaczone na język litewski z przydaniem ‘Kilku słów o języku i literaturze litewskiej’ [Fragments from the new Polish poetry translated into Lithuanian with an addition of “a few words on the Lithuanian language and literature”] (Wilno: Nakładem tłumacza w tłoczni B. Neumana, 1837), 7–31. The collection features a few poems by Mickiewicz, Antoni Edward Odyniec and Bohdan Zaleski in Lithuanian translation. Michał Baliński and Tymoteusz Lipiński, Starożytna Polska, pod względem historycznym, jeograficznym i statystycznym opisana [Ancient Poland, described historically, geographically and statistically], vol. 3 (Warszawa: Nakład i druk S. Orgelbranda Księgarza, 1846), 502–509. [Jucewicz], Wyjątki z nowoczesnych poetów polskich, 7–12. Ibid., 31.

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Jucewicz reveals the relationship between the Polish and Lithuanian creative spheres by interpreting the purpose of literature in the Lithuanian language. Besides the function of cultural memory (traditionally) performed by the language itself, Jucewicz to a great extent also assigns Lithuanian literature a new, pragmatic purpose of “enlightening the common folk” and promoting the public use of the Lithuanian language, oriented towards the present. Therefore in Jucewicz’s article, Lithuanian belles lettres are discussed alongside religious and philological writings, and the translations from the Polish language contribute to the belles lettres of Lithuanian literature. It may seem that these are lesser aesthetic expectations for Lithuanian literature, as they are partly transferred to Polish poetic self-expression, but the goal of enlightening the people signaled attention to the actual circulation of literature and not just to passive representation of the past. It foreshadowed the need to modernize literature – to expand its addressees, to ensure its distribution and thus its future. In this way, Jucewicz innovatively detected the possibility of developing bilingual Lithuanian literature, in which translation becomes particularly important for literary communication. It was perhaps a modest, but an original attempt to bring closer and to connect the linguistically different literary phenomena of Lithuania, to involve them in a linguistic exchange. Nevertheless, in Jucewicz’s article, the concept of “Lithuanian literature,” clearly connected to the premodern category of the Lithuanian civic nation, is not so integral. To Jucewicz, Lithuanian literature also includes the writings from Prussian Lithuania based on a different logic of the concept – that of an ethnic Lithuania nation. Thus the Prussian Lithuanian poet Donelaitis, and next to him Stanevičius, too, from the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania are considered to represent ethnic Lithuanian culture,40 and thus, in a way, to compete with the Polish poets, the prophets, in the sphere of the literary self-expression of the Lithuanian nation. Such an ambivalent relationship between the Lithuanian and Polish literary works could have been realized in history in various ways, depending on the political and institutional context. Theoretically, this ambiguity could have developed into the linguistic model of Swedish-Finnish literature, in which the historically dominant writing in Swedish transformed into a linguistic minority in the Finnish literary system,41 or to a mostly equal relationship of the regional literatures in the different languages of Swiss literature, or to a linguistically distinct minority

40 41

Ibid., 18–22. Sven H. Rossel, gen. ed., and George C. Schoolfield, ed., A History of Finland’s Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), XVII–XXVIII; 50–111, 298–398.

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literature in the dominant tradition as in the case of Welsh and English literature.42 The first option became unrealistic in the mid-19th century, after the Polish-Lithuanian uprising against the Russian Empire in 1830–1831, as the assimilationist policies of the Empire grew stronger in Lithuania (by the way, unlike in Finland); the second or the third option were the most likely ones. Almost a decade after Jucewicz’s bilingual literary publication, the historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” was presented in the public discourse directly: Baliński included an overview of the history of Lithuanian literature in his narrative of “ancient Poland,” i.e., the Polish-Lithuanian state’s history, to a great extent based on Jucewicz’s article. On the one hand, such attention from a historian to Lithuanian literature is extraordinary: in the third volume of Ancient Poland dedicated to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania there is no separate discussion of the writing or literature in any other language of the land. Baliński presented Lithuanian literature with a strong sense of piety, even overstepping his own chronological limits (up to the fall of the state in 1795). It is indicative of how the early 19th century attitude to the Lithuanian language and its texts as a “monument” of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s history also strengthened the attention to Lithuanian literature – especially among the “compatriots” like Baliński, who had little to do with ethnic Lithuanian culture in terms of origin and language. On the other hand, in the context of the entire historical work Lithuanian literature appears as a strictly regional and exotic phenomenon: its history is only connected to Samogitia (Žemaitija), the region that in the 19th century was the most Lithuanian in terms of social usage of language in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Symbolically, in describing some of the Grand Duchy’s towns and locations, Baliński employed relevant quotes from Mickiewicz or the works of Dyzma Bończa Tomaszewski, the early 19th century poet well-known in Lithuania.43 Thus Polish poetry is disseminated throughout the historical narrative, whereas Lithuanian literature, framed by the regional-ethnic borders, appears as a strange kind of cultural ghetto. Baliński’s attitude towards Lithuanian literature as regional exoticism in the context of Polish culture and literature correlated with his national identity

42

43

See Gerraint H. Jenkins, “Wales, the Welsh and the Welsh Language: Introduction,” in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801–1911, ed. Gerraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2000), 1–35; Prys Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43–100. Baliński and Lipiński, Starożytna Polska, pod względem historycznym, jeograficznym i statystycznym opisana, vol. 3, 397–399, 424–425.

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(as well as that of a large part of the elite of Lithuanian society), which since the mid-19th century gravitated more and more towards the modern Polish national identity. It is also significant that the Polish works by Lithuanian writers in the mid-19th century were also perceived as a unique, but not a selfsufficient regional variant of Polish literature. Besides, the historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” brought about by the wave of European antiquarianism, which viewed the Lithuanian language as an access to the “ancient times,” as a monument of the past, once provided the linguistic material for Lithuanian literature with a great symbolic value precisely because of its “age.” However, as the idea of progress of civilization was emerging in Europe in midcentury, the old age of cultural phenomena came to be viewed as an anachronism, an obstacle to progress.44 Therefore in the environment of Lithuanian historiographical discourse, attention to the Lithuanian language and literature as a “monument” of the past became less and less sufficient, too disconnected from the current requirements of the development of literature in the present, and namely, from the growth of its circle of readers. The need to publish and promote Lithuanian writing as opposed to studies of the past was raised by the peasant-born Lithuanian literary figure Mikalojus Akelaitis (1829–1887). He wrote a letter to the editor of the almanac Teka Wileńska,45 in which he criticized the position of the Lithuanian elite that had formed the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission to use the Polish language in their cultural communications without paying attention to the publication of Lithuanian books and periodicals. Akelaitis thought that the then current spread of Lithuanian literature and the distribution of texts was too limited for it to be considered a national literature in its own right, but it could become one, if the potential Lithuanian readers from the lower social classes using the Lithuanian language received some attention. Thus he directly formulated the position of Jucewicz’s bilingual publication, but much more urgently, and he emphasized the separate cultural needs of the Lithuanian ethnic group with a great passion: There may be around 2,5 million of us, Lithuanians who speak our native language, and that is more than the Greeks who live in Hellas, and almost as many as Danes or Portuguese who have their own literature. Will 44 45

See Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” 98–99. Teka Wileńska [The Vilnius almanac] (1857–1858) was the unofficial publication of the only academic institution in Lithuania after Vilnius University was shut down, the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission (1855–1865). This society united the country’s academic community, although obviously the majority of its members were historians.

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we, Lithuanians, give up our own word? Thus, will we choose voluntary national suicide […]?46 In the same vein, Akelaitis raised the necessity for the compatriots themselves, without relying on “foreigners” (maybe because of the linguistic skill, maybe because of interests other than those of academic studies), to compile and publish Lithuanian-Polish and Polish-Lithuanian dictionaries – thus he emphasized the cause of philological resources of the Lithuanian readers and language users in general in the traditionally Polish-speaking environment.47 Akelaitis did not separately discuss the relationship between Lithuanian and Polish literature in Lithuania, but he was the first to systematically acknowledge the need for the circulation and distribution of Lithuanian literature, moving away from the historical sphere of interests towards the philological one. As Baliński published Akelaitis’s letter, he reiterated his attitude to Lithuanian literature as presented in the work Ancient Poland with additional force, in this case, not towards its history, but towards its future. According to him, Lithuanian literature may not become a national literature in its own right, as the Lithuanian written tradition is weak, thus, compared to other nations, the ambitions to develop it have come too late. Therefore, the Lithuanian language and writing should be used for the initial enlightenment of native speakers, and the wider cultural self-expression and communication require more “universal” languages, since unnecessary proliferation of publicly used languages interferes with the development of civilization.48 This debate between Baliński and Akelaitis represents the conflicting attitudes to Lithuanian culture and literature of the old and the new elites. They grew into full-fledged confrontation later, during the years of the Lithuanian national revival at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. However, Baliński’s projected vision of Lithuanian literature with its narrow functional range and purpose in the deterministic arrow of progress was not the only version of the concept of “Lithuanian literature” that suited the needs of the modernizing Lithuanian society. Perhaps the last text that reflects the situation of Lithuanian cultural and literary life of this period from an insider’s

46

47 48

Auszlawis [Michał Baliński], “Odezwa do Redakcyi Teki Wileńskiéj starego ziemianina Litewskiego” [Appeal to the editors of the Teka Wileńska by an old Lithuanian landowner], Teka Wileńska, no. 3 (1858): 379–380. Ibid., 380. Ibid., 383–384.

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perspective was the article “Archeologia na Litwie” [Archaeology in Lithuania], published in Kraków in 1871 by the historian and archaeologist, the Chair of the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission, Count Eustachy Tyszkiewicz (1814–1873).49 Like Bohusz back in the day, Tyszkiewicz did not use the term “Lithuanian literature,” as his aim was to review the emergence of the discipline of archaeology in the situation of historical research in Lithuania. However, at the same time he surveyed the Lithuanian culture of the early to mid-19th century by introducing not only Lithuanian historians, but also other scholars, artists, and writers (whom he, like Bohusz, called “Lithuanian authors” – “autorowie Litwini”). Thus in his overview of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, Tyszkiewicz introduced the panorama of the 19th-century bilingual Lithuanian literature, in which he named some Poles and some authors writing in Lithuanian. First and foremost, it indicates that, as opposed to Baliński’s treatment of Lithuanian literature as an “appendix” to the history of Ancient Poland, Tyszkiewicz did not consider the authors who wrote in Lithuanian during the time the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission operated to belong to a cultural ghetto: for the first time and directly he introduced Lithuanian literature as part of the general “intellectual life in Lithuania” (“życie umysłowe na Litwie”). It is true that for the purposes of the article, the vision of bilingual Lithuanian literature was not conceptualized, rather it reflected the situation of Lithuanian literature at the time, but the text reveals that over the half-century since Bohusz’s work Lithuanian literature and writing became visible in the general field of multilingual Lithuanian culture, and not just as a regional phenomenon. At the same time, this case illustrates the extent to which the development of the historical concept of ‘Lithuanian literature,’ related to the civic national Lithuanian (Polish-Lithuanian) identity, depended on the institutional context that created the possibilities of collaboration among the various groups of the society. After the Polish-Lithuanian uprising against the Russian Empire in 1863, the conditions of public cultural life in Lithuania were drastically limited, and in 1864, Lithuanian press in Latin characters was entirely banned, Lithuanian culture moved underground, and the possibilities of collaboration became virtually nil. In the illegal Lithuanian press that was distributed in secret, the term “Lithuanian literature” (“lietuviška literatūra” and the folk variant “lietuviška

49

E. T. [Eustachy Tyszkiewicz], “Archeologia na Litwie,” in Rocznik dla Archeologów, Numizmatyków i Bibliografów Polskich. Rok 1871 [Annual for Polish archaeology, numismatics and bibliography. Year 1871], ed. S[tanisław] Krzyżanowski (Kraków: w Drukarni uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 1871), 1–13.

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rašliava”)50 was first used in connection to the ethnic concept of the nation and its main distinguishing feature, the language. The medical doctor, ethnologist, future signatory of the Lithuanian Act of Independence and prominent figure of the Lithuanian national revival, Jonas Basanavičius (1851–1927) in his definitive article “Priekalba” [Preface] for the first newspaper published in the Lithuanian language, Auszra [Dawn], put the language at the center of national identity, using the Herderian lexicon for describing the uniqueness of the nation, but also the arguments of universal human rights, emphasizing the linguistic rights of the Lithuanian ethnic community that are violated in the Prussian and Russian Empires in which a Lithuanian ethnic minority lives.51 The author took on such a position to evaluate and interpret Bohusz’s idea about the disproportion between the ancient Lithuanian statehood and the development of its culture: to Bohusz, the lack of Lithuanian culture in the Lithuanian state was, indeed, a “misfortune,” but it did not mean the disappearance of the Lithuanian nation, whereas for Basanavičius the existence of the nation – precisely the one that is captured by the Herderian term of the “spirit” of the nation – seemed as directly and necessarily conditioned by the use of language. This was also the initial position of the author of the first historical review of Lithuanian literature in Lithuanian, the activist of the Lithuanian national revival Jonas Šliūpas (1861–1944): in the introduction of his book he presented the aim to survey the efforts of creating Lithuanian culture that complement and continue the history of the Lithuanian state and compensate for the disproportion between the political and cultural activity of Lithuanians.52 Šliūpas described the disproportion with an organicist image of the state of the nation: the history of Lithuanian literature reveals the process of “healing” the nation and may encourage the “recovery” from the disease in the present.53 Thus by the end of the 19th century, the philological concept of “Lithuanian literature” came to dominate Lithuanian discourse, which determined that monolingual Lithuanian literature came to spread, and the relationship with the literature of Lithuania in other languages mostly reached the stage of sharing the heritage.

50 51 52 53

M. [Jurgis Mikšas] and J. A. W. L. [Jonas Andrius Vištelis-Lietuvis], “Musu knigos” [Our books], Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 20. B. [Jonas Basanavičius], “Priekalba” [Preface], Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 4. [Jonas Šliūpas], Lietuviszkiejie rasztai ir rasztininkai [Lithuanian writings and writers] (Tilżēje: Kaszta Bałtimorės M. D. L. M. Draugystēs, 1890), V. Ibid., VI.

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Conclusion

The term “Lithuanian literature” in the process of nationalization of Lithuanian literature in the 19th century was used in two senses, historical and philological, in connection to civic and ethnic concepts of the Lithuanian nation. Until the 1870s, in Lithuania, the former land of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Russian Empire, the historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” prevailed, as it fit the form of the premodern civic nationality and the multicultural state of the civic nation, but to a certain extent it was in competition or in combination with the philological concept of “Lithuanian literature” that emerged from Prussian Lithuania. The historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” was connected to the statehood tradition of the former Lithuania and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the development of Lithuanian literature was seen as a way to overcome the arrhythmia of the Lithuanian political and cultural life brought about by the historical circumstances. The usage of the term reveals the conditions under which Lithuanian literature functioned in the multilingual culture and the various perceptions of the relationship between the country’s literature in the Lithuanian and Polish languages. The historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” that was prevalent in the early to mid-19th century lost the possibility of further development due to the detrimental institutional context and much stricter policies of ethnic-religious minorities in the Russian Empire at the end of the century. Thus the variants of the concept of “Lithuanian literature,” the history of their usage that was determined by the tradition of statehood and its cultural memory, partly account for the circumstance that Lithuanian literature, unlike the national literatures of other cultural communities of the region (e.g., Czech, Latvian) achieved the level of self-description only rather late, at the end of the 19th century. Since the Lithuanian ethnic community did not have sufficient possibilities for cultural-political organization (especially for education), the Herderian variant of nationalizing literature became dominant at the end of the 19th century as a more promising “communal technology” that offered more possibilities of cultural organization. Nevertheless, the historical concept of “Lithuanian literature” that was present in the early to mid-19th century in Lithuania and the reality of literary life it represented, even if it did not achieve continuity in the process of modern Lithuanian culture, survived as a recurring problem of national and cultural identity, never fully absorbed by Herderian cultural anthropology. Translated by Gabrielė Gailiūtė-Bernotienė

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Robinette, Nicholas. “The World Laid Waste: Herder, Language Labor, Empire.” New Literary History 42, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 193–203. Rossel, Sven H., gen. ed., and George C. Schoolfield, ed. A History of Finland’s Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Stanevičius, Simonas, and Kristijonas Donelaitis. Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa [Six tales from Simonas Stanevičius, Samogitian. And six others from Kristijonas Donelaitis, Prussian]. Wylniuje: Spaustuwoj’ B. Neumana, 1829. Subačius, Giedrius. Žemaičių bendrinės kalbos idėjos: XIX amžiaus pradžia [Ideas about Samogitian as standard language: The beginning of 19th century]. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 1998. [Šliūpas, Jonas]. Lietuviszkiejie rasztai ir rasztininkai [Lithuanian writings and writers]. Tilżēje: Kaszta Bałtimorės M. D. L. M. Draugystēs, 1890.

Towards an Unofficial Canon: Striving to Strengthen the Lithuanian Cultural Community under Russian Domination in the Mid-19th Century Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn

The notion of an unofficial canon seems to be self-contradictory and in fact it is. It concentrates opposing pursuits of repressed Lithuanians in the middle of the 19th century: rebuilding and renewing the foundations of their culture and meanwhile hiding the real goal of this attempt from the eyes of the invaders. Both underground and legal work served the purpose, despite the laws imposed, which aimed to stop rather than develop editorial, theatrical, and other initiatives. Only after Tsar Alexander II, considered to be liberal, had been enthroned in 1855, did people’s hopes rise and generate an enthusiasm for new cultural institutions, the first of which was the Museum of Antiquities. Deemed to be a kind of “shrine of national memories,” as Adam Mickiewicz would call it, as a materialization of poetic testimonies of the past, which were created to preserve the national consciousness of the country, the creation of the Museum epitomizes an affectionate circulation of values essential also for the process of a specific canon formed under circumstances of captivity. The initiative, modest at the beginning, was secretly intended to become a university in the future, i.e., to replace Vilnius University, which was closed by the Russians in 1832 after 250 years of activity. Lack of such centres of scholarly and artistic life resulted in scattering efforts for the enhancement of Lithuania. Consequently, private societies, literary circles and parlors, and reading communities took over the role of the institution in the distribution of significance. In this unofficial way some authors and works gained a key position due to some discrete measures like anonymous quotations, dedications, private recommendations, and last but not least uplifting poetry through music. The network of mutual support and the process of receiving recognition as well as entering the unofficial canon, will be the subject of this research article. To begin with, this complex situation seemingly needs to be seen in the light of early Nietzschean thought, but at the same time it points out imperialtainted aspects of his judgements. A conflict between the canon as the essence of the oppressive culture – in this case, Russian – and the attempt to oppose it by the oppressed, forms the background of this study which, nevertheless, aims to bring to light the less evident aspects of the struggle. Such a conflict

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_005

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would be understood – referring to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations – as a conflict between the imperial canon of “strong,” “monumental art,” and the endeavors of authentic cultural circles concerned about the survival and revival of the values under threat: But that antiquarian historical sense of reverence has the highest value when it infuses into the modest, raw, even meagre conditions in which an individual or a people live a simple moving feeling of pleasure and satisfaction […]. How could history better serve living than by the fact that it thus links the less favoured races and people to their home region and home traditions, keeps them settled there, and prevents them from roaming around and from competition and warfare, looking for something better in foreign places? (“On the Use and Abuse of History”)1 Nietzsche showed a lot of understanding of what he referred to as “antiquarians” – although, in fact, he also regarded their dependence on the past as harmful, both due to their lack of criticism of the past and disrespect toward manifestations of new life, including novel artistic forms. “Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present.”2 It is that life which should oppose any mummification of the past, both antiquarian and monumental. The former often turns into “the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting,”3 the latter is congealed in monuments, and it sanctions the lust for power over the present and the past equally. Correspondingly, the canon stands for dominance, whilst the ever-growing collection of archaeological or antiquarian excavations is tantamount to an escape from contemporary times and real-life challenges. The instrumental use of history, as legitimating the reign, implies the need to defend its canonical interpretation through administration and institutions, the judiciary, the police, or even the army. On the other hand, the devout approach to the ghosts of the past transforms into its very opposite. “Then reverence withers away” (in the original there is “die Pietät,” Pietism, at the place of “reverence”), the past becomes but a lifeless ballast.4 He judged history to be too overwhelming for the “anxious and short-lived animals who

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. by Ian C. Johnston (Nanaimo: Malaspina University-College, 1998), accessed April 12, 2018, http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche _untimely_meditations/on_the_use_and_abuse_of_History.htm. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

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always come back to the same needs and who with difficulty postpone their destruction for a little while. As a first priority they want only one thing: to live at any price.”5 Nevertheless, what seemed to be the raison d’être of a creative individual in the German Empire, i.e., the criticism of overwhelming monumentalism and suffocating antiquarianism, does not adequately reflect the complex reality of the inhabitants of the oppressed countries. Apart from the criticism of the literary canon imposed by the invaders, and the contempt for the archives or museums built to praise sovereign power, one had to cultivate monuments of his or her own past. Better yet, at times new ones had to be excavated or even created from scratch, disregarding the lack of historical records, as did some pre-Romantics and Romantics all over Europe, notably in enslaved countries. The opposition to the destructive force which took away the possibility of constituting the national entity of the “here and now” required anchoring it in the past, however, such activity was subject to the control of the oppressors. Hence, the opening of the Museum of Antiquities on 17 April 1856 in Vilnius happened to be such an extraordinary event which, from the perspective of the Teuton Valhalla at Regensburg (1831) or Germanischen Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (1852), may have appeared to be parochial and misbegotten.6 In his Wiersz na uroczyste otwarcie Muzeum… [A poem for the ceremonial opening of the Museum], published in the form of a special leaflet, Ludwik Kondratowicz-Władysław Syrokomla, a gifted poet, admired by his contemporaries, did not hide the deficits of the Vilnius institution, while expressing hope for its rapid development: Za szczupłość naszych zbiorów nie wstyd nam u świata, Bo jeszcze ziemia nasza w pamiątki bogata, Bogate serce naszych współobywateli, Co się każdym nabytkiem ochoczo podzieli. […] Nie chcą bogatych darów tej świątyni ściany, Rdzawy kawał żelaza w polu wyorany, Stara miedziana drachma gryszpanem pokryta, Albo karta odwieczna, co nikt nie wyczyta, Lub staroświecki obraz z odwiecznymi plamy, Oto cała jałmużna jakiej pożądamy!

5 Ibid. 6 Christian Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 153.

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Jeśli z takimi dary pośpieszyć ochota, Między święte pamiątki umieścim te wota; A może wśród tych szczątków najlichsza okrucha Posłuży do zbadania dziejowego ducha. […] Za czasów starożytnych, jak nam piszą dzieje, Zawieszano w kościołach wojenne trofeje; I dzisiaj toczy walkę i zwycięstwa szuka Z czasem i niepamięcią dziejowa nauka. A te stare żelastwa, te spróchniałe karty, To łup w imię nauki Czasowi wydarty, Zawieszamy go z chlubą w pamiątek kościele; Ale walka trwa ciągle – zdobyczy jest wiele: Wspomożcie nas w tej walce, dodajcie nam siły, Kto szanuje pradziada, komu prawnuk miły! A da Bóg może plony zjawią się bogate, Przeszłość weźmie uczczenie, a przyszłość oświatę.7 [We are not ashamed of the paucity of our collection, For our Earth is still rich in relics, The warm heart of our fellow citizens, That is eager to share every new acquisition. […] The temple’s walls do not want lavish gifts, A rusty piece of iron ploughed in the field, An old copper coin covered with verdigris, Or a timeless card which no one will read, Or an old-fashioned painting with age-old stains, That’s all the alms we desire! If you are eager to hurry with such offerings, We shall put these votives between our sacred relics; Perhaps the smallest part amid this debris Will serve us to explore the spirit of the times. In ancient times, as the story says, War trophies were hung in churches;

7 Ludwik Kondratowicz [Władysław Syrokomla], Wiersz na uroczyste otwarcie Muzeum ([Wilno], 1856), [2].

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Up to this day historical science has been fighting and craving for victory Against time and oblivion-predictory. And that old ironware, the decayed pages, Is the loot taken away from time for science’s sake, We’re hanging it proudly in the church of relics; Yet the struggle continues with achievements aplenty; Help us in this fight, give us strength, If you respect both great-grandfather and your dear great-grandson! With God’s will there will be a rich harvest, The past will take celebration and the future – education.] The opening of the Museum took place on the birthday of Alexander II, which was shrewdly reflected in the tribute at the onset of the poem, although the next stanzas voice the democratic spirit which is the opposite of the Tsarist autocracy. It was fellow citizens who enriched the collection with the relics found at their homes or on their land.8 The exhibits brought from particular regions of the country make up the symbolically reproduced whole of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, revealing its past, looking into its future and combining memory with hope. Furthermore, thanks to comparing the museum to a temple, the archaeological-patriotic gathering activity, sometimes contemptuously referred to as “gratomania” (a kind of hoarding), appears to serve the continuation of the community, bringing a new sacral dimension to it.9 With the full consciousness of their seeming unattractiveness, a few wretched, rusty, stale, stained and decaying fragments of the past that Syrokomla called “sacred souvenirs” and “relics” came to be included. Whereas Syrokomla kept a certain slightly ironic distance from the results of the first excavations, a journalist, a local lore researcher, Adam Honory Kirkor described the collection of the Museum in his Przechadzki po Wilnie [Strolls around Vilnius], published in 1856 under the pseudonym of Jan ze Śliwna, disseminating the chapter about Antiquities as a separate print. Apart from mentioning Eustachy Tyszkiewicz as the founder of the institution, he enumerated a large group of individuals engaged in the co-creation of the institution, i.e., scholars, painters, writers, and even one censor. He regarded a “statuette of

8 Žygintas Būčys, “‘Bastionas nuo šiaurės vėtrų’: Senienų užuovėjoje” [“A bastion against the north winds”: In the shelter of antiquities], in Kova dėl istorijos: Vilniaus senienų muziejus (1855–1915) [A fight for history: Vilnius Museum of Antiquities (1855–1915)], ed. Reda Griškaitė and Žygintas Būčys (Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus, 2015), 21–28. 9 Konstanty Tyszkiewicz, Wilija i jej brzegi [Wilija and its banks] (Drezno: J. I. Kraszewski, 1871), 16–17.

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the Lithuanian god, Perkūnas (No. 1, cabinet No. 11) found in Kiernów (Kernavė) and donated to the museum by a famous novelist and antiquarian Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, to be the “most important monument.”10 Interestingly, the high rank of the writer is on a par with the importance of the subject, since Kraszewski quite unquestionably held a central place in the Lithuanian cultural pantheon of the time. One could get the impression that the hierarchy of gods and the hierarchy of writers are in a mysterious and close relationship as, shortly after Perkun, the following item was placed in the same cabinet: Maleńki posążek Kawosa, boga wojny u Litwinów, […] posążek znaleziony w Pińszczyźnie, przez Mieczysława Sliźnia, ofiarowany Ludwikowi Kondratowiczowi, a przez niego w Muzeum złożony, wysoki calów litewskich 2,15, wyobraża rycerza z szyszakiem na głowie, z sztyletem za pasem i jakiemś narzędziem w rodzaju trąbki. Oczy na wierzch wysterkły, usta otwarte, ręce do góry wyciągnięte z dziurkami w dłoniach, widocznie do przewleczenia nici dla zawieszenia na szyi, może samego Krewe-Krewejty, lub kapłana boga Kawosa.11 [A tiny statue of Kawos, a Lithuanian god of war, […] found in Pińszczyzna by Mieczysław Slizień, given to Ludwik Kondratowicz, and donated by him to the Museum, it is 2.15 Lithuanian inches tall, and it depicts a knight with a helmet on his head, a dagger behind his belt and some kind of trumpet tool. His eyes standing out, mouth open, hands up with some holes in the palms so as to weave a thread into and hang it on the neck, perhaps of the pagan chief priest Krewe-Krewejta or the preacher of Kawos himself.] Undoubtedly, it is this detailed description of the subject along with the accession, which is of greater importance than the obvious analogy between the cultural and the pagan Lithuanian world. This emphasizes the solicitude with which everyone approached traces of the past – be they rank-and-file fellow citizens and explorers of the past, including poets who were the most important spiritual representatives of the community. Each and every individual who contributed to the common good was considered “a worker.”12 It is worthy to note that a landlord Mieczysław Ślizień, the one who gave the statue to 10 11 12

Adam Honory Kirkor, Przechadzki po Wilnie [Strolls around Vilnius] (Wilno: A. Marcinkowski, 1856), 235. Ibid. Ibid., 229.

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Kondratowicz, was a relative of the Philomats, Otton and Rafał Ślizieńs, who were hosts of the poet and ethnographer Jan Czeczot in the years 1844–1846, after his return from exile in inner Russia and compulsory settlement in east Belarus.13 The message conveyed by the secret Philomath Society (which brought together Vilnius University students and young intelligentsia, active at the end of the second and at the beginning of the third decade of the 19th century, later severely persecuted) stressed the importance of self-education with the aim of achieving self-awareness, whose component was exploring and praising the past, all treated with due respect. The attempt to continue the Philomathic tradition of “improving in self-study” and cultivating patriotism led to Kraszewski’s arrest in 1830, which subsequently turned into police surveillance and a ban on leaving Vilnius. Still, Kraszewski remained loyal to the mission of the organization – in the words of Onufry Pietraszkiewicz, also one of the Philomaths – as “a mirror which collected scattered remnants of nationality so as to keep them from the ultimate loss.”14 All the valuable remnants discovered despite somewhat inadequate education and moral sensitivity – together with other values constitutive for the community – should be retrieved, exposed, nurtured and wrapped with – to quote Nietzsche once again – “moving feeling.” It was the very “antiquarian historical sense of reverence,” appreciated by the philosopher, which served that role and allowed for forming a cordial relationship between individuals and their homeland. Pietism, referred to on many occasions by Nietzsche in his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life – so fervently practiced in the youth of the future foe of Christianity15 – had a meaning which seriously exceeded the history of Protestant religious movements. Despite the knowledge of the spiritual background, the author of Untimely Meditations used the word Pietism in its common sense, i.e., as a special kind of attentiveness combined with a feeling, a sort of sensitive respect, reverence. In the English lexicon, it retains some religious affectation. Pietism, with its primary requirement regarding

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Stanisław Świrko, Z Mickiewiczem pod rękę, czyli życie i twórczość Jana Czeczota [Arm in arm with Mickiewicz, or The life and work of Jan Czeczot] (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1989), 256, 290–291; Jerzy Borowczyk, Zesłane pokolenie. Filomaci w Rosji (1824–1870) [A deported generation. Philomats in Russia (1824–1870)] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014), 358. Wybór pism filomatów. Konspiracje studenckie w Wilnie 1817–1823 [Selected Philomats’ writings. Student conspiracies in Vilnius 1817–1823], ed. Alina Witkowska (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1959), CXLII. Paweł Mazanka CSsR, Fryderyka Nietzschego droga od wiary do ateizmu [Friedrich Nietzsche’s way from faith to atheism], Studia Redemptorsystowkie 8 (2010): 67–83.

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experiencing the Bible, provided the foundation of the Romantic movement, as shown by Zygmunt Łempicki in his brilliant essay The World of Books and the Real World. A Contribution to Grasping the Essence of Romanticism, written in German in its original language version (Bücherwelt und wirkliche Welt. Ein Beitrag zur Wesenserfassung der Romantik).16 The emotionality of Pietism, which transitioned in the 18th and 19th centuries from the spiritual to the secular, caused non-religious literary works to exude a sacral aura and enabled, or even commissioned, both their internalization and shaping of life in accordance with the patterns they contained. That way, the canon as a term referring to the Bible gained a new meaning and started encompassing secular literary works which were considered to be as prominent, especially when conveying imponderables.17 In fact, one could venture to say that the definition of the canon itself remained the same: “a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine”;18 the only thing that was subject to change was the notion of inspiration. The authenticity of inspiration was verified not by the Church thought of as a community inspired by the Holy Spirit, but by other authorities: academies, schools, theaters, editorial offices, magazines and newspapers, societies, cultural figures as, for instance, great inspired poets and writers. Also, as Andrea Lanoux proves in her dissertation Od narodu do kanonu [From nation to canon], critics, chronicles and historians of literature should be taken into account.19 However, owing to the fact that Lithuania was severely affected by an acute lack both of such institutions and esteemed people, who might have freely expressed their opinion,20 the recognition of values, especially when deep emotions were involved, proceeded in a less evident and quite a complex way. Therefore, the Museum of Lithuanian Antiquities was thought up – in the words of Eustachy Tyszkiewicz – to unite:

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18 19 20

Zygmunt Łempicki, “Bücherwelt und wirkliche Welt. Ein Beitrag zur Wesenerfassung der Romantik,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturenwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte III (1925): 339–386. Grzegorz Marchwiński, Kanon literacki i naród (1870–1905) [The Literary canon and the nation] (Kraków: Collegium Columbinum, 2017), 19. Andrea Lanoux, Od narodu do kanonu. Powstawanie kanonów polskiego i rosyjskiego romantyzmu w latach 1815–1865 [From nation to canon. Forming the Polish and Russian literary canons in the years 1815–1865] (Warszawa: IBL, 2003), 24–25. “Canon,” in Oxford Dictionary, accessed April 17, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/canon. Lanoux, Od narodu do kanonu, 27–28, 90–107. Some of them, e.g., Hippolyte Taine, Georg Brandes and Stanisław Tarnowski, gained a lot of influence mostly thanks to university chairs. This is also, to some extent, the case of Harold Bloom as the theoretician and advocate of the Western canon.

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w jedno uczone grono, utworzyć towarzystwo naukowe, stworzyć muzeum i bibliotekę jako źródło pomocnicze dla pracujących, otworzyć publiczną czytelnię, zająć się wydawnictwem pism pożytecznych i zgromadzić w jedną całość rozproszone ówczesnymi wypadkami indywidua reprezentujące inteligencją krajową.21 [into one scholar’s circle, establish a scientific society, create a museum or a library as a helping source for the workers, open a public reading room, start publishing worthy journals and bring together all individuals, scattered by the then circumstances and representing the national intelligentsia.] According to Tyszkiewicz, the Museum was supposed to play a fundamental role, not only as its national vault but also as a creative institution, a centre of academic and cultural activity for the country. It was in a way the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in nuce as, alongside the exhibits of fauna and flora, there were also seeds of all the trees growing in the Lithuanian land.22 After six years of its activity, the Museum was closed in 1865, and the vast part of its collection was transferred to Moscow. Most probably, had it not been for the liquidation of this institution, and the plundering and diffusion of the collection, the Museum would have helped in drawing up a list of obligatory reading for every Lithuanian. Judging from the description made by Kirkor, the Library was at the initial stage of the organization,23 with a rich, but rather random collection of books,24 and definitely did not duly reflect the heritage of “domestic” authors. Naturally, it would have become an institution organizing by and large the body of literature,25 especially within the historical domain, but also, thanks to the planned publishing companies, the contemporary one, if only the circumstances had been different. Surely, as confirmed by the Philomaths’ literary choices, the priority among the works which were crucial for the historical identity of Lithuania’s heirs was given to the Statute of Lithuania which was effective until 1840. That is

21 22

23 24 25

Tyszkiewicz, Wilija i jej brzegi, 11. Audronė Meldžukienė, Radvilė Rimgailė-Voicik, Mindaugas Rasimavičius, “Botanikos rinkiniai Vilniaus senienų muziejuje” [The Botanical collections in the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities], in Kova dėl istorijos: Vilniaus senienų muziejus (1855–1915), 411–423. Kirkor, Przechadzki po Wilnie, 250. Małgorzata Stolzman, Czasopisma wileńskie Adama Honorego Kirkora [Adam Honory Kirkor’s Vilnius journals] (Warszawa: PWN, 1973), 40. Marchwiński, Kanon literacki i naród, 21.

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why a prominent place was taken also by Tadeusz Czacki’s treatise O litewskich i polskich prawach, o ich duchu, źródłach, związku i o rzeczach zawartych w pierwszym Statucie dla Litwy w 1529 roku wydanym [On Lithuanian and Polish laws, on their spirit, sources, relationship, and on things presented in the First Statute of Lithuania issued in 1529 AD]. Next, there were: Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmudzka i wszystkiej Rusi [The chronicle of Poland, Lithuania, Samogitia and all of Ruthenia] and O początkach, wywodach, dzielnościach, sprawach rycerskich i domowych sławnego narodu litewskiego, żemojdzkiego i ruskiego [On the beginning, reasoning noble genealogy, bravery, deeds, knighthood and domestic issues in the renowned Lithuanian, Samogitian and Ruthenian nation] by Maciej Stryjkowski.26 The fundamental significance of the aforementioned literary pieces of work is unquestionable. In a masterpiece rooted in the gentry’s tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, a character of the same surname joins the discussion on the origin of noble families: “The white rose of five petals,” cried Mickiewicz, “with a cap in a golden field: it is a princely coat; Stryjkowski writes frequently of it.”27 It is worth noting that the high status of historical, juridical as well as genealogical works corresponds to the key role of intelligentsia of noble origin in the 19th-century Lithuanian cultural movement, from its Philomath beginnings until, at least, the eighties.28 As a result of the same pattern, a specific kind of a tale called “gawęda,” which originally was a semi-theatrical genre typical for the oral culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, gained its popularity in literature. Several authors even partially, to an achievable level, followed the example of Pan Tadeusz by Mickiewicz, as to literary compositions in verse, or Pamiątki JPana Seweryna Soplicy, cześnika parnawskiego [Memories of a Rev. Gent. Seweryn Soplica, a cup-bearer in Pärnu County] by

26

27

28

Cf. Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, “Narodowy kompozytor nieistniejącego kraju. Stanisław Moniuszko i wskrzeszanie Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego ‘w Pieśni’” [A national composer from a non-existent country. Stanisław Moniuszko and the revival of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania], in Teatr operowy Stanisława Moniuszki [Stanisław Moniuszko’s musical theater], ed. Magdalena Dziadek and Elżbieta Nowicka (Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN: 2014), 104–106. Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania, trans. George Rapall Noyes (London, Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1917), 101, accessed April 22, 2018, https://archive .org/stream/pantadeuszorthel28240gut/28240-pdf_djvu.txt. Cf. Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Antanas Kulakauskas, Carų valdžioje: Lietuva XIX amžiuje [Under tsarist rule. Lithuania in the 19th century] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996), 236–268.

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Henryk Rzewuski, as to pieces in prose. In the former Lithuania Syrokomla built his reputation in the previous field, Ignacy Chodźko in the latter. In the tail poem Urodzony Jan Dęboróg [Man of breeding Jan Dęboróg], the father of the main protagonist admonishes the interlocutor (in the third person): “If only he had looked into the Statute, […] there, in the fourth chapter […],”29 pointing out the codex as an indispensable source of wisdom. The continuation of Syrokomla’s poem, or actually its prequel, entitled Szkolne czasy Jana Dęboroga [Schooldays of Jan Dęborg] offers some recent literature guidelines, referring to contemporary works such as Obrazy Litwy [Images of Lithuania] by the just mentioned Chodźko and Barbara Radziwiłłówna by Antoni Edward Odyniec. There, to close the circle of references, Mickiewicz is mentioned – not directly of course – but as “Grażyna’s prophecy weaver, the most prominent creator in our prophetic circle.”30 Suffice it to say, Mickiewicz’s oeuvre was of inestimable value, but the poet could not participate in the cultural activity of Lithuania personally at that time as a political expatriate. Nevertheless, he influenced it with the power of his legend and works, distributed clandestinely, transcribed also manually and quite commonly read, against the oppressor’s will.31 Both the official decrees and the proceedings of the repression apparatus – explicit and implicit, lawful and above the law, – comprised the extension of the Tsar’s will, personally involved in that matter. That will was quite capricious, which should not be interpreted as an indication of weakness, but – on the contrary – as the evidence of unlimited power, capable of anything. The sui generis paternalism implied a peculiar kind of pedagogy. Any breach of the applicable laws should elicit fear, guilt and subsequently the desire for moral improvement. Thus, since 1834 no work of Mickiewicz’s was to be disseminated, including the works published before the November Uprising – however, some of them were referred to as “prohibited for the public,” while others – according to the capricious will – as “prohibited without reservation.”32 Their public collection and storage, e.g., in libraries and bookstores, which were successively searched through, were prohibited “under the most severe penalty.” Paradoxically, the 29

30 31

32

Władysław Syrokomla [Ludwik Kondratowicz], Szkolne czasy Jana Dęboroga [Schooldays of Jan Dęborg], in Wybór poezji [Selected poems], ed. Franciszek Bielak (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1970), 157. Ibid., 228. Krzysztof Kopczyński, “Mickiewicz w systemie carskich zakazów: 1831–1855: cenzura, prawo i próby ich oficjalnego omijania” [Mickiewicz in the system of tsar’s constraints: Censorship, law and attempts at the official evasion], Pamiętnik Literacki 83/3 (1992): 153–170. Ibid., 160–161.

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works gained an even higher value, and Mickiewicz’s authority, which was already substantial in the Philomathic era, continued to gain ground and exude almost supernatural power. Therefore, critic Aleksander Tyszyński, when distinguishing the “Lithuanian school” in poetry in the late thirties, claimed that three words can be found at its core: “song,” “virtue,” and “friend,” and immediately added: “right after the Master.”33 In this view, Mickiewicz was not at the forefront of other poets, but as if beyond the horizon of the real world, in the domain of superior values and imponderability. At the same time, he remained a hidden author, a person outside the public sphere, someone from the closest circle of friends. On the one hand, in order to evade censorship, he was called “the Nemen’s prophet,” “Grażyna’s prophet,” “our land’s prophet,” the Master himself; on the other hand, he was referred to as a close acquaintance – “Mr Adam,” or even more friendly – “Adam,” familiarly – “Adaś.” Nevertheless, on a rare occasion the surname of Mickiewicz was smuggled into print under the eye of Russian censors.34 He turned out to be strictly canonical, considering that thanks to the canon a link with the past, as Grzegorz Marchwiński sharply points out, combines contradictory features: ceremonialism with friendly relationship.35 The more limited the possibility to celebrate the link publicly, the stronger the need for familiarity. Under foreign occupation, reading was mostly of a non-institutional nature, and often even anti-institutional. Books circulated within one’s family, a certain company or circle of friends, fraternity in a parish and the like.36 This way of disseminating literary works determined their obligatory nature, the worth for national self-consciousness, the literary hierarchy, which naturally could not have been done without certain guidance. Due to the lack of the kind of institutions existing in independent countries, the focuses of this process were located simply in houses, manors, palaces – not in all, of course – but, as proved by Reda Griškaitė, in quite many.37 These locations constituted real, vibrant cultural centers which avoided state control rather ef-

33

34 35 36 37

Aleksander Tyszyński, “O szkołach poezji polskiej” [About schools in Polish poetry], in Polska krytyka literacka (1800–1918) [Polish literary critics (1800–1918)], vol. 2, ed. Zofia Szmydtowa (Warszawa: PWN, 1959), 75. Kopczyński, “Mickiewicz w systemie carskich zakazów,” 162–163. Marchwiński, Kanon literacki i naród, 19. Cf. Elizabeth Long, “On the Social Nature of Reading,” in Book Clubs: Women and the Use of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1–30. Reda Griškaitė, “Dvaras kaip ‘archyvas’: bajorija ir Lietuvos istorijos tyrimai” [The manor as “archive”: Gentry and a research on Lithuanian history], Metai, no. 10 (2016), accessed April 28, 2018, http://www.zurnalasmetai.lt/?p=1398.

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fectively, without giving in to terror. Widely-known Stanisław Moniuszko perfectly captured and exploited this situation, devising the concept of Śpiewniki domowe [Domestic songbooks] and implementing this despite the objections of the censorship. The composer skilfully emphasized Mickiewicz’s patronage over his endeavor, using the scene from Świtezianka [The fair maiden from Świteź] as the commencement of the first issue of Śpiewniki domowe, and privileging poets from the Lithuanian school along with other authors related to the downtrodden country.38 At this point it is well to remember that Moniuszko praised pagan Lithuania as well in his Milda and Nijoła cantatas in the words of an original, but forgotten poet and local traveler Edward Chłopicki, according to Anafielas, an epic by Kraszewski. The composer also encouraged Syrokomla to adapt his epic Margier into an opera libretto, which he barely commenced. Furthermore, Moniuszko composed music to the play Sielanka [Pastoral] by a bilingual poet, Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, written both in Polish and Belarusian. The musician’s persistence in encouraging his colleagues and the cooperation of other artists proves that all of them intentionally, though not with equal perseverance, participated in the founding of an independent Lithuanian culture. It was implicitly understood as an effect of cooperation among Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish nationalities as part of one federal, complex nation, that of the Grand-Duchy that they desired to rebuild.39 Undoubtedly, such an idea implied distinguishing the body of elementary reading. It subsequently meant bringing into existence something that seems illogical and unfeasible, i.e., the establishment of an unofficial canon. Since it was a concealed phenomenon, such a canon cannot be fully retraced easily. It was a formidable undertaking because that which could easily be recommended to trusted friends, in the public domain had to be mere suggestion, indication or gesture, that would not raise the oppressor’s suspicions. Otherwise, it could have simply turned into a disservice, an exposure of the enterprise. Falling into disgrace was not difficult at all, as shown by the Philomaths’ trial, which destroyed the culture-creating endeavor of the first generation of the Lithuanian intelligentsia. All very ambitious activities had to be enacted by means of inconspicuous measures, kept within reasonable limits. It is possible, however, to find accounts of how some components of the canon emerged. “Having bid farewell to the open-minded guest – as poet and diarist, Gabriela Puzynina née Günther, summed up the year 1842 when a Philomath and poet,

38 39

Okulicz-Kozaryn, “Narodowy kompozytor nieistniejącego kraju,” 158–161. Ibid.

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Tomasz Zan, left her estate – books were the only entertainment and company. Kazimierz Zaleski, the parish priest of Świr, provided us with Grabowscy, Kraszewscy, Of-Dyclapowie.”40 Although it may appear that the three authors: Michał Grabowski, Kraszewski, and Placyd Jankowski, who wrote under the pseudonym John of Dyclap, were equal partners, it was Kraszewski – as evidenced by other fragments of Puzynina’s notes and the poet’s correspondence – who was definitely at the forefront. After all, it was he who received the role of her adviser thanks to his noticing and reviewing her debut in “Ateneum.”41 In Puzynina’s library, mentioned several times in her diary W Wilnie i dworach litewskich [In Vilnius and in Lithuanian manor houses] Kraszewski held a special place next to two other of Puzynina’s friends and mentors, i.e., a prose writer Chodźko and a poet Odyniec. Maria Berkan-Jabłońska claims that in the home collection “in Dobrowlany, on the list of works read with fondness, there was a great number of literary pieces written by ‘swojacy’ [the locals].”42 Besides the authors already mentioned, one could find included the poetry of Syrokomla, Zan, Wincenty Korotyński, Karolina Praniauskaitė (Proniewska), and others. It is worth emphasizing that the word “fondness” could be also interpreted as heartfelt feeling if not a hidden ardor, which united each and every manifestation of domestic cultural life. Most authors whose works were read by Puzynina belonged to the circle of her close acquaintances or faithful friends. This interdependence of reading choices and social relations, which is understandable because of the prevailing lifestyle, contributes a few more interesting aspects. The first one, an ideal, is the aspect of “friendship,” “brotherly friendship” – a notion which was suggested by Tyszyński as being crucial to the “Lithuanian school,” wherein “brotherly” means “close,” “deep,” “cordial,” “dictated by the heart.” Puzynina would have been glad to gather all of those authors under her roof. Some of them – Zan, Chodźko, Odyniec… were literally her guests, and those who could not participate were hosted metaphorically. Arranged in many places, encompassing growing and more and more numerous circles, the reading (or reading-authoring) community was characterized by increasing dynamics, which was additionally magnified by vain hopes that Alexander 40

41

42

Gabriela Puzynina, W Wilnie i w dworach litewskich: pamiętnik z lat 1815–1843 [In Vilnius and in the Lithuanian manor houses: Diaries from the years 1815–1843] (Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1928), 320. Maria Berkan-Jabłońska, Arystokratka i biedermeier. Rzecz o Gabrieli z Güntherów Puzyninie (1815–1869) [An aristocrat and biedermeier. A thing about Gabriela Puzynina née Günther (1815–1869)] (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2015), 88. Ibid., 57.

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II would turn out really liberal. The Museum of Lithuanian Antiquities was one of the fruits of this collective work, whose interpersonal character is so intriguingly stressed in the descriptions of the exhibits’ accessions. Accordingly, it was not an imagined community, a community mediated by printing, an entity existent thanks to imagination provided and disseminated by the press and books. It does not resemble the community preconceived by Benedict Anderson,43 but approaches an informal society, postulated by Kraszewski.44 It benefited from traditional, personal relations, rather than from the impersonalizing mediation of print, albeit members would have been delighted at the possibility for free or at least less limited exchange of information, meanings, ideas. In Lithuania publishers, printers, and booksellers could not take the initiative in that process, having been exposed to repression by the government authority from one side, and, to the complaints of writers and readers from another. Manifestations of gratitude, like a poemtale Księgarz uliczny [Street bookseller], devoted to a bouquiniste from Vilnius, Kinkulin, by his friend, Syrokomla, were rather unusual. The friendship principle applicable in the reading-authoring community clearly had a utopian character, which was inhibiting the development of criticism. It is symptomatic that Kraszewski’s severe reaction against an issue of Romulad Podbereski’s almanack Rocznik Literacki [Literary yearbook], filled largely with the writings of his family, was taken as a violation of the domestic peace and caused difficulty for the author. Zofia Klimańska née Chłopicka – quite a flamboyant and controversial figure and a publicist – wrote an open letter in this matter (List Zofii z Brzozówki do Benedykta Dołęgi [Zofia from Brzozówka’s letter to Benedykt Dołęga]), objecting to Kraszewski’s mocking tone and condemning his talent for accentuating the dark side of human nature. “On this ocean of time and events – admonished Klimańska – brotherly feelings should work as our north star!”45 The second aspect of this interdependence is linked to the custom of sharing literary works. The custom had already been cultivated in the “republic of the youth,” “republic of friends,” that is, in Philomathic circles. In print this custom mainly took the form of a dedication. In literature written in Lithuania in the forties and especially in the fifties of the 19th century, the number of dedicated works increased considerably. Dedications sometimes took over the

43 44 45

Cf. Lanoux, Od narodu do kanonu, 28. Berkan-Jabłońska, Arystokratka i biedermeier, 88. Zofia Klimańska, List Zofii z Brzozówki do Benedykta Dołęgi (Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1850), 7.

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functions of titles of works; in other cases – especially with regard to longer works, poems, tales, tale poems, novels as well as almanacks – they turned into dedication letters. Most of the time they were addressed to other authors, yet also – of course, in accordance with ancient custom – to patrons and benefactors.46 At times dedications appear on a given piece of work somehow detached from its content, but most of the time they signal a meaningful relationship between the gift and the recipient. This pattern is connected with the ancient tradition of an epistle, which is a kind of semi-private statement, closely linked to a dedication via the transition form of a dedication letter.47 In mid-century Lithuania one of the most significant examples of such epistles was given by Puzynina in her poem “Do Adama M… (posyłając mu trochę wody i kwiatek)” [To Adam M… (sending him some water and a flower)]: Nie wzgardzisz darem moim, Litwinie, Bo w nim jest wspomnień władza tajemna, Kwiat na kowieńskiej wykwitł dolinie, A woda z rzeki domowej Niemna!48 [You will not despise my gift, Lithuanian, Because it hides a secret power of memories, A flower blossomed in the Kaunas valley, And the water is from the Nemunas river!] In the poem Mickiewicz, legible to all denoted by his name and the initial letter of his surname, focuses all desires and dreams of his compatriots reading his poetry and weeping on the banks of the Nemunas. Furthermore, the whole country addresses him, as the main river contains – along with their tears – waters from “all Lithuanian rivers and springs.”49 In discussing imbricate concepts of the canon and world literature David Damrosch accents what is relevant to both of them: “the mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading

46

47 48 49

Jan Trzynadlowski, “O dedykacji” [On dedication], in Rękopiśmienne dedykacje autorskie w księgozbiorze Ossolineum [Original manuscript dedications in the Ossolineum book collection], ed. Jan Długosz (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1967), 9. Elżbieta Nowicka, Postylion niesie pisanie. Szkice o romantycznym liście poetyckim [Postilion carries writings. Essays on the Romantic epistle] (Poznań: WiS, 1993), 5–19. Gabriela Puzynina, “Do Adama M…,” in W imię Boże – Dalej w świat [In God’s name – further in the world] (Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1859), 43–44. Ibid., 44.

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established classics and new discoveries alike.”50 It prompts one to examine the process of creating cultural hierarchy and to cope with the challenge of reconstructing the unofficial canon. Dedications are very useful in this respect as they certify relations between writers and, often enough, allow one to learn more about persons of influence, and the rank of literary works. Despite the unquestionable and concurrently confidential supremacy of Mickiewicz, a query regarding dedications, unsurprisingly, displays the chief role of Kraszewski and his works. Among them are favored those pieces of writing which involve Lithuania, especially Vilnius, e.g., novels Poeta i świat [A Poet and the world] and Powieść bez tytułu [A novel without a title]. Moreover, formally offering him a musical, artistic or literary composition, a book or other publication was intended to try to make the work more significant. On the other hand, authors, who were honored with a dedication by him, received an instant acknowledgement or retained the recognition. There were, above all, the cases of Syrokomla and Chodźko. The latter, to whom in 1824, before being deported, Mickiewicz gave a manuscript of his Romantic tale Grażyna, seemed to be the most respected after Kraszewski. On the title page of his novel Boża czeladka [God’s retinue] wrote: “To Ignacy Chodźko, the author of Obrazki litewskie [Pictures of Lithuania] as evidence of my high esteem for him as a man and a writer.”51 He also received dedications from Odyniec, Syrokomla and others… In light of such recognition and empathy, the position of Syrokomla appears to be even higher: he addressed some of his works to Kraszewski, but explicitly only Zgon Acerna [The death of Acernus], and was repaid with two books of prose (Ostatni z Siekierzyńskich. Historia szlachecka [The last of Siekierzyńscy. Story of the nobility] and Jermoła. Obrazki wiejskie [Jermoła. Village pictures]). Dedications addressed to Syrokomla as well as the ones he addressed to other cultural “workers” of the Grand Duchy or, generally, to all Lithuanians, indicate the huge integrative role of the poet. In fact, he linked many people. As mentioned by Teodor Tripplin, a traveler from Warsaw, in his report on an excursion across Lithuania and Samogitia: “in all the houses I had to visit […], I found Syrokomla’s books.”52 Not only did Syrokomla put a lot of effort into “developing a taste for literature,” but also – having gained wider recognition – he introduced new authors to it. The first collection of a young poet Wincenty Korotyński’s poems 50 51 52

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Boża czeladka (Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1858), 5. Teodor Tripplin, Dziennik podróży po Litwie i Żmudzi [Travel chronicles across Lithuania and Samogitia], vol. 1 (Wilno: Maurycy Orgelbrand, 1858), 91.

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was complemented with Syrokomla’s introduction, where a word to the reader ceases to be conventional and gains an intimate dimension. An older poet introduced a younger one as his household member, actually for a couple of years, and his charge, and dedicated a long poem to him before sending him out into the greater world: Idź młody piewco! leć młody ptaku! […] Śpiewać w litewskich piewców orszaku, To znaczy śpiewać dla dobrych ludzi, Kochać tych ludzi […].53 [Go, young bard! fly young bird! […] To sing in the Lithuanian bards’ procession That is to sing for the righteous people, Love those people […].] In turn, in his collection of verses Korotyński published an epistle “Do F. P.” [To F. P.] (“sending a copy of Dęboróg”). Seemingly, the custom of sending pieces of work to each other is passed on to the younger generation of writers as part of the alliance, not conflict. Additionally, these authors – following the pursuits of their elders (Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, Moniuszko, Syrokomla) – even more eagerly used the less esteemed languages of the Great Duchy. Apart from writing in Polish, Korotyński wrote in Belarusian – his patriotic series of poems Hutorka staraho dzieda [An old man’s talk] was published anonymously in Kraków during the 1863 uprising. Proniewska (Praniauskaitė), a Polish-Lithuanian poetess addressed Kirkor in one of her poems, and Syrokomla twice. Her pieces of work were also addressed to Antanas Baranauskas (Antoni Baranowski), who was seven years younger than she was. Baranauskas was also keen to dedicate his pieces of work to other authors. In the subtitle of a poem: “Do Panny Karoliny Proniewskiej (odpowiedź na Jej wiersz: Bracie w Chrystusie, chociaż mi nie znany…)” [To miss Karolina Proniewska (An answer to her poem: brother in Christ, though unknown to me)], he included a supplement: “Sending back

53

Władysław Syrokomla [Ludwik Kondratowicz], “Idź młody piewco!” [Go, young bard!], in Wincenty Korotyński, Czem chata bogata, tem rada. Kilka poezyj [All we have is at your disposal. Some poetry] (Wilno: J. Krasnosielski, 1857), 2.

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Syrokomla.” In the last stanza of this piece of work, he makes a significant confession: Czytam autorów dawnych i nowych Niech Bóg nie wzgardzi modłów gorących Za dawców książek oświecających.54 [I read old and new authors May God not reject my prayers For the donators of enlightening books.] The development of the Lithuanian reading community was impeded by the uprising against Russia – yet one could still find some interesting traces commemorating and somehow prolonging the existence of the community. It can be found, for example, in the monograph by an archaeologist and country explorer Konstanty Tyszkiewicz Wilija i jej brzegi [Neris and its banks], in Upominek wileński [Vilnius gift] dedicated to Kraszewski, in translation of Witolo rauda into Lithuanian by Andrius Vištelis (Andrzej Wisztelewski). In spite of the above, the Lithuanian utopian reading community together with the project of an unofficial canon seems to have found itself almost – to quote the words from the “Preface” to Konrad Wallenrod by Mickiewicz – “entirely in the past.”55 Translated by Marta Kozłowska, Mateusz Fórmanek and Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn

Bibliography Aleksandravičius, Egidijus, and Antanas Kulakauskas. Carų valdžioje: Lietuva XIX amžiuje [Under tsarist rule. Lithuania in the 19th century]. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996. Baranauskas, Antanas. “Do Panny Karoliny Proniewskiej (odpowiedź na Jej wiersz: Bracie w Chrystusie chociaż mi nie znany…)” [To miss Karolina Proniewska (An

54

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Antanas Baranauskas, “Do Panny Karoliny Proniewskiej (odpowiedź na Jej wiersz: Bracie w Chrystusie chociaż mi nie znany…,” in Raštai [Writings], vol. 1, ed. Regina Mikšytė and Marius Daškus (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1995), 78. Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod. A Historical Poem, trans. Maude Ashurst Biggs (London: Trübner and Co, 1882), V.

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answer to her poem: brother in Christ, though unknown to me…)]. In Raštai [Writings], vol. 1. Edited by Regina Mikšytė and Marius Daškus, 78–79. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1995. Berkan-Jabłońska, Maria. Arystokratka i biedermeier. Rzecz o Gabrieli z Güntherów Puzyninie (1815–1869) [An aristocrat and biedermeier. A piece about Gabriela Puzynina née Günther (1815–1869)]. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2015. Borowczyk, Jerzy. Zesłane pokolenie. Filomaci w Rosji (1824–1870) [A deported generation. Philomats in Russia (1824–1870)]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014. Būčys, Žygintas. “‘Bastionas nuo šiaurės vėtrų’: senienų užuovėjoje” [“A bastion against north winds”: In the shelter of antiquities]. In Kova dėl istorijos: Vilniaus senienų muziejus (1855–1915) [A fight for history: The Vilnius Museum of Antiquities (1855–1915)]. Edited by Reda Griškaitė and Žygintas Bučys. Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus, 2015. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Emden, Christian J. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Griškaitė, Reda. “Dvaras kaip ‘archyvas’: bajorija ir Lietuvos istorijos tyrimai” [The manor as “archive”: Gentry and research on Lithuanian history]. Metai, no. 10 (2016). Accessed April 28, 2018. http://www.zurnalasmetai.lt/?p=1398. Kirkor, Adam Honory. Przechadzki po Wilnie [Strolls around Vilnius]. Wilno: A. Marcinkowski, 1856. Klimańska, Zofia. List Zofii z Brzozówki do Benedykta Dołęgi [Zofia from Brzozówka’s letter to Benedykt Dołęga]. Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1850. [Kondratowicz, Ludwik] Władysław Syrokomla. Szkolne czasy Jana Dęboroga [Schooldays of Jan Dęboróg]. In Wybór poezji [Selected poems]. Edited by Franciszek Bielak. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1970. [Kondratowicz, Ludwik] Władysław Syrokomla. Urodzony Jan Dęboróg [Man of breeding Jan Dęboróg]. In Wybór poezji [Selected poems]. Edited by Franciszek Bielak. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1970. [Kondratowicz, Ludwik] Władysław Syrokomla. “Idź młody piewco!” [Go, young bard!]. In Wincenty Korotyński, Czem chata bogata, tem rada. Kilka poezyj [All we have is at your disposal. Some poetry]. Wilno: J. Krasnosielski, 1857. [Kondratowicz, Ludwik] Władysław Syrokomla. Wiersz na uroczyste otwarcie Muzeum [A poem for the ceremonial opening of the Museum]. [Wilno], 1856. Kopczyński, Krzysztof. “Mickiewicz w systemie carskich zakazów: 1831–1855: cenzura, prawo i próby ich oficjalnego omijania” [Mickiewicz in the system of tsar’s constraints: Censorship, law and attempts at official evasion]. Pamiętnik Literacki 83/3 (1992): 153–170.

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Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy. Boża czeladka [God’s retinue]. Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1858. Lanoux, Andrea. Od narodu do kanonu. Powstawanie kanonów polskiego i rosyjskiego romantyzmu w latach 1815–1865 [Forming the Polish and Russian literary canons in the years 1815–1865]. Warszawa: IBL, 2003. Łempicki, Zygmunt. “Bücherwelt und wirkliche Welt. Ein Beitrag zur Wesenerfassung der Romantik.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturenwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte III (1925): 339–386. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Use of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Marchwiński, Grzegorz. Kanon literacki i naród (1870–1905) [The Literary canon and the nation (1870–1905)]. Kraków: Collegium Columbinum, 2017. Mazanka, Paweł CSsR. Fryderyka Nietzschego droga od wiary do ateizmu. [Friedrich Nietzsche’s way from faith to atheism]. Studia Redemptorsystowkie 8 (2010): 67–83. Meldžukienė, Audronė, Radvilė Rimgailė-Voicik, and Mindaugas Rasimavičius. “Botanikos rinkiniai Vilniaus senienų muziejuje” [The botanical collections in the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities]. In Kova dėl istorijos: Vilniaus senienų muziejus (1855–1915). Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by George Rapall Noyes. London, Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1917. https://archive.org/ stream/pantadeuszorthel28240gut/28240-pdf_djvu.txt. Mickiewicz, Adam. Konrad Wallenrod. A Historical Poem. Translated by Maude Ashurst Biggs. London: Trübner and Co., 1882. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Use and Abuse of History.” In Untimely Meditations. Translated by Ian C. Johnston, 1998. http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche _untimely_meditations/on_the_use_and_abuse_of_History.htm. Nowicka, Elżbieta. Postylion niesie pisanie. Szkice o romantycznym liście poetyckim [Postilion carries writings. Essays on the Romantic epistle]. Poznań: WiS, 1993. Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. “Narodowy kompozytor nieistniejącego kraju. Stanisław Moniuszko i wskrzeszanie Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego w Pieśni” [A national composer from a non-existent country. Stanisław Moniuszko and the revival of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania]. In Teatr operowy Stanisława Moniuszki [Stanisław Moniuszko’s musical theater]. Edited by Magdalena Dziadek and Elżbieta Nowicka, 155–183. Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN, 2014. Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. “Stanisław Moniuszko i kanon litewskiej literatury krajowej” [Stanisław Moniuszko and the canon of Lithuanian domestic literature]. In Teatr operowy Stanisława Moniuszki. Rekonesanse [Stanisław Moniuszko’s operatic theater. Investigations]. Edited by Maciej Jabłoński and Elżbieta Nowicka, 101–108. Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN, 2005. Puzynina, Gabriela. W Wilnie i w dworach litewskich: pamiętnik z lat 1815–1843 [In Vilnius and in the Lithuanian manor houses: Diaries from the years 1815–1843]. Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1928.

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Puzynina, Gabriela. “Do Adama M…” [To Adam M…]. In W imię Boże – Dalej w świat [In God’s name – further in the world]. Wilno: Józef Zawadzki, 1859, 43–44. Stolzman, Małgorzata. Czasopisma wileńskie Adama Honorego Kirkora [Adam Honory Kirkor’s Vilnius journals]. Warszawa: PWN, 1973. Świrko, Stanisław. Z Mickiewiczem pod rękę, czyli życie i twórczość Jana Czeczota [Arm in arm with Mickiewicz, or The life and work of Jan Czeczot]. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1989. Tripplin, Teodor. Dziennik podróży po Litwie i Żmudzi [Travel chronicles across Lithuania and Samogitia], vol. 1. Wilno: Maurycy Orgelbrand, 1858. Trzynadlowski, Jan. “O dedykacji” [On dedication]. In Rękopiśmienne dedykacje autorskie w księgozbiorze Ossolineum [Original manuscript dedications in the Ossolineum book collection]. Edited by Jan Długosz. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1967. T.[yszkiewicz], E.[ustachy]. “Archeologia na Litwie” [Archaeology in Lithuania]. In Rocznik dla Archeologów, Numizmatyków i Bibliografów Polskich, 1871, 1–13. Quoted from: Ilgiewicz, Henryka. Wileńskie towarzystwa i instytucje naukowe w XIX wieku [Scholarly societies and institutions in 19th-century Vilnius]. Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2005. Tyszkiewicz, Konstanty. Wilija i jej brzegi [Neris and its banks]. Drezno: J. I. Kraszewski, 1871. Tyszyński, Aleksander. “O szkołach poezji polskiej” [About schools in Polish poetry]. In Polska krytyka literacka (1800–1918) [Polish literary critics (1800–1918)], vol. 2. Edited by Zofia Szmydtowa, Warszawa: PWN, 1959. Witkowska, Alina, ed. Wybór pism filomatów. Konspiracje studenckie w Wilnie 1817–1823 [Selected Philomat writings. Student conspiracies in Vilnius 1817–1823]. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1959.

The Concept of Lithuanian Folk Song in Lithuanian Folklore 1800–1940 Jurga Sadauskienė

The aim of this article is to explore Lithuanian folk songs as a genre that represented actual Lithuanian culture in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, and to show how a canonical conception of traditional folk song was formed through the influence of historical circumstances and a growing Lithuanian national consciousness. From the very beginning of the formation of Lithuanian folklore, Lithuanian songs were given special attention. Folklorists understood that out of all the forms of folk culture folk song was the most original genre. Folk song occupied an important local position that included language, customs, and sensibility. Because the traditions of Lithuanian literature were still undeveloped scholars who wished to propagate Lithuanian national culture, folklore, and especially folk songs became the most representative genre that reflected the Lithuanian’s spiritual outlook on life. Our early collectors held the words of the 18th-century German humanist Johann Gottfried Herder dear: “Songs are the archive of a nation, the treasure of its science and religion, its theogony and cosmology, its parents’ accomplishments and the events of its history, depicting the life of its home in joy and suffering at the wedding bed and the grave.”1 Incidentally, Herder was interested not only in raising the status of folk poetry, but also the position of “innocent” men, who were still close to nature. For him the Lithuanians and Latvians were exemplary in this respect: “It would be difficult to find a gentler way of imagining the world than in their language and poetry. The language is filled with pleasant diminutives; their national character is clever, gentle, soft.”2 Therefore, it is obvious that during the Romantic period, folk songs were not just a source for linguistic history, but also the concern of humanism, art, and national culture. The importance of songs in 19th-century Lithuanian research is evidenced by the publication of folk song sources. The first songbook, Dainos [Songs], 1 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst,” in Herders Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1893), 128–129. 2 Idem, “Eine Gemählde aus der Preuβischen Geschichte,” in Herders sämmtliche Werke, vol. 23 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1885), 465–466.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_006

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was published as early as 1825 by Ludwig Rhesa. In 1829 the book, Dainos Žemaičių, surinktos ir išduotos per Simoną Stanevičių [Samogitian songs, collected and disseminated by Simonas Stanevičius] was published. In 1846, Simonas Daukantas published Dainės Žemaičių [Songs of the Samogitians]. In 1857 and 1879–1882 the brothers Antanas and Jonas Juška published three volumes of the collection Lietuviškos dainos [Lithuanian songs]. Jonas Basanavičius published Ožkabalių dainos [Songs of Ožkabaliai]; their first publication was in 1884, and the 2nd expanded edition appeared in 1902. Ludwik Adam Jucewicz (Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius) translated a collection of 35 songs called Lietuvių dainos [Lithuanian songs] into Polish as Pieśni litewskie in 1840. The Polish poet Karol Brzozowski translated 51 songs into Polish, and in 1844 published them in the collection Pieśni ludu nadniemeńskiego z okolic Aleksoty [The folk songs of the people of Panemunėlis]. In 1879 in Kraków Oskar Kolberg published 76 Lithuanian folk songs in the Lithuanian and Polish languages (Pieśni ludu litewskiego). The Russian scholars Всевoлод Миллер (Vsevolod Miller) and Филип Фортунатов (Filip Fortunatov) in 1872 published 100 songs in their collection Lithuanian National Songs [Литовские народные песни]. Somewhat later Christian Bartsch published a collection of Lithuanian melodies Dainų balsai [Voices of songs]. Melodien litauischer Volkslieder, I – 1886, II – 1889. No other genre of folklore received the same amount of attention during the course of the century.3 People involved in culture had several goals at that time: (1) to collect as many examples of the language, which due to Polish cultural colonization and Russian imperialist repression was in danger of extinction; (2) to collect as many examples of ancient folklore in a region where written language came very late with the expectation of finding archaic folklore texts and forms of oral tradition or finding important facts about the region’s history; (3) to publish folklore and literature in Lithuanian, their own language, with the goal of raising the society’s sense of self-worth, its national consciousness, and give the Lithuanian language a public life. In part the collectors of folk songs made decisions based on their own opinions as to which traditional songs and what folklore is worthy of collection and of popularizing. Accordingly, the song collectors of the 19th century can be divided into two groups: those who considered folk songs only an ancient phenomenon, and those who viewed the folk song tradition as a living manifestation of contemporary culture. The image of romantically uplifting and idealized traditional songs was formed by the Prussian expert in the Lithuanian language, the folklorist, 3 Lietuvių tautosakos apybraiža [A study on Lithuanian folklore], ed. K[azys] Grigas et al. (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963), 32–85.

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theologian, and Lithuanian cultural activist, Ludwig Rhesa.4 In his 1890 essay “Daina” [Song] he seeks to accentuate the subtlety of emotion among Lithuanian cottage dwellers and posits that a quality of naiveté is typical of Lithuanian songs that is equated with “intimacy, delicate actions, and gentle feelings.” Elegance and grace are typical of the songs, along with a natural authenticity. Often in the songs “a brave lyric flight of fancy and passionate feeling pleasantly combine with endearing simplicity.” He also writes that “a gentle melancholy, a fragile and sad longing” are characteristic as well.5 In another article, “Apie lietuvių liaudies poeziją” [About Lithuanian folk poetry] (1818) Rhesa emphasizes even more the high moral standards, the spiritual nobility, and pure morality expressed in Lithuanian folk songs.6 In his “Lietuvių liaudies dainų tyrinėjimas” [Research on Lithuanian folk songs] (1825) he writes about the songs that “they are just, emotional, and moral.”7 The songs in his collection reflect an exalted vision of the Lithuanian character. The latter view became established in the consciousness of many Lithuanian cultural figures and folklorists for over a hundred years. The poet, folklorist and ethnographer Jucewicz (1813–1846) supported Rhesa. In the introductory essay to his collection Lietuvių dainos [Lithuanian songs] Jucewicz writes: The emotions reflected in those songs are calm, simple, pure, untarnished, innocent. You won’t find among these lyrics any lusty, loose, or vulgar phrases, which Ukrainian and Polish songs are full of. The Lithuanian peasantry is decent, God-fearing, innocent, hospitable, and passionately bound to their native land. They still retain the virtues characteris-

4 Ludwig Rhesa (Liudvikas Rėza) is representative of Lithuania Minor (Preussisch Litauen) – a northeastern region of Prussia where Lithuanians lived until the 18th century and at the time made up the majority of the population. This region played a large role in the establishment of written Lithuanian because up to the 18th century the Lithuanian language was a written language in the region. In the 19th century (more accurately from 1864 to 1904) when the Tsarist government banned publishing in the Latin alphabet, closed Lithuanian language schools in Lithuania, and terrorized proponents of Lithuanian national rebirth, Lithuanian publications were published in the Latin alphabet in Lithuania Minor and were secretly brought into Lithuania. 5 Ludwig Rhesa, “Daina,” in Lietuvių literatūros antologija [The Anthology of Lithuanian literature], vol. 2, ed. Brigita Speičytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 293–294. 6 Idem, Lietuvių liaudies dainos [Lithuanian folk songs], vol. 2 (Vilnius: Vaga, 1964), 340. 7 Idem, “Daina,” 334.

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tic of their class that they have inherited from their forefathers. Their thoughts, wishes, and emotions come straight from their hearts.8 The folklorist Vilius Kalvaitis (1848–1914) from Lithuanian Minor was of a similar opinion. In the foreword to his collection, Prūsijos lietuvių dainos [Prussian Lithuanian songs] (1905) he refers only to German soldiers’ songs as vulgar. Meanwhile, in his opinion there are no “ugly or uncomfortable” songs among Lithuanian folk songs.9 Without a doubt, this folklorist was motivated to make such a statement in reaction to the politics of active Germanization in Prussia. These collectors of folklore raised the issue of the ethical and emotional subtlety of the folk songs as an argument on which to base the spiritual worth of a people who in general were less literate and technologically advanced. The tradition of folk songs presented in their collections reflected the creative product of farmers along with newer songs that showed an idealized tradition of poetic folk song and a vision of the Lithuanian peasant. This refers to collections that excluded songs that Lithuanians translated from other languages, and later Lithuanian songs written by individual Lithuanians. In addition, in these collections one would not find folk couplets,10 obscene wedding ditties nor ballads. It is interesting that researchers from other cultures describe the same idealizing view of Lithuanian folk songs. Vsevolod Miller and Filip Fortunatov in the foreword to their collection note that the tradition of older songs is occupied by songs of low quality, even vulgar songs, which mostly men liked to sing.11 The degradation of the contents of a song is viewed as a degradation of the morality of the nation, and a threat to the nation’s spirit. Only, for a long time nobody raised the question of whether those types of texts were those of older songs or whether they had been imported from other cultures.12

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Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius, Raštai [Writings] (Vilnius: Vaga, 1959), 550. Vilius Kalvaitis, Prūsijos lietuvių dainos (Tilžė: Printed by E. Jagomastas, photocopy) (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1998), V. Talalinės [ditties] – short improvised songs in couplets that poked fun and were often vulgar. They were often performed by men with a musical accompaniment. Литовские народные песни, собранные Всев. Миллером и Ф. Фортунатовым (Москва: Moсковский университет, 1873), 4. This problem was viewed more objectively in the mid-20th century. In 1977 the Lithuanian folklorist Jonas Balys (1909–2011) in his book, Lietuvių dainos Amerikoje [Lithuanian songs in America] acknowledges that “an entire myth has been created about the decency of our song tradition.” He confirms that this myth was started by Rhesa. He states that “Lithuanians have many erotic songs in their repertoire along with coarse wedding ditties.” See Jonas Balys, Lietuvių dainos Amerikoje: lyrinės meilės, papročių, darbo, švenčių ir

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For Simonas Stanevičius (1799–1848) it was especially important to show the beauty of pure Lithuanian language, and the artistic quality of the lyrics. Therefore, he himself admits in his foreword that in preparing his publication, he would reject lyrics that contained foreign words, or songs that were too direct, or incoherent.13 Stanevičius intended his collection for an educated audience, and therefore he primarily sought to create an aesthetic image of traditional folk songs that was beyond reproach. Certain collectors of folklore, like Jonas Basanavičius (1851–1927), Mykolas Biržiška (1882–1962), Liudas Gira (1884–1946) did not raise issues around the morality or aesthetic quality of the songs. Instead, they analyzed the songs for their historical data. Even now it is debated whether the early 20th century writer and folklorist Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius14 (1882–1954) might have rewritten the lyrics of folk songs in order to give them more historical value. The Prussian folklorist Christian Bartsch (1832–1890) presented a more moderate view of traditional Lithuanian folk songs: As with the nature of Lithuania, it is the same case with Lithuanian national poetry: the poetry primarily lacks, as does its more Northern sister, Latvian poetry, refinement and a sense of nobility. It also lacks belief in miracles, a view back at its rich history, the ideal of a hero, which would unify all its scattered energy. Everyone here lives peacefully, surrendering to the instinct for survival, which Mother Nature has instilled in its children’s hearts.15 This scholar quite objectively misses a sense of history and heroism in the old folk songs of Lithuanians and Latvians. At the same time, he emphasizes how the mentality of the farmer dominates the songs, and notes that what is lacking is a sense of civic consciousness.

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pramogų dainos [Lithuanian songs in America: Lyrical songs of love, customs, work, holidays and entertainment], collected and edited by Jonas Balys (Silver Spring, MD: Lietuvių tautosakos leidykla, 1977), XIII. Simonas Stanevičius, “Dainos žemaičių. Pratarimas” [Songs of Samogitia], in Lietuvių literatūros antologija, 357–358. The songs he collected in the Merkinė parish in 1903–1907 were noteworthy for their rare historical elements: the mention of the Grand Duke Šarūnas, and the battles of Perloja and Merkinė, which were not found by later collectors of folklore (Cf. Vincas KrėvėMickevičius, Dainavos krašto liaudies dainos, prof. V. Krėvės Mickevičiaus surinktos [Folk songs from Dainava region] (Kaunas: Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetas, 1924). Christian Bartsch, Dainų balsai, compiled by Jadvyga Čiurlionytė, Laima Burkšaitienė, and Vida Daniliauskienė (Vilnius: Lietuvos muzikos akademija, 2000), 54.

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Other folklorists were interested in what contemporary society lived for, and which songs they sang the most. Therefore, in their collections of songs or their notes on songs we see another image: here we see many songs that evolved later; these songs reflect as texts of a newer poetics, melody, prosody, theme and structure. Among these songs are songs of uprisings, songs from the movements for abstinence from alcohol, texts of patriotic songs, authorial love songs, and others. For example, we will find a fair number of authored and anonymous songs of literary origin among the songs in Daukantas’s Dainės žemaičių, the Juška brothers’ trilogy Lietuviškos dainos, Basanavičius’s Ožkabalių dainos, Vilius Kalvaitis’s collection from Lithuania Minor, Rūtų lapeliai [Little leaves of rue] (1894), and his Prūsijos lietuvių dainos (1905). Eduardas Volteris (1856–1941), who collected folklore and made sound recordings in eastern and southern Lithuanian villages in the early 20th century, also recorded various materials that differed vastly in age, and style as well as contents. The teacher and publisher, Laurynas Ivinskis (1810–1881) had liberal views on this issue. In 1894 a separate edition of his proclamation was published in America, in which he encouraged the collection of folklore. His questions about songs included not only a traditional repertoire, but also a newer one. He sought to document how songs spread, raised questions about Lithuanians losing their cultural heritage, and analyzed the influence from foreign repertoires.16 At this point it is important to note that the concept and interpretation of folk songs in the 19th century were strongly influenced by the general cultural and literary movements, and also by the diffusion of individual poetry in the Lithuanian language. The first poets to compose their poems in the Lithuanian language were: Antanas Strazdas (1760–1833), Silvestras Teofilis Valiūnas (1789–1831), Antanas Baranauskas (1835–1902), Antanas Vienažindys (1841–1892). Their poems were the most lyrical and closest to the bardic tradition. They were hand-copied and passed around. Common people set the poems to music, and sang them. The Temperance movement, which originated in the 19th century, greatly influenced Lithuanian folk songs. At that time many moralistic, didactic songs were written, which then became popular. This innovative, authored poetry made its way into the traditional repertoire, into the everyday lives of villagers, changing the traditional folkloric worldview, and the poetics of the folklore. It brought new themes that were not limited to

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Laurynas Ivinskis, Atsiszaukimas į Brolius Lietuvius Lauryno Liet. Amer. Europ. Draugystės [Calling for brothers Lithuanians from Laurynas about Lithuanian-American-European friendship] (Plymouth: Pa, 1894).

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songs tied to the traditional holidays that followed celebrations marking the agricultural calendar, family holidays, or the repertoire of farm work songs. These new influences added political and civic relevance to the traditional repertoire, even gave it religious undertones. The poetics of the songs acquired significant individualism, a new sense of the literary, new versification, and a new vocabulary. Moreover, the 19th century was conducive to the spread of the genre of sung poetry and gave this type of song a role in society. Because the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry at the time was mostly illiterate, the strong sung poetry genre became very influential, as it was the most convenient means of spreading information, communicating, and had an ideological effect. In addition, because of the Tsarist prohibition against publications in the Lithuanian language and the persecution of writers of literature, it was convenient for most authors of sung poetry to remain anonymous, so that their songs could disperse amongst the populace as songs composed by an anonymous author that were set to popular melodies. This led to extremely close links between folk songs and the newly created poetry. Although later lyrics were influenced by the popular literature of the time, these lyrics spread not only in writing, but also through the oral tradition. As they spread, they were transformed, even uniquely contaminating ancient traditional songs. These songs soon made their way into the repertoire of songs sung during traditional holidays. They remained in the public consciousness for over a century; therefore, it is no longer possible to consider these songs non-traditional.17 Basically, they constitute a later tradition. For our purposes it is important to note that already in the 19th century among collectors of folklore there were two concepts of Lithuanian song: (1) the repertoire of songs is ancient and was composed by illiterate people in the provinces and serves to best reflect the national character as well as the sensibility of the time; (2) all of these songs – both old and new – are popular, topical Lithuanian songs that express Lithuanian expectations, regardless of their origin and the time they were created. The first concept of folk song could be named the normative one and claims that Lithuanian songs are ethical, aesthetic and archaic. The song tradition is understood as static, formed over many centuries, and unaffected by the influence of literacy or outside cultures. The second concept could be called a liberal and flowing one. It interprets the song tradition not as an ornamented 17

Jurga Sadauskienė, Didaktinės lietuvių dainos: Poetinių tradicijų sandūra XIX–XX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian didactical songs: Interaction of the poetic traditions in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006).

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and a conserved heritage of the past, but rather as an expression of the mentality of the society of the time. The requirements for the genre of song are topicality and popularity, without too much emphasis on origin, the age of the song, or stylistic-artistic completeness. True, these different conceptions of the songs had not yet been more clearly defined and understood. In the 19th century the Lithuanian terms, “folk song,” or “Lithuanian song,” or “national song,” did not yet exist.18 The first author to name the songs “Lithuanian songs” or “national songs” was Basanavičius in the foreword to his Ožkabalių dainos collection. Later his terminology was consistently used by the folklorists of the era of national rebirth, and especially by Mykolas Biržiška and Teodoras Brazys.19 In the early 20th century Lithuanian folk songs were often called the “people’s songs.” This term was favored by famous writers like Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, Balys Sruoga, Kazys Binkis.20 These names reflect the understanding, forming in the early 20th century, that songs must reflect not only the thoughts and emotions of the villagers, but must represent the society and nation, that they can express the individual hopes of groups of people in society. At the same time songbooks that were intended for the broader society often had titles that were very specific: songs for farmers, songs for young people, songs for girls, battle songs, entertaining songs, etc. In these publications the lyrics were often presented in the following manner: at the beginning were new songs or later songs that were literary in origin and usually were strongly ideological; then followed traditional ancient songs, usually abbreviated, and with poetic forms and stylistics that were beyond reproach. What does such songbook structure reveal? First, that the new poetic style aims to influence the audience by shaping its national and civic understanding. Second, by publishing authored poetry next to folk songs, a message

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The first Lithuanian songbook was prepared and published by Rhesa with the title “Dainos oder litthauische Volkslieder.” The German “das Volk” refers to the common people and the nation. Looking over the titles of later 19th-century Lithuanian song collections, it is apparent that at the time regional and national concerns predominated. Collectors of songs tended to work in certain specific regions. See Vita Ivanauskaitė and Jurga Sadauskienė, “Dainų vardo klausimu” [On songs’ names], Tautosakos darbai 12, no. 19 (2000): 239–240. An example could be the publication by Teodoras Brazys Lietuvių tautinių dainų melodijos [Melodies of Lithuanian national songs] (1927). Although the songs are named as national, there are no songs in this collection that are not traditional. There are no composed literary songs or stanzas that were added later. See Teodoras Brazys, Lietuvių tautinių dainų melodijos, Kietaviškių parish (Trakai region), book I, collected and recorded by Docent Father Teodoras Brazys (Kaunas: Valstybės spaustuvė, 1927). Ivanauskaitė and Sadauskienė, “Dainų vardo klausimu,” 242–243.

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was sent that assigned folk song a new rank, one that equated it with high literature and the printed word. In this manner, the reader was to be influenced to accept the ideological value of the songs. Apparently, as the new century dawned, it was not clear to everyone that folk songs held innate value. The Tsarist government did everything in its power to squelch the spread of Lithuanian nationalism. It terrorized those who organized Lithuanian events. In this climate for a long time folk songs had little opportunity to make it out into the open. Additionally, some members of the Church who had lost their Lithuanian identity also did not support the tradition of secular singing in Lithuanian. Therefore, by seeking the performance of Lithuanian folk songs on stage, the cultural activists interpreted such events as an expression of their national freedom and independence. The goal of elevating the songs to a higher artistic level can be seen in the activities of choir directors and composers.21 The first to arrange folk songs were, the philosopher, writer, and cultural activist, Vilhelmas Storostas-Vydūnas (1868–1953) in Lithuanian Minor, and then in ethnic Lithuania the ideologue of the nationalist movement, the writer Vincas Kudirka (1858–1899). They made efforts to popularize traditional songs among the upper classes by arranging them and by adapting them to the harmonies that were inherent in the choral works of that time. Vydūnas believed: “The song must reveal its beauty even to those people whose sensitivity has been dulled by the cultural life surrounding them. To make the folk songs appeal to this group of people it is necessary to instill a stronger rhythm and a condensed lyrical text.”22 In his opinion song lyrics of necessity must rhyme and must be shortened. The melodies must be adapted so that they may be sung in three or four harmonies. The folklorist Stasys Skrodenis has noted: “In East Prussia folk songs from their very first steps went onto the stage dressed in fancier clothing; they were more academic, and most of the time were greatly

21

22

Already at the end of the 19th century in Lithuania Minor and in Lithuania societies formed that held Lithuanian evenings where Lithuanian songs were sung. The first Lithuanian evening took place in Kaunas in 1899. There the first secular Lithuanian choral group “Daina” performed. (Their first public performance as a group took place at a May Day picnic in 1901). “Lithuanian folk songs made an indelible impression on the surrounding rural people. Just the fact that as the singers were returning home, the villagers built bonfires along the banks of the Nemunas River and shouted ‘Valio!’ [hurrah] showed the powerful effect that Lithuanian songs had on people.” See Anicetas Arminas, Lietuvių chorai, tautinės savimonės ir muzikinės kultūros žadintojai [Lithuanian choirs, awakeners of national consciousness and musical culture] (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 1998), 25. Vydūnas, Lietuvos aidos, published by Vilhelmas Storost (Tilžė: Rūta, 1904), 79.

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altered.”23 Kudirka also believed that composing harmonies for folk songs rendered them more palatable for the needs of a cultured society. He even organized a folk song arranging contest in Warsaw, so that the newly formed Lithuanian choirs would have material to perform. Soon afterwards two volumes of a collection of arranged songs called Kanklės [Baltic psaltery] were published in 1895 and 1899.24 In 1904 a collection of Vydūnas’s harmonized folk songs for chorus, Lietuvos aidos [Echoes of Lithuania] was published, followed by Lietuvos varpeliai [Bells of Lithuania] in 1909.25 It must have seemed that by applying a choral sound to a folk song the folk song then entered the genre of the musical elite, which was suitable to be performed on stage. At the end of the 19th century, the society “Lietuva” [Lithuania] was formed with one of its goals being collecting Lithuanian folk songs from the field, and then arranging them for choirs, so that there would be enough material available for cultural performances. The songs were popularized in the pages of the newspaper Varpas [The bell].26 At the crossroads of the centuries both in Lithuania Minor and in Lithuania there was the comprehension that the modernized traditional song could take on a new quality without losing its cultural content and roots. On the other hand, the stylistics of choral singing in this period cannot be regarded as prevailing or even opposed to more traditional performances of the songs. There were few choruses that were secular, and the culture of choral singing was still not fully developed; therefore, the singing tradition both in the private and the public spheres was extremely homogenous. The close connection between folkloric singing and artistic singing is best expressed through Austė Nakienė’s observations on the earliest choir and ethnographic recordings. In the early 20th century attempts were made to collect ethnographic material. In 1908–1909 examples of how folk songs were sung in the villages and the manner in which they were sung was recorded onto wax cylinders, and in 1907–1911 records of choral songs were released. Nakienė observed that in the field recordings of folk music there was a wide range of stylistic interpretation. Often village singers would record modern songs that were being 23 24

25

26

Stasys Skrodenis, Folkloras ir gyvenimas: straipsnių rinkinys [Folklore and life: Collection of articles] (Vilnius: Vilniaus pedagoginio universiteto leidykla, 2010), 171. Vytautas Landsbergis, Vincas Kudirka: Lietuvos darbininkas ir muzikas. Studijos ir pabiros [Vincas Kudirka: Lithuanian worker and musician. Studies and comments] (Vilnius: Jungtinės spaudos pajėgos, 2012), 7. Juozas Gaudrimas, Iš lietuvių muzikinės kultūros istorijos 1861–1917 [From the history of Lithuanian musical culture 1861–1917] (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1958), 114. Landsbergis, Vincas Kudirka, 73–74.

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performed at the time, many of which had been composed by individual authors. At the same time, in many locations the stylistic characteristics of the choir and the repertoires of the choirs carried the intonations of folk music and were strongly influenced by regional traditions. In part this happened because Lithuanian urban culture was just forming, and it did not have its own traditions or strong cultural communities.27 On the other hand, one must not forget that in the early 20th century the greater part of the first generations of intellectuals had themselves relocated from the countryside, thus the divide between folk and town, mass and elite, was not so relevant. Society in cultural centers and village communities, freely formed their own repertoires: whatever seemed out of date, was simply forgotten; what seemed new, beautiful, and relevant, was adopted. This relevance was guided by the changing cultural function of songs: if in the traditional village community it was important for a song to fit within the framework of work, traditions, and rituals, now new goals became more important – new identities that reflected the new expectations of a new society and the emotional identity of a modern person, his selfreflection, a changing aesthetic, and, of course, the demands of performance on stage. A song had to appeal to the audience that expected to hear not only what was familiar, but also something new. In this manner slowly in the early 20th century the stylistics of the stage performance of folk songs formed as did the image of folk songs – their ethics and aesthetics. The lyrics were often shortened and often lost their elements of dialect. Often they were performed in multiple part harmonies. The published songbooks began to canonize folk songs for choruses, for schools, for clubs, and organizations.28 Such was the natural development of tradition and the pretext for that development. However, discerning and more educated participants soon missed the national spirit in this natural process. For example, the famous Lithuanian composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) sincerely mourned the fact that the common people sang many songs that were not inherently Lithuanian, but international. He was even more grieved that supposedly Lithuanian poets often composed lyrics for which Polish melodies were 27

28

Austė Nakienė, Nuo tradicinės polifonijos iki polifoninės tradicijos: lietuvių muzikos kaita XX–XXI a. [From traditional polyphony to polyphonic tradition: Changes in Lithuanian music in the 20th–21st century] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 64–67. A typical example would be the publication prepared by Stasys Šimkus 50 Jaunimo dainų [50 songs for youth] (1922). This publication contains only Lithuanian folk songs that were arranged for choral singing. Melodic harmonies were changed and the texts of folk songs were abbreviated and written in standard Lithuanian. See Stasys Šimkus, 50 jaunimo dainų (Kaunas: Švyturio bendrovės leidinys, 1922).

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chosen.29 The composer invited people to appreciate the charm of traditional songs with monotonous melodics. He was convinced that one could discern the “deep mystical nature” of Lithuanians in such songs.30 He formed new principles for arranging songs: he did not seek to make the songs more complex, but rather worked towards their authentic sound. Čiurlionis was only interested in ancient songs. In those songs he perceived the soul of the nation, which, in the opinion of the composer, reflected the criteria that were most important, when making a judgment about the value of a creative work. A more anthropological view into folk songs was popularized by the poet, writer, and folklorist, Balys Sruoga (1896–1947). His research and viewpoint was influenced by German traditions of folklore. According to this scholar, the local landscape, the traditions of agricultural life, and historical fate influenced a specific form of consciousness, which he deemed “a certain complex of emotions and ideas,” and which he felt influenced the originality of art. True, this is an ideal that he did not see in the content of folk songs, but rather in their poetic use of language. When writing about the predominant emotions in folk songs, he was rather biased. He maintained: “Lithuanian art is folk art – it is melancholic, filled with longing, and cannot wade out of its pain, having quiet glimpses into another way of being.”31 His 1927 study, “Dainų poetikos etiudai” [Studies of song poetics] reflects his attitude towards both older and newer songs. The researcher equates the emergence of the new literary songs in the second half of the 19th century with the moment, when the Lithuanian nation was being reborn. In terms of the creative object and its form the folkloric tradition began to change more radically. The modern songs were noteworthy for their more stable texts, for the coherent way in which their ideas were laid out, for the logical rhyme and transitions between stanzas. Sruoga drew attention to the fact that such songs survived because they suited the tastes of the majority, and the mentality of most people, but was reluctant in this study to refer to the literary songs composed by individuals as folk songs. According to him, “the people did not create these songs. They did not even fully digest [that is, integrate, J. S.] these songs [italics mine, J. S.]. Therefore these songs could absolutely never be considered to be examples of our folk art, nor could they be the of object of folklore research.”32 Although he emphasizes that “over the centuries the form of the folk mentality changes” and that 29 30 31 32

Nakienė, Nuo tradicinės polifonijos iki polifoninės tradicijos, 308–309. Ibid., 298–299. Balys Sruoga, “Dainų poetikos etiudai,” in his Raštai [Writings], vol. 9, book 1, ed. Algis Samulionis (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003), 26–27, 33. Ibid., 55.

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“the people’s poetic style, the manner in which it develops provides a view of the nation’s cultural maturation,”33 Sruoga does not acknowledge that the Lithuanian national spirit could be expressed through these later individually composed songs. However, it is noteworthy that a decade later Sruoga’s position was no longer as strict.34 Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė (1886–1958) had a slightly different assessment of the evolution of Lithuanian folk song and its tradition. Her perspective as a cultural figure led her to seek moral and ethical support in art (in the visual arts) that “through its beauty alone, through its nobility, raises the human spirit towards perfection.” According to her, true art is “a cry of the heart” or “a second world” or “the painful path to the gates of spirituality” or “a view through spiritual eyes.” All this Čiurlionienė finds in the ancient songs, which “were born in untarnished forms.”35 It is interesting that she considered the songs collected by Rhesa and Juška as untarnished, although there are many newer stanzas attached to some of those songs. Therefore, in opposition to even Čiurlionis or Sruoga, she is more likely to categorize a late 19th century song within the folkloric tradition, especially if that song speaks from the heart: “Today […] many ears might be offended by Vienužis’s barbarisms, but after all he sang the way people talked, and, having felt his true poetry, people pay no attention to mistaken expressions – they only see that the poet is the way he is, close to everyone, and his songs are a national treasure.”36 She considers the most typical features of traditional Lithuanian folk song texts to be their laconic quality, simplicity, and their closeness to nature.37 However, she evaluates the situation of 20th-century song negatively: Lithuanian song melodies are no longer pure because the tradition was negatively influenced by songs from other cultures that had infiltrated Lithuania and were impacted by contemporary harmonizations. She summarizes it this way: “We have no contemporary art.”38 It is important to mention here that this type of glorification of the old folklore at the beginning of the 20th century did not only have its own goals 33 34 35

36 37 38

Ibid., 4. Balys Sruoga, “Mūsų tautosaka ir gyvenimas” [Our folklore and life], Mūsų tautosaka, vol. 10 (1936): 204–206. Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė, Tautos auklėjimo mintys: Kultūros kritika, publicistika, viešos paskaitos, pokalbiai [Thoughts on nation’s education: Cultural criticism, articles, open lectures, conversations], ed. Aušra Martišiūtė-Linartienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 106–121. Ibid., 32, 37. Ibid., 29–30, 139, 211, 220. Ibid., 67–78, 107.

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nor was it dictated strictly by the desire to strengthen the nation’s sense of selfrespect. Right up until 1918, as Lithuanian statehood was being recreated, those involved in cultural work glorified traditional village culture with the goal of instilling a sense of pride in provincial Lithuania, and in all of Lithuania, while strengthening a sense of equality with other nations. They also sought to instill the idea that Lithuania had the right to its own statehood. However, at the same time the same idea was strengthened – that it was namely traditional folk culture that had preserved the ethnic foundations, which are the present and future nation’s cultural base. The philosophers, the ideologues of ethnic culture, Vydūnas, Stasys Šalkauskis (1886–1941), and Antanas Maceina (1908–1987) created the national ideology, while maintaining the conviction that only by retaining its unique cultural identity and by being true to itself could the nation meaningfully fulfill its mission in the history of civilization. Therefore, questions of the authenticity of the song tradition, its value, and ability to survive were in general perceived as problems of national originality, combined with the opportunity to meaningfully participate in the process of creating world culture.39 At that time there was no doubt that if traditional culture was amoral or filled with influences from outside cultures, it is seemingly no longer worthy of further participation in the progress of civilization. Certainly, if one describes the character of national songs by their inspirational value or romanticized qualities, then one has to reject a large number of texts which do not fit such a description because of their ethical, stylistic, emotional value or their origin. Creating the ideology of the national spirit in the first half of the 20th century, the founders ignored traditional humoristic songs, literary didactic-humoristic songs from the 19th century, songs of the uprisings, romances, and popular songs with melodies borrowed from other cultures, since these songs were later additions that were strongly influenced by the literary tradition and Church ideology, and did not reflect the old worldview of the village, but rather its changing face along with the new regional sense of national identity that was just forming.

39

See the works of Vydūnas, Šalkauskis, Maceina: Vydūnas, Raštai [Writings], vol. 3, ed. Vacys Bagdonavičius (Vilnius: Mintis, 1992), 329–346; Stasys Šalkauskis, Tautybė, patriotizmas ir lietuvių tautos pašaukimas [Nationality, patriotism and devotion of Lithuanian nation] (Kaunas: Raidė, 1928); Antanas Maceina, “Liaudies daina – tautos sielos išraiška. Lietuvių dainų dvasia ir pobūdis” [Folk song as soul’s expression. Spirit and style in Lithuanian songs], ed. Leonardas Sauka, Tautosakos darbai 2, no. 9 (1994): 145–149; Idem, “Liaudies daina – tautos sielos išraiška. Lietuvių dainų dvasia ir pobūdis,” ed. Leonardas Sauka, Tautosakos darbai 3, no. 10 (1994): 53–73.

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On the other hand, folklorists who worked in the field and collected folklore had a variety of different opinions concerning song traditions. In 1907 in Vilnius the Lithuanian Scholars’ Association prepared a program with guidelines for collecting folklore. It was published in 1910 as Trumpa Folklioro dalykams rinkti programa [Short program on how to collect folklore]. In it not much attention is paid to songs, the only instruction being to collect “songs, ballads, narratives, pantomimes.” However, it is obvious that the authors were interested in studies of “fragments of the ancient past” and the ancient sensibility.40 A 1925 publication prepared by the Lithuanian Student Fieldwork Organization (founded in 1923) titled Lietuvių tautotyros žinių ir senienų rinkimo programa [Guide to collecting information on Lithuanian folk culture and ancient material] named a great variety of songs according to theme, genre and origin. They are all considered worthy of attention, none are distinguished as being superior to others. Mentioned in this collection are not only old wedding songs, work songs, war songs, children’s songs, lullabies, but also songs composed by poets that reflected war songs, begging songs, drinking songs, ballads, ditties, and even rhyming songs composed for local occasions or songs composed in a person’s honor. They also mention the expectation of finding historical and mythological songs.41 In 1935 the Archive of Lithuanian Folklore was established and published the Tautosakos rinkėjo vadovas [Manual for collecting folklore]. This publication instructs folklorists to collect all folklore that is “both beautiful and ugly, decent and indecent, long or short, known or unknown. It is only important to note that the song is a folk creation that is widespread among the common people.” Nevertheless, predominance was given to old songs: While collecting songs it is important to first look for ancient songs: it is not difficult to differentiate them from new songs created by village poets. Ancient songs usually do not have rhyme (end rhyme), their lines are short, the number of syllables in each line vary quite a bit, and it is not always possible to clearly delineate where one stanza ends and another begins. Ancient songs are noteworthy for their simplicity and sincerity. They employ a great number of poetic devices.42 40 41

42

Kazys Grinius, Trumpa Folklioro dalykams rinkti Programa (Vilniuje: M. Kuktos spaustuvė, 1910), 7–8. Pranas Būtėnas, Lietuvių tautotyros žinių ir senienų rinkimo programa [Guide to collecting information on Lithuanian folk culture and ancient material] (Šiauliai: “Vilties” draugijos leidinys, 1925), 144–147. Jonas Balys, Tautosakos rinkėjo vadovas (Kaunas: Lietuvių tautosakos archyvo leidinys, 1936), 7, 10.

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Those same principles are repeated in the guide’s second edition in 1940. Thus collectors of folklore are encouraged to open their eyes wide and to view the entire repertoire of people’s creativity as important and deserving of preservation for future generations. Yet, up until the middle of the 20th century there was still no clear position on whether a song with a later origin was considered a traditional song or a folk song. However, the literature professor and famous Lithuanian writer Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas (1893–1967) was of the opinion that the era of creating folklore was irretrievably over. He even took the position that 19th-century historical songs about rebellions and war were not actual folk songs43 because their poetics were too far removed from that of the traditional songs. In the meantime, the folklorist and literary critic Sruoga defended a different position: the folkloric tradition was alive. It was always renewing itself and was naturally added to with songs composed by individual authors.44 In these discussions it is important to consider the question of authorship of the traditional songs. Those folklorists who were of the opinion that a song was first of all composed by an individual, and then society took over the song and adapted it to its own needs, had an easier time of conceiving that folklore was still being created. Meanwhile, those who were of the opinion that folk songs were created collectively in times past had a hard time agreeing that such creativity was possible in the present moment. Meanwhile, in the public life of a song there were other strong tendencies. As choruses and Lithuanian academic music became more professional, it was evident that harmonized songs were taking precedence on stage. In 1924 the first National Song Festival took place and most of the songs performed were harmonized songs for choruses. Incidentally, only in the 1990s was authentic folk music performed on stage by ethnographic ensembles at the song festivals.45 Vladas Šimkus, who published the first collection of harmonized songs, “Mūsų dainos” [Our songs] in 1911, was one of the most active participants in the movement to harmonize folk songs and arrange them for choral performance.46 His collection contains only traditional folk songs arranged for choral performance. On the other hand, slowly the understanding took hold

43 44 45 46

Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, “Lietuvių tautosakos menas” [Lithuanian folklore art], in his Raštai [Writings], vol. 8, ed. Vanda Zaborskaitė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1999), 432. Sruoga, “Mūsų tautosaka ir gyvenimas,” 209–213. Skrodenis, Folkloras ir gyvenimas, 276. Juozas Gaudrimas, Iš lietuvių muzikinės kultūros istorijos 1917–1940 [From the history of Lithuanian musical culture 1917–1940] (Vilnius: Mintis, 1964), 114.

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that traditional culture is unique in the provinces. For this reason, society began to form not only a national cultural vision, but an ethnographic one as well. Therefore, in the 1930s regional folk art festivals were organized together with holidays that celebrated ancient Lithuanian culture. An effort was made to showcase authentic regional folklore and folk art.47 In 1936 Antanas Mažiulis prepared a brochure on Tautosakos ir papročių ruošimas šventėms [How to prepare folk art and traditions for holidays], which Skrodenis considers to be the first instructional material on how to transfer authentic folklore onto the stage.48 In the 1930s gradually the term “folk song” established itself in the field of folklore and in society.49 Probably this happened because of the necessity for differentiating professionals’ work from that of amateurs. Although during this period the terms “Lithuanian song,” “folk song,” “the people’s song,” and “the nation’s song” were often used synonymously, slowly the terms the “nation’s song” and “Lithuanian song” were pushed out of popular usage. In a manner, this process occurred on its own because the proliferation of professionally composed songs necessitated stricter identification during concerts as to whether a song was a folk song or a song composed by an individual author. On the other hand, it would have been inaccurate and sacrilegious to not refer to the popular songs that had been composed by individual authors as national songs or Lithuanian songs. Thus the term “folk song” became reserved for old traditional songs. However, it is worth noting that during the interwar period the same terms, “folk song,” and “national song,” were used to describe two somewhat different types of song: (1) a traditional village song that is adopted into the repertoire of a family or a native region, which was passed on orally, sung privately and for one’s own pleasure and in dialect, had light variations, and could be adapted to any circumstance; and (2) an arranged choral song, designed for the stage, performed in standard Lithuanian language, harmonized, evened out, and which had to suit the public norms of decency. These types of song were linked by the same textual content (if we discount later obscene folklore that was designed for entertainment) and had the same melody. However, the stylistics, intention, venue, vocal technique, and harmonies were different. In the interwar period, it seems that these two forms of song did not contradict each other, only the latter was more appreciated as intended for a public

47 48 49

Ibid., 187. Ibid., 188. Ivanauskaitė and Sadauskienė, “Dainų vardo klausimu,” 243.

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audience. It also became a form of expressing identity for the younger generations: many organizations, schools, work collectives formed their own choirs. To sing in one of these choirs was a certain means of showing one’s active participation in cultural life and in society. In general, it can be assumed that Lithuanian secular choirs were both the nourishers of national culture, at the same time serving the purpose of representing Lithuanian and national culture before the beginning of the World War II. Anicetas Arminas observes that Lithuanian choirs formed more easily in the villages than they did in the cities. Therefore, he concluded that this movement was the most intense in places where the nation’s roots were least damaged, and where the communities were strongest. Choirs were especially popular in Lithuanian émigré communities: “In general, wherever there was even a small group of Lithuanians, if there was a choir conductor to be found, there was a choir.”50 It was a given that choirs became the manifestation of national identity during this period, while harmonized folk songs, performed by a trained choir, were the genre that best displayed Lithuanian identity. It should be mentioned here that in the first half of the century all Lithuanian composers arranged folk songs; the process had become like a compulsory test or a social obligation for them.

Conclusion From the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century Lithuanian folk song as a genre experienced strong influences and transformations. The traditional villagers’ repertoire, which had held relevance in the old society under serfdom, now began to be enriched by Lithuanian poetic texts, which took on a greater and greater influence as the 20th century drew ever closer. In the 20th century, the songs were strongly affected by the need to turn them into a genre for the stage that adhered to requirements necessary to make the national genre representative of the country. The changing song repertoire reflected the socio-cultural and political changes in the country. At this time, researcher folklorists turned their attention to the oldest songs because they considered them to best reflect the true Lithuanian national character, and be least influenced by foreign influences. For a long time most of them maintained an idealized vision of Lithuanian songs, believing that through songs illiterate people in countries with little to no technological expertise were able to maintain their moral fortitude and subtlety of emotion – 50

Arminas, Lietuvių chorai, 56, 89.

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all the qualities of a civilized person. For a nation seeking cultural and national independence this was important. Therefore, the idealization of ancient songs was inspired by a defensive stance, which became apparent both in representing Lithuanian culture to foreigners and in raising the national consciousness and sense of self-esteem for Lithuanians. On the other hand, a more objective, fluid concept of the tradition formed, one which allowed for viewing the tradition of song as a changing, unbroken, and ever-renewing genre that incorporated the stylistic qualities of both high and low art. Nevertheless, harmonized Lithuanian folk songs performed on stage in the 20th century did not reflect these liberal ideas, but rather retained the conservative ethic and aesthetic standards that were formed by Rhesa and Stanevičius still in the 19th century. These standards instilled in society an ethical, lyrical, emotionally moderate, stylistically impeccable image of folk song. Translated by Laima Vincė

Bibliography Arminas, Anicetas. Lietuvių chorai, tautinės savimonės ir muzikinės kultūros žadintojai [Lithuanian choirs, awakeners of national consciousness and musical culture]. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 1998. Balys, Jonas, ed. Lietuvių dainos Amerikoje: lyrinės meilės, papročių, darbo, švenčių ir pramogų dainos [Lithuanian songs in America: Lyrical songs of love, customs, work, holidays and entertainment]. Collected and edited by Jonas Balys. Silver Spring, MD: Lietuvių tautosakos leidykla, 1977. Balys, Jonas, ed. Tautosakos rinkėjo vadovas, 2nd Edition. Kaunas: Lituanistikos instituto lietuvių tautosakos archyvo leidinys, 1940. Balys, Jonas, ed. Tautosakos rinkėjo vadovas [Manual for collecting folklore]. Kaunas: Lietuvių tautosakos archyvo leidinys, 1936. Bartsch, Christian. Dainų balsai [Voices of songs]. Compiled by Jadvyga Čiurlionytė, Laima Burkšaitienė, and Vida Daniliauskienė. Vilnius: Lietuvos muzikos akademija, 2000. Brazys, Teodoras, ed. Lietuvių tautinių dainų melodijos [Melodies of Lithuanian national songs], Kietaviškių parish (Trakai region), book I. Collected and recorded by Docent Father Teodoras Brazys. Kaunas: Valstybės spaustuvė, 1927. Būtėnas, Pranas. Lietuvių tautotyros žinių ir senienų rinkimo programa [Guide to collecting information on Lithuanian folk culture and ancient material]. Šiauliai: “Vilties” draugijos leidinys, 1925.

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Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė, Sofija. Tautos auklėjimo mintys: Kultūros kritika, publicistika, viešos paskaitos, pokalbiai [Thoughts on nation’s education: Cultural criticism, articles, open lectures, conversations]. Edited by Aušra Martišiūtė-Linartienė. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Gaudrimas, Juozas. Iš lietuvių muzikinės kultūros istorijos 1917–1940 [From the history of Lithuanian musical culture 1917–1940]. Vilnius: Mintis, 1964. Gaudrimas, Juozas. Iš lietuvių muzikinės kultūros istorijos 1861–1917 [From the history of Lithuanian musical culture 1861–1917]. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1958. Grinius, Kazys. Trumpa Folklioro dalykams rinkti Programa [Short program on how to collect folklore]. Vilniuje: M. Kuktos spaustuvė, 1910. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Von Ähnlichkeit der mittlern englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst.” In Herders Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 2. Leipzig: Reclam, 1893. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Eine Gemählde aus der Preuβischen Geschichte.” In Herders sämmtliche Werke, vol. 23. Berlin: Weidmann, 1885. Ivanauskaitė, Vita, and Jurga Sadauskienė. “Dainų vardo klausimu” [On songs’ names]. Tautosakos darbai 12, no. 19 (2000): 238–249. Ivinskis, Laurynas. Atsiszaukimas į Brolius Lietuvius Lauryno Liet. Amer. Europ. Draugystės [Calling for brothers Lithuanians from Laurynas about LithuanianAmerican-European friendship]. Plymouth: Pa, 1894. Jucevičius, Liudvikas Adomas. Raštai [Writings]. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1959. Kalvaitis, Vilius. Prūsijos lietuvių dainos [Prussian Lithuanian songs]. Tilžėje: Printed by E. Jagomastas. Photocopy. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1998. Krėvė-Mickevičius, Vincas. Dainavos krašto liaudies dainos, prof. V. Krėvės Mickevičiaus surinktos [Folk songs from Dainava region]. Kaunas: Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetas, 1924. Landsbergis, Vytautas. Vincas Kudirka: Lietuvos darbininkas ir muzikas. Studijos ir pabiros [Vincas Kudirka: Lithuanian worker and musician. Studies and comments]. Vilnius: Jungtinės spaudos pajėgos, 2012. Lietuvių tautosakos apybraiža [A study on Lithuanian folklore]. Edited by K[azys] Grigas, Amb[raziejus] Jonynas, K[ostas] Korsakas, and L[eonardas] Sauka. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963. Maceina, Antanas. “Liaudies daina – tautos sielos išraiška. Lietuvių dainų dvasia ir pobūdis” [Folk song as soul’s expression. Spirit and style in Lithuanian songs]. Edited by Leonardas Sauka. Tautosakos darbai 3, no. 10 (1994): 53–73. Maceina, Antanas. “Liaudies daina – tautos sielos išraiška. Lietuvių dainų dvasia ir pobūdis.” Edited by Leonardas Sauka. Tautosakos darbai 2, no. 9 (1994): 145–149.

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Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas. “Lietuvių tautosakos menas” [Lithuanian folklore art]. In Raštai [Writings], vol. 8. Edited by Vanda Zaborskaitė, 403–438. Vilnius: Vaga, 1999. Nakienė, Austė. Nuo tradicinės polifonijos iki polifoninės tradicijos: lietuvių muzikos kaita XX–XXI a. [From traditional polyphony to polyphonic tradition: Changes in Lithuanian music in the 20th–21st century]. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Rhesa, Ludwig. “Daina” [Song]. In Lietuvių literatūros antologija [The Anthology of Lithuanian Literature], vol. 2. Edited by Brigita Speičytė, 293–296. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Rhesa, Ludwig. “Lietuvių liaudies dainų tyrinėjimas.” In Lietuvių literatūros antologija, 327–342. Rhesa, Ludwig. Lietuvių liaudies dainos [Lithuanian folk songs], vol. 2. Vilnius: Vaga, 1964. Sadauskienė, Jurga. Didaktinės lietuvių dainos: Poetinių tradicijų sandūra XIX–XX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian didactical songs: Interaction of the poetic traditions in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century]. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006. Skrodenis, Stasys. Folkloras ir gyvenimas: straipsnių rinkinys [Folklore and life: Collection of articles]. Vilnius: Vilniaus pedagoginio universiteto leidykla, 2010. Sruoga, Balys. “Dainų poetikos etiudai” [Studies of song poetics]. In Raštai [Writings], vol. 9, book 1. Edited by Algis Samulionis, 7–184. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003. Sruoga, Balys. “Mūsų tautosaka ir gyvenimas” [Our folklore and life]. Mūsų tautosaka, vol. 10 (1936): 198–216. Stanevičius, Simonas. “Dainos žemaičių. Pratarimas” [Songs of Samogitia]. In Lietuvių literatūros antologija, 357–358. Šalkauskis, Stasys. Tautybė, patriotizmas ir lietuvių tautos pašaukimas [Nationality, patriotism and devotion of Lithuanian nation]. Kaunas: Raidė, 1928. Šimkus, Stasys. 50 jaunimo dainų [50 songs for youth]. Kaunas: Švyturio bendrovės leidinys, 1922. Vydūnas. Raštai [Writings], vol. 3. Edited by Vacys Bagdonavičius. Vilnius: Mintis, 1992. Vydūnas. Lietuvos aidos [Echoes of Lithuania]. Edited by Vilhelmas Storost. Tilžė: Rūta, 1904. Литовские народные песни, собранные Всев. Миллером и Ф. Фортунатовым. Москва: Moсковский университет, 1873.

“Who Are You? A Little Pole”: The Vision of the Nation and Nationality in the Polish Literary Canon for Children on the Threshold of Independence (around 1918) Krystyna Zabawa

In 1918, Poland became an independent state after 123 years of partitions when the country was divided between the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and Austria. For over a century, control over the territory of Poland had been shared by three different, foreign and largely hostile state organisms. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the new state was to establish a common national identity. Such educational efforts were supported by many of the literary works written before 1918 that created the vision of one nation and built national identity in all three parts of the annexed territory. In my paper, I will focus on the writers and books which were the most influential in shaping the picture of Poland and Poles in the hearts and minds of children. They created a kind of literary canon which was valid throughout the twenty years of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and, to some extent, also after World War II in the Polish People’s Republic. In studies to date, critics have discussed literary canons for schools (in practice – the lists of obligatory readings) or national literary canons consisting of books with the exclusion of children’s literature. However, it seems even more important to look at children’s canons (not only the school ones, but also those created in family education). As Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller wrote in 2017: “[…] it is certainly surprising that research into the canon of children’s literature has remained comparatively restricted in its scope.”1 It is worth remembering that Polish children who were brought up on the basis of “pre-independence” canons, were about 30 years old in the 1930s and were responsible for creating Polish policy and culture just before and during World War II. Their vision of nation and nationality was crucial in one of the turning points of Polish history. 1 Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, “Introduction: Canon Studies and Children’s Literature,” in Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, ed. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller (New York: Routledge, 2017), 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_007

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The aim of my paper is to answer the question: how could this have been influenced by canonical children’s texts, read by children on the threshold of independence? Before presenting the results of my research, I first have to define “literary canon” because it is understood in various ways. Most critics agree that nowadays canons are perceived as “functional structures, aiming and constructing collective identities and collective memories.”2 They could be discussed from different perspectives: the methodological, historical, cultural, sociological or the philological. “The problematic situation of the Polish canon of children’s literature from the historical and educational perspective”3 is presented by Anna Maria Czernow and Dorota Michułka in their paper “Historical Twists and Turns in the Polish Canon of Children’s Literature.” The authors discuss three Polish canons: “from the interwar period, from the communist times and the present.” In my paper, I discuss canonical children’s texts written before the turning point of 1918 (the regaining of independence). Children’s canons are understood as lists of literary works written for children and especially popular in the given period. The proof of their popularity lies in the number of editions, reviews, quotations in autobiographies, and diaries. In Poland around 1918 there were few canons because they differed (at least a little) in every annexed territory, and also in every kind of school as well as in home education (most popular among higher classes of society). That is why I am writing about the canons (in the plural). But actually I am going to focus not on the whole canons, but on Polish writers and their books that seem to be common to all of them, and that have something to do with the vision of the nation and nationality. While reading Polish children’s literature published before 1918, one can notice that there are two main kinds of books that were published, widely read and reviewed. The first group is connected with Polish history and the second one with the Polish landscape and nature, often referred to as “polska ziemia” (Polish land). Historical stories and novels were written by (among others) Antonina Domańska, Walery Przyborowski, Wiktor Gomulicki, and Teresa Jadwiga. The most popular authors of travel books, termed by Zofia Budrewicz as “lessons in the Polish landscape,”4 were: Maria Zaleska, Zofia Urbanowska, and Władysław Umiński.

2 Ibid. 3 Anna Maria Czernow and Dorota Michułka, “Historical Twists and Turns in the Polish Canon of Children’s Literature,” in Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, 85. 4 Zofia Budrewicz, Lekcje polskiego krajobrazu. Międzywojenna proza podróżnicza dla młodzieży [Lessons in Polish landscape: Interwar travel literature for young readers] (Kraków: WNAP, 2013).

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Knowledge of national history and geography was therefore the foundation on which to build children’s national identity. The works of all of the mentioned authors are analyzed in Budrewicz’s monograph. For the analyses in this paper I have chosen the three most popular, eminent, and influential writers, published and read in all three territories annexed by Poland. They definitely create a canon for every Polish child who could read or listen to others reading. They were: Stanisław Jachowicz (1796–1857), Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910), and Władysław Bełza (1847–1913). Each of them wrote numerous poems and published several books. Their poems were learned by heart in schools, but the most influential, however, and the one showing the clearest vision of nation and nationality were the three volumes: Bajki i powieści [Tales and stories] by Jachowicz (1824), O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi [On Dwarfs and little orphan Mary], translated into English as The Brownie Scouts (1896) by Konopnicka, and Katechizm polskiego dziecka [A Polish child’s catechism] (1900) by Bełza (the quotation in the title of this paper comes from the latter). The first mentioned writer, Jachowicz, regarded himself primarily as an educator, not a poet, but he came to be known as the father of Polish children’s poetry, being extremely popular until World War II. He was two years older than Adam Mickiewicz – the greatest Polish Romantic poet – and the first edition of his tales appeared two years after Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances, regarded as the book which introduced Romanticism into Polish literature. Over the next five years (1824–1829) there were five (!) editions of Jachowicz’s tales (with every edition there were more of them, from 58 in the first edition to 113 in the fifth).5 The book was first published in Płock (a Russian annexed territory)6 and later also in Kraków (1871) which belonged to Austria. There are not many mentions about the nation in these short tales, and it is obvious that the name of Poland could not be mentioned there (it was forbidden by the Russian censorship). But there is no doubt that the poems promoted virtues needed, according to Jachowicz, for a “little Pole” who knew that everything which is Polish is better than things coming from another country. Such an awareness is shown in the third poem of the first edition of Bajki i powieści. It is entitled Augustynek (the name of the boy character) and shows the situation, when the father asks his son which fruit he prefers – a pear from his “own garden” or a “juicy orange.” The answer is obvious to the son: 5 Izabela Kaniowska-Lewańska, Stanisław Jachowicz. Życie, twórczość i działanie [Stanisław Jachowicz. Life, creation and works] (Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia, 1986). 6 It was also published in Russia and Ukraine (belonging to the Russian Empire), where many Polish children lived in that period, e.g., Petersburg (1860), Kijów (1916).

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Ja wolę gruszkę. – Z jakiego powodu? Bo tamta obcą, a ta jest ojczystą.7 [I prefer the pear. – Why? Because orange is a foreign fruit and the pear is a native one.]8 The satisfied father praised his son, formulating the moral of the poem: Pochwalił ojciec roztropnego syna, Że pięknie myśli za młodu I rzekł: Kto dzieckiem kochać kraj zaczyna, Będzie pociechą narodu. [The Father praised his wise son That he thinks correctly being still young And said: whoever starts to love his country as a child, He will then become a joy to his nation.] This conviction of the superiority of everything which is Polish must have been strong because we can find it in many 19th-century literary works. The most famous example comes from the national epic and masterpiece – Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz (published ten years after Jachowicz’s tales), where the protagonist argues that the national trees and even the sky should be seen as superior to Italian ones!9 In most of his poems, Jachowicz emphasizes the value of the family, the authority of the father and mother, who demand respect, and the virtue of obedience to them. The family transmits the national values and identity to children. But “the highest value” in the tales, as Bogusław Żurakowski stated, is

7 Stanisław Jachowicz, Bajki i powieści (Płock: Karol Kulig, 1824), 9. Emphasis by the author, S. J. 8 All Polish texts are translated by the author of the paper (K. Z.), unless stated otherwise. 9 The main character Tadeusz tries to persuade his lover of the superiority of the Polish landscape: “[…] that Italian sky of yours, so far as I have heard of it, is blue and clear, but yet is like frozen water: are not wind and storm a hundred times more beautiful? In our land, if you merely raise your head, how many sights meet your eye!” The woman, Telimena, answers: “[…] this is the malady of the Soplicas [the noble family of Tadeusz], not to like anything except their own country.” Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania, trans. George Rapall Noyes (London, Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1917), 86. Emphasis mine, K. Z.

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God.10 And the praise of a religious attitude to reality is another characteristic feature for children’s texts of all of the chosen authors. Religion is usually associated with the Polish nation and fidelity to it is shown as fidelity to the nation. In the last poem of Konopnicka’s collection of children’s prayers Psałterz dziecka [A child’s psalter] we can read: Ojcowską ręką błogosław nas, Otwórz nam serca bliźnie, A pozwól służyć, gdy przyjdzie czas, I Tobie i Ojczyźnie.11 [Bless us with Your Fatherly hand, Open our neighbors’ hearts, And let us serve when the time comes You and our Fatherland.] This is the last stanza of the poem and in the second one a similar desire is also expressed: “[…] niech ma chlubę Ojczysty kraj / Z swych przygarniętych dzieci” [May our Fatherland be proud / of the children taken under its protection]. Konopnicka wrote many poems that could be treated as a patriotic catechism. But her most famous work for children and popular from the moment it was published in 1896 was her masterpiece fairy tale (O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi). In the preface to its English translation, the editor writes: “Mary Konopnicka was a poet, or perhaps one should say rather that she was an ardent Polish patriot who devoted to the service of her country all the best and noblest that she possessed: her poetic talent. […] In her works we find two dominant notes: faith in the future of Poland, to which every effort should be devoted; and sympathy with those who suffer.”12 The vision of the nation in her fairy tale is deeply rooted in history, even in pre-historical, legendary times. Already at the beginning of this long, multilayered story one of the main characters – the dwarf Koszałek-Opałek (Master Tittle-Tattle) – tells the village children legends about the oldest times of their country. It turns out that all the little girls and boys already know the story

10 11 12

Bogusław Żurakowski, Literatura – wartość – dziecko [Literature – value – child] (Kraków: Impuls, 1999), 52. Maria Konopnicka, Psałterz dziecka (Lublin: Wydawnictwo M. Arcta w Warszawie, 1918, 2nd Edition), 32. Eadem, The Brownie Scouts, trans. Kate Żuk-Skarszewska (Warsaw: M. Arct Publishing Company, 1929), 5.

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about the princess who “refused to marry a German.” They react enthusiastically and “all began to sing a song about Wanda, the Princess who preferred death to marriage with a German.”13 This is another trait of the vision of the nation in children’s canonical works: the hostility and contempt towards enemies, especially the Germans and the Russians. Actually, the whole of Konopnicka’s fairy tale could be read as a great allegory of a country that had lost its independence (life) because of its selfishness and not caring about others (“A story of a hamster”). Now it is waiting for resurrection which is possible only through the ultimate devotion of its citizens, including its children. In the tale, the orphan Mary has to overcome many difficulties and obstacles before she stands in front of the Queen of the Tatras who could fulfill her only wish: “Three days and three nights did Mary journey before she came to the castle.”14 It must be remembered that the Tatra mountains during the partitions of Poland were believed to be the only free place where the soul of the nation and the knights sleeping were ready to wake up when the time came. The eagle – the symbol of Poland – appears when Mary is too frightened to go on; it encourages and helps her. The Queen of the Tatras is moved by Mary’s simple request, and she says: “[…] never, never has anyone come to me who wished only to be as he was before, as does this little child.”15 To wish “only to be as [it] was before” sounds like a desire to bring back the times when Poland was a great nation with its own state (like in the dwarf’s stories from the beginning of the tale). The motif of bringing back good times is a kind of leitmotif of the fairy tale. At the end of the book, a poor peasant, Skrobek (Scrub), who had neglected his piece of land for a long time until it became barren, started to work at the instigation of the orphan Mary. The narrator comments: Was it magic? No, it was not magic. It was simply that for the very first time the poor man’s sluggish mind had stirred. His soul was awakening: for the first time he felt that he loved that little bit of neglected land lying under God’s sky, warmed by God’s sun and watered by God’s rain.16 And when he had finished his work, he started to behave like a man who returns to his homeland after a very long time of separation: “He took off his 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 185.

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cap, knelt down, and kissed the ground.”17 Treating the land as a sacred thing is another characteristic of the patriotic visions in the children’s canon before 1918 (and after this date as well). Such a vision of the Polish land is also created in the most famous children’s text from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which is still known by heart by every Polish child. It appears in most discussions on Polish identity, nation, nationality, and patriotic education.18 Its author, Bełza, now known as a one poem author, was a popular poet in his time as well as a journalist, cultural, and education activist. He died a year before World War I started, and his collection of poems, entitled Katechizm polskiego dziecka (1900) consisted of 12 pieces, among them: O celu Polaka [About the aim of the Pole], Polska mowa [Polish language], Ziemia rodzinna [Native land], Modlitwa polskiego dziecka [A Polish child’s prayer]. And it comprises all the traits of the vision of the nation and nationality that have been presented before. The poem that opens the book has the same title as the whole, but it is known as Wyznanie wiary dziecięcia polskiego [A Polish child’s confession of faith]. Indeed, it has also been called “the children’s patriotic mantra.”19 It consists of 10 couplets: every first line is a question and every second one – an answer. There are mentions of the national symbol (a white eagle), the Polish land that was gained through “blood and scars,” and a child’s love and gratitude to her / his fatherland. The last stanza introduces the most disturbing element (from today’s point of view): – Coś jej winien? – Oddać życie! [– What do you owe Poland? – To sacrifice my life.] The young Pole, Bełza’s godson to whom the poet dedicated his “catechism,” indeed sacrificed his 24-year-old life.20 Lots of boys and girls went fighting for

17 18 19

20

Ibid., 192. Władysław Bełza, Katechizm polskiego dziecka (Lwów: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1912). “Kto ty jesteś? You need to know the answer if you want to be Polish,” accessed April 20, 2018, http://inside-poland.com/t/kto-ty-jestes-you-need-to-know-the-answer-if -you-want-to-be-polish/. The story about the origin of this poem is included in the book of Maryla Woska’s memories (a poet and the mother of Ludwik Wolski who was the first addressee of the poem

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Poland with these verses on their lips or just in their hearts. It was the 19thcentury vision of the nation that every member (even “a little one”) should sacrifice her or his life for their Fatherland (even without the prospect for independence as in Bełza’s poem; just to show the world that “we are the nation” ready to die for our national identity). It is amazing how powerfully these twenty verses of Bełza have influenced Polish consciousness and imagination for over a century. Today almost every discussion about patriotic education in Poland starts from Bełza’s question: “Who are you?”21 What is more, the short poem transgressed the borders of nationalities. There is a Lithuanian paraphrase of the Catechism… that has also been popular, though not to the same degree as its Polish prototype.22 The poem is called “Lietuvos pilietis” [The Lithuanian citizen]23 and was written by Aleksandras Dambrauskas (pseudonym of Adomas Jakštas, 1860–1938) – a poet, literary critic and a public figure of that time – in 1925.24 It consists of 16 verses: every line contains a question and an answer. The equivalent of a Polish couplet quoted above are four lines where the “Lithuanian boy”25 confesses that after school he wants to be a soldier to chase all enemies out from

21

22

23 24

25

and “sacrificed his life” for Poland in 1919): Maryla Wolska and Beata Obertyńska, Wspomnienia [Memories] (Warszawa: PIW, 1974), 214–215. The title appears in many web sites, blogs, and Internet forums. The poem is a starting point for reflections in a book about Polish education: Agnieszka Kania, “Polak młody” na lekcjach języka polskiego: Edukacja polonistyczna a kształtowanie poczucia tożsamości narodowej [“Little Pole” in Polish language lessons…] (Kraków: Universitas, 2015). The discussion with the canonical Bełza’s text has been held by the authors of children’s books, e.g., Joanna Olech and Edgar Bąk, Kto ty jesteś [Who are you] (Warszawa: Wytwórnia, 2013, 2018); Michał Rusinek, Jaki znak twój? Wierszyki na dalsze sto lat niepodległości [What is your sign…] (Kraków: Znak, 2018). The author of the paper presents Bełza’s poem with the suggestion to use it in education: Krystyna Zabawa, Literatura dziecięca w kontekstach edukacyjnych [Children’s literature in the context of education] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Ignatianum w Krakowie, 2017). During the international conference in Vilnius in May 2018 the Lithuanian scholars informed me about the paraphrase which has been learnt by heart by Lithuanian children (and is still recited in kindergartens). I would like to express my gratitude to prof. Brigita Speičytė who was so kind as to send me the text of this paraphrase with all the useful information. The poem was translated into Polish by prof. Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn. I would like to thank the Professor for making this translation available to me. Dalia Tarailienė, “Adomo Jakšto-Dambrausko rankraščiai Lietuvos nacionalinės bibliotekos Retų knygų ir rankraščių skyriaus rinkiniuose” [The manuscripts of Adomas Jakštas-Dambrauskas in the collections of the Rare book and manuscript department of the National library of Lithuania], LKMA Metraštis XXXVI (2012): 199–226. Adomas Jakštas, Rinktinė: Lyrika, satyros, vertimai ir sekimai, feljetonai [Selected works: Poetry, satires, translations, feuilletons] (Vilnius: Vaga, 1998), 205. My analysis is based on the unpublished translation by Okulicz-Kozaryn.

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his country. However, in the Lithuanian paraphrase there are no such outright imperatives to sacrifice the child’s life, to give a child’s blood for the country. Such imperatives, however, appear in Polish children’s literature. The necessity of shedding blood is present in many children’s books written before 1918 (and later, too). The analyzed literary works created the vision of Poland as the martyr nation which was oppressed and suffering at the hands of its enemies and which needed the lives of its citizens, even children, to fight for freedom and independence. This vision stems, of course, from Polish Romanticism that is clearly shown in Michułka’s monograph on Polish literary education. The author presents “the Romantic understanding of the term” homeland. Her conclusions interact with the results of the analyses presented above: “During the second half of the 19th century, […] there functioned a consistently executed – ideological and communal trinity: family – church (God) – homeland.”26 To conclude, Polish children greeted independence in 1918 with this kind of Romantic vision of their nation. Literary texts, written for them, presented Poland as a country with a rich and glorious history. Children were taught to be proud of it and to do everything they could to regain their Homeland and to continue its great tradition. The support of this tradition and national identity was – according to many poems, tales and stories – the Polish family, treated also as the foundation of the nation. It was the role of mothers especially emphasized with reference to Our Lady, God’s Mother (shown as all Polish orphans’ Mother), and Poland as the mother of all Polish children. Young readers and listeners were also persuaded to believe that their nation is superior to others, especially the Germans and the Russians who are their “eternal” enemies. This superiority is often motivated by Poland’s special connection to God and His exceptional loving care. Polish families are presented in literature as the ones preserving all Christian values, and young boys and girls were called to do the same: obeying their parents, praying for the homeland’s independence, caring for those who were wounded in the fight for Poland, and remembering those who had lost their lives. One of the most important values in children’s literature before 1918 was the Polish land which should be loved and explored. Every child should know all regions of the country, its main towns and especially their closest surrounding. The basis of national identity and national treasure is the language that should be learned eagerly and known thoroughly. And finally, last but not the least 26

Dorota Michułka, “Ad usum Delphini. On Literary Education in Schools Then and Now. Summary,” in Dorota Michułka, Ad usum Delphini. O szkolnej edukacji literackiej – dawniej i dziś (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2013), 417. Emphasis mine, K. Z.

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the commandment for “a little Pole” was to sacrifice his or her life for Poland’s independence having in mind that the Polish land has been gained “through blood and scars.” The generation brought up with such a vision of nation and nationality in 1918 was to build a new independent state. Some of the young people soon recognized that the old “pre-independence” canon was outdated and even undesirable.27 But the political situation caused a comeback of the 19th-century patriotic canon quickly. What is more, it seems that it is also considered by some Poles as relevant in the 21st century. This proves the necessity of thorough research on this canon and its reception.

Bibliography Bełza, Władysław. Katechizm polskiego dziecka [A Polish child’s catechism]. Lwów: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1912. Budrewicz, Zofia. Lekcje polskiego krajobrazu. Międzywojenna proza podróżnicza dla młodzieży [Lessons in Polish landscape: Interwar travel literature for young readers]. Kraków: WNAP, 2013. Czernow, Anna Maria, and Dorota Michułka. “Historical Twists and Turns in the Polish Canon of Children’s Literature.” In Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature. Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, 85–102. New York: Routledge, 2017. Jachowicz, Stanisław. Bajki i powieści [Tales and stories]. Płock: Karol Kulig, 1824. Jakštas, Adomas. Rinktinė: Lyrika, satyros, vertimai ir sekimai, feljetonai [Selected works: Poetry, satires, translations, feuilletons]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1998. Kaniowska-Lewańska, Izabela. Stanisław Jachowicz. Życie, twórczość i działanie [Stanisław Jachowicz. Life, creation and works]. Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia, 1986. Konopnicka, Maria. The Brownie Scouts. Translated by Kate Żuk-Skarszewska. Warsaw: M. Arct Publishing Company, 1929. Konopnicka, Maria. Psałterz dziecka [A child’s psalter], 2nd Edition. Lublin: Wydawnictwo M. Arcta w Warszawie, 1918. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina, and Anja Müller. “Introduction: Canon Studies and Children’s Literature.” In Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature. Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, 1–14. New York: Routledge, 2017.

27

Czernow and Michułka, “Polish Canon,” 86.

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Michułka, Dorota. Ad usum Delphini. O szkolnej edukacji literackiej – dawniej i dziś [Ad usum Delphini. On literary education in schools then and now]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2013. Mickiewicz, Adam. Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania. Translated by George Napall Noyes. London, Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1917. Tarailienė, Dalia. “Adomo Jakšto-Dambrausko rankraščiai Lietuvos nacionalinės bibliotekos Retų knygų ir rankraščių skyriaus rinkiniuose” [The manuscripts of Adomas Jakštas-Dambrauskas in the collections of the Rare book and manuscript department of the National library of Lithuania]. LKMA Metraštis XXXVI (2012): 199–226. Wolska, Maryla, and Beata Obertyńska. Wspomnienia [Memories]. Warszawa: PIW, 1974. Zabawa, Krystyna. Literatura dziecięca w kontekstach edukacyjnych [Children’s literature in the context of education]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Ignatianum w Krakowie, 2017. Żurakowski, Bogusław. Literatura – wartość – dziecko [Literature – value – child]. Kraków: Impuls, 1999.

State-Building and Nation-Building: Dimensions of the Myth of the Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939 Jagoda Wierzejska

1

Introduction

During the period between 1772 and 1918 Lviv was the capital of Galicia, the province of the Habsburg Monarchy. In 1910 Galicia had 7.9 million inhabitants: 45.4% were Poles, 42.9% Ukrainians, and 10.9% Jews. In Eastern Galicia, however, Ukrainians formed a majority as 62% of the population, with 25.5% Polish, and 8.2% Jewish.1 In the mid-19th century national rivalry between Galician Poles and Ukrainians started to intensify. Beginning in the 1860s, both groups perceived the province as a “Piedmont,” a territory with national separatist potential. When World War I ended and the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed, Poles and Ukrainians had opposed visions of Eastern Galicia, where Lviv was situated. Lviv itself constituted a Polish-Jewish island on the Ukrainian sea of Eastern Galicia: in 1910, Poles formed a slight majority, constituting 51% of its population, while Jews made up one third at 27.8%, and Ukrainians a minority at 19%.2 In autumn of 1918, the Poles designed the city and surrounding lands as a part of renascent Poland and planned to join them with Western Galicia, which was already under their control. At the same time the Ukrainians claimed Lviv as the capital of the rising Western Ukrainian state or even a regional centre of a future united Ukraine. As a result, on 1st November 1918 the Polish-Ukrainian war of Eastern Galicia broke out. It spread throughout the entire province and ended with a Polish victory only in mid-July 1919. Its most dramatic stage, which vastly contributed to the ultimate incorporation of Eastern Galicia into the Second Polish Republic, was the battle of Lviv, which lasted from 1st to 22nd November 1918; the battle was known in Polish

1 Other groups present in Galicia were Austrians and Germans, Armenians, Lemko-Rusyns, and Russians. See Paul R. Magocsi, “Galicia: A European Land,” in Galicia: A Multicultured Land, ed. Christopher Hann and Magocsi (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press, 2005), 7–8. 2 Konrad Wnęk, Lidia A. Zyblikiewicz, and Ewa Callahan, Ludność nowoczesnego Lwowa w latach 1857–1938 [Lviv population in modern times in the years 1857–1938] (Kraków: Towarzystwo Naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2006), 75.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_008

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national discourse as the Defense of Lviv (“Obrona Lwowa”) against Ukrainian usurpation. As regaining independence of the Polish state was officially promulgated on 11th November 1918, the Defense of Lviv was considered to be the first victorious battle in the period of the restoration of Poland and fights for its frontiers (1918–1921). Consequently, it shortly became one of the pivotal motifs in Polish literature, and was regarded as canonical between 1918 and 1939. The article is devoted to analyses of this motif and its role in nation-building and state-building processes in the Second Polish Republic. In the following parts of the text I will, first, characterize the Polish literary canon, which unfolded the events of the Defense of Lviv. Second, I will analyze a canonical literary narrative of the Defense. Third, I will hint at how it came to be ideologized. My final objective will be to highlight how the myth of the Defense served the nation-building and state-building ideology of interwar Poland, and excluded Ukrainians and Jews from its social community. In terms of methodology, the article represents a meeting point of literary studies, critical discourse analysis, and studies on nations and nationalism.

2

The Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939

The Polish-Ukrainian battle of the Galician capital became a theme of Polish literature while fighting for the city was still going on. Amid the first works concerning the battle were texts, predominantly lyric ones, published in the Lviv Polish newspapers Pobudka and Placówka, in November 1918, or somewhat later. The next years brought tens of Polish publications on the PolishUkrainian conflict, especially on the Defense of Lviv; these publications were of various genres – lyric, prosaic, dramatic3 and different artistic status – from simple propagandist works to complicated poems and novels. Some of these publications, in particular those printed in newspapers only, had a limited circle of readers. The majority, however, published in book version, gained great popularity among interwar Poles. During the two decades of the existence of

3 Although my interest is literature, publications concerning the Polish-Ukrainian war were not confined to this kind of discourse. In the interwar period, numerous publications on the topic, having historical and documentary aspirations, were brought out. Among them especially worth mentioning are the collective volumes of historical memoirs: Obrona Lwowa 1–22 listopada 1918. T. 1–2. Relacje uczestników [The Defense of Lviv November 1st–22nd, 1918. Vol. 1–2: Participants’ reports], ed. Eugenjusz Wawrzkowicz and Aleksander Kawałkowski (Lwów: nakładem Towarzystwa, 1933, 1936).

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independent Poland, some of the publications under study had numerous editions and joined the canon of Polish literature, as it was perceived between the World War I and the World War II. Their belonging to the canon was determined by the fact that they presented the narrative on the Defense, which the Poles desired, and which itself became canonical in Polish discourse. The most popular and canonical turned out to be, first and foremost, books dedicated to children and youth, second, memoirs of a literary character, third, works which won or stood out in literary competitions. In the first group, special attention should be paid to the short story “W obronie swego gniazda” [In defense of our nest] by Helena Zakrzewska (1919, six editions up until 1939), the collection of short stories Orlęta [Eaglets] by Artur Schroeder (1919, 5 editions), the novel Uśmiech Lwowa [Lviv smile] by Kornel Makuszyński (1934, three editions4), and the novel about a Lviv urchin by Ferdynand Neumeuer Jóźko żołnierzem polskim [Jóźko, a Polish soldier] (1934). In the second group, especially worth mentioning is Wacław Lipiński’s literary memoir (1927, two editions), based on his diaries from the time of the PolishUkrainian and Polish-Soviet wars. The third group in turn comprises, among others, the drama Lwów chlubą narodu [Lviv, the pride of the nation] by Zofia Lewartowska. The drama won an award in a competition announced on the occasion of the anniversary of the construction of the Lviv Theater5 and was published in 1929. Such works as the aforementioned ones were often recommended as didactic materials at schools and were recalled during official state ceremonies, especially connected with anniversaries of the November battle.6 As a result, between 1918 and 1939 they became typical readings for Poles and shaped their collective awareness of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict to a great extent. In the Polish Peoples’ Republic – after World War II and incorporation of former Eastern Galicia into the USSR – the works dealing with the Defense of Lviv lost their canonical status. The vast majority of them were censored and fell into oblivion. Only very few had new underground editions, 4 See Bibliografia literatury dla dzieci i młodzieży 1918–1939. Literatura polska i przekłady [Bibliography of children’s and youth literature 1918–1939. Polish literature and translations], ed. Bogumiła Krassowska and Alina Grefkowicz (Warszawa: BP. Biblioteka Główna, 1995) and the database of the National Library in Warsaw (Poland). 5 See Józef Białynia Chołodecki, [Preface], in Zofia Lewartowska, Lwów chlubą narodu. Dramat w 4 aktach na tle obrony Lwowa w roku 1018, słowo wstępne Józef Białynia Chołodecki (Lwów: nakładem Małopolskiej Straży Obywatelskiej we Lwowie, 1929), 3–4. 6 E.g., the program of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Defense of Lviv included declamation of three very well-known poems on the Defense: by Artur Oppnam, Schoeder and Jan Kasprowicz, Deržavnij Arkhiv Lvivskoi Oblasti (DALO), fond (f.) 2, opis (op). 26, sprava (spr.) 384, 7.

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e.g., Zakrzewska’s Dzieci Lwowa [Lviv’s children] (1985) and Schroeder’s Orlęta (1988). After the political turn of 1989 in Poland, the number of new – this time official – issuances increased and embraced, among others, Uśmiech Lwowa by Makuszyński (1989, 2004) and subsequent editions of Dzieci Lwowa (1990, 1991, 2004). Consequently, the interwar canon of patriotic readings, at least partly, has been regaining its strong and influential position.

3

The Defenders and Their Enemies

The canonical narrative on the Defense of Lviv formed by interwar Polish literature was virtually unequivocal. The Ukrainian seizure of power in the city, on 1st November 1918, was usually depicted as a shock for Poles or even a betrayal by their alleged “brothers.” Such a viewpoint, present, among others, in Zakrzewska’s “W obronie swego gniazda,” ensued from a tendency of Polish authors to divide Ukrainians into a small group of aggressive nationalists and the rest of “the people” – as Ruthenians – ethnically related and loyal to the Poles.7 In fact, the tendency in question was tacitly based on the ideology of Polish superiority in Galicia and Poles’ denial of Ukrainians’ existence as a separate nation. Very quickly, however, it was superseded by a new perspective on Ukrainians en masse – as undisputed enemies of the Poles. In Polish literature the next stages of the battle of Lviv, following the Ukrainian action on 1st November, were presented by using the poetics of psychomachia as a struggle between good (Poles) and evil (Ukrainians) for the innocent (Polish by its nature) city and land. Many authors described Ukrainians, using deeply deprecatory metaphors. For example, Wilhelmina Adamówna in the young people’s novel Gdy zagrzmiał złoty róg… [When the gold horn sounded…] (1921), about a group of adolescent Polish fighters for Lviv, named their foes as “Kalmyks’ snouts” or “Russian devils.”8 Other authors reached for phraseology referring to abomination. Zakrzewska portrayed a Polish boy, one of the main protagonists of “W obronie swego gniazda,” as a beautiful blue-eyed angel, while his Ukrainian opponent and traitor as a stinging, hissing creature, which evoked Poles’ “profound disgust.”9 Such a rhetoric of

7 Christoph Mick, Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016), 221–222. 8 Wisława [Wilhelmina Adamówna], Gdy zagrzmiał złoty róg… (Lwów: Księgarnia Naukowa, 1921), 75, 139. 9 Helena Zakrzewska, “W obronie swego gniazda,” in Helena Zakrzewska, Dzieci Lwowa (Gdańsk: GRAF, 1990 [1919]), 60, 66–67.

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literary works proved that Poles, immediately after the beginning of the battle for the city, started to perceive Ukrainians as aggressors, whose attempt to seize power in Lviv had no national, cultural or moral legitimacy. Applying the philosophical analyses on hostility and repulsion by Umberto Eco10 and Julia Kristeva11 to literary interpretation allows us to state that rhetorical figures related to ugliness and repulsion especially, used in descriptions of Ukrainian atrocities, aimed to distinguish (the good and beautiful) Polish defenders from (the evil and horrible) Ukrainian usurpers. They were to exclude the latter group from cultivated European nations, in general, and full-fledged citizens of Eastern Galicia, future Lesser Poland,12 in particular. Due to the rhetorical figures mentioned, authors sought, first, to counter the Ukrainian claim that only the armed resistance of Poles had escalated the conflict in Lviv, second, to justify Polish retribution and, third, to foster Polish claims to the contentious multinational city and its surrounding territory. In the canonical narrative on the Defense of Lviv national groups other than Poles and Ukrainians were presented less frequently, but they were not absent. Relatively often Austrians and Germans appeared in it, always in the role of supporters of Ukrainian aggressors. According to Polish authors, the Ukrainian seizure of power in Lviv was a result of machinations by the Austrians and the Germans, purportedly hostile towards Poles at all times. As Zakrzewska named it, that seizure of power was a “rape and murder” committed by “the savages who were led by the criminal German hand.”13 Accusations of Austrian-German-Ukrainian cooperation found confirmation neither in testimonies of Austrian and German diplomats and officers, nor in archival documents – they are also repudiated in contemporary historical accounts14 – 10 11 12

13 14

Umberto Eco, “Inventing the Enemy,” in Inventing the Enemy: Essays (New York: Mariner Books, 2012), 1–21. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). At the beginning of the 1920s the name “Galicia” in the official Polish nomenclature was superseded by the term “Eastern Little Poland.” Such a term was introduced to underline the exclusively Polish character of the region, see Katarzyna Hibel, “Wojna na mapy,” “wojna na słowa”: Onomastyczne i międzykulturowe aspekty polityki językowej II Rzeczpospolitej w stosunku do mniejszości ukraińskiej w Galicji Wschodniej w okresie międzywojennym [“War on maps,” “war on words”: Onomastic and intercultural aspects of interwar Poland’s language politics as applied to the Ukranian minority in Eastern Galicia] (Vienna, Berlin: LIT, 2014), 254–256. Zakrzewska, “W obronie swego gniazda,” 106–107. See Mick, Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947, 143–144; Maciej Kozłowski, Między Sanem a Zbruczem. Walki o Lwów i Galicję Wschodnią 1918–1919 [Between San and Zbrucz. Fights for Lviv and Eastern Galicia 1918–1919] (Kraków: Znak, 1990), 117, 143.

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but despite these facts interwar Polish literature reproduced them endlessly. This way Polish authors suggested that Austrians and Germans actively resisted the Polish fight for the province. Additionally, they shed a negative light on the Ukrainian action on 1st November 1918. The Polish viewpoint thus deprived the action of national motivation and made the Ukrainians appear to be not a self-conscious national group fighting for its state-building dream, but schemers susceptible to Austrian and German manoeuvrings. The group which was most rarely portrayed in the canonical narrative on the Defense consisted of Jews. Their virtual absence in the Polish literature concerning the battle was connected with the tragic fate the Jews encountered in the wake of the battle for the city. When Ukrainians withdrew from Lviv, immediately after the Polish victory, the pogrom perpetrated by Polish soldiers and civilians broke out in the Jewish quarter and lasted from 22nd to 24th November, 1918. Although the Lviv Jews promulgated their neutrality in the Polish-Ukrainian war, the Poles were indignant at the lack of their support, and questioned their impartiality. Poles believed that Jewish militiamen15 collaborated with the Ukrainians, and that Jewish civilians furtively fired and threw axes at Polish soldiers.16 They denied the pogrom-like character of the November slaughter and blamed Jews themselves for provoking “reasonable” Polish anger, caused by alleged Jewish support for the Ukrainian side.17 Slander aimed at the Lviv Jews was not grounded in reality, and representatives of the Jewish elite fervently argued against it. They accused Poles of anti-Semitic violence and demanded an official condemnation of the riot by the Polish regime, but their demand was in vain.18 During the Paris Peace 15

16

17

18

Jewish militiamen were set up at the beginning of the battle of Lviv in order to protect Jewish inhabitants and their properties. See memorandum by Tobiasz Aszkenazy [November / December 1918], DALO, f. 257, op. 2, spr. 504, 23–59. See Brygada Lwowska. Wypadki w dzielnicy żydowskiej we Lwowie w listopadzie 1918 [The Lviv Brigade. Accidents in the Jewish quarter of Lviv in November 1918] [no date], DALO, f. 257, op. 2, spr. 1624. This information is presented as rumors in A sketch about the riot against the Jews in Lemberg from the 22th till 23th of November [1918], Archiwum Akt Nowych, zespół Komitet Narodowy Polski, sygn. no. 159, 29–33. Particularly valuable studies on the Lviv pogrom in 1918 are: Alexander V. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 75–91; William W. Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918,” in Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 124–147. See Abraham Insler, Dokumenty fałszu. Prawda o tragedji żydostwa lwowskiego w listopadzie 1918 roku [Documents of falsehood. The truth about the tragedy of the Lviv Jews in November 1918] (Lwów: I. Jaeger, 1933); Idem, Legendy i fakty [Legends and facts] (Lwów: “Cofim” Żydowskie Towarzystwo Wydawnicze, 1937).

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Conference, with the problem of Polish boundaries at stake, accusations of anti-Semitism were very inconvenient for the Polish authorities and propaganda, so they constantly sought to play down the tragic event. To justify the Lviv Poles who carried out the pogrom, the dominant Polish discourse on the Defense either presented Jews as enemies of the Poles, or ended the narrative on the battle at the moment of Ukrainian retreat, covering the pogrom with silence. Canonical literary representations of the Defense usually chose the second option and simply concealed the riot. Very few of them mentioned the fate of the Jews in Lviv during and immediately after the fight, and if they did so, they always portrayed the Jews as bribed Ukrainian allies and consistently avoided the term “pogrom.” For example, the novel Jóźko żołnierzem polskim by Neumeuer depicted the pogrom outrageously, using the poetics of the picaresque novel, called the slaughter an incidental pillage, and blamed unidentified robbers for it.19 Such representation strategies as negation or distorting of the pogrom ensued from the fact that literary works, especially those committed to the canon, were entrusted with the task of heroizing the deeds of the defenders of Lviv.20 Simultaneously, however, they vastly contributed to making the pogrom into a bone of contention between Poles and Jews, and seriously caused their mutual relations in the entire interwar period to deteriorate. The identification of Ukrainians, Austrians, Germans, and Jews with opponents of the Polish case evoked a simplified, black and white vision of the conflict in Lviv and Eastern Galicia. In this vision Poles formed a new kind of community: a coherent Polish nation, which was a new host in the province and in the country as a whole. Other national groups surrounded it, but they were excluded from the Polish community as strangers and its deadly enemies.

4

A Symbol of the Unity of the Nation

Establishment of the canonical narrative on the Defense of Lviv was immediately followed by its ideologization, which made it very useful for nationbuilding and state-building propaganda of the Second Polish Republic. In the 19 20

Bezłuda, Jóźko żołnierzem polskim, 165–174. Stanisław Uliasz, “Wokół narodzin legendy orląt lwowskich w literaturze polskiej” [About the birth of the legend of Lviv Eaglets in Polish literature], in Literatura – język – kultura [Literature – language – culture], series Galicja i jej dziedzictwo [Galicia and its heritage], vol. 4, ed. Czesław Kłak and Marta Wyka (Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej, 1995), 79–96, particularly 86.

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1920s and 1930s the battle of the city was not only interpreted as the most heroic episode in the history of the city. It was also elevated to the rank of a turning point in the process of the restoration of Poland’s independence as a symbol of national unity and as a symbol of state unification. Moreover, it was widely presented as a patriotic role model for subsequent generations of Poles. The unity of the defenders, i.e., the strengthening of solidarity within the group of Poles that experienced the November fight, was a very important theme that contributed to the rise of the cult of the Defense, and canonization of its narrative. All literary works under investigation maintained that despite the initial shock, the actions of the Poles were fast and efficient. Most of all, however, was the fact that they engaged masses of Polish dwellers of the city, irrespectively of their age, gender, social status, and political views. The latter issue became a topos of Polish literature pertaining to the Polish-Ukrainian war. Writers created visions of urchins and intellectuals of all political fractions, children and fathers, men and women fighting together for “their” Polish Lviv. Zakrzewska in “W obronie swego gniazda” pointed out amid the defenders: a professor, a young child, a dandy, a Lychakiv urchin, a white-haired old man and a young girl. Then she concluded: “Differences in gender, age and state disappeared. Everyone defended the threatened Polish nest and endured the entire hell of endless fights, sleeplessness, and hunger during these three weeks…”21 Particular emphasis was put on the participation of lower social strata in the Defense, among others by Neumeuer. As I mentioned, the main protagonist of his novel Jóźko żołnierzem polskim was an urchin who manifested all the features of character traditionally ascribed to the Lviv proletariat: he was adventurous and pugnacious, as well as in tatters.22 At the same time, however, he was a fervent Polish patriot and fought in the November battle so bravely that he finally won the heart of a Polish girl who belonged to a much higher social class. Although their relationship could have been regarded as a misalliance, it was totally accepted by their milieu because Jóźko and his female lover were connected by their being Polish, and the same devotion to the Polish national cause. According to historical surveys, the solidarity of the defenders of Lviv had its limits as not all the Poles, even in Lviv, supported the Defense actively.23 In fact, during the battle the Polish side could count on support of the majority 21 22

23

Zakrzewska, “W obronie swego gniazda,” 113. See Urszula Jakubowska, “Mit lwowskiego batiara” [Myth of Lviv Batyar], in Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku [Polish political myths of the 19th and 20th centuries] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994), 119–127. See Kozłowski, Między Sanem a Zbruczem, 160–167.

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of the civilian population of the city, while the Ukrainian side leaned on forces recruited in the Eastern Galician countryside. Nevertheless, images of Poles participating in the November battle without any exceptions were somewhat idealized. Taking into account Polish literary works, one can infer this fact from references that this or that protagonist tried to wait out the danger of the war at home. In Adamówna’s novel Gdy zagrzmiał złoty róg… a Polish captain, asked to send additional forces to a threatened outpost, gave the following answer: “Perhaps I can find only a dozen volunteers and mostly these are young boys, who are unfamiliar with war… But I do not have even one officer. They are to be found there – in the city: by a warm stove or maybe in a cafeteria.”24 In general, however, the number of such statements in Polish literature was very small. The canonical literary works on the Defense virtually lacked them, so that Adamówna’s novel can be regarded as an exception to this term. Moreover, the disappointment and bitter sarcasm revealed by these statements left no doubt that eschewing military service by some Lviv Poles in November 1918 to the Polish community appeared deeply embarrassing and it was treated as a taboo subject. Why was glorifying the absolute solidarity of the defenders so zealously maintained by Polish authors? In my opinion, it was connected with the problem of the narrow social horizons of the Polish nation. The problem in question was historically contingent. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the political nation comprised gentry of disparate ethno-religious backgrounds, but excluded the middle class and the peasantry.25 After the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772, 1793, 1795) – due to the shift of power from the environment of the gentry to the partitioning empires (Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire) and, in the second half of the 19th century, due to the gradual democratization of political life – the barriers between the gentry, conceived as the Polish nation, and Polish-speaking representatives of the lower classes begun to blur. Nevertheless, historians estimate that in the 1870s only 30–35% of Polish speakers had full awareness of being Poles.26 Although the restoration of Poland’s independence and the battles for its bound24 25

26

Wisława, Gdy zagrzmiał złoty róg…, 33. The classic study of this topic is Jarema Maciszewski, Szlachta polska i jej państwo [Polish nobility and its state] (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986). The new one, inspired by such methodological approaches as postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, is Jan Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą [The King’s phantom body. A peripheral struggle with modern form] (Kraków: Universitas, 2011), 259–283. Tadeusz Łebkowski, Polska – narodziny nowoczesnego narodu 1764–1870 [Poland: Birth of a modern nation 1764–1870] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967), 508; Roman Wapiński, Polska i małe ojczyzny Polaków. Z dziejów kształtowania się świado-

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aries certainly increased that number, the problem of the low national consciousness of the Polish peasants and the proletariat, as well as their limited participation in political life remained a weakening factor of the Polish community up until the collapse of the Second Polish Republic. In the face of such socio-political circumstances in interwar Poland, the narrative on the solidarity of the defenders of Lviv had priceless ideological potential. Not only did it underscore the drama and uniqueness of Lviv events, which prompted many civilians to fight for the city regarded by them as Polish, but what is more crucial, it countered the real experience of the interwar Polish collectivity, ridden with social and political divisions, with an idealistic vision according to which spilled blood united this collectivity across boundaries, first and foremost, social but also political, age, and gender ones. As a symbol of Polish unity when their national well-being was at stake, such a vision was meant to reconcile the Polish population to the boson of one nation, so that all conflicting interests would have disappeared.

5

The Symbol of the Unification of the State

The exceptional role of the battle of Lviv in the process of the restoration of Poland’s independence was the second motive, which fuelled the cult of the Defense and enhanced canonization of the narrative of this event. Literary works willingly treated the conflict for the Galician capital as a central point or even a pars pro toto of all battles for the frontiers of the Second Polish Republic. They also elevated the clash to a symbol of the revival of Poland as a coherent geopolitical entity after the period of the partition. This motive had disparate manifestations in the canonical narrative on the Defense, usually, however, it consisted in equating the fight for Lviv with struggles for Poland as an independent state, especially immediately after World War I. Makuszyński presented such a perspective on these two historical phenomena in the novel Uśmiech Lwowa. The protagonist of the work, Mr. Koliński, an old Polish Lvivian, took his mentee, Michaś, an orphan from Warsaw, to the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv and clarified a sense of the defenders’ deed for him as follows:

mości narodowej w XIX i XX wieku po wybuch II wojny światowej [Poland and the Poles’s homelands: From the history of the coalescing of national identity during the 19th and 20th centuries until World War II] (Wrocław, Warszawa, Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1994), 100.

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[They – J. W.] signed a manifesto of inviolability of Polish borders with their own blood and marked out these borders with mounds of their graves. They fought against hope to the death, to testify that the idea is immortal and that sacrifice of life is nothing to it. And this idea, boy, was the wholeness and greatness of the Fatherland.27 From Mr. Kolinski’s viewpoint, the defenders of the city fought for the Fatherland, i.e., for Poland. In this way they proved they inviolability of the state, not only its urban borders. In the opinion of the protagonist, the idea of Lviv, embodied in the deeds of the Poles in November 1918, was a general idea of Poland, its “wholeness and greatness.” The tendency to associate the Defense of Lviv with battles for Poland additionally increased after the commemoration of the Polish Unknown Soldier, in 1925. This phenomenon was connected to the fact that the Soldier’s remains were taken from the battlefield of Lviv, chosen by lot from one of fifteen battlefields where battles for Polish frontiers had taken place. At the beginning of November 1925, the Soldier’s body, brought from the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv, was located in the Tomb under the arcades of the Warsaw Saxon Palace.28 From that moment, the Poles were particularly eager to efface the difference between the Defense and the struggle for Polish independence. For example, Edward Słoński, the author of popular patriotic poetry, made a rhetoric move of this kind in the poem “Nieznany Obrońca Lwowa” [The unknown Lviv defender], written in 1925, on the occasion of bringing the body of the Unknown Soldier from Lviv to Warsaw. According to the work, its lyrical protagonist, the Unknown Soldier, “fell somewhere in Lviv,” however, he fell not only for Lviv but also “for Poland as a coherent whole.”29 The process of reestablishing Poland as a geopolitical entity on maps of Europe was not confined to the battle for the city or the acquisition of Eastern Galicia. On the contrary, it included many clashes on different – military and diplomatic – fronts. The Defense of Lviv, however, was the first victory in the period of the restoration of Poland. Due to the fact that it was first, as well as due to the participation of civilian Poles and bloodshed, it quickly came to prominence as a crucial event during struggles for Polish frontiers. For these

27 28

29

Kornel Makuszyński, Uśmiech Lwowa (Warszawa: nakład Gebethnera i Wolffa, 1934), 57. For further investigation of the topic, see Joanna Hübner-Wojciechowska, Grób nieznanego żołnierza [The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1991). Edward Słoński, “Nieznany Obrońca Lwowa,” in: Wiersze o Lwowie [Poems about Lviv] (Wrocław: [no name of the publishing house], 1988 [1925]), 20.

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reasons it was transformed into a symbol of the consolidation of Polish lands and the reconstruction of Polish statehood. Such a symbol met the expectations and needs of Poles from the province and from all over the country. It constituted a symbolic response to the problem of the disintegration of the Polish domain in the wake of partitions; it was a problem, which let itself be felt in two spheres. First, in the Poles’ limited sense of familiarity towards lands remote from Warsaw, but inhabited by Polish speakers.30 Second, in disparate divisions – socio-political, legal, administrative, cultural, linguistic and many others – which split the country along former boundaries of the partitioned empires, and which remained difficult to overcome up until 1939.31 As for the first issue, raising the Defense to the level of the crux of Poland’s reintegration added splendor to Polish Lviv and transformed it into a pivotal place on the mental map of all Poles, not only those from former Galicia but also those from the erstwhile Russian partition and the Prussian partition. This phenomenon was clearly depicted in Makuszyński’s Uśmiech Lwowa. As I wrote earlier, the protagonist, Michaś, was a boy from Warsaw. Before coming to Lviv, he knew nothing about the city, which appeared to him very distant and unfamiliar. However, when Mr. Koliński told him the story of the defenders, who “signed a manifesto of the inviolability of Polish borders with their own blood,” the boy acknowledged the city as the most “beloved” place in Poland and willingly stayed there with his patron.32 As for the second issue, raising the Defense to such a high level made it into an indicator of the expected state-building success of the Second Polish Republic, i.e., unification of lands encompassed by Polish borders in all possible terms. The Defense of Lviv as a symbol of unification of the country superseded the real panorama of interwar Poland, unconsolidated on many levels of public life, with a compensative vision of “the wholeness and greatness of the Fatherland,” as Makuszyński put it, or, in other words, with a vision of the cohesive state, which Poles desired and which they could be proud of.

6

The Role Model for Poles

The exceptional devotion to the Fatherland, which Polish fighters demonstrated during the battle for the city, was yet another motive playing a crucial 30 31 32

Wapiński, Polska i małe ojczyzny Polaków, 235–236. Ibid., 340. See Makuszyński, Uśmiech Lwowa, 54–62, particularly 60–62.

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role in the canonical narrative on the Defense of Lviv. Presenting the achievements of the defenders, Polish literature rarely depicted them in a naturalistic way, which would correspond with the deadly tragedy of war. Instead, it heroized or even sacrificed them. It also treated the defenders with special consideration of the youngest ones called the Lviv Eaglets (Orlęta), as a group role model that should be emulated by contemporary as well as future generations of Poles. The very category of “Eaglets” had a heroizing character, inasmuch as it referred to the Polish emblem, the white Eagle. The metaphor appeared in popular poems and songs; it was widespread among the Lviv Poles already in November 1918,33 and then popularized by Schroeder, who used it as the title of his famous collection of short stories, Orlęta. Schroeder did not hide from readers that his book was an homage paid to the “Dear Little Citizens” of Lviv, who defended the city and to whom the author wanted “to say the beautiful Polish word […]: Honor [Cześć] [to you, J. W.]!”34 The tendency to glorify the Lviv Eaglets – as the metaphor itself – dated back to November 1918 and to the 1920s and 1930s, when it reached its peak. Polish authors invariably emphasized the heroism and absolute devotion of the young defenders. According to the canonical narrative of the Defense, the Eaglets did not take into account the possibility of withdrawing from the fight. They also did not hesitate even if they had to kill or die. Killing an enemy instead of being an emotional or moral problem, constituted an acceptable price for the Polishness of Lviv for them, and dying for this Polishness seemed an honor. When a young literary protagonist was dying in the wake of fighting, his or her death was imbued with the radiant splendor of glory. A scene of shooting of the aforementioned angel-like boy, the thirteen-year-old defender, in Zakrzewska’s “W obronie swego gniazda” reminded depictions of martyrdom: the victim, surrounded by an aureole, underwent an apotheosis.35 Moreover, in the last moment of his life he did not feel fear. Instead, he recalled prince Józef Poniatowski – a Polish hero of the Napoleonic epoch – and he desired to fall for the “honor of Poles” like Poniatowski.36 The latter episode hints at a didactic aspect of glorification of Lviv Eaglets in Polish literature; namely at the appreciation of bringing up children and

33 34 35 36

Sz. [Jan Szarota], “Lwowska poezja wojenna” [Lviv war poetry], Pobudka, no. 12 (November 17, 1918): 3. Artur Schroeder, Orlęta (z walk lwowskich) [Eaglets (from the fights in Lviv)] (Lwów: nakładem Rady Parafialnej, 1919), 3. Zakrzewska, “W obronie swego gniazda,” 69–70. Ibid.

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young people according to patriotic values and a Romantic model of dedication to the Fatherland. Due to the monumentalization of the Eaglets’ deed, the Defense could serve as a role model for Poles, who were supposed to live up to it. Simultaneously, it could be used as a convenient criterion with which to measure the national consciousness of the Polish community and to determine whether it was eager to defend Poland as bravely as “the beloved Defenders”37 stood up for the city. Such a role model and criterion were of great importance, as they reduced the Poles’ sense of threat from the part of Germany and Russia / USSR as well as numerous national minorities on the Eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic, particularly, in former Eastern Galicia. Indeed, Ukrainian patriots distributed national and state-building propaganda among Ukrainians dwelling in the province, although they had lost the war with the Poles and although the authorities of interwar Poland did their best to counter Ukrainian attempts at nation-building. Additionally, the Polish-Jewish conflict on the interpretation of the Lviv pogrom was still ongoing and lasted until the end of the era. In such circumstances, the image of the glorified Lviv Eaglets mobilized Poles to defend the cause of the state of the Second Polish Republic in all terms, from territory to language and culture. It also gave Poles hope that they were able to win in current and foreseen struggles for Polishness, threatened by external and internal foes, just like the Eaglets had won in Lviv against all their enemies.

7

Conclusion

Between 1918 and 1939 the theme of the Defense of Lviv underwent canonization in Polish culture. A special role in this process was played by interwar Polish literature, in particular by a few publications, which themselves were included in the Polish literary canon of the period. These publications proved that the central figure of the canonical narrative on the Defense was the Polish community, the disposer of power and discourse in renascent Poland, including former Eastern Galicia. It was clearly distinguished from other national groups – Ukrainians, Jews, Austrians, and Germans – who were presented as Poland’s enemies and rebellious foreigners in the province. The canonical narrative on the Defense – as a simplified vision of the conflict in Eastern Galicia, which idealized the Polish side and condemned all

37

See Lewartowska, Lwów chlubą narodu, 52.

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others – had great ideological power. It offered a story of national unity, reintegration of the state as well as bravery and solidarity in devotion to the Fatherland. This way it gave symbolical responses to the problems of the narrow social horizons of the Polish nation, disintegration of the Polish domain after the partitions, and Poles’ fear of internal and external foes. As a collection of symbolic responses to interwar Poland’s weaknesses, the canonical narrative on the Defense became one of the pivotal foundational myths of the new country. This myth constituted an ideology of the united Polish nation and the unified Polish state, which could withstand the malevolence of its enemies. Such an ideology enabled the effective integration of interwar Poles. It jeopardized, however, the other goal: reconciliation of miscellaneous groups across national-religious divisions. The way of interpreting the battle for Lviv divided Poles and Ukrainians into two hostile factions. In the perspective of the former group, it was the Defense against the Ukrainian usurpation, while in the optics of the latter, it was a counteraction to the Poles’ plans for annexation of Eastern Galicia. The Lviv Jews also did not share the Polish viewpoint, as they associatesd the battle of the city primarily with the memory of the Lviv pogrom. Therefore, the analyzed narrative on the Defense, serving the nationbuilding and state-building objectives of the Second Polish Republic, simultaneously threatened the Republic’s precarious consensus as a multinational state, where all citizens should have enjoyed the same privileges. Instead of connecting citizens across barriers, it established the dangerous notion of “internal enemies,” Ukrainians and Jews that true Poles had to unite against, and thus split the multinational society. As a result, it intensified Polish-UkrainianJewish antagonism, which found its tragic finale during World War II.38

Bibliography Archival Sources Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, Poland. Deržavnij Arkhiv Lvivskoi Oblasti, Lviv, Ukraine.

References Bezłuda, Mirosław. Jóźko żołnierzem polskim [Jóźko, a Polish soldier]. Grudziądz: Pomorska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1934.

38

This article has been written under the grant ref. no. 2018/31/D/HS2/00356, funded by the National Science Centre [NCN].

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Bibliografia literatury dla dzieci i młodzieży 1918–1939. Literatura polska i przekłady [Bibliography of children’s and youth literature 1918–1939. Polish literature and translations]. Edited by Bogumiła Krassowska and Alina Grefkowicz. Warszawa: BP. Biblioteka Główna, 1995. Eco, Umberto. Inventing the Enemy: Essays. New York: Mariner Books, 2012. Giełżyński, Wojciech. Budowanie Niepodległej [Building the independent one]. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1985. Hagen, William W. “The Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918.” In Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland. Edited by Robert Blobaum, 124–147. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Hibel, Katarzyna. “Wojna na mapy,” “wojna na słowa”: Onomastyczne i międzykulturowe aspekty polityki językowej II Rzeczpospolitej w stosunku do mniejszości ukraińskiej w Galicji Wschodniej w okresie międzywojennym [“War on maps,” “war on words.” Onomastic and intercultural aspects of interwar Poland’s language politics as applied to the Ukranian minority in Eastern Galicia]. Vienna, Berlin: LIT, 2014. Hübner-Wojciechowska, Joanna. Grób nieznanego żołnierza [The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1991. Insler, Abraham. Legendy i fakty [Legends and facts]. Lwów: “Cofim” Żydowskie Towarzystwo Wydawnicze, 1937. Insler, Abraham. Dokumenty fałszu. Prawda o tragedji żydostwa lwowskiego w listopadzie 1918 roku [Documents of falsehood. The truth about the tragedy of the Lviv Jews in November 1918]. Lwów: I. Jaeger, 1933. Jakubowska, Urszula. “Mit lwowskiego batiara” [Myth of Lviv Batyar]. In Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku [Polish political myths of the 19th and 20th centuries], 119–127. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994. Kozłowski, Maciej. Między Sanem a Zbruczem. Walki o Lwów i Galicję Wschodnią 1918–1919 [Between San and Zbrucz. Fights for Lviv and Eastern Galicia 1918–1919]. Kraków: Znak, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Łebkowski, Tadeusz. Polska – narodziny nowoczesnego narodu 1764–1870 [Poland: Birth of a modern nation 1764–1870]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967. Lewartowska, Zofia. Lwów chlubą narodu. Dramat w 4 aktach na tle obrony Lwowa w roku 1018 [Lviv, the pride of the nation], słowo wstępne Józef Białynia Chołodecki. Lwów: nakładem Małopolskiej Straży Obywatelskiej we Lwowie, 1929. Lipiński, Wacław. Wśród lwowskich orląt [Among the Lviv Eaglets]. Łomianki: LTW, 2015. Maciszewski, Jarema. Szlachta polska i jej państwo [Polish nobility and its state]. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986.

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Magocsi, Paul R. “Galicia: A European Land.” In Galicia: A Multicultured Land. Edited by Christopher Hann and Paul R. Magocsi, 3–21. Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press, 2005. Makuszyński, Kornel. Uśmiech Lwowa [Lviv smile]. Warszawa: nakład Gebethnera i Wolffa, 1934. Mick, Christoph. Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016. Obrona Lwowa 1–22 listopada 1918. T. 1–2. Relacje uczestników [The Defense of Lviv 1st–22nd November 1918. Vol. 1–2: Participants’ reports]. Edited by Eugenjusz Wawrzkowicz and Aleksander Kawałkowski. Lwów: nakładem Towarzystwa, 1933, 1936. Prusin, Alexander V. Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Schroeder, Artur. Orlęta (z walk lwowskich) [Eaglets (from the fights in Lviv)]. Lwów: nakładem Rady Parafialnej, 1919. Sowa, Jan. Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą [The King’s phantom body. A peripheral struggle with modern form]. Kraków: Universitas, 2011. Sz. “Lwowska poezja wojenna” [Lviv war poetry]. Pobudka, no. 12 (November 17, 1918): 3. Uliasz, Stanisław. “Wokół narodzin legendy orląt lwowskich w literaturze polskiej” [About the birth of the legend of Lviv Eaglets in Polish literature]. In Literatura – język – kultura [Literature – language – culture], series Galicja i jej dziedzictwo [Galicia and its heritage], vol. 4. Edited by Czesław Kłak and Marta Wyka, 79–96. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej, 1995. Wapiński, Roman. Polska i małe ojczyzny Polaków. Z dziejów kształtowania się świadomości narodowej w XIX i XX wieku po wybuch II wojny światowej [Poland and the Poles’s homelands: from the history of the coalescing of national identity during the 19th and 20th centuries until World War II]. Wrocław, Warszawa, Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1994. Wisława [Wilhelmina Adamówna]. Gdy zagrzmiał złoty róg… [When the gold horn sounded…]. Lwów: Księgarnia Naukowa, 1921. Wnęk, Konrad, Lidia A. Zyblikiewicz, and Ewa Callahan. Ludność nowoczesnego Lwowa w latach 1857–1938 [Lviv population in modern times in the years 1857–1938]. Kraków: Towarzystwo Naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2006. Zakrzewska, Helena. “W obronie swego gniazda” [In defense of our nest]. In Dzieci Lwowa [Lviv’s children]. Gdańsk: GRAF, 1990.

Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923) Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev

Romania is being built today. Despite the perplexed political parties, we enter into the great industrial-activist stage… Let us destroy, through the strength of disseminated disgust, the ghosts cowering from the light. Let us dispatch our dead! “Activist Manifesto to the Young,” Contimporanul, no. 46, May 19241

∵ 1

Romania after World War I: National Specificity vs. Cosmopolitanism

The beginnings of nation-building processes in Romania date back to the 19th century, to the symbolic year of 1848, so important for the formation of the paradigm of modern European identity. According to many Romanian historians and critics, 1848 represents a turning point in Romanian history, and leads to the development of national ideologies, since at that time the national identity project becomes a central issue for Romanian writers, philosophers and journalists, who completed their education in the most significant European intellectual centres in France and Germany. Once they received their diplomas, they returned to their motherland. One of the major figures of the time was the historian, novelist and politician Mihai Kogălniceanu, who, following the philosophy of German Romanticism, the Herderian path, in particular, founded

1 Steven Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art in Romania,” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 3 (September 1998): 538.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_009

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a literary magazine, which aimed to institutionalize Romanian literature and Romanian as a national language and which was called Dacia literară [Literary Dacia].2 After 1848 the Romanian language (earlier written in the Cyrillic alphabet), was programmatically drawn back to its Latin form by the introduction of the Latin alphabet (officially introduced after 1860 by Alexandru Ioan Cuza) and by a substantial importation of French neologisms.3 The beginning of the national state understood as a formal basis of what is now Romania is identified with the year 1858 when Alexandru Ioan Cuza becomes the first prince (Domnitor – Ruler) of The United Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (united in 1859–1861). In 1866 he was replaced by a foreign prince Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who eventually becomes King Carol I of Romania in 1881. Requiring the creation of an entirely new political, social, economic and cultural framework of statehood, the forceful nation-building processes did not end with the entry of the fragile modern state into the new century. On the contrary – after World War I, their ideological dimension even gained strength within the intellectual currents that debated questions about the potential path for modernization of the country.4 Due to the arrangements of The Treaty of Trianon from 1920, Romanians were granted the chance to create the largest nation-state in their history – called Great Romania (in Romanian, România Mare). The state took on new boundaries and the most extensive territory they had ever had. Since the consequences involved not only territorial changes but especially changes in the number and ethnical diversity of the population, the government felt legitimated to pursue a policy of unifying the hybrid identity. The unification of Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia with Bessarabia in 1918 undoubtedly influenced the development of national-centric thought. This historical circumstance aroused national consciousness and encouraged the creation of

2 One of the most important myths which shaped the national identity starting from the 19th century is constructed around the idea of the Dacian descent of Romanians; the second one is apparently the one of their Latin heritage. 3 Cf. Monica Spiridon, “Literature and the Symbolic Engineering of the European Self,” in Literature for Europe?, ed. Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2009), 418–422. 4 For a general overview of intellectual currents in interwar Romania, see Zigu Ornea, Tradiționalism și modernitate în deceniul al treilea (București: Editura Eminescu, 1980); Idem, Anii treizeci: Extrema dreaptă românească (București: Editura Fundației Culturale Române, 1995); Keith Hitchins, A Concise History of Romania (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Marta Petreu, De la Junimea la Noica. Studii de cultură românească (Iași: Polirom, 2011); Keith Hitchins, ed., “Identity and Destiny: Ideas and Ideologies in Interwar Romania,” Plural: Culture and Civilization 29 (2007): 1.

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national political mythologies, which can be classified according to the distinction of four elementary myths, considered by the French historian Raoul Girardet to be the fundamental ones in the construction of national identity: the Conspiracy, the Savior, the Golden Age, and Unity.5 Intellectual elites, forming an immature and inexperienced academic group, were primarily occupied with the “Romanization” of the country, discovering and nurturing the so-called specific național (national specificity), and the identity myth built around the Dacian and Roman past. This atmosphere was the basis for the development of all the extreme ideologies in the young, multinational state, obsessed with its history – the obsession resulting from its inferiority complex,6 while the complex itself resulted from the intensified cultural, political and industrial contact with Western Europe. After the paradigm change in the 19th century, caused by the “constitutive overthrow of reference from the Orient to the Occident,”7 the latter became the only correct and valuable reference point for Romania. The question, “What does it mean to be Romanian and how can our national specificity and historical continuity be explained?”, gained strength. Romanian culture needed to determine the national path for itself, constantly comparing itself to the Occidental significant other. As a result of the nation-building processes which began in the wake of 1848, the writers and philosophers in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe were both the defenders of culture, and the defenders of national consciousness, politicians and statesmen at the same time. They developed a formula for national identity, which concurrently provided them with the role of its creators and guarantors. A Hungarian researcher, Andor Horváth, calls this process an

5 Cf. Raoul Giradet, Mythes et Mythologies politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1986). Romanian national myths are the subject of Lucian Boia’s most famous book, which aroused many controversies in the Romanian intellectual milieus: Lucian Boia, Istorie și mit în conștiința românească (București: Humanitas, 1997). Boia remains one of the most outstanding and productive Romanian historians. 6 To read more about the complexes of Romanian culture, see Mircea Martin, G. Călinescu și “complexele” literaturii române (București: Albatros, 1981). The problem of the Romanian “inferiority complex” is present also in contemporary intellectual debates, recently appearing in Lucian Boia’s book, De ce este România altfel? [Why is Romania different?] (2012), and in the polemic answer to it – the volume De ce este România astfel? Avatarurile excepționalismului românesc [Why is Romania like this? Avatars of Romanian Exceptionalism] (2017), coordinated by Vintilă Mihăilescu. 7 Vintilă Mihăilescu, “Excepționalismul Țăranului Român. Prezența unei absențe,” in De ce este România astfel? Avatarurile excepționalismului românesc, ed. Vintilă Mihăilescu (Iași: Polirom, 2017), 57.

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“intellectual strategy of identity” (“stratégie intellectuelle d’identité”).8 The literary canon was shaped in close dependence on the socio-political context – such a situation favored combining aesthetic and ethnic categories, and, consequently, almost immediately writers or poets regarded as significant from the aesthetic point of view became representatives of national specificity (the most significant illustration of this tendency in the Romanian context would be the making of the poet Mihai Eminescu a national prophet). Hence, it influenced the whole concept of modernity, which acquired a slightly different meaning in Romania than in Western Europe, where it represented a natural consequence of centuries-old processes and a response to the industrialization and urbanization of society. These changes are best reflected in the canonical text of Charles Baudelaire from 1863, The Painter of Modern Life, where modernity appears as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent nude, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”9 Thus, modernity arises with the changes introduced by industrialization, urbanization, and secularization; its characteristic features are disintegration and reformation, fragmentation and rapid changes, volatility and uncertainty.10 However, for Romania modernity is a moment of synchronization with Western culture, an attempt to articulate its identity, not from the perspective of separateness, but from the perspective of an imposed homogenized world. Thus, the representatives of the new sensitivity in literature are somehow craftsmen who transfer the “source” ideas to new ground and adapt them to new circumstances.11 As Dumitru Micu notes in his work about Romanian modernism, “Romanian poetry has gone through all the stages of synchronization with European modernism, however, contrary to the diachrony of the great Western literatures.”12 According to Horváth’s thesis, in the second half of the 19th century, the poet in France is an antisocial figure who has deviated from the Romantic 8

9 10 11

12

Andor Horváth, “Les notions de ‘culture,’ de ‘tradition’ et de ‘modernité’ dans les littératures roumaine et hongroise de l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Modernisme en Europe Centrale. Les avant-gardes, ed. Maria Delaperrière (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 66. Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from French and Romanian are translated into English by the author of this article. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 13. Cf. Peter Childs, Modernism (London, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2000), 15–16. This idea refers to the critique launched by Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917) and other foreigneducated personalities in 1863, concerning the superficial import of occidental models in the 19th century, denounced as “forms without substance” (“forme fără fond”) (T. Maiorescu, În contra directiei de astăzi în cultura româna, [1868]). Dumitru Micu, Modernismul românesc (București: Minerva, 1985), 135–137.

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attitude. Rimbaud requires something new from the poet, without making any reference to social reality and expressing his thoughts regarding timeless mythology rather than history. However, in Romania or Hungary (or in other countries from the region), the modern poet is deeply “immersed” in society, combining the vision of a Romantic mission and the aristocracy of a dandy or a member of a bohemian subculture.13 The cultural and the historical perspective as well as the aesthetic standpoint merge in this case. And only the Romanian avant-gardists14 in the first half of the 20th century will attempt to consciously address the aesthetic and existential crisis of modernity, implementing the modern concept of “art for art’s sake.” However, in our opinion this first attempt at the aesthetic autonomy of art was also deeply influenced by social and political contexts. The avant-garde in Romania grew out of a different tradition than the existential and aesthetic crisis of the West European avant-garde; it was realized within the framework of local subtexts and meanings. It was determined by the socio-political situation of the country, characterized by an unambiguous and determined rejection of the ideology of nationalism as well as opposition to intellectual trends prevailing in Romania, even as progressive as the school of Eugen Lovinescu. The “pope of modernism” himself regarded avant-garde trends as an extreme option of modernist postulates formulated by his circle: Integral, 75 HP, Punct, Unu [titles of the most important avant-garde journals – O. B. N.] etc. – disastrous consequences of synchronous movements of general literature, also experimenting on our territory with Dadaism, Expressionism, Integralism, Surrealism, hence with the most extreme forms of Western Modernism.15 Those forming the avant-garde movements in Romania were predominantly Jews, and the adverse historical circumstances could have fostered their efforts to internationalize:

13 14

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Horváth, “Les notions de ‘culture,’ de ‘tradition’ et de ‘modernité,’” 63. For a general overview of Romanian avant-garde movements, see Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002); Ion Pop, La Réhabilitation du rêve – une anthologie de l’avant-garde roumaine (Bucarest: Maurice Nadeau, 2006); Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei. Primul val. (București: Cartea Românească, 2007). Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane. 1900–1937 (București: Minerva, 1989), 44.

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Frustrated in their attempts to integrate themselves into their society and excluded from the culture reserved for “true citizens,” many Jewish artists chose this expressive form of rebellion against the prevailing social attitudes, governmental practices, and aesthetic convention of orthodox Romania.16 Paul Cernat, one of the greatest specialists of the Romanian avant-garde, understands this phenomenon in a larger context, as a part of the generational experience carried out in various ways by young intellectuals and Romanian artists after the dramatic and traumatic experiences of World War I. For some of the intellectual milieus (like the autochthonous right Gândirea17), the central issue will be an effort to find the essence of Romanian identity, to others (like the adepts of the radical left gathered around Contimporanul) it will be an attempt to deny the existence of the latter, to follow more universal values and to ridicule tendencies based on the inferiority complex, which appeared in all Romanian-centric ideologies.18 At the turn of the 1930s and 1940s two literary histories of Romania were created which established the Romanian literary canon for decades: Lovinescu’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane [History of contemporary Romanian literature] (1936–1937) and George Călinescu’s Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent [History of Romanian literature from its origins up to the present] (1941). They both confirm the “invisible” position of avant-garde artists, calling them “extremists” (Lovinescu) or presenting them briefly under a very general and superficial category of “dadaists, surrealists and hermetic writers” (Călinescu). However, while Lovinescu will concentrate on modern literature and separate it from the traditional cultural fund, Călinescu will follow the traditional path trying to prove the organic development of Romanian literature, and its autochthonous character, finding its roots in folk literature. This monumental work interested in a historical validation of the “national specificity” will remain the most important point of reference for many generations of Romanian literary critics (and readers). The interior portrait of Ro-

16 17

18

Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art in Romania,” 538. Autochthonism characterized by a higher level of spirituality, with its inclinations to religious and mystical experiences, was developed within an ideological framework of the movement called Orthodoxism, led by Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) and gathered around the monthly Gândirea [The thinking / the thought], founded in 1921. Cf. Paul Cernat, Contimporanul. Istoria unei reviste de avangardă (București: Institutul Cultural Român, 2007), 17–18.

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manian literature is based mostly on male writing,19 represented by, inter alia, the particular works of Vasile Alecsandri, Eminescu, Ion Creangă, Ioan Slavici, Liviu Rebreanu, Mihail Sadoveanu, Lucian Blaga – “big prosaists and poets,” the already paradigmatic names for the history of Romanian culture. The dominant discourse will thus concentrate on the research of national specificity and exceptionality, legitimizing the presence of Romania in European history. Voices, belonging to women, ethnic minorities, and artistic movements striving for a universal vision of art, will remain rather invisible, but crucial for understanding the integral portrait of the period, as we will try to present in this article.

2

The Political, Social and Cultural Engagement of the Romanian Avant-garde

The strong cultural and political anchors have encouraged the Romanian avant-garde, especially in the first period of its activity, to criticize openly the social limitations imposed on the minorities by the Romanian government. They do not hide their left-wing views and publish politically independent social critics, generally opposed to the National Liberal Party, which ruled over most of the 1920s and 1930s (it is symbolized by the figure of the politician Ion I. C. Brătianu, Prime Minister between 1922 and 1926; his government adopted the Constitution of 1923). Therefore, before turning into a journal undertaking strictly aesthetic subjects, Contimporanul [The present time], the longest surviving and most important of the magazines of the interwar national avant-garde (1922–1932), founded by Ion Vinea (1895–1964) and Marcel Iancu (1895–1984), served as the platform of counter-narrative against the dominating nationalistic ideologies. As Cernat claims: The evolution of the magazine […] had three distinct stages: 1) the stage dominated by social-political militancy, 2) the stage of militant artistic activism (with a constructivist dominance), 3) an eclectic stage without

19

To read more about the concept of “feminine literature” in interwar Romania, used by Romanian literary critics as a description of normative femininity rather than as an aesthetic category, see Voichița Năchescu, “The Visible Woman. Interwar Romanian Women’s Writing, Modernity and the Gendered Public / Private Divide,” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, vol. 2 (2008): 70–90.

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precise doctrinal orientation, very receptive to the changes in the sensibility of the time.20 Our article focuses on the first stage of Contimporanul’s evolution and presents its polemical engagement against anti-Semitic tendencies in Romania at the beginning of 1920, and against the mono-narrative in the cultural field, excluding Jewish artists. They existed in the margins both of artistic and sociopolitical life, outside the area of the literary canon that was still being shaped at that period and was concentrated, as we mentioned above, around the literary works essential for the creation of “national specificity.” Furthermore, the avant-garde milieus provided alternative points of view, helping to present the complexity of Romanian realities after 1918. Their perspective is precious especially nowadays, when the festive celebration of the century of the Great Union in Romania represents an excellent opportunity to reflect once again on the role of 1918 in the history of the country, with voices emerging into the daylight and coming from outside the mainstream. The chief concern of this article is thus to present how in interwar Romania the most important avant-garde journal Contimporanul opposes the dominating mono-narrative (clamoring for the discovery of “national specificity”) and deconstructs it by publishing articles ridiculing anti-Semitic and xenophobic attitudes, and simultaneously supporting an open, cosmopolitan discourse. On the margins of the prophetic narrative about a great, powerful state, they show real problems which affect society – anti-Semitism at universities,21 controversies around the new (liberal) Constitution from 1923, xenophobic attitudes within intellectual milieus, students’ attempts to introduce numerus clausus at faculties. The source fragments quoted in our article come from the archival issues of the magazine, which appeared between January and July 1923. Afterwards the magazine ceased to appear because of political reasons, and it reappeared almost one year later, changing its character to a strictly literary-artistic one.22 Our article will not present all the texts which appeared in Contimporanul between January and July 1923, and which are politically and socially involved; however, we would like to quote the most representative ones, showing the

20 21

22

Cernat, Contimporanul. Istoria unei reviste de avangardă, 12. To read more about the problem of anti-Semitism at universities in Greater Romania, see Lucian Nastasă, Antisemitismul universitar în România (1919–1939). Mărturii documentare (Cluj Napoca: Institutul pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităților Naționale Kriterion, 2011). Cf. Cernat, Contimporanul. Istoria unei reviste de avangardă, 21–22.

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entire diverse range of topics undertaken by the authors of the magazine at that time. We propose then to reveal some manifestations of a specific counter-narrative (from both an aesthetic and a socio-political point of view) whose presence remained marginal in Romanian urban public discourse. In the first period of its existence, Contimporanul appears very regularly, even as a weekly journal. The analysis of the source material indicates that the topic of anti-Semitism was an important one for the authors who co-created the magazine, because in almost every issue a text which is explicitly referring to this problem appears.23 Besides criticizing the state’s politics and the xenophobic ideas circulating in society, the authors also wanted to show the vital role that the Jews play in Romanian culture. They shifted the burden of discussion from the declaration of the need to strive for the homogeneity of the Romanian people to a conviction of the need to create a civil state. They wanted a society which believes in values that serve development and modernization, and thus improvement in the living conditions of the whole community. They succeed in proving that such an attitude is superior to the nation-centric narrative. Also, the openly philo-Semitic character of the journal does not surprise, because among its editors and collaborators there are many writers of Jewish origin: the co-founder Iancu, B. Fundoianu, Sergiu Dan, M. H. Maxy, Jacques G. Costin, et al. The year 1923 constitutes a crucial context in the history of Romanian Jewry, being the year when the new constitution was introduced, whose Article 724 established the full emancipation of the Jews in Romania. But, as Raul Cârstocea observes, 1923 introduces a quite schizophrenic situation – on the one hand, Romanian Jews are promised to eventually obtain all civil rights, on the other hand, the discriminatory tendencies do not fade. On the contrary: In anticipation of the voting of the new Constitution, which formally provided for Jewish emancipation, a new organization founded on 4 March 1923, the League of National Christian Defense (Liga Apărării Național-Creștine – LANC), became the first political organization in the

23

24

Here are some titles of articles which are not mentioned in our text, but help to understand the high level of implication of the journal in the formation of a social and cultural counter-narrative: Ion Vinea, “Fascismul e de origină română” [Fascism is of Romanian origin], no. 27 (January 1923); “Evreii și huliganii” [Jews and hooligans], no. 33 (March 1923); Henri Gad, “Profesorii antisemiți” [Anti-Semitic professors], no. 35 (March 1923); I., “Mici pogromuri la Șipote” [Small pogroms at Șipote], no. 36 (March 1923). The vote of the Article 7 of the 1866 Constitution closed the road to political emancipation of the Jews for more than half a century.

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interwar period with an exclusively anti-Semitic platform. Led by A. C. Cuza and with Codreanu in charge of the organization of the youth section at the national level, the League brought together briefly the two leading representatives of the old and the young generations of Romanian anti-Semites.25 Contimporanul will engage against the anti-Semitic activities of the LANC through a critical attitude and biting language, many articles are meant to mock xenophobic social programs intelligently, appealing to the erudition and sense of humor of readers. One of such texts, published in no. 29 in February 1923 and entitled “Numerus clausus și gramatică” [Numerus clausus and grammar], is an ironic comment on grammatical mistakes made by students who adopt an anti-Semitic attitude. The conclusion is self-evident – since they do not know the rules of their native language well, why do they prohibit their fellow citizens of Jewish descent, writing and studying in this language (which besides represents their mother tongue),26 especially if they often have better developed Romanian language literary skills? Nevertheless, the argument of the high level of cultural competence and the significant contribution of Romanian Jews to the formation of the intellectual atmosphere conducive to the cultural development of the country, and their predominant activity in the editorial realm is an essential and often recurring subject on Contimporanul pages. Thus the article on Jews in Romanian culture (“Evreii în cultura română I și II,” no. 39–40, April 1923, and no. 41, May 1923) written by V., published in two parts in the consecutive issues of Contimporanul, wants to legitimize the presence of Jews in Romania. It starts with an ironical reference to a quotation by A. C. Cuza, an (in)famous intellectual with overtly anti-Semitic views mentioned previously, who once wrote that “the goal of the nation is to create a culture.” The author of the article wants hence to show that Romanian culture would not have existed without

25 26

Raul Cârstocea, “Anti-Semitism in Romania: Historical Legacies, Contemporary Challenges,” Ecmi Working Paper #81 (October 2014): 11. According to Ezra Mendelsohn’s thesis, in Moldavia there were few traces of modern Yiddish culture; only in 1914 an attempt was made, unsuccessfully, to create a Jewish literary magazine in Iași in Yiddish: Cf. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 250. All important cultural and literary journals addressed to the Jewish community in Romania were written in Romanian. However, it was in 1876 in Iași that Abraham Goldfaden founded the world’s first Yiddish theater, initiating an important theatrical tradition, which resembles the study of Camelia Crăciun, De la Dibuk la Lozul cel Mare. 140 de ani de teatru idiș în România (București: Hasefer, 2016).

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Jews. He draws attention to the contribution of Jewish publishing houses, which were publishing works of Romanian classics, sometimes even those, which contain negative anti-Semitic cultural stereotypes.27 The text accentuates the groundlessness of national and religious prejudices, while the cultural market is co-created by citizens, regardless of their religious or national adherence. Paradoxically, therefore, Jewish publishers and their capital contributed to the dissemination of the literary canon valid in modern Romanian society. The text also says that the publishing policy contributed to the formation of a “cultural audience”: “The Jews contributed [to cultural life – O. B. N.] in such a proportion that allows the conclusion that they created, almost alone, our cultural atmosphere.” Such a point of view is confirmed by modern researchers, who appreciate the contribution of Jews to the development of the cultural capital of modern Romania: […] Jews have shown a great openness to investments – seemingly risky – in new or innovative areas, such as the cultural industry, the press, publishing, then cinema. Many of them can be considered as promoters […] of modern ideas in the political, cultural-aesthetic, literary and philosophical fields in Romanian life.28 V. Dănoiu also mentions in his article Jewish journalists, once again in ironic opposition to one of the “dear expressions” (“expresie scumpă”), as he calls it, used once by A. C. Cuza describing the presence of Jews in the Romanian press: “Jidania în presă” (“jidan” is a pejorative term for Jew in Romanian). V. Dănoiu observes that “a weirdness of our cultural life often wanted that the most eminent writers were also professional journalists” – this remark refers to the observation made in this article a little earlier, namely the active involvement of writers in the socio-political life in modern Romania.29 The writers felt legitimized to take the floor on political and social issues, ignoring the modernist elimination of art from its national-oriented contexts.

27

28 29

Present, for example, in one of the canonical Romanian poets, playwrights and politicians, Vasile Alecsandri’s, play Lipitorile satului [The village leeches] (1863). To read more about the image of the Jew in Romanian culture, see Andrei Oișteanu, Inventing the Jew. Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, trans. Mirela Adascalitei (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Nastasă, Antisemitismul universitar în România, 26. Actually, in his History of Romanian Literature… Călinescu identifies the evolution of reportage with the literary activity of avant-garde magazines.

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Speaking about Jewish journalists, V. Dănoiu evokes the name of Henric Streitman (1873–1949), underlining his “universal” style of writing: “The Jews gave us a journalist who would illustrate any foreign literature through the grace of style, its subtlety and delicious irony. It is H. Streitman, who published tardily two volumes of essays after a whole life of scattered pages.” Such praise of a universal style that can appeal abroad does not surprise in B. Fundoianu’s case (the author who hides under the pseudonym of V. Dănoiu), who repeatedly complained in his other essays about the small cultural reach of the Romanian language. Hence, in his Prefața la Imagini și cărți din Franța [Preface to images and books from France] (1922), the young author regrets that Romanian artists create in their native language, which immediately puts them “in a subordinate position towards French artists.”30 Moreover, V. Dănoiu accentuates the political engagement of the Jews and their fruitful “collaboration for conquest freedoms and the implementation of reforms,” dating back to 1848. The author sacrifices an essential part of his text to Jewish literature in Romanian,31 mentioning the prominent personalities who co-create the pillars of modern Romanian culture, but whose names remain (and will remain) outside the literary canon: one of the most important is Moise Ronetti-Roman (1847/53–1908). V. Dănoiu recalls once again the concept of the universal dimension of writing. Evoking the most well-known play of Rosetti-Roman, Manasse, he observes: “With Manasse, through acute realism, through picturesque which he depicts, through a diabolical vow which he carries along with a noble drama, we pass to the universal repertory area.” Other authors mentioned by V. Dănoiu are Avram Steuerman-Rodion (1872–1918), Barbu Nemțeanu (1887–1919), D. Iacobescu (1893–1913), Alfred Hefter (1892–1951), and B. Luca (Bernstein; 1873–1931) – the classics of Jewish writing in Romanian. Regarding literary and aesthetic criticism, V. Dănoiu evokes Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855–1920) who, “despite his Jewish origins and his having learned Romanian only later in life, was one of the most authoritative Romanian literary critics of his time promoting ideologically engaged writing.”32

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B. Fundoianu, “Prefața la Imagini și cărți din Franța” (1922), in Imagini și cărți, ed. Mircea Martin (București: Minerva, 1980), 26. There were two main journals in Greater Romania that were promoting Jewish literature in Romanian: Mântuirea [The redemption] (1919–1922), and Știri din lumea evreiască [News from the Jewish world] (1922–1940). Leon Volovici, “Romanian literature,” trans. Mircea Anca, accessed September 1, 2018, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Romanian_Literature.

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Thus in this essay V. Dănoiu recognizes the importance of Jewish intellectuals in building structures of Romanian culture, eventually also drawing the reader’s attention to the problematics of translation: To the library of translations […], the Jews brought Shakespeare’s entire shelf. It is the translation of Dr Stern who, through honest observation of the text, through a restoration of the Romanian literary language, came to replace the bizarre version of Shakespeare in the repertoire of the National Theater. Once again, the excellent knowledge of Romanian literary language and vast knowledge of foreign languages by Romanian Jews is underlined. Moreover, the author points out the cultural competence and erudition of Adolphe Stern (not only a writer, translator and advocate, but also the leader of the Union of Romanian Jews until 1923), who applied the most appropriate and effective translation strategies to his work. The primary goal of the article about Jews in Romanian culture is thus to show how useless and sterile it is to think about culture through nationality and superficial differences, when its richness is clearly based on the interhuman relationship. In his article “Cultura și antisemitism” [Culture and antiSemitism] (no. 30, February 1923) Vinea calls for solidarity among young Romanians and Jews – because only this attitude will allow faith in the future of culture. The social and political engagement of the journal is manifested inter alia in a frequent return of the subject of anti-Semitism at universities and some violent manifestations of students in Iași, conducted by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the future leader of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail). Lucian Nastasă, who has already been mentioned, emphasizes that anti-Semitism developed in Romania along with the progressive evolution of intellectual circles. Recently the latter had perfect conditions to extend themselves because in the second half of the 19th century, the first modern Romanian universities were established – in succession in 1860 in Iași and in 1864 in Bucharest. Nastasă draws attention to the fact that in the entire history of higher education in Romania, from 1864 to 1944, Jews were excluded from any academic groups. The only exceptions, confirming the rule, were several Jewish professors mainly in medical faculties because there were outstanding experts and professionals there.33 33

Nastasă, Antisemitismul universitar în România, 46.

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In his article “Minorii și minoritățile” [Minors and minorities], in the no. 32 issue from February 1923, the author, St. Antim, evokes the historical context of Jewish-Romanian relations: In 1866,34 when the Jewish question was discussed, heads and windows were broken, and a synagogue was demolished in 1879, when the issue returned to the Constitution’s debates, the same anti-Semitic excesses were repeated. Now, when a new Constitution is being discussed and when the problem is raised again, the street is talking again. The only difference – perhaps demanded by progress – between then and now is that, while in the past there were no students in sufficient numbers, the mahala35 has its definitive word. Today, when universities and higher schools have multiplied, and when there are tens of thousands of students, these generous young people embraced the views of the former mahala, with all the bitterness inherent at their young age. They began in a sinister fashion, with the dead bodies, then happily crossed to the numerus clausus, and, finally and logically, stopped in front of the narrow gates of the 7th article. The wordplay from the title refers to the anti-Semitic attitude of students, therefore, the young part of society. On the one hand, St. Antim is pleased that power will be handed over to the young people, but on the other hand – it is impossible not to read the clear irony in his words, because the triumph of the student tribunal, opposing the mass granting of citizenship to Romanian Jews, would only contribute to the moral degradation of society. St. Antim, therefore, draws attention to the danger posed by the exclusion of such a large and vital part of society, predicting the rather tragic later historical events. In the same issue of Contimporanul, there is an article by Petre Cioraneanu, “Tot criza universitară” [Again about the university crisis], in which the author regrets the future of the Romanian university, which will not take advantage of the forced eviction of Jews – such actions will lead it rapidly to ruin. The satirical dimension of the journal was enriched by the illustrations and satirical drawings of Iancu. They were executed in his proper, Expressionist

34

35

The Constitution adopted in 1866 only granted civil rights to Christians. A little later, the Romanian government managed to bypass the order to recognize Jews as full-fledged citizens of Romania, as formulated by the Western European powers during the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which paved the way for Romanian officials and politicians to engage in discriminatory practices. Mahala – suburbs in Romanian cities, often having the pejorative connotation of a slum.

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style, “based on an active line that both describes the often distorted figures and energizes them.”36 One of the most representative and meaningful illustrations was published on the cover of no. 27 (January 1923). On it Iancu depicts a Jew who is tied up with a rope (with other characteristics and attributes combined with a stereotypical image: beard, sidelocks, yarmulke), surrounded by two representatives of the Romanian government – one is threatening him with a knife, the other with a rifle. The signature under the figure informs: “The government has taken measures to secure domestic order.”

3

Conclusion

Post-war Romanian literary critics are rarely interested in the political and social commitment of the avant-garde, pointing mainly to its aesthetic subversiveness. While the most prominent representatives of the Romanian avantgarde, left outside the literary canon by default, besides their artistic engagement, were genuinely interested in socio-political matters, often standing on bold, sometimes even radical, but always clearly defined left-wing positions. The careful study of the first articles published in the most significant Romanian avant-garde journal, Contimporanul, helps the reader observe a counternarrative which differs from the dominant one – where, until today, the interwar period is very often seen as a Golden Age in Romanian history. Nevertheless, the content of a non-mainstream journal from early 1920s, showing us the perspective of a minority, allows us to see the whole range of problems faced by Greater Romania. This multi-ethnic state had to regulate this new and challenging situation legally, build new political structures, find the most appropriate implementation of the concept of national identity, create a Romanian literary language and, last but not least, establish a cultural and literary canon, which would confirm its exceptional status and historical and cultural continuity. These were all fundamental dilemmas of a young state that was still looking for its path to modernization. It is worth remembering that a multitude of points of view brings us closer to an objective view of history, and the stories written at its margins can very often change the entire perspective.

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Năchescu, Voichița. “The Visible Woman. Interwar Romanian Women’s Writing, Modernity and the Gendered Public / Private Divide.” Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, vol. 2 (2008): 70–90. Nastasă, Lucian. Antisemitismul universitar în România (1919–1939). Mărturii documentare. Cluj Napoca: Institutul pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităților Naționale Kriterion, 2011. Oișteanu, Andrei. Inventing the Jew. Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures. Translated by Mirela Adascalitei. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Ornea, Zigu. Anii treizeci: Extrema dreaptă românească. București: Editura Fundației Culturale Române, 1995. Ornea, Zigu. Tradiționalism și modernitate în deceniul al treilea. București: Editura Eminescu, 1980. Petreu, Marta. De la Junimea la Noica. Studii de cultură românească. Iași: Polirom, 2011. Pop, Ion. La Réhabilitation du rêve – une anthologie de l’avant-garde roumaine. Bucarest: Maurice Nadeau, 2006. Spiridon, Monica. “Literature and the Symbolic Engineering of the European Self.” In Literature for Europe? Edited by Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt, 417–428. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2009. Vinea, Ion. “Cultură și antisemitism.” Contimporanul, no. 30 (Februarie 1923): 2. Vinea, Ion (?). “Numerus clausus și gramatică.” Contimporanul, no. 29 (Februarie 1923): 4. Volovici, Leon. “Romanian literature.” Translated by Mircea Anca. Accessed September 1, 2018. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Romanian_Literature.

“The Experience of Change”: Hungarian Literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic Judit Dobry

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the most important milestones in the development of Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia from its beginnings in 1918, i.e., the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic, to the year of 1938. In addition to the processes of formation and revival of Hungarian literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic and the building of literary identity and its self-definition, I will address the most important representatives, as well as the issue of naming the Hungarian written literature created by the authors of Hungarian nationality in Czechoslovakia. When the new country of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed on October 28, 1918, its leaders were still in exile. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was elected president of the Czechoslovak Republic on November 14, while he was still in the United States; he did not arrive in Prague until December. Edvard Beneš, the country’s foreign minister, was in Paris for the upcoming peace conference, as well as Karel Kramář, who had become Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister. (The first Slovak war minister Milan Rastislav Štefánik died in an airplane crash in May 1919.) Masaryk and Beneš remained in charge of foreign relations, and the leaders of five major parties dealt with home affairs. The delineation of the Slovak boundary was another serious problem, as there was no recognized linguistic frontier between the Hungarian and Slovak populations in the south. Hungary’s communist government in Budapest – which had taken power in March 1919 under the leadership of Béla Kun – sent troops to eastern Slovakia, where a sister communist republic was proclaimed. The Hungarian communists and their Slovak allies wished to reattach the Slovak “Upper Lands” to a multiethnic communist Hungary, to which the Russian Bolsheviks promised military assistance. With Allied help, however, the Czech military asserted itself in Slovakia as well as in the new province of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In December 1918 Kassa (Košice) and Pozsony (Bratislava) were seized by the Czechoslovak Legion and by mid-January 1919 taking control over the territory of Southern Slovakia had been finished. Based on the 1920 census, 1,070,772 people of Hungarian nationality lived in the territory of the then Czechoslovakia.1 After signing the Treaty of Trianon 1 Lajos Turczel, Két kor mezsgyéjén (Bratislava: Madách, 2007), 10.

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in 1920 more than one million Hungarian people found themselves living within the borders of Czechoslovakia. For Hungarians living as a minority the establishment of a specific culture was crucial. Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia lacked all its institutions and also the basic conditions for a functioning literary life. Under such minority circumstances literary criticism, literary history, literary periodicals, readership, literary societies fulfilled the role of the most important institutions. In the first decade of its existence aesthetic and poetic principles were established, literary societies, publishing companies and readership were founded, and manifestos were published. Given its geographic proximity to Budapest and the fact that most of its talented writers came to settle in the Hungarian capital, Hungarian literary traditions and institutions in Czechoslovakia were much less developed at first. The evolution of literary life was set back also by other factors such as the political uncertainty of the first years of the new republic, and the forced exile of intellectuals; Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London became literary centres for Hungarian ethnic literature. According to literary historian Béla Pomogáts, the Hungarian literatures of Hungary, Romania, (Czecho)Slovakia, Serbia, all belong to the literature of one nation: the literature of the Hungarian nation. Every Hungarian community that evolved from the “mother country” situated in Austria–Hungary in 1918–1920 considers itself an authentic part of the Hungarian nation that is homogeneous in terms of language, culture, history, and traditions. Therefore, the polycentric model of Hungarian literary culture derives from the fact that, in addition to the literature of the “mother country,” the ethnic Hungarian minorities also developed their own literatures – not the least to preserve their national identity.2 The Hungarian minority literatures that developed in the neighboring countries after the establishment of the new republic had two sources to draw from: regional and universal national literatures – the concept used to designate the totality of literary works no matter where they had been composed or published – in Hungary or outside its borders, or in diasporic communities in the past or present. At this point of my paper I would like to emphasize that there is no unified terminology used for naming the subject of this paper; that is, the Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia. However, there are a few options: the concept of minority and ethnic literature is also used. According to Zorán Ardamica,

2 Béla Pomogáts, “Hungarian Minority Literature (Hungarian Literature in Transylvania and the Historic Upper Hungary),” Minorities Research 7, no. 7 (2005): 79.

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the variety of terminology used in literary and literary-historical publications reflects the views and beliefs of their authors and editors.3 According to the Slovak literary comparatist Dionýz Ďurišin, the concepts of minority and ethnic literature represent two fundamental developmental stages, while in the earlier, minority stage, the minority consciousness of the Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia towards majority literature written in Czech and Slovak is dominant, and thus it makes up a part in relation to the “maternal” literature. The stronger this connection is to the whole, the weaker is the consciousness of its own identity.4 Ďurišin considered the ethnic literature as a separate historical phenomenon with a distinctive function, or as a separate literary-historical whole. Literary theorist László Kocur, on the other hand, judges Ďurišin’s theory together with the polysystem theory of Itamar Even-Zohar to be a suitable framework for determining the status of ethnic literature.5 The general history of Hungarian literature written in Hungary before 1989 defined Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia as a Hungarian-written literature that originated in the territory of Czechoslovakia, automatically perceiving it as part of universal Hungarian literature, but – as Ardamica points out – literary historians applied a “double categorization” emphasizing the “minority character” of the literature, but on the other hand, they supported the idea of Hungarian literature as a universal whole.6 In Ardamica’s view, the terms “ethnic” and “minority” suggest a pejorative undertone, he considers them debatable, because they lack aesthetic value. Further he argues that the first term is a created one. In addition, the second term is not needed since the accession of the countries to the European Union.7 Poet and literary theorist Árpád Tőzsér analyzed these issues from a different perspective – he was trying to define the concept of so-called universal Hungarian literature (“egyetemes magyar irodalom”), incorporating Hungarian literatures beyond the borders of Hungary. Tőzsér was looking into the possible “connecting” elements among these literatures, raising the question as to whether language should be considered a connecting element at all, because Hungarian language includes different meanings depending on the country of its usage, and can be deemed a disin-

3 Zorán Ardamica, “A szlovákiai magyar irodalom létének kérdéséről,” Hitel 19, no. 4 (2006): 105. 4 Dionýz Ďurišin et al., eds. Osobitné medziliterárne spoločenstvá (Bratislava: Veda, vydavateǏstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1991), 33–34. 5 László Kocur, “Határ és irodalom,” Szövegek között 7 (2003): 180. 6 Ardamica, “A szlovákiai,” 103. 7 Ibid., 106.

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tegrative rather than an integrative element.8 Tőzsér was also dealing with the possibility of reciprocal reception of these literatures. Authors of greater importance did not live in Czechoslovakia; talented and promising writers had already left the country for Budapest. Although small local editorial offices existed, they lacked professional editorial staff, so they were not able to take intellectual leadership or have an impact on literary life. Zoltán Fábry called this period the era of “naked freedom.” Since there was no institutionalized book publishing, most of the political newspapers created columns for literature and critical reviews. A significant turn in the intellectual life of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia came with the arrival of the émigrés (Pál Ignotus, Lajos Hatvany, Lajos Kassák, Lajos Barta, Sándor Barta, and Illés Kaczér). Between 1919 and 1921 progressive thinking and leftist intellectuals were persecuted and forced to leave Hungary and go into exile. They found shelter in Czechoslovakia, but most of them stayed only transitionally and settled down in other countries. They brought the dilettantes face to face with their delusions, and the low-quality of their writing. The émigrés claimed that the literature created under minority circumstances should set an example regarding the formal and intellectual level, because of its close relation with the culture of other ethnic groups; they were emphasizing the responsibility of the written word. The first decade of Hungarian ethnic literature was characterized by the constitution of literature and the battle against dilettantism and provincial thinking, resulting in dilettante / amateur literature. On the other hand, the important role of regional amateur authors such as Ferenc Sziklay, Pál Rácz, Marcell Jankovics, Sándor Telek A., Gyula Alapy, Károly Szeredai Gruber and János Kersék in shaping a new literary approach was indisputable. By means of their literary works the importance of the survival of the Hungarian ethnic group was accentuated; to the émigrés this aspect was irrelevant. The émigrés were the founders of the first Hungarian literary and cultural magazine called Tűz [Fire] (1921–1923). In 1921, the managing editor was Jenő Gömöri. The individual issues of the magazine were compiled in Vienna and Bratislava, with the aim of trying to bring together two cultures – Czechoslovak and Hungarian.9 The magazine was initially published monthly, and later weekly. However, a few years later, the émigrés were expelled from Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, within a short time, they contributed to the rise of Hungarian literature, winning over provincialism and dilettantism. These

8 Árpád Tőzsér, “Ugrás a bizonytalanba,” Irodalmi Szemle 40, no. 2 (1997): 57–60. 9 Jenő Gömöri, “Induló,” Tűz 1, no. 1–2 (1921): 6–12.

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authors have proclaimed the importance of both the formal and intellectual level of literature, and the responsibility of the written word.10 The leftist authors became opinion leaders – they wrote sociography, literature of fact, documentary prose, and proletarian literature. The Sarló [Sickle] movement was founded by Hungarian students studying at Czech universities and centred around the “Szent György Kör” [Circle of St. George] as well as by the intellectuals gathering around the journal Mi Lapunk [Our journal] in order to organize sociographic journeys and self-educational seminars. Sarló was a movement of large influence, which mobilized young people in the entire country. Its members organized ethnographic research across the villages of Czechoslovakia, their findings were published in newspaper articles, and journals; sociographic works, such as Tíz nap Szegényországban [Ten days in the Land of the Poor, 1930] depict the common life and everyday reality of the people living in the villages. This type of literary work laid the foundation for the “documentary” literature. The orientation of these groups toward the far left made most intellectuals distance themselves from the movement. Connecting to the Communist movement came to a gradual demise, and a devaluation of its significance. The qualitative aspects of the literature came to the forefront as a very important attribute of the literary canon which was yet to take shape. Ostracism and exclusivity were characteristic for the period between 1926–1932. According to Pál Szvatkó, these debates were similar to the faith debates of the era of the Reformation.11 Historical necessity brought Hungarian literary institutions to life and started the career of several important writers: among them, Dezső Győry and a priest of the Premontre Order, László Mécs. Although they started from different political presuppositions, both were promoters of humanism, and clearly turned against the Fascism developing during World War II. This approach was also characteristic of the works of Zoltán Fábry (1897–1970), who lived in seclusion in a small mining town near Košice.12 The work of Fábry, one of the most important Hungarian writers, critics and essayists in Czechoslovakia, defined and shaped Hungarian literature during the first half of its existence. Throughout this period, Fábry evoked many political and literary movements and ideologies that inspired him to create his own insights into questions related to the mission of literature. He was one of the first organizers of Hungarian literary life in Czechoslovakia and

10 11 12

Pál Szvatkó, A változás élménye (Pozsony: Kalligram, 1994), 140. Ibid., 146–147. Pomogáts, “Hungarian Minority Literature,” 85.

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worked as an editor in the newly-established Hungarian literary magazines in Czechoslovakia (Prágai Magyar Hírlap, Esti Újság, Kassai Napló) as well as in the Czechoslovak editorial offices of Hungarian literary and artistic magazines from Romania (Géniusz, Periszkóp). His view of the world and attitude had been formed by his experiences of the World War I. Although his literary work began with writing poetry and prose, later he turned to journalism and literary criticism. In the 1920s, he created the concept of “human literature” (“emberirodalom”), his “vox humana,” a moral attitude according to which writers would no longer be satisfied with self-discovery and the revelation of their own inner world; they should commit themselves to fulfilling the mission in favor of humanity.13 Fábry’s left-wing orientation gradually drew him away from right-wing periodicals. This was when the concept of “literature of reality” (“valóságirodalom”) began to form. By retaining the facts, the documentary way of imagining, authors sought to uncover the realistic social situation.14 The first important work created in this spirit was a story about the life of people in Subcarpathian Russia entitled Az éhség legendája [Legend of hunger] (1932), followed by an essay collection called Korparancs [The order of the age] (1934) – a summary of political, cultural and literary themes. As a counter-reaction to the ever-increasing danger of fascism, a process of reconsideration of past and national traditions began to increase in his work, and in the second half of the 1930s, he began to address issues of the future of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, and Hungarian schools in Czechoslovakia.15 The first attempts at canon-building came from publicists as well as journalism and essays that measured up to a high standard. The main representatives were: Fábry, Rezső Peéry, László Dobossy, László Wass, Rezső Szalatnai, and Szvatkó. The importance of objective literary criticism took priority. Critical reviews and essays were published about the development of Hungarian minority literature in Czechoslovakia (Szempontok a csehszlovákiai magyar irodalom fejlődéséhez, 1937, written by Peéry), about contemporary poetry (A szlovenszkói magyar líra, 1937, foreword to an anthology of poems: Az új magyar líra, 1937 written by Szalatnai), also literary portraits about the most significant poets of the time – about Dezső Győry, Dezső Vozári, Imre Forbáth, written by

13 14 15

Zoltán Szeberényi, Magyar irodalom Szlovákiában (1945–1999). I (Pozsony: AB-ART Könyvkiadó, 2000), 96. Idem, “Valóságirodalom,” in A cseh/szlovákiai magyar irodalom lexikona 1918–2004, ed. Zoltán Fónod (Bratislava: Madách-Posonium, 2004), 448. Zoltán Fónod, A csehszlovákiai magyar irodalom története / Dejiny mad’arskej literatúry v Československu (1918 až 1945). Vysokoškolské skriptá (Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 1992), 149.

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Szalatnai.16 Publicists striving to define and create the notion of Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia have perceived this literature as a phenomenon existing in the form of literary works in which common values are articulated by modern forms, characterized by a realistic depiction of the life of the minority with emphasis on questions about its fate and future. These demands began to appear in the literary works of the new generation of authors whose decisive experience was the experience of “transformation, change” resulting from the historic events of 1918:17 The young authors in Czechoslovakia felt that they were the “Hungarians with a new face.” […] They were saturated with the social tendencies they had adopted from the Émigrés, but also patriarchal love for the land, that they could learn only in the countryside, through rural thinking, and not in the then Budapest literature, which was turned to the Western Mecca of that time.18 However, in the 1930s Szvatkó wondered whether there were individual authors in Czechoslovakia, or if a regional literature existed, and if it was necessary to create regional literature and thus to emphasize “the new mentality” of literary works, or to approach Budapest to publish in local literary journals, and to write according to the tastes of its critics and readers.19 Finally, he found that the questions of literature and literary identity could be of interest to the public only during the period of the cultural struggle between 1924 and 1929. For the readers of the following decade these issues had become outdated.20 According to Balázs Béla Végh, peripheral culture has a less significant value-generating and value-preserving force, albeit both of them are crucial for creating a canon. Since the peripheral cultures lack historical canoncreating conditions, makeshift solutions were needed; authors, literary historians, critics who were shaping the new literature were trying to create a specific status-consciousness.21 They were hoping that local idiosyncrasies of the minority culture will serve as virtual canon-creating values and will become literature-organizing factors. A shared system of values and a suitable

16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 377. Szvatkó, A változás élménye, 140. Ibid., 140–41. Translation by J. D. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. Balázs Béla Végh, “Kanonizáció a kisebbségi irodalmakban,” Erdélyi Tudományos Füzetek 253 (2005), accessed June 13, 2018, http://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03202/03202.htm#8.

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forum were needed, and a new approach, too, which could combine and bring into accord two different aspects – the realistic portrayal of minority life and the modern formal approaches. This rejuvenation is associated with a new generation of writers, who appeared in the middle of the 1920s. Their artistic techniques were shaped by the conditions of their minority status, but they became acquainted with the new strategies of Hungarian and modern world literature. Their activities were guided by generational self-awareness, creating literature from the vital questions of the fate and future of the Hungarian minority community. The year 1927 is considered to be a milestone of Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia. In this year the manifesto Kisebbségi géniusz [The genius of the minority] by the Hungarian poet Dezső Győry was published in the periodical Mi Lapunk, along with his collection of poems called Újarcú magyarok [Hungarians with a new face]. In his work Kisebbségi géniusz – which became a guideline for the progressive youth – Dezső Győry declared a war against any kind of physical or intellectual exploitation. Moreover, he claimed that the Hungarian ethnic minority had a mission to create universally endorsed culture of mankind under minority circumstances. Poet Dezső Győry saw the possibility of development, and the opportunity to promote the ideals of human solidarity, humanity, and freedom in the Central European area in the minority situation of Hungarian literature.22 In 1928 intellectuals around the Szent György Kör [Circle of St. George], mentioned earlier, compiled a list of artworks, which could be included in the first list of the literary canon coming into view. It contained already canonized works of Hungarian culture (which were helping to form the identity of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia) – poems by Endre Ady, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Hungarian folksongs; Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete; Dezső Kosztolányi, Édes Anna; Zsigmond Móricz, Hét krajcár, Sárarany, Úri muri, A fáklya; Dezső Szabó, Az elsodort falu, Ölj, Egyenes úton, Segítség; Gyula Szekfű, Három nemzedék, alongside three works of Hungarian authors from Czechoslovakia: Dezső Győry, Újarcú magyarok [Hungarians with a new face] (1927), published in Berlin (Ludwig Voggenreiter Verlag, Hungarian Section); László Mécs, Hajnali harangszó [Tolling at dawn] (1923), published in Užhorod; István Darkó, Szakadék [Abyss] (1928), published in Košice. The list was created with the strong belief that Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia could integrate

22

Judit Görözdi, “Hledání menšinové literatury. Mad’arská literatura v ČSR,” in Literární kronika první republiky 1918–1938, ed. Petr Šámal and Pavel Janáček (Praha: Academia – Památník národního písemnictví – Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2018), 142.

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into universal Hungarian cultural standards. Fábry ranks these authors among the representatives of the so-called “literature of value,” who remained faithful to the collective and qualitative ideals of the minority literature. Not all of the authors were creating their literary works in terms of the canon outlined above. They were following the ideal of Modernist, quality literature in Hungary, represented by the authors focused around the literary journal Nyugat [West], published in Budapest. These authors were among others: the women authors Piroska Szenes, and the poet Erzsi Szenes, including the bilingual (German, Hungarian) male writer Pál Neubauer. In the Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia, female authors (Erzsi Szenes, Erzsébet Ásgúthy, Ida Urr, Boris Palotai, and Mária Szucsich) were also present, representing a female voice and view, the most prominent being the writer Piroska Szenes (1899–1972). Despite their remarkable literary works, they were ignored by the Hungarian literary history in Czechoslovakia. Szenes’s works were associated with the leading Hungarian literary magazine Nyugat. She was born in Transylvania, had lived in the former Czechoslovakia, studied in Budapest, after her return in 1927 (where she lived until her emigration in 1938), her publishing activity did not bind her unambiguously to the Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia, thus she has long been excluded from it.23 In the 1930s interpretive communities partly legitimize the status quo of the previous decade, on the other hand, they admitted that an ethnic and community-centred canon could set some aesthetic and ideological limitations on authors and recipients, therefore emphasizing the importance of the authors’ identity and the autonomy of freedom, in spite of the practice of minority literatures to create a traditionalist canon, which puts the community at the top of its hierarchy of values.24 Typically, these literatures go through the process of institutionalization in a more intense way and in a shorter time. As for the Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia, we are speaking about a period of only 20 years. The First Vienna Award on November 2, 1938 transferred the territories of southern Slovakia and southern Ruthenia to Hungary. On March 14, 1939 the Slovak State was founded with the help of Nazi Germany – in this territory the literary life of ethnic Hungarians practically ceased to be. After World War II the whole literary life of Hungarians in the Third Czechoslovak Republic (in February 1948 after the coup d’état of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia

23 24

Lajos Turczel, “Szenes Piroska,” in A cseh/szlovákiai magyar irodalom lexikona 1918–2004, 383. Végh, “Kanonizáció.”

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the name of the state was changed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) needed a complete restart.

Bibliography Ardamica, Zorán. “A szlovákiai magyar irodalom létének kérdéséről.” Hitel 19, no. 4 (2006): 103–113. Ďurišin, Dionýz, et al., eds. Osobitné medziliterárne spoločenstvá. Bratislava: Veda, vydavateǏstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1991. Fónod, Zoltán, ed. A cseh/szlovákiai magyar irodalom lexikona 1918–2004. Bratislava: Madách-Posonium, 2004. Fónod, Zoltán. A csehszlovákiai magyar irodalom története / Dejiny mad’arskej literatúry v Československu (1918 až 1945). Vysokoškolské skriptá. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave, 1992. Gömöri, Jenő. “Induló.” Tűz 1, no. 1–2 (1921): 6–12. Görözdi, Judit. “Hledání menšinové literatury. Mad’arská literatura v ČSR.” In Literární kronika první republiky 1918–1938. Edited by Petr Šámal and Pavel Janáček, 140–144. Praha: Academia – Památník národního písemnictví – Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2018. Kocur, László. “Határ és irodalom.” Szövegek között 7 (2003): 167–182. Pomogáts, Béla. “Hungarian Minority Literature (Hungarian Literature in Transylvania and the Historic Upper Hungary).” Minorities Research 7, no. 7 (2005): 78–86. Szeberényi, Zoltán. Magyar irodalom Szlovákiában (1945–1999). I. Pozsony: AB-ART Könyvkiadó, 2000. Szeberényi, Zoltán. “Valóságirodalom.” In A cseh/szlovákiai magyar irodalom lexikona 1918–2004. Edited by Zoltán Fónod, 448–449. Bratislava: Madách-Posonium, 2004. Szvatkó, Pál. A változás élménye. Pozsony: Kalligram, 1994. Tőzsér, Árpád. “Ugrás a bizonytalanba.” Irodalmi Szemle 40, no. 2 (1997): 57–60. Turczel, Lajos. Két kor mezsgyéjén. Bratislava: Madách-Posonium, 2007. Turczel, Lajos. “Szenes Piroska.” In A cseh/szlovákiai magyar irodalom lexikona 1918–2004, 383–84. Végh, Balázs Béla. “Kanonizáció a kisebbségi irodalmakban.” Erdélyi Tudományos Füzetek 253 (2005). Accessed June 13, 2018. http://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03202/03202 .htm#8.

Part 2 Literary Canonization: Case Studies

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Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary Gergely Fórizs

… The phrase “nation-building” is commonly used as a scholarly idiom: a search in Google Scholar for papers containing this word generates about 636,000 results. This high number already suggests that the phrase lacks a definitive meaning. Commonly, it has been used to describe the national movements of the past 250 years, regardless of where they appeared in the world. As a result of deliberate state policies, nation-building has been theorized upon as a structural process, whether it was top-down or bottom-up.1 Yet, this central and narrative-constructing metaphor originally implied a more specific approach, and it was only from the 1970s on that the use of the term has become so widespread that it has given rise to the most contradictory explanations. The phrase “nation-building” came into vogue through the works of a handful of historically oriented American political scientists of the 1960s, among others, Karl W. Deutsch, Reinhard Bendix and Charles Tilly. In the following decades it became commonly used in political and cultural history. In his introductory essay to the re-edition of Reinhard Bendix’s 1964 NationBuilding and Citizenship, in 1996 John Bendix reconstructs the primary context in which the term came into general use. He stresses that Reinhard Bendix’s “perspective has also been affected by where and how newly independent states have been created,” adding that in the mid-1960s these new states primarily emerged in Asia and Africa, and that between 1957 and 1964, twentyfive new countries were established in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Referring to an essay by David E. Apter, John Bendix concludes that at that time the term “nation-building” was “a shorthand to understand the ‘discontinuities in tradi-

1 For an overall account, see Harris Mylonas, “Nation-Building,” Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations, ed. Patrick James (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), accessed October 15, 2018, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/ obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0217.xml.

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tion, culture, social organization, and material standards’ newly independent countries were experiencing.”2 The 1960s were not, however, the first time that the term gained currency: John Bendix himself mentions some earlier examples, including Nicholas Murray Butler’s 1930 Cobden lecture “Nation-Building and Beyond.”3 Butler (1862–1947), an American philosopher, diplomat and educator, president of Columbia University and of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and recipient of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize was an early-20th-century popularizer of the term.4 In a series of political essays, including his 1916 The Building of the Nation, his 1923 Building the American Nation, his 1917 article “Have We an American Nation?” and the above-mentioned Cobden lecture in 1930, Butler defined nation-building as follows: There is not yet a nation but the rich and fine materials out of which a true nation can be made by the architect with vision to plan and by the builder with skill adequate to execute. The grave problem before the American people today is that of completing the process of nationbuilding. It is the problem of subordinating every personal ambition, every class interest and policy, every race attachment, to the one dominant idea of an America free, just, powerful, forward-facing, that shall stand out in the history of nations as the name of a people who conceive their mission and their true greatness to lie in service to mankind.5 In its early 20th-century usage, therefore, “nation-building” refers to the process of inventing a new nation. Based on a version of the melting-pot theory, Butler stresses that the creation of a radically new national identity requires the discontinuation of all previous traditions. There is an even earlier example of using the term in reference to American society. In his 1883 popular The Lives and Graves of Our Presidents, Reverend George Sumner Weaver (1818–1908) defines “the great work of nation-building” 2 John Bendix, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition,” in Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order: Enlarged Edition (New Brunswick, London: Transaction Publishers, 1996), XI–XXVI. Here: XIII–XVI. Cf. David E. Apter, “Preface,” in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: The Free Press, 1963), V. 3 Bendix, “Introduction,” XXIII [Footnote 5]. 4 Cf. Charity Eva Runden, Twentieth-Century Educators (New York: Monarch Press, 1965), 77–79. 5 Nicholas Murray Butler, “Have We an American Nation?”, The Journal of Education 85, no. 3 (January 18, 1917): 61–62.

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in the founding period of the United States as “the construction of state, county, town and city governments,” stressing how unprecedented this work was: “There were no models for the government they had to make. They had started a nation on a new plan; and they were to build it by the principles of righteousness and common sense, recognizing every man’s place and right in the new structure.” According to Weaver, “nation-building” did not merely raise new institutions, but also conceived a new (republican) ideology. As an instance of this, he mentions the state of Virginia: “To reconstruct such a state on republican principles required a re-making of all the laws and all the usages of society.”6 The early occurrences of the phrase “nation-building” in Weaver and Butler show that what by the 1960s became a scholarly term had already been there before in the vocabulary of popular history and politics with a similar meaning, describing the cultural discontinuity typical of a “new nation.” In this perspective, it is not surprising that American political scientist Karl W. Deutsch, in an introductory essay to an edited collection of studies entitled “NationBuilding” in 1963 talks about nation-building from a very similar point of view as Butler, despite shifting the genre from political essay to political science essay and writing at a more abstract level. Deutsch distinguishes three different viewpoints on the matter of nationalism and the rise and fall of nations. These concepts are: (1) national growth; (2) nation-building and (3) national development. The first and the third are both more or less organic concepts, portraying the slow “growth of a living thing” through certain fixed qualitative stages, while the second has mechanistic and voluntaristic aspects: nation-building […] suggests an architectural or mechanical model. As a house can be built from timber, bricks, and mortar, in different patterns, quickly or slowly, through different sequences of assembly, in partial independence from its setting, and according to the choice, will, and power of its builders, so a nation can be built according to different plans, from various materials, rapidly or gradually, by different sequences of steps, and in partial independence from its environment.7 The way “nation-building” is described here reminds the reader of Weaver’s and Butler’s previous description of American nation-building: Deutsch’s 6 George Sumner Weaver, The Lives and Graves of Our Presidents (Chicago: National Book Concern, 1883), 139. 7 Karl W. Deutsch, “Nation-Building and National Development: Some Issues for Political Research,” in Nation-Building [First edition: 1963], ed. Karl W. Deutsch and William J. Foltz (New York: Atherton Press, 1966), 1–17.

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builders (unifying Butler’s “architect” and “builder” into one person and resembling the American Founding Fathers in Weaver) as central figures of nationbuilding are people who command mastery over all parts and circumstances of this process. They handle it consciously, according to their own vision and are free to choose their instruments. This original meaning of “nation-building,” as we have seen, implies a close connection with that of “state-building,” corresponding to the fact that in the case of the USA and other ex-colonial states these two processes are closely linked to each other. This original context might be one of the reasons why the notion of nation-building later came close to that of state-building. Even if historians like Samuel E. Finer separate the two images (saying that “nationbuilding is not the same as state-building”), he emphasizes the “historical and logical connections” between the two and sees “nation-building” as a higher form of “state-building” where the population of a state forms “a community of feeling based on self-consciousness of a common nationality.”8 In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, “nation-building” gradually moved away from its original context and became a phrase generally used for the rise of nations, and the term’s architectonic imagery suggested henceforward that it is about a conscious “greenfield project.” The term’s implications in American political science, however, resulted in controversies wherever it was applied to cases different from the American type, that is, when the formation of a nation and a state did not occur simultaneously and in closely connected ways, or when confronted with beliefs in the primordial existence of nations. This is the case for most East-Central European countries, including Hungary. The primary reason why it is difficult to apply the image of nation-building to East-Central Europe is that in the 19th century most ethnic groups in the region lacked their own independent state, but some could look back on a self-governed medieval state, as in Hungary; the existing traditions became part of the ideology of an ever-existing nation, and the wish for state-building also harked back to these memories. National literature, as a tool of “cultural nationalism,”9 was occasionally felt to make up for a non-existing state, and

8 Samuel E. Finer, “State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1975), 86–88. 9 According to Joep Leerssen, European cultural nationalism followed a separate dynamic and chronology from political nationalism. Cf. Joep Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 559–578.

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as such it came to play a key role in the national ideologies of this region.10 Thus the narrative on the “awakening” of an (ever-)existing nation became a common pattern of East-Central European stateless literary cultures.11 In what follows, I want to tackle this dynamic as it operated in 19th-century cultural history; that is, I am less interested in the theoretical debates as to whether modern nations are modern social constructs (Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson) or are the results of centuries-long organic development (Anthony D. Smith).

… Now, I will turn to two ideologues of the Hungarian national awakening and their interpretive interventions with regard to the works of a national poet. I will use their examples to demonstrate that in their efforts they in fact did not act as “builders,” i.e., someone free to choose his tools and materials, but rather as bricoleurs (“handymen”) of national culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss employed the term bricolage for describing the characteristic patterns of mythological thought.12 Gérard Genette picked up this term in application to literary criticism on the whole, while Jacques Derrida extended it to all possible discourses. What they had in common was that for them the bricoleur was someone who constructed something new out of a diverse range of available materials and tools that were not intended for that particular end. The limits of his or her repertoire distinguishes the bricoleur from the engineer, “who (in principle) can any time obtain the tool specially adapted to a particular technical need.”13 Genette’s take on the rules of intellectual bricolage conforms to Lévi-Strauss’s definition: “always to make do with whatever is available and to use in a new structure the remains of previous constructions or destructions […] forming of these heterogeneous elements into a new whole in which none of the re-used elements will necessarily be used as originally intended.”14 10

11

12 13 14

Cf. Virgil Nemoianu, “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance,” in Romantic Poetry, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), 249. Cf. John Neubauer, “General Introduction,” in History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 4: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 1–39. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [1962] (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). Gérard Genette, “Structuralism and Literary Criticism,” in Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4–5. Ibid., 3.

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My first example of intellectual nation-bricolage comes from the threevolume critical edition of the oeuvre of the Hungarian poet, critic and aesthetician Dániel Berzsenyi (1776–1836), edited and published in 1842 by Gábor Döbrentei (1785–1851), who was a writer, and the first secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Döbrentei’s edition was a major step toward the canonization of Berzsenyi as a “national poet.”15 Recent research points at 19thcentury scholarly text editions as ideological constructions and parts of the “nation-building process.”16 Editorial scholarship provides an “infrastructure of memory” by not only archiving and processing but also by producing cultural memories.17 Döbrentei takes the power of editing to the extreme: often, he does not only reproduce and interpret Berzsenyi’s works but intervenes in their choice of words and imagery. Döbrentei claimed to have been authorized to do so by his friend Berzsenyi himself. Defining editorial work – in accordance with 19th-century European philology – as the execution of the author’s last will, Döbrentei never dares to erase anything from the poems, although, in one particular case, he suggests that the final two stanzas of Berzsenyi’s famous ode To the Hungarians (A magyarokhoz) should be left out as they apparently contradict what Döbrentei considered the true ideology of nationhood. The first and the last three stanzas of the poem read as follows: Oh you, once mighty Hungary, gone to seed, can you not see the blood of Árpád run foul, can you not see the mighty lashes heaven unleashed on your dreary country? […] Árpád, our Chief, the founder of Hungary, had braver troops to fight the Danubian shores,

15

16

17

Regarding this term, see Nemoianu, “National Poets,” 249–255; John Neubauer, “Figures of National Poets: Introduction,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, vol. 4, 11–18; Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever, ed. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason, National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Joep Leerssen, “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures,” in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in 19thCentury Europe, ed. Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2008), 22. Paula Henrikson, “Inventing Literary Heritage: National Consciousness and Editorial Scholarship in Sweden, 1810–1830,” in Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, ed. Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), 103.

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how diff’rent were the swords of Hungary Hunyadi used to repel the Sultan! But woe – this is how everything perishes. We bear the yoke of fickle vicissitudes; the fairy mood of Luck has tossed us playfully upward and down, while smiling. The iron fist of centuries finishes but all that man has built: gone is noble Troy; gone are the might and pride of Carthage, Babylon, Rome – they have all gone under.18 In his editorial note, Döbrentei argues that the poem should occupy a central position in the Hungarian national literary canon, but with the ending omitted: “All ninth-grade students should learn Berzsenyi’s ode by heart in all the schools of the Hungarian Empire, regardless of their religious denomination, but without the last two stanzas. For pedigreed boys should not be disappointed by the prospect that Hungary might fall into the ranks of Troy, Carthage, Rome and Babylon, and be replaced by a Pan-Slavic or German province.”19 In a striking example of intellectual bricolage Döbrentei recommends that the material under his editorship be used for purposes other than originally intended by its author, namely, for strengthening of what he saw as a modern national identity. His interpretation relied on two implicit presuppositions, first that Berzsenyi’s view of the Hungarians in his poem is based on ethnic identity and second that his view of national history is an essentialist one, in which history is an organic process of the unrolling of a nation’s potential. Counter to the first presupposition, the phrase “Hungarians” that the first stanza addresses in no way defined an ethnic group different form the surrounding Slavs or Germans, but the community of Hungarian nobility, the natio hungarica, who claimed to have “the blood of Arpad” in their veins.20 18

19 20

Dániel Berzsenyi, “To the Hungarians (The First),” trans. Adam Makkai, in In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’: The Poetry of Hungary, vol. 1, ed. Adam Makkai (Budapest, Chicago: Tertia, Atlantis-Centaur, Framo Publishing, 2000), 207–209. Dániel Berzsenyi, Összes művei: Költelem és folyóbeszéd [Complete works: Poetry and prose], vol. I, ed. Gábor Döbrentei (Buda: Royal University Press, 1842), 245. See the latest philological-based interpretation of the poem: Gábor Vaderna, A költészet születése. A magyarországi költészet társadalomtörténete a 19. század első évtizedeiben [The birth of poetry: A social history of poetry in Hungary in the first decades of the nineteenth century] (Budapest: Universitas, 2017), 435–449, 438.

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(Prince Árpád was the founder of Hungary, who led the Magyar tribes to the Carpathian Basin.) This Hungarian nobility has consisted of all the noblemen in Hungary, with their various vernaculars, but it did not include the Hungarian-speaking serfs.21 An analysis of the poem referred to this approach to nationhood as a special kind of “state nationalism,” based on the Hungarian feudal-estate constitution.22 In line with the second presupposition of Döbrentei, leaving out the last two stanzas departs from the Stoic cyclical cosmology for an essentialist view of history. Originally, Berzsenyi’s poem seemed to rely on the conviction that history takes a destined course, unaffected by human power, through events which were mere repetitions of previous ones. Unlike his Stoicism, Döbrentei claims that it is not pure destiny or “luck” that determines the history of nations but their own will to survive. As he emphasizes in his lengthy notes to the poem: “Nation! Do you want to stay alive? If yes, then get on your feet! Emerge from below! But if you do not even care about your downfall, you should fall even deeper.”23 In the light of this national essentialism, the last two stanzas, ending the ode with the chimera of the nation’s death, are clearly inappropriate. Omitting them, the poem would end on the encouraging image of the 15th-century war-lord János Hunyadi, famously defeating the Turks at Belgrade. Despite their common voluntaristic aspects, Döbrentei’s essentialism differs from the concept of nation-building as starting something new and relies more on the sustained continuity of national traditions. However, ideologists of nation-bricolage like Döbrentei were convinced that there was a continuity between the national ideas of the past and the efforts of the present towards national self-identification. In this essentialist concept of nationhood, modern language- and ethnicity-based nations are God’s creations and had existed since time immemorial. Döbrentei’s editorial essay on To the Hungarians makes this explicit by alluding to the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel: God wanted nations to exist. If there were only one language in this world, the 900–1000 million different kinds of people would become

21

22 23

Cf. Leslie S. Domonkos, “The Multiethnic Character of the Hungarian Kingdom in the Later Middle Ages,” in Transylvania: The Roots of Ethnic Conflict, ed. John F. Cadzow, Andrew Ludanyi, and Louis J. Elteto (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 41–60. Lajos Csetri, Nem sokaság hanem lélek: Berzsenyi-tanulmányok [Not multitudes, but souls: Studies in Berzsenyi] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1986), 61–64. Berzsenyi, Összes művei, 234.

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nothing but a lazy crowd, always handing over the business to someone else. But the disjunction caused by the 3000 different languages and dialects, the difference of countries and constitutions has led to rivalries among neighbors and it comes to a perennial competition for gaining balance. […] This is the central force that makes relatives from the millions. And so these millions create in every inch of the world their own countries, which are named after them.24 Here Döbrentei seems to echo the 18th-century Neoplatonic dynamic version of the idea of the Great Chain of Being, recast in terms of nationality, inasmuch as in the cosmic order of increasing diversification “man’s high calling was to add something of his own to the creation, to enrich the sum of things, and thus, in his finite fashion, consciously to collaborate in the fulfilment of the Universal Design.”25

… Another example of Hungarian nation-bricolage comes from the interpretation that István Széchenyi (1791–1860), the influential Hungarian statesman gave of Berzsenyi’s poem. Széchenyi, an enthusiastic admirer of Berzsenyi’s poetry, in his first major work Hitel [Credit] (1830) quotes the ode To the Hungarians so as to serve his own vision of a future-oriented nation: “What once was the keystone and the strength of our nation has gone to ruin and so the poet laureate of our fatherland is right: ‘How diff’rent rang the thunder of Hungary / amidst the blood-soaked battles of Attila.’ And what is gone, we should not want to bring back to life, because it’s beyond possibility.”26 Instead of turning back to the past, according to Széchenyi, the nation should be reestablished on an another, higher level, as the next examples will show. In 1829 Széchenyi translated Berzsenyi’s ode into German for his future wife. With a remarkable gesture, he left out the last two stanzas, just as Döbrentei would suggest years later, but on different grounds. In a note added to his translation, Széchenyi explains that “I don’t translate the two final verses. […] They want to say as much that ‘this is how everything goes in this world,’ ‘one nation arises and another one descends,’ etc. So everyone could believe in be-

24 25 26

Ibid. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), 296. István Széchenyi, Hitel [Credit] (Pest: Trattner–Károlyi, 1830), 72.

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ing corrupted by destiny, though the fault lies with himself.”27 For Széchenyi, therefore, the ending should be omitted not because of the necessity to glorify the nation’s past, as it was for Döbrentei, but because the nation’s selfrecognition should not be influenced by the limits of its historical existence. This demonstrates that even the intention of breaking with the past for the sake of the nation’s future requires the work of a bricoleur, if the ideologist has a significant cultural inheritance at hand. Thus, again, it is misleading to name this undertaking as “nation-building,” a term, which – as we have seen before – suggests the idea of a new beginning without precedents. On the contrary, what Széchenyi wanted was a re-awakening of the nation, its rise to a new self-consciousness, by surpassing, but not forgetting, the past. This aspect is stressed in the final paragraph of Széchenyi’s Hitel: “The Past has slipped from our grasp forever, but we are masters of the Future. Let us not bother, then, with futile reminiscences but let us awaken our dear fatherland through purposeful patriotism and loyal unity to a brighter dawn. Many think: ‘Hungary has been’; I like to believe: she will be!”28 As for Döbrentei, this approach to the nation’s mission is also of Neoplatonic character, but with a greater emphasis on national self-criticism. For the idea of the awakening of the nation to a self-consciousness regained on a higher level by adaptation and reworking of elements of the national heritage, highly correlates with that of the “unity lost and unity regained,” the “progress by reversion” and the “redemption as progressive self-education,” which, according to M. H. Abrams, are among the prominent Neoplatonic developmental patterns of “Romantic” thought and imagination of the four decades after 1790.29

… Perceiving the nation as a quasi-eternal entity, a platonic idea, the last thing the nation-bricoleurs wanted was to appear as builders of a new nation. In27

28

29

Idem, Naplói, 3 (1826–1830) [Diaries of István Széchényi 1826–1830], ed. Gyula Viszota (Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, 1932), 298 (Note on 10. March 1829). The original German text: “Die zwei letzten Strophen übersetze ich nicht […] sie wollen so viel sagen ‘Es gehet aber alles so in der Welt … eine Nation entstehet, die andere fällt … u[nd] s[o] w[eiter] – Auf diese Art ist jeder berechtigt zu glauben, dass ihn das Geschick verdorben hat, indes der Fehler in ihn[!] liegt.’” Cited from: A History of Hungary, ed. Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák, and Tibor Frank (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 193. The original version: Széchenyi, Hitel, 270. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 169–195.

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stead, they used the elements of the past but made selections and combinations with them in a new way. There is a wide range of tools bricoleurs might use for this purpose. In the list below, I mention four significant types of it. (1) Forgery as mystification. Forgeries of ancient national literary monuments like The Manuscript of the Queen’s Court and Green Mountain Manuscript at the time of the Czech “national revival” were not anything unusual, and – according to Vladimír Macura – do not represent a unique case of classic literary forgeries, rather common and acceptable “mystifications,” for “revivalist culture mystified (and could not but mystify) as a whole.” Accordingly, Václav Hanka’s forgeries became an integral part of a “mystificatory game” with the purpose of creating “an entire Czech culture” with its “traditions.”30 (2) Rearrangement of material found. The Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg (1850), compiled by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, was based on Estonian folklore, but the episodes from various sources are combined into a coherent narrative. The legends about Kalevipoeg are translated from prose into verse, and the hero (originally a giant) is depicted as a 13th-century Estonian king fighting against the German crusaders.31 (3) Re-contextualization of a preexistent work. In Theodor Körner’s German drama Zriny (1812), the war-lord Miklós Zrínyi represents a hero of the Habsburg Empire, while the Croatian and Hungarian translations adapt the story of his heroic death to their own national narratives. In the Hungarian version of Pál Szemere (1826), Zrínyi becomes the defender of the Kingdom of Hungary against the Turks; in the Croatian version by Stjepan Marjanović Brođanin (1840) he is the forerunner of the Panslavic idea.32

30

31

32

Vladimír Macura, “Mystification and the Nation,” in Vladimír Macura, The Mystifications of a Nation: “The Potato Bug” and Other Essays on Czech Culture, trans. and ed. Hana Píchová and Craig Cravens (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 9–11. Also see Pavlina Rychterová, “The Manuscripts of Grünberg and Königinhof: Romantic Lies about the Glorious Past of the Czech Nation,” in Manufacturing a Past for the Present: Forgery and Authenticity in Medievalist Texts and Objects in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. János M. Bak, Patrick J. Geary, and Gábor Klaniczay (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 3–30. Ölo Valk, “Levels of Institutionalization in Estonian Folklore,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 3: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 286. Kálmán Kovács, “Zrínyi: National Recycling(s) of a Hybrid Material (1566–2000),” in History as a Foreign Country: Historical Imagery in the South-Eastern Europe, ed. Zrinka Blažević, Ivana Brković, and Davor Dukić (Bonn: Bouvier-Verlag, 2015), 83–100; Marijan Bobinac, “Theodor Körner im kroatischen Theater,” Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 11 (2002): 59–96.

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Another well-known example for re-contextualization is the opening words of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1833). The words of the Polish national poet “Lithuania! My fatherland!” in the eyes of contemporary readers marked Lithuania as a region of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.33 But in 1898 the Lithuanian poet Vincas Kudirka incorporated this line (modified to “Lithuania! Our fatherland!”) into his poem, “The National Hymn,” where the word “Lithuania” is already taken in a narrow sense as a national territory. This poem eventually became independent Lithuania’s national anthem in 1919.34 (4) Blacking out those parts of the cultural heritage that seemed irrelevant or controversial from a nationalist point of view is yet another tool at the disposal of the nation-bricoleur. Széchenyi’s diaries, cited above, were censored after his death by his secretary Antal Tasner, who deleted compromising passages from the manuscript in order to maintain an idealized picture of the man known as “the greatest Hungarian.”35 While Berzsenyi’s two stanzas mentioned above and Széchenyi’s passages were wiped out because of their problematic contents, in other cases it’s the language that makes certain parts of an oeuvre insignificant. According to a previously prevailing view of Slovak literary history, the Slovak National Poet Hviezdoslav’s (1849–1921) early unpublished attempts represent a “separate and closed chapter, from which the poet disavowed himself.”36 In this period, he also wrote Hungarian poems, among them a poetic composition of approximately 500 verses entitled Tompakő that was not published either by him or by his biographer, the literary historian Albert Pražák (1880–1956), and it had been unknown to the public until recently, when the manuscript was found in Pražák’s familial legacy.37 Sometimes a whole oeuvre is excluded from the national literary canon on the grounds of its language, like that of the Hungarian archbishop Johann Ladislaus Pyrker (1772–1847), who in the 1820s was well-known all over

33

34 35

36 37

Theodore R. Weeks, “Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855),” in Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, ed. Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 139–140. Kevin O’Connor, Culture and Customs of the Baltic States (Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 2006), 123. George Gömöri, “Széchenyi, István,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn / Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), 1119. Anna Zelenková, Ján Gbúr, “Unknown Hungarian First Fruits of the Slovak Poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav,” Neohelicon 44 (2017/2): 469. Ibid., 469.

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Europe for his German-language epic poems.38 Around 1830 young Hungarian nationalist authors criticized him and even the translator who dared to translate a German-language poetic work originally written by Pyrker, for, in their eyes, the Hungarian language was considered to be the only key to Hungarian culture. The leading figure among them was Ferenc Toldy, later known as the “father of Hungarian literary history.”39 All these efforts of nation-bricolage seem to share the belief that although there might be some kind of reworking and selecting of traditions going on, this does not affect the authenticity of the process. The keyword here is “belief”: the bricoleur and his public should believe that the transformation of the historical material found is not an arbitrary deformation but leads through some corrections to a just understanding of the original substance of the subject which actually represents the nation itself.

… If we regard nationalism not as something that emanates from historical processes or social categories, but as a “cultural phenomenon,”40 as a discourse, namely a practice that systematically forms the objects of which it speaks,41 it is illuminating to take into account Derrida’s reflections on the term bricolage: If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it “out of nothing,” “out of whole

38

39

40 41

Ilona T. Erdélyi, “Deutschsprachige Dichtung in Ungarn und ihre Gegner um 1820–1830: Der Pyrker-Streit,” in Jahrbuch der ungarischen Germanistik 1997, ed. Antal Mádl and Gunther Diez (Budapest, Bonn: Gesellschaft Ungarischer Germanisten, DAAD, 1998), 14–21. István Margócsy, “When Language Became Ideology: Hungary in the Eighteenth Century,” in Latin at the Crossroads of Identity: The Evolution of Linguistic Nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary, ed. Gábor Almási and Lav Šubarić (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015), 34. Joep Leerseen, “Introduction,” in Joep Leerseen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 14. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge [1969], trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, New York: Routledge Classics, 1989), 54.

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cloth,” would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. […] [T]he engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur.42 Considering that what on this general level is called the engineer, may be called in the special case of a nationalist discourse the nation-builder, we might add that nation-building is a myth originally produced by nationbricoleurs of the likes of Weaver and Butler. The difference between the two notions can be understood only if one takes their close relationship into account. Both belong to what Joep Leerssen called the “cultivation of culture,” that is, both are re-contextualizing and instrumentalizing the elements of cultural inheritance for modern needs and values,43 with the difference that nation-building produces a nation-builder first, who is supposed to be the origin of the discourse, while nation-bricolage rearranges the material found and produces new constructions, like the “national poet,” within the existing discourse. In sum, I suggest that we should use the terms “nation-building” and “nation-bricolage” in the field of cultural history as follows. “Nation-building” should be used for describing nation-making processes when discontinuities in tradition are to be emphasized; “nation-bricolage” when the goal is to reestablish a continuity between the national past and the present in order to acquire control over the future. “Nation-building” might be the proper phrase in cases when there is a close connection between political and cultural nation-forming endeavors, thus state-building makes up a defining part of the whole process, while “nation-bricolage” is a process that often lacks any connections to political institutions. “Nation-building” is a term describing the American type of discourse on the “founding” of a new nation, while “nation-bricolage” alludes to the narrative on the “revival / rebirth / awakening” of an (ever-)existing nation, which is a common pattern in East-Central European literary cultures. Nation-building is based mainly on the will of the builder, while nation-bricolage consists of organic and voluntaristic aspects at the same time – the individual nation-forming will of the builder is in the latter case replaced by a collective will shared by the bricoleur and his national community. The authenticity of the nation-bricolage is secured by and valid to this national community, while nation-building is based on authen-

42

43

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” [1967] in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 285. Leerseen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” 568.

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tic and iconic builders of the nation. Nation-building is connected to the idea of starting something anew, while nation-bricolage represents a middle course between innovation and tradition. Finally, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the bricoleur’s grasp of nationhood (which, in the last instance, embraces the nation-builder’s discourse, too) follows the patterns of Neoplatonic thought. This relationship awaits further investigation.44

Bibliography Abrams, Meyer Howard. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Apter, David E. “Preface.” In Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. Edited by Clifford Geertz, V–VIII. New York: The Free Press, 1963. Bendix, John. “Introduction to the Transaction Edition.” In Reinhard Bendix, NationBuilding & Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order: Enlarged Edition, XI–XXVI. New Brunswick, London: Transaction Publishers, 1996. Berzsenyi, Dániel. Összes művei: Költelem és folyóbeszéd [Complete works: Poetry and prose]. Edited by Gábor Döbrentei. Buda: Royal University Press, 1842. Bobinac, Marijan. “Theodor Körner im kroatischen Theater.” Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 11 (2002): 59–96. Butler, Nicholas Murray. “Have We an American Nation?” The Journal of Education 85, no. 3 (January 18, 1917): 61–62. Csetri, Lajos. Nem sokaság hanem lélek: Berzsenyi-tanulmányok [Not multitudes, but souls: Studies in Berzsenyi]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. [1967].” In Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, 278–294. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Deutsch, Karl W. “Nation-Building and National Development: Some Issues for Political Research.” In Nation-Building [First edition: 1963]. Edited by Karl W. Deutsch and William J. Foltz, 1–17. New York: Atherton Press, 1966. Domonkos, Leslie S. “The Multiethnic Character of the Hungarian Kingdom in the Later Middle Ages.” In Transylvania: The Roots of Ethnic Conflict. Edited by John F. Cadzow, Andrew Ludanyi, and Louis J. Elteto, 41–60. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983. Dović, Marijan, and Jón Karl Helgason. National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 44

The author wish to thank Réka Futász and Sándor Hites for their help and advice with this article.

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Erdélyi, Ilona T. “Deutschsprachige Dichtung in Ungarn und ihre Gegner um 1820– 1830: Der Pyrker-Streit.” In Jahrbuch der ungarischen Germanistik 1997. Herausgegeben von Antal Mádl, Gunther Diez, 14–21. Budapest, Bonn: Gesellschaft Ungarischer Germanisten, DAAD, 1998. Finer, Samuel E. “State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military.” In The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Edited by Charles Tilly, 84–164. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1975. Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge [1969]. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London, New York: Routledge Classics, 1989. Genette, Gérard, “Structuralism and Literary Criticism.” In Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse. Translated by Alan Shredian, 3–26. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Gömöri, George. “Széchenyi, István.” In Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. Edited by Christopher John Murray, 1118–1119. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn / Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. Henrikson, Paula. “Inventing Literary Heritage: National Consciousness and Editorial Scholarship in Sweden, 1810–1830.” In Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation. Edited by Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen, 103–126. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010. Kovács, Kálmán. “Zrínyi: National Recycling(s) of a Hybrid Material (1566–2000).” In History as a Foreign Country: Historical Imagery in the South-Eastern Europe. Edited by Zrinka Blažević, Ivana Brković, and Davor Dukić, 83–100. Bonn: Bouvier-Verlag, 2015. Leerssen, Joep, and Ann Rigney, eds. Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Leerssen, Joep. “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literatures.” In Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and NationBuilding in 19th-Century Europe. Edited by Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen, 13–27. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2008. Leerssen, Joep. “Introduction.” In Joep Leerseen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, 13–24. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 559–578. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind [1962]. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953.

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Macura, Vladimír. The Mystifications of a Nation: “The Potato Bug” and Other Essays on Czech Culture. Translated and edited by Hana Píchová and Craig Cravens. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Makkai, Adam, ed. In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’: The Poetry of Hungary. Budapest, Chicago: Tertia, Atlantis-Centaur, Framo Publishing, 2000. Margócsy, István. “When Language Became Ideology: Hungary in the Eigteenth Century.” In Latin at the Crossroads of Identity: The Evolution of Linguistic Nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary. Edited by Gábor Almási and Lav Šubarić, 27–34. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015. Mylonas, Harris. “Nation-Building.” In Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations. Edited by Patrick James. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Accessed October 15, 2018. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/ obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0217.xml. Nemoianu, Virgil. “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance.” In Romantic Poetry. Edited by Angela Esterhammer, 249–255. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. Neubauer, John. “Figures of National Poets: Introduction.” In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 4: Types and Stereotypes. Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 11–18. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Neubauer, John. “General Introduction.” In History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 3: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions. Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 1–39. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. O’Connor, Kevin. Culture and Customes of the Baltic States. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 2006. Runden, Charity Eva. Twentieth-Century Educators. New York: Monarch Press, 1965. Rychterová, Pavlina. “The Manuscripts of Grünberg and Königinhof: Romantic Lies about the Glorious Past of the Czech Nation.” In Manufacturing a Past for the Present: Forgery and Authenticity in Medievalist Texts and Objects in NineteenthCentury Europe. Edited by János M. Bak, Patrick J. Geary, and Gábor Klaniczay, 3–30. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Széchenyi, István. Hitel [Credit]. Pest: Trattner–Károlyi, 1830. Széchenyi, István. Naplói, 3 (1826–1830) [Diaries of István Széchenyi 1826–1830]. Edited by Gyula Viszota. Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, 1932. Vaderna, Gábor. A költészet születése: A magyarországi költészet társadalomtörténete a 19. század első évtizedeiben [The birth of poetry: A social history of poetry in

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Hungary in the first decades of the nineteenth century]. Budapest: Universitas, 2017. Valk, Ölo. “Levels of Institutionalization in Estonian Folklore.” In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 3, 285–290. Weaver, George Sumner. The Lives and Graves of Our Presidents. Chicago: National Book Concern, 1883. Weeks, Theodore R. “Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855).” In Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present. Edited by Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland, 139–140. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Zelenková, Anna, and Ján Gbúr. “Unknown Hungarian First Fruits of the Slovak Poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav.” Neohelicon 44 (2017/2), 469–485.

A National Epic from Below: Kalevipoeg in the Writings of Grassroots Literati Katre Kikas

The literary canon is not something fixed, but a constant process of (re)interpreting, (re)including and (re)excluding. There are works which are included only for a short period and then forgotten, and others which by constant reinterpretations manage to keep their position through different eras and political situations. Often the importance of a canonical work is not based on the work itself, but on the dense layer of other texts (literary works, paintings, movies, retellings, research, etc.) inspired by it – be those texts panegyric, critical or parodic. The focus of this article is on one of the stars of the Estonian literary canon – the national epic Kalevipoeg (Son of [the mythical hero] Kalev, Fr. R. Kreutzwald, first publication 1857–1861, most up-to-date English translation is published in 2011).1 It is not an exaggeration to say that besides being the starting point of the Estonian literary canon as such, this work is also a kind of symbolic beginning of the modern Estonian nation. Kalevipoeg gave rural Estonians something substantial which helped them to perceive themselves as members of this new kind of “imagined community.”2 In this article I am not focusing on Kalevipoeg as such, but on a very specific layer in its reception – ideas written down by laymen in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This is a kind of hidden area of the dense intertextual network surrounding Kalevipoeg – hidden because those literati I am concentrating on did not have direct access to public literary space. I do agree with Karin Barber who has stated that the proper understanding of the literary sphere of a certain era can only be assessed by involving authors who for different reasons remained hidden, besides those who were published and known, – even if the former did not affect what happened later, they provide “a glimpse into what people at the time saw as possibilities that existed or could

1 Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, Kalevipoeg, The Estonian National Epic, trans. Triinu Kartus (Tartu, Tallinn: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, Kunst, 2011). 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_012

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be created.”3 Because even in obscurity, they did not exist in isolation – their writings are in dialogue with those who entered the public space and they show how the ideas spreading in public were interpreted in the village milieu where oral and literate modes of expression were living side by side.

1

Estonians in the 19th Century

Estonia became an independent state on the 24th of February 1918. Before that the area belonged in the Russian Empire. Estonians did not even have an administrative unit for themselves – what is now Northern Estonia was called the Estonian Province, whereas Southern Estonia was one part of the Livonian Province (together with Northern Latvia). The local power was divided between the Baltic-German elite and Russians; the Estonian-speaking majority was mostly agrarian (in case social advancement occurred, they mostly became Germanized). All through the 19th century the status of Estonians improved. Abolition of serfdom (1816 in the Estonian Province and 1819 in the Livonian Province) and the right to own land (1849 in the Livonian Province and 1856 in the Estonian Province) provided the possibility for economic independence. Formation of a network of village schools (fully formed by the 1850s in the Livonian Province and the 1870s in the Estonian Province) brought about a considerable increase in literacy: according to the census of 1881, 93.7% of adults were able to read, 35.2% could also write;4 according to the census of 1897, 91% of the population was able to read and 77% to write as well.5 The last decades of the century were marked by centralizing reforms of the state (also called Russification) which had a rather equivocal influence on Estonians. On the one hand, the reforms reduced the use of the Estonian language in public institutions (including the lower court and village schools), on the other hand, it offered better job opportunities to Estonians who were able to learn Russian. Economic independence and higher literacy rates can be linked to the rise of national consciousness among Estonians. The Estonian national awakening is often described using the three-part model of Miroslav Hroch. In phase A, representatives of another nation take an interest in the language and folk3 Karin Barber, “Writing, Genre, and a Schoolmaster’s Inventions in the Yoruba Provinces,” in Africa’s Hidden Histories. Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 385. 4 Heldur Palli, Eesti rahvastiku ajaloo lühiülevaade (Tallinn: Sisekaitseakadeemia, 1998), 21–22. 5 Uno Liivaku, Eesti raamatu lugu (Monolleö: Jyväskylä, 1995), 86.

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lore of a certain ethnic group (in the Estonian case, those were Baltic-German estophiles), in phase B the process is taken over by indigenous nationallyminded enthusiasts (who establish various societies, newspapers and start to standardize the language, in Estonia this started in the 1860s), whereas phase C involves the spread of national ideas among the wider masses and the rise of political ambition (in the Estonian case, this phase started in the 1890s).6 In this article I am mostly concerned with the last mass-movement phase, but the object of discussion – the national epic Kalevipoeg – was a kind of cocreation of the people from phases A and B. I will start off with some notes about Kalevipoeg.7

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Kalevipoeg: Fulfilment of the Synecdoche

Kalevipoeg is a character in Estonian folklore. He is a giant who is mostly found in etiological and local legends (he is comparable to Prometheus or Scandinavian trolls). Most of these texts are short and closely connected to the landscape of Estonia. A typical text just says: “this stone was thrown by Kalevipoeg to defend his horse from the wolves” or “this valley was formed when Kalevipoeg took a nap here.” There is also one folk song type (Suisa suud [Just a kiss]), one fairy-tale type (ATU 650B) and some more elaborate legends, but overall the oral tradition is as described above. The character is not always human-friendly, nor very smart or heroic, neither are the stories evenly distributed across Estonia.8 This means that the oral tradition about Kalevipoeg is not very easily translatable into a coherent whole – it is not possible just to write down the tradition and do some editing work. The creation of an epic out of this material needed quite a different kind of processing. Estonian literary scholar Jaan Undusk has stated that Estonian nation-building was initially founded on “a principle of synecdoche” – a way of thinking that regards current phenomena as remnants of some whole that existed in the past. Undusk notes that this 6 Miroslav Hroch, Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Völkern Europas (Praha: Universita Karlova, 1968), 24–26. 7 More detailed accounts on the creation and reception of Kalevipoeg can be found in Cornelius Hasselblatt, Kalevipoeg Studies. The Creation and Reception of an Epic (Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, 2016); and Lauri Honko, ed., The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002). 8 For archival texts and overview of the tradition, see Eduard Laugaste and Erna Normann, Muistendid Kalevipojast. Monumenta Estonia Antiquae II. Eesti muistendid. Hiiu- ja vägilasmuistendid I (Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1959).

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principle was inspired by several Western European authors (whom Undusk defines as the cultural centre of the time) – mostly Friedrich Gottlieb Herder and Johann Georg Hamann, but in the Baltic Provinces (which Undusk sees as a periphery) those ideas were taken much more seriously. It was not just an aestheticizing of the fragment / torso, but an urge “to fulfil the synecdoche,” i.e., reconstructing the hypothetic whole: Indeed, the past was acknowledged here as an extensive synecdoche, but this only signified an encouraging start. A bold venture onwards ensued, sparking the fulfilment of the synecdoche, as it were. The Estophile cultural activity is a striking example of how, by embracing ideas from the centre, the periphery can particularly empower them in a certain direction, compress them into a particularly dense and even elusive body of principles, to build on it in full earnestness something not altogether facilitated by the philosophically groomed scepticism of the centre.9 If we assess the texts written by people who were somehow involved in the emergence of the epic, we can detect a strong emphasis on the fact that though we now have only fragments, there used to be something bigger. Especially noteworthy are two speeches given at the Estonian Learned Society in 1839. In the beginning of the year, the physician Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798–1850), who was of Estonian descent, rendered a compilation of the stories about Kalevipoeg known to him. Through he stresses that the stories are fragmentary, he has made an effort to unite them, at the same time providing the character with a kind of national heroism (an aspect totally lacking in oral tradition). Faehlmann did not call his compilation an epic but a cycle of fairy tales. The idea of the epic was applied to this material in another speech delivered by a Baltic-German intellectual, Georg Julius von Schultz-Bertram (1808–1875); after naming the remaining Kalevipoeg-tales as a “distorted torso,” he utters his famous call “Let’s give the nation its epic and history and we have made it.”10 After those events, the Estonian Learned Society asked Faehlmann to consider the possibility to elaborate his compilation into an epic. Faehlmann continued collecting new stories but died in 1850. Upon Faehlmann’s death, the work was taken over by his friend and colleague Friedrich Reinhold

9 10

Jaan Undusk, “Hamanni ja Herderi vaim eesti kirjanduse edendajana: sünekdohhi printsiip,” Keel ja Kirjandus 9–11 (1995): 679. Quoted from Laugaste and Normann, Muistendid Kalevipojast, 102.

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Kreutzwald. After reading the German translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala, Kreutzwald decided that the epic should be in verse. He gave up the idea to rely only on tales about Kalevipoeg and used various motifs of folk songs and folk narratives, but also motifs from pseudo-mythology. In doing this, Kreutzwald was a real bricoleur,11 but at the same time he maintained a synecdochal attitude, recurrently complaining that the folk has forgotten so much or mixed everything up, and he has to be the one to sort it out. The first version of the epic (called The Proto-Kalevipoeg) was ready in 1853 but it was rejected by censorship. The heavily reworked version was published in 1857–1861 by the Estonian Learned Society as an academic publication. The first edition meant for the general reading public was issued in 1862 in Kuopio, Finland.

3

Kalevipoeg in the Public Discourse at the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Century

In brief, the creation of Kalevipoeg was a kind of public relations project of the Estonian national awakening, directed simultaneously in two different ways: towards non-Estonians to prove that Estonians belong among the educated nations; and towards Estonians to unite ethnic Estonians regardless of where they were living or which dialect they spoke. The uniting power of the text relied on the belief that the work was not written by Kreutzwald but he was a diligent transcriber of an existing oral piece. But this belief did not last long – already in the last decades of the 19th century, intellectuals became suspicious of the oral origins of Kalevipoeg.12 In the beginning of the 20th century, accusations of inauthenticity were coupled with ones about its meagre literary quality (mainly expressed by the members of the modernist literary group Noor-Eesti or Young Estonia). This criticism coincides with the beginning of phase C of the national movement, i.e., the time when national ideas spread from the elite level to the other strata of the society. Broader involvement also brought about diversification of opinions about the nation and its symbols. Thus, while members of the 11 12

See Gergely Fórizs’s article in this volume “Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary,” 165–182. For example, linguist and folklorist Jakob Hurt wrote in 1888: “Even the blessed father of song Kreutzwald has greatly harmed the songs he wrote down by often changing them and mixing them with his own poetry. In the field of science, his material has therefore unfortunately lost a large share of its price.” (Jakob Hurt, Mida rahva mälestustest pidada (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1989), 50).

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national elite began to question the oral origins and literary value of the epic, the laymen of little education who had just started to show interest in national matters took it as something of high symbolic value and reacted painfully to the critical views they saw in newspapers. Often those reactions were not prompted by reading the epic from cover to cover – the Kalevipoeg experience of those people was more dispersed, consisting of longer and shorter quotations or retellings in different written (newspapers, schoolbooks, anthologies) and oral (speeches, performances) sources which they often complemented with their own knowledge of the oral tradition about Kalevipoeg.13 Some of the reasons for this were rather mundane – the epic was just too expensive for ordinary people and their access to bookshops was rather limited. In the title of my paper I have called this phenomenon “grassroots literati” – which is a derivation from the notion “grassroots (or vernacular) literacy,” denoting literacy practices evolving outside the institutions dedicated to the spread of literacy.14 What counts as “vernacular literacy” is of course to some extent the choice of the researcher. As Estonian language did not have any official status in the decades I am covering, the whole Estonian language literary sphere can be analyzed as vernacular. Here I am still separating the cultural elite, who had better access to education and public sphere (and who usually were able to read and write in some foreign language as well) and ordinary people who tended to have minimal education, whose literacy was mostly confined to Estonian language and whose access to the public sphere was restricted. Still the boundaries are vague, since people often strove for a better position in this social scheme. Some managed, others did not. Also, the restricted access to the literary sphere did not mean total denial, but rather participation within certain boundaries – for example, everybody was welcome to send news from their area to newspapers (every newspaper had a special section for local news), while the space for longer writings was reserved for more educated people. So at least in my case, the grassroots literati do not exist in absolute isolation – they were well aware of what was going on in public, and they constantly borrowed from its discourse, adapting and interpreting it from the perspective of their respective world. 13 14

This experience of Kalevipoeg is in many respects similar to their experience of the Bible. See, for example, Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Barton and Mary Hamilton, Local Literacies. Reading and Writing in One Community (London, New York: Routledge, 2003 [1998]); Johannes Fabian, “Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading,” in Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), 80–97.

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The National Epic from Below: Two Cases

One very special arena of vernacular literacy in 19th-century Estonia was participating in folklore collecting campaigns. During the 1890s there were two major campaigns going on simultaneously, conducted by Jakob Hurt (1839–1907) and Matthias Johann Eisen (1857–1934). These were open to everybody and among the participants there were quite a few village people of limited education. As the calls and reports of collecting were published in newspapers, the writing for those campaigns was considered a kind of half-public writing (or the first step in becoming a public writer). Though the writing done in this frame may seem very restricted, people often sent very varied texts to the organizers – besides folklore, they also contributed their own literary creations or interpretations of folklore. Though the organizers were not always happy about this, nowadays those “other writings” are as important cultural documents as the “folklore proper.”15 The grassroots literati whose texts I am going to analyze here were also involved in folklore collecting campaigns. One of them – a tailor Hans Anton Schults (1866–1905) – was among the most prolific folklore collectors for Hurt; the writings he sent to Hurt are the only sources we have of his literacy practices. The other man – a miller Märt Siipsen (1846–1816) – was a co-worker of Eisen, but besides the texts in Eisen’s collection I have discovered his personal archive in the Estonian Cultural Archive, which is my main source here. Schults and Siipsen belonged to different generations but there are several similarities between their life experiences. They were representatives of a rather untypical vocation – the lives of tailors and millers differed considerably from the lives of farmers. Both were very religious, but being critical of the institutional Lutheran church (which tended to segregate according to class and nation at the time), they joined other denominations – Schults turned to the Orthodox church, Siipsen to the Brotherhood congregation. Their formal education consisted of three years in a village school (this was the minimal level compulsory for everyone), but they both tried to compensate their lack 15

Katre Kikas, “Folklore Collecting as Vernacular Literacy. Establishing Social Position for Writing in the 1890s Estonia,” in Vernacular Literacy. Past, Present and Future, ed. AnnCaterine Edlund, Lars-Erik Edlund, and Susanne Haugen (Umeå: Umeå University, 2014), 309–323. Also see Kati Mikkola, “Self-Taught Collectors of Folklore and their Challenge to Archival Authority,” in White Field, Black Seeds. Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Anna Kuismin and M. J. Driscoll (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2013), 146–157; Kaisa Kauranen, “Odd Man Out? The Self Philosopher and his Social Analyses of the 19th-Century,” in White Field, Black Seeds. Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century, 120–133.

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of education with a lot of reading. They also sought possibilities to connect with the public literary spheres – besides participation in folklore collecting campaigns they also sent their writing to newspapers. Quite possibly their interest in reading and writing and their urge to participate in the public sphere distinguished them from their surroundings (for example, both indicate that they are among the very few newspaper readers in their vicinity). They served as mediators between written and oral – as folklore collectors, they contributed their local traditions to the body of national ones, as readers they “translated” the written world for the local level. While delving into their take on Kalevipoeg, it is important to remember this special position. Though they wanted to belong to the new and modernizing written society, their reading practices (i.e., the ways they made sense of what they read) were often guided by their oral backgrounds. In case of Kalevipoeg, this special way of reading was even more intensified by their knowledge of the oral background of the text.

5

Hans Anton Schults (1866–1905)

Hans Anton Schults was born in the village of Vaali in Central Estonia (Estonian Province). He was a tailor, but later in life he also worked as a travelling bookseller and farmhand. He spent most of his life in the village of Vaali (he had a small house on his brother’s land), except for 1887–1889 when he was in military service in Vyborg (he got an early release because of a sudden illness). Schults was active during the Revolution of 1905. He represented his area in the national gatherings held in Tartu, but as he felt that the gatherings were not achieving enough, he decided to act on the local scale himself. In December 1905, he and some companions established the Republic of Vaali (named after their home village) and he was elected president of this republic. At the end of the year, everybody involved in the administration of the republic was shot.16 Besides being a revolutionary, Schults is also remembered as one of the most prolific co-workers of Jakob Hurt. During 1890–1903 Schults sent Hurt more than 2000 pages of various materials. These pages include quite diverse folklore genres: folktales, songs, short forms, descriptions of local language and

16

It is worth noting that across Estonia, about 30 similar mini-republics were formed during the revolution. The republic of Vaali was somewhat exceptional among them – it is the only one that is said to have had a written constitution.

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customs. However, Schults also sent Hurt his own literary creations (which he presents as folklore, but there is a huge stylistic difference) and several polemical writings on different topical matters. Especially in his later collections (sent in 1903, two years before the revolution) these polemical texts fill most of the pages. Although these texts are often connected to some folklore publication, they mostly deal with wider social phenomena: he is worried about the difficult living conditions of landless people, the arrogance of Baltic-German gentry and Lutheran parsons (most of them were also Baltic-German at the time) and the decline of morals of contemporary people. His polemical writings are often like defense speeches. His aim is to react to any kind of critique addressed towards phenomena and people he admires. He is very angry when somebody speaks about the international origin of certain folktales (he finds it offensive towards his nation), but he also reacts fervently to criticism concerning people he considers cultural heroes. These include a writer, politician and pedagogue Carl Robert Jakobson (1841–1882), a writer and linguist Mihkel Veske (1843–1890), but most often he is defending Kreutzwald and Kalevipoeg. In the collection sent to Hurt in 1903, there are two texts overtly dealing with attitudes towards Kalevipoeg. One is a heated reaction to an article by a writer Andres Saal – Schults’s aim is to prove that Saal’s reading of the epic is totally mistaken and depreciates his own nation. The other text is titled “Dr Kreutzwald and his Kalevipoeg” and it is an overt defense speech. So he starts off: “Dr Kreutzwald has been blamed for not building his ‘Kalevipoeg’ purely on folklore.”17 After that he admits that he has not read the whole epic, but only excerpts embedded in other books, but he finds that those excerpts are real folklore: “Indeed I have not read ‘Kalevipoeg’ yet, but those songs in the school textbook and stenography manual and in various other places – these are by the people…”18 In this excerpt he refers to two specific books: “a school textbook” and a stenography manual.19 The first of these is quite unsurprising – the readers compiled by Jakobson were widely used in different schools, playing an important part in disseminating knowledge of Estonian history and (pseudo)mythology.20 The stenography manual (which contains

17 18 19

20

Hans Anton Schults, 1903, H II 67, 466/7, Folklore collection of Jakob Hurt, Estonian Folklore Archives. All the citations from archival materials are translated by Berk Vaher. Ibid. Likely Carl Robert Jakobson, Kooli Lugemise raamat. 1. jagu (Tartu: H. Laakmann, 1867); and Juhan Kurrik, Stenografia õpetus. Eestikeele kohta loonud Juhan Kurrik (Schnakenburgi trükikoda: Tartu, 1882). Ea Jansen, Vaateid eesti rahvusluse sünniaegadesse (Tartu: Ilmamaa, 2004), 280.

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one song from Kalevipoeg as an exercise), on the other hand, is quite a surprising reference – something that people are meant to read for learning a practical skill is actually read for pleasure. At the same time this surprising reference is quite a nice illustration of the fact that the access to printed matter could be rather complicated, and people who were interested in reading would read all they could find. One reason why Schults himself did not see any problem with his fragmentary reading experience was that his take on the subject was similar to Kreutzwald’s – he believed in the principle of synecdoche. On the one hand, he could take the excerpts he read for representations of the epic as a whole. But what is more important – he believed that Kreutzwald’s work itself was only a fragment of something bigger, a fragment that needed completion. So he states in the same text: “I think that Kreutzwald was not even able to collect all the Kalevipoeg songs […] The blessed Kreutzwald has only just made a start. Many more Kalevipoeg tales can still emerge.”21 So we can see that being a folklore collector himself, Schults values Kreutzwald in the first place as an exemplary folklore collector. Continuing Kreutzwald’s quest for the old heritage is what he sees as the duty of his contemporaries. Rather than being a (mere) reader, he aspires to become the co-creator of the epic. Schults himself has noted down several tales about Kalevipoeg. Among them are folk legends but Kalevipoeg is also a character in his own literary creations (which are presented as folklore). All these texts are prose narratives – among Schults’s collections there are no songs about Kalevipoeg. It is rather unsurprising because even though Schults has collected some songs, he prefers narrative materials, and his own literary creations are without exception prose narratives. This prevalence of prose can also be explained by most of the oral tradition consisting of prose narratives. But taking into account Schults’s defense of Kreutzwald, and especially his remark that the songs he has encountered in the books are “by the people” (see above), a question arises – doesn’t he see any contradiction between his own materials and Kreutzwald’s work? The answer seems to be yes and no. On the one hand, there is one contextual factor that helped to blur the question of which is more authentic, prose or verse: when excerpts from Kalevipoeg where embedded in other works (such as readers or anthologies) they could be direct (verse) quotations or prose retellings. Of the two books Schults refers to, one (the stenography manual) contains only verses, while the other (the reader) contains verse and prose retellings. It seems quite likely that this kind of co-existence of versified and

21

Schults, H II 67, 466/7.

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prose versions served for Schults (and many others) as a connector between Kreutzwald’s work and oral tradition. In a way it downplayed the question of prose vs. verse as a matter of personal choice (not something essential to the tradition) and enabled Schults to choose prose. But there is still one hint that this lack of songs bothers him. While defending Kreutzwald, he refers to a possible source of new songs: My father, 78 years old, told me that when they were laboring and spending the nights in Tallinn Karu office, there was a scribe who all the time and through the nights was writing down Kalev’s songs and compiled those large books. But where this ancient collection is kept, nobody knows.22 This reference to hypothetical manuscripts is a nice variation of one of the main leitmotifs in Schults’s writings. Whenever he wants to prove his point but lacks suitable folkloric material, he hints at some old manuscripts created in ancient times and hidden at the time of the Crusades.23 Here he refers to the manuscripts created quite recently, but this hope to find written material that precedes his own time is quite telling. At the same time it is also a fine way to create missing songs in the form of prose narrative. Taking into account the sheer amount of non-folklore materials among his collections, it is interesting to see that instead of just creating the songs himself, he found a narrative solution which suited him better.

6

Märt Siipsen (1846–1916)

Märt Siipsen was born in the Ämmuste village in the so-called Mulgimaa area (in the Livonian Province) as the son of a miller. In 1883 he bought a small watermill and moved from Mulgimaa to Võrumaa. The purchase was not very successful. The watermill was situated on a river so small that the mill could only be used in case of heavy rains, and the landlord who sold the mill went bankrupt (followed by a decades-long series of court-cases with the new one who did not acknowledge the contracts drawn by the former one). In the Estonian Cultural History Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum there is quite an extensive collection of notebooks filled by Siipsen. Most of 22 23

Schults, H II 67, 466/7. Katre Kikas, “Rahvaluulekoguja raamatuid otsimas. Hans Anton Schults,” Acta Semiotica Estica VII (2010): 64–101.

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them are written after his move to Võrumaa. Only two have been started in the pre-move period, both rather practical (records of sowing times and spending). This asymmetry could have come about because it was inconvenient to take the whole archive along from earlier places. However, seeing how much his written heritage meant to him (he constantly re-reads, comments and rewrites his earlier writings), this explanation does not seem plausible. Rather, it was a move away from friends and relatives that got him writing on such a large scale. The notebooks are filled with poetry, short stories, diaries, religious contemplations, folklore texts, and different polemical commentaries on topical matters. Some of his writings have been sent to newspapers (some even got published), others (for example the religious ones) were read by his friends and relatives, but the majority of them seem to have had mostly an auto-communicative function.24 Texts meant for the public (if we leave aside the religious ones) are mostly very critical of his contemporary society. The problems he addresses are rather similar to those that bothered Schults: land problems, the parsons who do not care about the souls of the Estonians, and the declining morals of his contemporaries. As in Schults’s case one of the signs of the latter is the fact that people do not value cultural heroes. The choice of these is similar to Schults as well: Kreutzwald, Veske, a writer Juhan Kunder (1952–1888), however, he adds one woman – the first Estonian female poet Lydia Koidula (1843–1886). There is one huge difference between Schults and Siipsen – Siipsen expresses his ideas and feelings about these literati not in prose but in verse. For example, all the names mentioned are put side by side in a poem following the death of Veske in 1890 where he wonders about the fate of a nation whose heroes are dead: “Kreutzwald, Kunder, Jakobson are dead / Koidula has departed from us.”25 In the poem “Young Estonians” (written in 1914) he addresses a critique against his heroes expressed by the modernist literary group Young Estonia. Siipsen states that the literature created by these young writers is not understandable to ordinary people. As representatives of the old ones he mentions Kreutzwald and Koidula, but in the last lines of the poem he makes a rather international comparison: It’s unheard of among the Germans That Schiller and Goethe are spoken ill of 24

25

Eadem, “Mis kuulsin rahva suust se panin kirja… Mölder Märt Siipseni kirjalikust pärandist,” in Tartu Ülikooli Lõuna-Eesti keele- ja kultuuriuuringute keskuse aastaraamat, ed. Mart Velsker (Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2015), 33–54. Märt Siipsen, 1890, f 169, m 133: 1, l 37–39, Estonian Cultural Archives.

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What are young Estonian urchins up to? They keep on mocking our greatest men […].26 He has written two poems which more or less directly refer to Kalevipoeg. I do not know, if he had had the chance to read Kalevipoeg from cover to cover, but I suppose that similarly to Schults his access to this work had been through excerpts in various other publications. At least in the booklet where he notes down all his spending, there is no mention of buying Kalevipoeg; we also do not find any direct quotations or references to motifs derived from the epic. The earliest example is a poem “Ärkamine” [Awakening], written in 1888, where he refers to Kalevipoeg as a moral example for contemporary people. The poem expresses severe criticism against the deeds of the Baltic Germans, and it calls people up to recognize the social inequality surrounding them. The poem starts with the statement that in earlier times, Estonians were illiterate and all their wisdom was gathered in oral lore. He exhorts people to turn to Kalevipoeg to get a glimpse of their ancestors’ lives and minds and find inspiration for thinking independently. See the songs of the son of the Kalevs That are now brought back to life […] Take note with the greatest care Then the song can give much guidance […].27 Another poem (written in 1903) does not mention Kalevipoeg (nor Kreutzwald), but as it is written in alliterative style (in all other poems Siipsen uses endrhyme), Kalevipoeg is a quite obvious source of inspiration. Though alliteration can also refer to old regilaul (runic song) which Kreutzwald used as his model, it is rather unlikely that Siipsen wanted to highlight this connection – the style and content of the poem is closer to Kalevipoeg than to oral regilaul. The poem is titled “Lugulaul” – the word means story-song and can refer to different narrative songs. Sometimes “lugulaul” is used as a synonym to the epic (instead of the loanword “eepos”), Kreutzwald himself did not use this term (the subtitle of his work is The old Estonian tale), but several later retellings of Kalevipoeg do. The main content of Siipsen’s poem is similar to Kalevipoeg – the fight between Estonians and Germans, but Siipsen depicts the fight as an

26 27

Idem, 1914, f 169, m 134: 10, l 11–12, Estonian Cultural Archives. Idem, 1888, f 169, m 129:8, l 26–27, Estonian Cultural Archives.

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ongoing event and connects it with a criticism of the harsh conditions of landless Estonians. The poem incorporates several motifs from folk narratives, but mostly is Siispsen’s own creation, the choice of alliterative style (and a lot of parallel lines) has made the text more descriptive than appellative: But the sorcerers28 won’t slumber Get no sleep on fair Maryland They are selling dear Estonian ground Taking blood price for it If you’re not able to pay up Another farm goes to the Germans Larger chunk to a sorcerer Bigger chunk to one from hell […].29 Thus, while Schults was eager to uncover unknown Kalevipoeg songs / tales, Siipsen uses the form utilized by Kreutzwald to create something completely new – something that is as national and socially critical as Kalevipoeg, but addresses current affairs. For him, Kreutzwald is not the ultimate folklore collector but a poet (comparable to Koidula, Schiller and Goethe), capable of mixing old narratives and current needs into one whole. It is quite telling how he criticizes his contemporary life using a form (and stylistic mode) that is under severe criticism at the time – it is as if he is accusing the contemporary literati (who oppose this kind of writing) of not being interested in social problems of the time.

7

Conclusion

Schults and Siipsen were men living in an environment where orality prevailed but aspired towards literary culture. As folklore collectors they both stand quite consciously on the borderline between oral and literate, local and national. Their take on Kalevipoeg reflects this ambiguous position well – they both find it utterly valuable, but quite likely have read only excerpts from it, to

28

29

Sorts can mean a sorcerer or an evil spirit. Siipsen uses it in plural, as a reference to the enemies of the nation. This usage is similar to the way it is used by Kreutzwald in Kalevipoeg, but apart from Kreutzwald who uses it as a kind of symbolic enemy, never labelling any particular nation, here and there Siipsen uses an alliteration sortsid sakslased (evil spirits Germans), coupling in this fashion the symbolic enemy with the real one. Märt Siipsen, 1903, f 169, m 134: 6, l 20–28, Estonian Cultural Archives.

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which they have added their knowledge of local narratives about Kalevipoeg. Their interpretation of Kalevipoeg is rather like that of Kreutzwald and his contemporaries – they believe in the power of synecdochal thinking. This is especially visible in the case of Schults who sees Kreutzwald’s work as a kind of fragment needing additions, but Siipsen’s urge to create a poem in the Kalevipoeg style also indicates the same direction. It is rather paradoxical that the opposition between Schults, Siipsen and their contemporary literary elite reflects the earlier opposition between Estophiles (a cultural periphery) and Western Europe (a cultural centre) which Jaan Undusk highlighted30 – only this time, the naïve periphery consists of the lower classes of Estonians. It is interesting, though, that their defense of Kreutzwald has two different sides. On the one hand, the attacks against Kreutzwald correspond to their overall conservative and anti-modern stance towards society – this is one sign of the decline of the morals of their contemporaries. In this way, the defense of Kreutzwald is a critique of phenomena they dislike in their own society. On the other hand, we can see how defending Kreutzwald also means defending their own right for creative self-expression. Kreutzwald is a cultural hero because he gives viable models that can be used again in other circumstances. They are not defending Kreutzwald as someone to admire from afar, but one to follow earnestly. Awareness that their hero is being marginalized by their contemporaries can help them to accept their own marginal status. Being ironic, we can say that the examples are variations on the cliché of “a canonical work is something that nobody reads, but everybody has an opinion about.” This cliché refers, on the one hand, to the fact that every canonical work is surrounded by a dense intertextual network which influences how different people consume and interpret it. On the other hand, this non-reading gets quite a new meaning in an environment where literary and oral intermingle and where the dissemination of the printed word is uneven. Do the writings of these grassroots literati reflect some broader attitudes? Possibly yes. Though they did not have direct access to public literary space, it is probable that the ideas they present have evolved in talks with people around them. In Schults’s case it is quite likely that the speeches he gave during the revolution conveyed similar themes. Of course we do not know the extent of the resonance they could have, but still these materials are telling because they show that the attitudes (towards nationality and national sym-

30

Undusk, “Hamanni ja Herderi vaim eesti kirjanduse edendajana: sünekdohhi printsiip,” 679.

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bols) among Estonians were much more varied than is revealed in public sources.31

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Estonian Cultural Archives, f 169. Estonian Folklore Archives, Jakob Hurt’s folklore collections, H II 67.

References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 2006. Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Barber, Karin. “Writing, Genre, and a Schoolmaster’s Inventions in the Yoruba Provinces.” In Africa’s Hidden Histories. Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Edited by Karin Barber, 385–415. Bloomington and Indiapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies. Reading and Writing in One Community. London, New York: Routledge, 2003 [1998]. Fabian, Johannes. “Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading.” In Ethnography of Reading. Edited by Jonathan Boyarin, 80–97. Berkely, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. Hasselblatt, Cornelius. Kalevipoeg Studies. The Creation and Reception of an Epic. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, 2016. Honko, Lauri, ed. The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002. Hroch, Miroslav. Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Völkern Europas. Praha: Universita Karlova, 1968. Hurt, Jakob. Mida rahva mälestustest pidada. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1989. Jakobson, Carl Robert. Kooli Lugemise raamat. 1. jagu. Tartu: H. Laakmann, 1867. Jansen, Ea. Vaateid eesti rahvusluse sünniaegadesse. Tartu: Ilmamaa, 2004. Kauranen, Kaisa. “Odd Man Out? The Self Philosopher and his Social Analyses of the 19th-Century.” In White Field, Black Seeds. Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Anna Kuismin and M. J. Driscoll, 120–133. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2013. 31

The research for this article was supported by research project EKM 8-2/20/3 and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (CEES).

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Kikas, Katre. “Mis kuulsin rahva suust se panin kirja… Mölder Märt Siipseni kirjalikust pärandist.” In Tartu Ülikooli Lõuna-Eesti keele- ja kultuuriuuringute keskuse aastaraamat. Edited by Mart Velsker, 33–54. Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2015. Kikas, Katre. “Folklore Collecting as Vernacular Literacy. Establishing Social Position for Writing in the 1890s Estonia.” In Vernacular Literacy. Past, Present and Future. Edited by Ann-Caterine Edlund, Lars-Erik Edlund, and Susanne Haugen, 309–323. Umeå: Umeå University, 2014. Kikas, Katre. “Rahvaluulekoguja raamatuid otsimas. Hans Anton Schults.” Acta Semiotica Estica VII (2010): 64–101. Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold. Kalevipoeg. The Estonian National Epic. Translated by Triinu Kartus. Tartu, Tallinn: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, Kunst, 2011. Kurrik, Juhan. Stenografia õpetus. Eestikeele kohta loonud Juhan Kurrik. Schnakenburgi trükikoda: Tartu, 1882. Laugaste, Eduard, and Erna Normann. Muistendid Kalevipojast. Monumenta Estonia Antiquae II. Eesti muistendid. Hiiu- ja vägilasmuistendid I. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1959. Liivaku, Uno. Eesti raamatu lugu. Monolleö: Jyväskylä, 1995. Mikkola, Kati. “Self-Taught Collectors of Folklore and their Challenge to Archival Authority.” In White Field, Black Seeds. Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century, 146–157. Palli, Heldur. Eesti rahvastiku ajaloo lühiülevaade. Tallinn: Sisekaitseakadeemia, 1998. Undusk, Jaan. “Hamanni ja Herderi vaim eesti kirjanduse edendajana: sünekdohhi printsiip.” Keel ja Kirjandus, 9–11 (1995): 577–587, 669–679, 746–756.

The Polish Theater Canon and Comedy – A Complicated Relation Anna R. Burzyńska

In a recent interview for the Rzeczpospolita daily, Michał Zadara, one of the most outstanding Polish directors, renowned for staging Polish and international classics of tragedy (Jean Racine, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Norwid and Jan Kochanowski), aptly summarized the position of comedy in the national canon: I realized that comedy can never be considered as ambitious theater in Poland. […] In other countries it is different. You can’t imagine English theater without Shakespeare’s comedies, French without Molière’s comedies and Italian without Goldoni’s. In Poland, our national comic playwright Fredro doesn’t have the same position as Molière in France. Therefore, in the Polish artistic theater, the most reputable ones, with the most generous budgets, the best equipment, actors and directors, comedy is missing. The spectator has to go for less sophisticated productions. The National Theater should also stage comedies.1 Zadara directed Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the National Theater in Warsaw, treating it as an opportunity to ridicule the failings of the world of “high society,” entangled in suspicious political and business relations. The staging was received with reserve (or overt disapproval) by most reviewers, and one of the reasons was the alleged inappropriateness of bringing a comic repertoire to the historic stage where even the bitter comedy-dramas by Sławomir Mrożek, the Polish master of absurd theater, seem to be in the wrong place to some of the audience. The canon of the National Theater is understood to be a set of drama pieces that will be permanently (or at least on a regular basis, reappearing every few or every dozen years, or so) present in the repertoire of the largest state stage so that every Pole should have an opportunity to see their stage performance

1 Michał Zadara, “Cenimy tylko rozdzierające tematy,” interview by Jacek Cieślak, Rzeczpospolita, January 13, 2019, https://www.rp.pl/Teatr/301139979-Zadara-Cenimy-tylko -rozdzierajace-tematy.html.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_013

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in their lifetime. In 1924, during the re-inauguration of the scene, rebuilt after a fire, the prominent Polish actor and director, Juliusz Osterwa, swore a solemn oath that the National Theater would serve the “evangelists of the Polish Spirit, Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński and Norwid,” that is, the four most prominent writers of the Romantic era. The following directors of the national stage (among others, the avant-garde director Jerzy Grzegorzewski, who was appointed in 1997) announced that the repertoire would be based on the “great four” of the Polish classics, three Romantic ones (Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Krasiński) and one Neo-Romantic (Stanisław Wyspiański). Suffice to say that apart from Słowacki, none of those writers had any comedies in their output, and Słowacki’s comedies are thought to be a problematic part of his output and they make it onto the stage by no means often. This retreat from comedies also concerns the broadly understood canon of Polish literature, not just drama. In the list of masterpieces announced in 2018 by the President and the First Lady, Andrzej and Agata Duda, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of independence, there was not a single piece of comedy (the national comic playwright Aleksander Fredro is represented by a memoir, a rather untypical piece of his writing).2 With respect to theater, the kind of art that is more readily associated with entertainment than literature, this absence seems particularly acute. Against the background of over two hundred “non-comedy” years, one exception is the time of Socialist Realism (1949–1954) when comedy was banned for political reasons (due to the all too frequent theme of rebellion against the imposed rule or the antiRussian themes that could have been perceived as anti-Soviet in the situation current at that time) and emphasis was placed on the classical comedies from the mid-19th century and the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the most popular authors were Fredro, Gabriela Zapolska and Michał Bałucki). In 1965, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Public Theater in Poland, a group of artists and intellectuals presented a proposition to reorganize the National Theater (on the model of the Comédie-Française) and create a new canon containing 35 pieces, of which as many as one third were comedies (by Franciszek Zabłocki, Wojciech Bogusławski, Fredro, Bałucki, Józef Bliziński and Zapolska, and also the comedy Fantazy [Fantasy] by Słowacki). The Ministry of Culture, however, rejected that draft for fear of the excessively increased independence of the theater arts. Although the ideologues of socialism made reference in their postulates to the tradition of the Enlightenment,

2 “Antologia Niepodległości,” accesed February 2, 2018, http://www.prezydent.pl/kancelaria/ narodowe-czytanie/narodowe-czytanie-2018/antologia-niepodleglosci-lista-tekstow/.

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this was not reflected in the theater canon of that time, and the change of the political system in 1989 did not cause any change in this particular respect, either. In order to find the reason for such a state of affairs, it is worthwhile to have a look at the complicated fate of Polish comedy in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the theater canon that is still prevailing today was given its shape.

1

Entertain and Educate

In 2015 hundreds of artistic events, conferences, publications and extensive social actions (e.g., the creation of a commonly available online encyclopaedia of theater and reductions of prices of theater tickets to symbolic amounts) added to the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the public theater in Poland. Public, and thus open to all spectators able to pay for the inexpensive entrance tickets (as opposed to the private magnate theaters or convent theaters). In 1765 the premiere of a comedy by Józef Bielawski, The Interlopers (Natręci), took place in Warsaw, which was the inaugurating performance of the company established at the initiative of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, being the nucleus of the first permanent professional public theater in Poland. The institution set up in Warsaw was named the National Theater – following the pattern of the Comédie-Française. This theater operated (despite such tragic historical events as the partitions of Poland, uprisings, and wars) until 1939 and resumed its activity in 1945. The Interlopers by Józef Bielawski was inspired by Molière’s play Les Fâcheux. Imitating the storyline created by the French author, the comedy criticized the failings of Polish society, divided for the purpose of the drama conflict into coarse Sarmatian conservatives and superficial, pretentious nouveaux-riches who were indiscriminately absorbed with French culture. At the explicit request of the king, the author enriched the comedy with a commendation of Enlightenment ideas. The premiere was a great success, the debut of the acting ensemble was favorably evaluated, and Bielawski soon had his comedy published. For the almost eighty years that followed, comedies prevailed in the repertoire of the National Theater. As a matter of fact, during the first two years of its activity (until the first partition of Poland) it was basically only comedies that were staged there. There is nothing strange in this; satirical comedy (to a lesser extent sentimental comedy also) was one of the two favorite genres of the Enlightenment (besides the novel). The plays were supposed to entertain, while educating and enlightening.

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Today, when you read reviews and letters from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, you can indeed equate the Polish National Theater with comedy theater. It was comedies that made up the repertoire of the national stage; it was comedies that constituted the canon of the Polish public theater at its origins. An analysis of the theater repertoires in the capital city brings an astonishing discovery: there was not a single tragedy staged in Warsaw between 1766 (when Athalie by Jean Racine was staged by seminarians at the school theater at the Piarist convent, thus an amateur performance) and 1792 (Merope by Voltaire on the stage of the National Theater, the first tragedy on a public stage in Poland). Between these dates the audience could only watch premieres of Polish comedies and guest appearances of foreign troupes, French comedies (mainly by Molière) as well as Italian comedies and farces. This overwhelming dominance of comedy continued until the 1840s. Then its popularity among theater goers and book readers decreased abruptly to never regain its former position. Fewer and fewer comedies are written or translated, and performances became less and less frequent. Above all, they ceased to be treated seriously (as paradoxical as it sounds in the case of this “non-serious” genre) by artists, spectators, critics, and researchers. The fact that one of the most important and most popular Polish playwrights of the 20th century, using satire in order to criticize national and individual flaws, Mrożek, would later on evade the notion of “comedy” and term his pieces as “tragic comedies” or “grotesques,” is the best evidence for that.

2

The Lost Right to Laughter in the Theater

If I were to point out one particular turning point in the history of comedy in Poland, it would be the year 1842 when Fredro (the most famous, most popular, most productive and probably the best national comedy playwright, with good reason called the “Polish Molière”) made the decision to give up comedy writing. To this day the cause of that decision, which shocked his contemporaries, remains unknown. It is assumed that the main reason for the abandonment was the fact that Fredro was unable to cope with the fierce criticism on the part of his peers, i.e., Romantic writers, whose works were full of pathos and fighting for freedom for the motherland under occupation of the partitioning powers. In their opinion, writing comedies while soldiers are killed in uprisings and their wives, mothers and daughters go dressed in mourning as a sign of despair not only for the loss of their loved ones but also for the lost motherland, is a sign of negligence and indifference to national affairs if not a token

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of stupidity or cynicism. The charges of lack of patriotism were not justified; in the 1820s and 1830s Fredro’s plays were dubbed “national comedies” and many of them (including the most famous Revenge (Zemsta), an allegorical story of the devastating disagreement between two neighbors who, instead of acting in the public interest, act in the name of selfishness and the urge to take revenge for their wounded pride) contained clear hints on how to be a good Pole, defend Polish identity and act in favor of maintaining and rebuilding the community. However, that approach was clearly too much in the Enlightenment spirit, not Romantic enough. Admittedly, later on Fredro returned to writing comedies, but he stipulated that they should not be published or performed in his lifetime (which was not fully adhered to). This is a very meaningful gesture; the most popular author, adored by actors and spectators, decides to go silent. Additionally, this gesture confirmed, in a sense, the condition that could be commonly observed: comedy had ceased to be an instrument of change in the political struggle already long before. Sharp, cheeky, sometimes propagandistic (when they served to praise one idea) and sometimes anarchistic (when they served to subvert the existing order) in spirit, satirical comedies gave way to elegant, toned down, conversational comedies with no greater ambitions than just to be light entertainment for the middle classes. This does not fully account for the reasons for which the Polish National Theater, born of the father, French comedy, and the mother, Italian farce, disavowed its parents at a certain point.

3

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Let us start with a quotation from the most important, most influential (quoted by the greatest theater creators, from Wyspiański to the Gardzienice Theater) Polish theater manifesto. This is the so-called Lesson XVI, a lecture on Slavic drama which Mickiewicz delivered in 1843 at the Collège de France in Paris: The drama is the most powerful artistic realization of poetry. It almost always announces the end of one era and the beginning of another. […] At the beginning of each era an inspired word chooses the geniuses to set this epoch in motion; but the masses remain passive for a long time, and then art uses all possible means; it calls upon architecture, music, and even dance to help animate these masses; but if art degenerates into comedy and farce, it eventually disappears. The drama, in the highest and broadest sense of the word, should unite all the elements of a truly

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national poetry, just as the political institution of a nation should express all its political tendencies.3 If we delve carefully into the literary and journalistic writings as well as documents from the 18th century, it will be easy to observe that the designation national in the name National Theater defined neither more nor less than using the national language (in this case Polish, which made it different from Italian opera and French theater, functioning in Warsaw). But in the course of the 19th century, when Poland was divided by its neighboring powers and did not exist on the map of Europe, the sense of this word experiences farreaching changes. It gets closely associated with the notion of nation as an ideological and political entity, an idea that unites Poles regardless of their religion, their station and in which partition (or in exile) they are. The word “national” begins to be closely related to such concepts as “independence,” “freedom” and “armed struggle.” It also becomes synonymous with the highest value that must not be criticized or ridiculed but should be protected at any price against military, economic, and also verbal attacks. In accordance with such a definition, most (if not all) of the comedies shown in Warsaw were not “national.” Additionally, during the period of the partitions setting up performances on public stages, in Polish, became somewhat more difficult (lack of additional subsidies, censorial restrictions, and departure of some of the audience). For this reason, the repertoire of the national stage was selected much more carefully. Adding to this the fact that the disappearance of ambitious comedy from the National Theater (and public stages of comparable rank) is accompanied by the blossoming of farces void of any substantial artistic value, vaudeville presented on stages typical for entertainment (otherwise willingly visited by representatives of the annexing countries), it is easy to understand that the gulf between the world of tragedy and the world of comedy was increasing at a fast rate.

4

The Improving Language

The decision to establish the National Theater was made quite violently. King Stanisław August Poniatowski desired to bring civilizational development to Poland and catch up with the countries of Western Europe. The problem, however, was that in the mid-18th century there were no experienced professional 3 Adam Mickiewicz, “Lesson 16: Slavic Drama, 4 April 1843,” trans. Daniel Gerould, The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 93.

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playwrights in Poland, neither for comedy nor for tragedy. The main author writing for the National Theater at its origins, Franciszek Bohomolec, was a monk, a lecturer of rhetoric at Jesuit colleges in Vilnius and Warsaw. He took up writing for teaching purposes, creating texts that seminarians could use in school theater. Bielawski was an aristocrat and also had some military responsibilities; he was not trained in literature, but agreed to rework Molière’s text to match Polish reality, encouraged by very generous remuneration. Contemporary Polish intellectuals believed that comedy adapted from French patterns was the only possible and appropriate beginning of the National Theater in Poland. They thought that it was impossible to adapt tragedies by Racine or Voltaire to the Polish stage because the transfer of those stories (typically taking place in mythical, ancient or mediaeval times) into Polish reality would inevitably mean slipping into ridicule. It was difficult to “translate” proud emperors and kings into representatives of parochial, provincial Polish gentry. Molière’s burghers were much better suited for this purpose. The second, even more important, reason why the establishing of the Polish theater should commence with comedy was the insufficient level of development of the Polish language. The Polish of Bielawski and Bohomolec was too limited and earthbound to be able to render philosophical dilemmas, moral predicaments, or subtle passions. Furthermore, tragedy required elaborate verse forms. In the case of comedy, dialogues in prose were admissible as well as very simple versification forms, fitting within the so-called principle of appropriateness, i.e., compatibility between thought, thing, and word. It was not the uncomplicated heroes of the first Polish comedies that shaped their simple language; it was the limited language that was only able to give birth to such heroes. In order to launch the theater mission as quickly as possible, it was necessary to go for comedies. Along with the maturation of the literary language it was possible to venture expeditions into previously uncharted regions. The development line of Polish theater literature is as follows: adapted comedies – original comedies – adapted tragedies – original tragedies. Such an original tragedy is, e.g., Barbara Radziwiłłówna by Alojzy Feliński, narrating the poignant story, full of pathos, of the Queen of Poland and Grand Duchess of Lithuania (the premiere at the National Theater took place in 1817). In the later period, the Polish drama developed in a similar way as the European, which entailed the growing popularity of the so-called mixed genres, i.e., tragic comedies, psychological comedies, and so on. Their comic qualities would mean above all a positive ending, and setting the action among representatives of the middle and higher social classes; comicality as such would be very sparse in them.

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Another important aspect of the issues discussed is the fact that comedy is a genre closely associated with the present to which time passing seldom adds nobility and depth, but rather deprives it of wit (because allusions and connotations become blurred, associations with actual life and real living language become loose). Staging the plays in modern times is seldom successful, unless we consider universal, timeless masterpieces.

5

Offending the Audience

In thinking of comedy as an instrument of social change, one can follow two paths. The first one is the satirical path of magnifying, ridiculing, and criticising human failings. The other one is the path of showing positive patterns of behavior. Obviously, the latter one leads to a specific “dilution” of the comicality, providing the audience not with a theater mixture of an elevated grade, but some secure, uncontroversial entertainment. One of the most popular playwrights of the Polish Enlightenment, Prince Adam Czartoryski, in the preface to his comedy Bride-to-be (Panna na wydaniu, 1771), considered to be one of the most important manifestoes of Polish theater and inspired by the reflections of Joseph Addison (comic playwright and journalist of the English magazine The Spectator), distinguished between “genuine” and “false” humor by comparing them to a man and a monkey. The “genuine” amusement combines a child’s recklessness and a mother’s empathy; it is merry but also gentle, friendly and polite. It brings together instead of dividing, comforts instead of mocking, commends instead of criticising. “False” humorousness, on the other hand, is inclined towards monkey tricks, tomfoolery, buffoonery, and also rudeness in words and actions. It delights in mimicking both flaws (lack of virtue, foolishness, wastefulness, and stinginess), and virtues (wisdom), and also misfortunes (misery). As Czartoryski writes, it is ready to “bite the hand that feeds it, and mock both a friend and a foe,” and “does not care to produce either morality or a teaching but keeps jesting for jesting’s sake.”4 Taking these considerations into account, under the surface of efforts to make comedy use subtle and gentle tools, to be a patient mother teaching her child by having fun, instead of being like a malicious one that hits its victims

4 Adam Czartoryski, “Przedmowa do Panny na wydaniu” [Preface to Bride-to-be], in Teatr Narodowy 1765–1794 [National Theater 1765–1794], ed. Jan Kott (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1967), 140–141.

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with a slap, concerned to ensure that theater should give positive examples; it is there that the conservatives’ fear of the anarchistic, rebellious power of comedy hides. Addison, and after him Prince Czartoryski, seem to sense that the Enlightenment ideas would soon bring the end of the world known to them in the form of the French Revolution, so they vehemently oppose the democratization of the theater where anyone can be ridiculed regardless of their station and function. Czartoryski sees in comedy a threat to aristocratic and Christian values; therefore, he strives to grind down the fangs and claws of this potentially dangerous species, to avoid scandals. Whether the purpose is not to discourage the potential audience of the National Theater with excessively sharp criticism or rather to protect his own prerogatives, it is hard to judge. Satirical comedies caused scandals in Poland from the very beginning when the national stage was established, and for various reasons, from moral issues to political matters. Above all, the gentry, who considered themselves the most perfect social class in every aspect, felt indignation due to the fact that its failings and ludicrousness were criticized and ridiculed onstage. To make matters worse, this was done within a theatrical genre “imported” from the West and performed by people with questionable morals (as actors were perceived at that time). It was not easy to humbly receive either malicious innuendoes or moral teachings from such untrustworthy people. Polish spectators often felt undeservedly attacked by the National Theater. However, the most interesting complaints about comedies have been preserved in the reports of foreign spies staying in Warsaw. The German spy Johann (Jan) Heine complained, after the premiere of The Interlopers, about the demoralising impact of this (fairly innocent in terms of morals from today’s point of view) comedy about the youth: “Polish comedies mostly feature love intrigues which are rendered so accurately by means of movements and words that it is only mattresses that are missing. It is also there that young girls learn the things they have not yet experienced.”5 The Russian spy, Henryk Mackrott, who was active a bit later, in turn warned against the satirical edge of comedy aimed at the authorities (which were Russian in the Warsaw of that time). In 1819 he wrote about the comedy As many as three weddings (Aż trzy wesela) by the actor and playwright Ludwik Adam Dmuszewski: “The author of the comedy presents the mayor in a very scandalous position for this category of official. Apart from different scenes in which the author clearly wanted to discredit our city mayor… there you can

5 Jan Heine, Teatr Narodowy 1765–1766. Raporty szpiega [National Theater 1765–1766. Spy reports], trans. Mieczysław Klimowicz (Warszawa: IS PAN, 1962): 16.

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find expressions clearly humiliating a certain ruling person, depriving them of their due respect.”6 The spy’s concern was also aroused by Dmuszewski’s comedies staged in 1821: “In all those three plays, the author made use of expressions that ridiculed the words Diplomacy, Police, to spy, etc.”7 On this occasion the association of comedy with the present time turned out to be its curse; the spies and censors persistently traced all possible allusions to current political reality, with the result that performances of suspicious plays were often banned. While Heine’s complaints could be considered harmless (the Prussian government had no power over Poland during the time of his activity), Henryk Macrott’s reports had a real impact on cultural and political life in Warsaw and other centres of Polish culture. In 1803, the Austrian government banned all the plays that could “ridicule the government, princes and officials, as well as the ones with satirical fragments depicting a particular status, especially that of the army and the nobility, last but not least those where the crime would not be clearly condemned or a freer relationship between the ruler and his helots would be pictured.”8 Soon similar rules were introduced by the Russian Tsar and his brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, Governor of the Kingdom of Poland in 1809. From 1819, all the books and articles had to be read by the censors first before they could (or could not) be printed. The same rule applied to theater plays, that have to be “checked” before being staged. However, theater plays were a much more complicated case than novels or poems. While anti-Russian, blasphemous or revolutionary expressions were easy to spot in a written text, theater plays – especially comedies! – showed the whole spectrum of their subversive power only when put on stage and watched by the audience. Being under the control of the occupying countries, Polish theater artists soon developed a kind of secret code to communicate with their audience. They used different word plays, puns, metaphors to conjure up associations (for example lots of political jokes were built around the name of a very popular Polish dish – “Russkie pierogi,” also “Russian dumplings,” very often called just “Russians” in short). These were very hard to spot in a written text – only the audience’s reaction (laughing, clapping) revealed the fact that there was a kind of hidden consensus between the actors and the members of the audience, that they share a secret code. Spies visiting 6 Karolina Beylin, “Teatr Narodowy w raportach Mackrotta z lat 1819–1821” [National Theater in Macrott’s reports 1819–1821], Pamiętnik Teatralny 1, no. 2–3 (1952): 151. 7 Ibid., 152. 8 Tadeusz Gutkowski, Cenzura w Wolnym Mieście Krakowie, 1832–1846 [Censorship in the free city of Kraków, 1832–1846] (Kraków: Drukarnia “Czasu,” 1914), 78–79.

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Polish theaters and watching seemingly innocent comedies to find out if they were really so simple and innocent, or elaborate and dangerous, helped the state censorship to control what kind of messages could reach the audience.

6

Death of a Comedian

The year 1842 that I mentioned as symbolic for the process of excluding comedy from the Polish theater canon is worth recalling for yet another reason besides Fredro’s decision to go silent. This is also the terminal date for the domestic reception of the writings of Molière. As the researcher Maria Olga Bieńka calculated,9 the popularity of the French playwright on Polish stages reached its peak during the reign of King Stanisław August Poniatowski when, between 1773 and 1783, as many as 15 of his comedies were published and performed on stage in Polish; soon the number rose to 20, and the most popular were the non-classical plays, close to farce. Bieńka asserts that the author of The Miser owed his popularity mainly to the actors who found delight in the roles in his plays and specialized in acting them. It was no coincidence that the Molière craze was gone after the death of the last “Molièrian actor,” Bonawentura Kudlicz, who died in 1842. The development of Polish comedy acting in the 18th and 19th centuries is a process of a gradual departure from the farce-based model, inspired by French and Italian theater (including commedia dell’arte). When reading 19th-century actors’ diaries and letters as well as reviews of their performances, it is clear that they strived to increasingly refine their acting and to provide their characters with greater psychological depth. They made efforts to empathize with their characters, not to create caricatures, not to ridicule, not to make the characters abhorrent. The personae sketched with the satirist’s pen in plays by such authors as Fredro change onstage into complex, ambiguous tragicomic characters, and the spectators are supposed to feel sorry for them and like them. Today, when you look at theater photographs of the outstanding comedy actor Wincenty Rapacki playing Fredrian roles in the mid-19th century, it is difficult to guess that they are heroes of comedy; looking at us from the photographs is a respectful, preoccupied gentleman. In this way, even plays initially written with comic intent were transformed onstage into in-depth psychological dramas. 9 Olga Maria Bieńka, “Molière w teatrach warszawskich (1870–1919). Rekonesans” [Molière in Warsaw theaters (1870–1919). A reconnaissance], Pamiętnik Teatralny 64, no. 3–4 (2015): 180–181.

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Odd One In

The examples that I have gathered show some possible internal (changes in the literary language, authors’ crises) and external (changes in the actors’, audience’s and critics’ expectations, censorship interventions) reasons for the crisis of comedy. The fundamental question should, however, be: Can comedy be a part of the canon at all? The Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, in her book Odd One In: On Comedy distinguishes two kinds of comedy. In a false / conservative comedy: The abstract-universal and the concrete do not change places and do not produce a short circuit between them; instead, the concrete (where “human weaknesses” are situated) remains external to the universal, and at the same time invites us to recognize and accept it as the indispensable companion of the universal, its necessary physical support.10 In false comedies, the men from the upper class (kings, aristocrats, judges, other characters of symbolic status within the society) turn out to be as “normal” and “simple” as the simplest peasants; they snore, slip on a banana skin, etc. The members of the audience can identify with these men because of their “ordinary human” aspect. As readers or spectators of such comedies we identify with the heroes’ weaknesses, but still respect their symbolic “higher calling.” We learn to accept the status quo and get discouraged from any emancipation or revolution whatsoever. Even if the image of the world is seemingly rebelliously turned upside down (e.g., a peasant becomes a king), soon there will follow another reversal and everything will return to its place. Things are different in the case of a true / subversive comedy: A true comedy about a presumptuous baron has to produce the following formula in all its materiality: an aristocrat who believes that he is really and intrinsically an aristocrat is, in this very belief, a common silly human. […] The point is not that an aristocrat is also an ordinary man. He is an ordinary man precisely as an aristocrat, at the very peak of his aristocracy. Here we should recall Lacan’s famous remark that a lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king.11 10 11

Alenka Zupančič, Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 30. Zupančič, Odd One In, 31–32.

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Examples of such a true comedy, a comedy in its pure state given by Zupančič include the film Borat and the Marx Brothers’ comedies. If we take a look at the history of Polish comedy, the first type will be represented by the very simple comedies by Bielawski or Bohomolec, based on pointing out nonnoble characteristics in the nobility, but also Mr Jovial (Pan Jowialski, 1832) by Fredro, in which a poor young artist Ludmir pretends to be an itinerant shoemaker and as such becomes an object of fun at the court of the nobleman Jovial. Disguised as a sultan, Ludmir has a chance to talk honestly and truthfully to those around him, which is used to point out their numerous failings to the inhabitants of the manor house. Finally, however, he gets recognized as a descendant of the family who went missing when he was a baby. It is easy to laugh at these heroes but it is also easy to identify with them, and the plot, rounded off in an as much neat as absurd way, leaves the audience with a feeling of harmony and peace. The other type will be represented by, e.g., Fantazy (1844–1845) by Słowacki, in which each of the heroes, the conservative count and countess Respekt, eccentric Fantazy and Idalia, the romantic couple Diana and Jan, the heroic Russian major, focuses with absolute seriousness on being oneself and on celebrating their own identity, while failing to notice the ridiculousness of their words and actions. Słowacki builds the plot of his tragicomedy in such a manner that he does not disturb the conservative order of the world, so that it would be able to return to normal like a swinging pendulum. In Fantazy this order is shown in a ruthlessly sharp manner so that the spectator might notice how false and dangerous to its inhabitants is the edifice of society, from its foundations to its very roof. Both types of comedy are in a sense questionable, but while the first one can be imagined within the canon of the National Theater, inclusion of the examples from the second group seems very risky and, in a sense, at odds with the very idea of the national canon. Why are Poles afraid of comedy? The Slovenian title of the book by Zupančič I quoted is Poetika. Druga Knjiga [Poetics. The second book], which is a clear reference to the celebrated novel by Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and its main “non-human” hero, the missing book Aristotle’s Second Poetics, a treatise on comedy and laughter, deemed in the Middle Ages an extremely dangerous work, able to wipe out the existing structures of power. Perhaps this is where the answer to this question should be searched for.

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Instead of a Summary

Banned from official, professional theaters, Polish comedy had to find an outlet – like steam closed under high pressure in a container, finding a way out to prevent its explosion. The Polish cultural landscape noticeably lacks the canon of “national comedies” (unlike France or England), but it has a very long, vivid, uninterrupted tradition of cabaret – from “Zielony Balonik” [The green balloon] and other literary cabarets founded during the final years of the partitions of Poland, through avant-garde cabarets and clandestine cabarets organized during the two World Wars to students’ and artists’ cabarets extremely popular during communist times: “Piwnica pod Baranami” [The Cellar under the rams] in Kraków, “Bim-Bom” in Gdańsk, “Studencki Teatr Satyryków” [Students’ satirical theater] in Warsaw. Since its very beginning until today, Polish cabaret has preserved its semidomestic, amateur character: mixing satirical monologues, sketches and songs, housed in cellars and attics, functioning outside the artistic and institutional confines of public theater, usually formed by non-professional actors (writers, painters, musicians, journalists, but also doctors, lawyers, architects), addressing their programs to limited audiences (entrance was very often possible only after a personal invitation and no tickets were sold), totally ephemeral (the sketches were not published, and very often most of the program was improvised). It has been able to overcome all the difficulties that were overwhelming for comedy: it exceeded the limitations of literary language and theater genres (“Piwnica pod Baranami” gained its reputation by artful, elaborate, poetry-like recitation of absurd communist documents), resisted the pursuit of psychologization (cabaret performers were “Brechtian” long before Brecht), cleverly evaded censorship (mostly by means of improvisation and by avoiding repeating their sketches and monologues). There is no risk that Polish cabaret will become canonical; it has always been anarchistically proud to be non-canonical.

Bibliography “Antologia Niepodległości.” Accesed February 2, 2018. http://www.prezydent.pl/ kancelaria/narodowe-czytanie/narodowe-czytanie-2018/antologia-niepodleglosci -lista-tekstow/. Beylin, Karolina. “Teatr Narodowy w raportach Mackrotta z lat 1819–1821” [National Theater in Macrott’s reports 1819–1821]. Pamiętnik Teatralny 1, no. 2–3 (1952): 141–160.

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Bieńka, Olga Maria. “Molière w teatrach warszawskich (1870–1919). Rekonesans” [Molière in Warsaw theaters (1870–1919). A reconnaissance]. Pamiętnik Teatralny 64, no. 3–4 (2015): 180–219. Czartoryski, Adam. “Przedmowa do Panny na wydaniu” [Preface to Bride-to-be]. In Teatr Narodowy 1765–1794 [National Theater 1765–1794]. Edited by Jan Kott. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1967. Gutkowski, Tadeusz. “Cenzura w Wolnym Mieście Krakowie, 1832–1846” [Censorship in the free city of Kraków, 1832–1846]. Kraków: Drukarnia “Czasu,” 1914. Heine, Jan. Teatr Narodowy 1765–1766. Raporty szpiega [National Theater 1765–1766. Spy reports]. Translated by Mieczysław Klimowicz. Warszawa: IS PAN, 1962. Mickiewicz, Adam. “Lesson 16: Slavic Drama, 4 April 1843.” Translated by Daniel Gerould. The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 91–97. Zadara, Michał. “Cenimy tylko rozdzierające tematy.” Interview by Jacek Cieślak. Rzeczpospolita, January 13, 2019. https://www.rp.pl/Teatr/301139979-Zadara-Cenimy -tylko-rozdzierajace-tematy.html. Zupančič, Alenka. Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008.

Constraints of Canon Constructing: Research into the Paradoxes of Reception of Józef Baka’s Poetry in Polish Literature and Literary Studies Paweł Bukowiec

The canon is a collection of texts of culture – in this case, literature – which are regarded as crucial, most important, they are classics, not negligible, etc. The passive voice hides an embarrassing issue of the subject, of the agency, the question who, and on what basis, decides that a given text is crucial, most important, is it a classic, one that is not negligible, and so on. These considerations could lead to criticism of the canon as a discourse of domination. Such an approach is particularly conducive to critiques of the feminist or postcolonial type, which see the canon as a system of exclusion that is beyond representation. I want to look at the canon in a slightly different way, so I will not be developing this issue.1 The most important feature of the canon is that the canon as such is always a synecdoche: works of art (literary texts) that make them stand for the whole (literature) from which they were chosen (the passive voice is still hiding the problem of agency). The entirety represented in this manner becomes somewhat structured: the multitude changes into a hierarchy, the centre and the margins arise. The tension between this part that represents the whole and the excluded rest that is represented; i.e., subordinated to the central (canonical) component, is not only socially sensitive, but also deconstructive. The infinite processes of canon creation and alteration have probably accompanied literature since time immemorial. In the history of Polish (and Lithuanian) writing, their function was critical in the 19th century. This is determined by three apparently disproportionate, but nevertheless closely related social facts: the fall of the Lithuanian-Polish state in 1795, the emergence of the history of literature as an academic discipline cultivated at Polish2 universities, and the vital role that poetry played in the process of creating a modern Polish (and Lithuanian) national identity.

1 I will just add that exclusion meets not only texts that could represent – and thus create – the unrepresented – and thus non-existent – groups, but also the ways of reading, which could perform analogous emancipatory and transgressive functions. 2 In the cultural sense of the word.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_014

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The canon of Polish literature was not only developed in the 19th century to represent Polish literature but was also conceived as a self-image of Polishness, the only existing institution of collective life replacing the non-existent state, the narrative social mirror of self-awareness. The main problem of such representation – the true curse of mimesis – is the inevitable disintegration of the allegedly stable author-text-reader relationship, leading to the disappearance of the author and the reader as different from the text. The nation (the creator) is represented by the canon, the canon (the created) begins to reproduce, to remodel the nation – its creator – in the process of establishing the original, constitutive values for the nation as a collective identity. And a kind of hermeneutical circle emerges: Poles (actually the part that represented them – the cultural elites) kept creating their own literature, and at the same time literature (actually its representative part – the canon) kept creating its own Poles. The aim of this text is to answer the question why Józef Baka, undoubtedly one of the most important and the most authentic Polish3 poets of metaphysical and mystical experience did not become a part of the 19th-century canon of Polish literature, did not enter the hermeneutical circle of reciprocal corroboration. The resistance of the canon to Baka’s poetry allows us to clearly see the paradoxes and constraints of the process of cultural canonization. Józef Baka was born at the beginning of the 18th century, in 1707 or 1706. As a Jesuit, a doctor of theology, educated at the Vilnius Academy, he lectured for a short time at this university and probably also at some other Lithuanian Jesuit colleges, then he worked as a missionary in the countryside for a long time. He was endowed with the grace of a long life – he died in 1780. Unluckily, this happened in Warsaw: that is why the capital city of Poland appears in each, even the shortest, of his biographies, implying much more than actually should be implied and contributing to his presumed Polishness. Because, contrary to what the place of his death suggests, Baka had probably never left Lithuania before 1780 and before that date had never been to Poland. Baka was a Lithuanian. We do not know much about his life, but even the few facts we know for sure will suffice to give a plain and unambiguous answer to the question about his identity, thus arguing with the unreflective position of Polish literary studies.4 Of course, Baka was a Lithuanian in harmony with his times, in the fashion one could be a Lithuanian in the 18th century, an epoch which did not know the contemporary model of nationalism. He was a Lithuanian within the frames of the concept of collective identity which was 3 In the linguistic sense of the word. 4 For too many colleagues of mine writing in Polish in general is equal to being a Pole.

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founded on a community of rights and duties rather than, for example, on language and religion.5 Born in Lithuania, brought up in Lithuania, working all his life in Lithuania and all his life bound to Lithuania, he wrote both in Polish6 and Latin languages,7 in this respect he was not different from many other Lithuanian and Polish poets of his time. The word Lithuania is used here in the 18th-century sense of the word and means the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; i.e., not only the ethnically Lithuanian but also Belarusian lands. One could say, therefore, that Baka, born in Belarus, was a Belarusian – after all, his family estates of Śliżyn8 and Januszkiewicze9 are located near the city of Borysów (today Барысаў) and he spent a significant part of his life in Belarus, in Błoń,10 where Baka worked for several years in his mission, located close to today’s Belarusian city of Чэрвень (up to 1923 it was called Ihumen). And last but not least: the probability that he knew Lithuanian is similarly low as is the probability that he did not know the Ruthenian (Belarusian) language. The part of his output that has survived to our times11 is mainly occasional literature (mostly in verse): panegyrics and works of piety, closely connected 5

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Of course, being such a Lithuanian did not clash with being a citizen of The PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. One must be very careful not to treat the word “Polish” as an adjective derived from the noun “Commonwealth.” Józef Baka, Nabożeństwo do Ś. Jana Franciszka Regisa wyznawcy y missyonarza (w Wilnie, w drukarni Akademii SJ, 1744); Idem, Wielki obrońca upadłey grzesznikow przed Bogiem sprawy abo gorliwy o zbawienie dusz ludzkich Missionarz S. Jan Franciszek Regis Soc. Jesu wyznawca (w Wilnie, w drukarni Akademii Soc. Jesu, 1755); Idem, Uwagi rzeczy ostatecznych i złości grzechowych przy nabożnych aktach, modlitwach i tekstach różnych. Uwagi śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone (Wilno, 1766); Idem, Nabożeństwo codzienne chrześcijańskie, ed. Jan Legowicz (Wilno: w Druk. XX Bazylianów, 1808). Idem, Comitia Honorum Et Aviti Splendoris Palatinas ad Aedes Post peractos fortunata Coronide in Corde Regni ad Lechici Orbis tranquillitatem Pacificationis Conventus, Sub Triumphalem Ingressus Pompam Illustrissimi ac Excellentissimi Domini D. Joannis Ludovici de Broel Plater Palatini Livoniae Inter publicos sui Ducatus Plausus Totiusque Palaemonij Orbis Festiva Gaudia Celebrata a Devinctissima Plateriano Nomini et Honori Residentia Düneburgensi Soc. Jesu Panegyrico applausu Promulgata (Vilnae: Typis Universitatis Societ. Jesu, 1736). Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich, ed. Filip Sulimierski, Bronisław Chlebowski, and Władysław Walewski (Warszawa: Kasa im. Józefa Mianowskiego, 1880–1914), X, 768. Ibid., 443. Ibid., 249. Some scholars even claimed – probably with a bit of exaggeration – that we do not know most of his works. For example, see Paulina Buchwald-Pelcowa, “Baka Józef,” in Literatura polska: Przewodnik encyklopedyczny, vol. 1, ed. Julian Krzyżanowski and Czesław Hernas (Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe: Warszawa, 1984), 44.

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with the profession he cultivated and with the truths he preached. The years of Baka’s creative activity coincide with the beginning of the Polish and Lithuanian Enlightenment, but they have nothing to do with the aesthetics and ideology of The Age of Light. Conversely, Baka is considered to be a late Baroque poet. The contradiction is apparent; Enlightenment in this part of Europe was of an insular nature for a very long time, it actually existed only in large urban centres and at magnate courts. Outside these isolated clusters, culture resembled late-Baroque culture for many years, even late into the 19th century. Immortality was brought to Father Baka by a Polish-language cycle of poems, in which he contemplates our fragile mortality in absolutely unique, harsh and raw poetics. Entitled Uwagi śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej [Remarks of the death inevitable and common to all], the cycle was published in 1766 in Vilnius.12 The exceptional artistic value of this series of poems is beyond dispute today. Undoubtedly, nowadays it belongs to the canon of Polish literature, and also arouses some interest in contemporary Lithuanian literary studies. However, this has not always been the case. Throughout the 19th century, and also for some time after, Polish literary scholars were giving Baka silent – and contemptuous – treatment or biting remarks on the margins of their works; Lithuanian researchers have become interested in this poetry only in the 21st century. The turbulent history of the presence (and absence) of Remarks in Polish (and Lithuanian) literary criticism is the subject of my article.13 The reception of Baka’s poetry in the 19th and 20th century is marked by a vivid discrepancy. Baka was both popular and disregarded, praised and derided, read and ignored. A century and a half after the first edition of Remarks, one of the commentators (named Władysław Bełza) considered their popularity at the beginning of the 20th century both unquestionable and embarrassing: “Who doesn’t remember Father Baka […], who doesn’t know long passages of his Remarks of the Death Inevitable by heart, and who doesn’t scoff secretly

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This booklet also contains a second, much more conventional and much less interesting cycle of Baka’s poems, Uwagi rzeczy ostatecznych i złości grzechowych [Remarks of the last things and the angers of sin]. There is no overriding title that would cover both cycles. I will use the abbreviated version of the title (Remarks) to address only Remarks of the Death Inevitable and Common to All. I would not be able to write this article without the excellent monograph about Baka: Aleksander Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał: “Uwagi śmierci niechybnej” księdza Baki – poetyka tekstu i paradoksy recepcji (Wrocław – Warszawa – Kraków: Ossolineum, 1991). While disagreeing with Aleksander Nawarecki on specific issues, I must emphasize that he drew my attention to the majority of examples discussed here. Moreover, without his research any discussion about the reception of Baka and his place in the canon would not be possible.

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at the warnings of the Pius Pater? […] Let us respect his ashes with silence.”14 However, Polish (and recently also Lithuanian) literary studies do not obey Bełza and express their respect for the poet’s ashes by sedulous remembering and not by silent forgetting. We have thus gained an astonishing masterpiece (and the literature of this part of the world is not too abundant in astonishing masterpieces). Remarks is a masterpiece, at least from the point of view of a contemporary Polish literature researcher.15 A unique and paradoxical contrast seems exceptionally fascinating: Baka was not – as one might suppose – forgotten first and then, after a century and a half, discovered. The scheme of perception was strikingly different: from oblivion through ridicule, humiliation, contempt, and silence filled with a sense of superiority to the recognition of Remarks as one of the most valuable works of Polish-language literature of the 18th century. And another paradox: Baka’s great artistry was relatively quickly recognized by other artists, his fellow writers; it took much more time for scholars to share their opinion. Why did this happen? What determined the difficult fate of this brilliant cycle? One should begin with the claim that the poetics of the cycle is an unprecedentedly radical project. There is no room for more detailed analysis here, so I will limit myself to stating that Remarks are extreme due to the strategic excess of rhythmicity, the transgressive atrocity of imagination, and the unique servitude of semantics to the sound layer. Here is a random Baka’s stanza, quoted from a poem, Damom uwaga [Remark to ladies]: O Dyjano, z ciebie mara Czy poczwara, gdy czamara Przybierze w ofierze Much rojem, rop zdrojem.16

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“Któż nie zna księdza Baki S.I. i jego Uwag śmierci niechybnej […] kto ich nie umie w znacznej części na pamięć, i kto po cichu nie szydzi z tych przestróg pobożnego patra? […] Uszanujmyż milczeniem jego popioły.” Władysław Bełza, “Dziwadła literackie,” in Encyklopedia humoru i satyry polskiej, ed. Antoni Orłowski (Warszawa: Tygodnik “Mucha,” 1914), IV, 135–136. See Paweł Bukowiec, Metronom: O jednostkowości poezji “nazbyt” rytmicznej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2015), 47–96. The only one to write a monograph of the poet denies Remarks the rank of a masterpiece, but at the same time ascribes to it the longevity of influence, which is typical for masterpieces (see Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał, 360). In the makeshift prose translation into English, which is of course very far from what would be needed to transfer “a real” Baka into English successfully, the panrhythmic effect

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We do not have any visual portrait of Baka, but the metric pattern of the original of the quoted stanza should be treated as his aural fingerprint. It is so typical for Remarks that it was half-jokingly, half-seriously called “stropha Bakana”:17 –‘ – / –‘ – // –‘ – / –‘ – 8 (4+4) a –‘ – / –‘ – // –‘ – / –‘ – 8 (4+4) a – –‘ – // – –‘ – 6 (3+3) bb – –‘ – // – –‘ – 6 (3+3) cc Each hyphen stands for one syllable, an apostrophe stands for an accent, a forward slash shows the end of “a foot,” the double forward slash is equal to the caesura. Numbers refer to syllables, letters show rhymes. Two b’s or two c’s in a row indicate a so-called internal rhyme, the rhyme that binds together words contained in the same verse. I have no room to analyze it more profoundly, but please believe me that the final effect is overwhelmingly manic: having read two or three such stanzas you become immune to the direct meaning of words, phrases, and sentences, you are seized by the powerful and inescapable rhythm of death. Such a rhythmical format is extremely rare in Polish poetry. Our verse-making tradition allows caesura to be used only in long verses with odd numbers of syllables; the most popular ones are thirteen syllables with a caesura after the seventh one and eleven syllables with a caesura after a fifth one. Short, eight-syllable or six-syllable verse with a symmetrical caesura after the fourth or after the third syllable is basically too rhythmical to be the vehicle of good poetry: Baka is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. The impression of intrusive rhythm is mostly determined by: very precise rhyming (also internal); short, most often six- or eight-syllable verses with symmetrically placed caesura; expressive arrangement of accents (trochees and amphibrachs); and omnipresent syntactic parallels. The joint influence of these devices consists in subordinating intonation to the order of accents and in fact places Remarks on the verge of poetry and chanting. Such poetry was far too radical to have a place in the high culture of its time. There are no traces of any presence of these poems in the literary culture of the second half of the 18th century. And if Remarks did not combine

17

will disappear, while the traces of the cruel gruffness, with which Baka treats the mortals, will undoubtedly be preserved in: “Oh Diana, a ghost or monster will be made of you when a swarm of flies will emerge from your dress and a fountain of pus will be flowing out of it.” Radosław Grześkowiak, “Bramka Górskiego: O ubezwłasnowolnieniu staropolskich autorów przy wyborze podstawy krytycznego wydania,” Terminus 2 (2007): 112.

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the peculiar sadism of imagination with the overwhelming rhythm (associated with nursery-rhyme kind of rhythmicity), it would probably remain forgotten forever. Luckily for us, at the beginning of the 19th century, the first and then only edition of Baka’s cycles was handed over to a certain Rajmund Korsak (1768–1817, an inferior poet) and it must have seemed so bizarre to him that in 1807 he decided to publish a pirated and barbaric reissue of Remarks on the Death Inevitable. Surely he intended it to be a sort of literary performance, which consisted in provocative sharing of poems so strikingly wicked that they appeared fascinating. A minor change in the title (the conversion of “of” into “on” in the English version of the title corresponds to it) was not his only unauthorized amendment. He decided to omit the second cycle, thus condemning it to oblivion until the ninth decade of the 20th century.18 In the first cycle, to enhance the impression of ferocious cultural savagery, he decided to cut Baka’s internally rhymed short lines in half, thus creating, for example, two three-syllable verses out of a genuine six-syllable one. Such damaged Remarks functioned in Polish culture until 2000, when Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki prepared the correct edition, using the found original.19 Probably Baka would not have survived without Korsak. But the same Korsak is responsible for the fact that Baka’s poetry for two centuries was functioning in a mutilated version. It seems that the next edition was a similarly deriding one:20 this is clearly evidenced by the attached parodistic preface. Only Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–1887) and Władysław Syrokomla (1823–1862) were the first to treat Baka with the seriousness that this poetry deserves.21 All these reissues repeated all of Korsak’s editorial decisions. The same should be said about subsequent editions of the 20th and 21st centuries.22 Only the Lublin,23 the Vilnius24 and 18 19 20 21 22

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Józef Baka, Poezje, ed. Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986). Idem, Uwagi, ed. Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Test, 2000). Idem, Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone (Warszawa: Drukarnia przy ul. Mazowieckiej, 1828). Baka odrodzony: Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone, ed. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Władysław Syrokomla (Wilno: Orgelbrand, 1855). Józef Baka, Poezje, ed. Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986); Idem, Poezje, ed. Michał Hańczakowski (Kraków: Universitas, 2002). Idem, Uwagi, ed. Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Test, 2000). Trys baroko saulėlydžio literatai: Pranciška Uršulė Radvilienė, Konstancija Benislavska, Juozapas Baka. Chrestomatija, ed. Aida Ažubalytė, Brigita Speičytė, and Giedrė Šmitienė (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2003).

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the Internet25 versions remain faithful to the original. Baka became a classic of Polish literature on the basis of editions prepared contrary to the basic rules and distorting key aspects of his poetics! It seems that the first member of the 19th-century Polish cultural elites who noticed the significant artistic values of Remarks was an outstanding writer, the author of a Polish novel of manners and of a historical novel, Kraszewski. In 1839 he wrote: “[…] there is a great poetic thought in Remarks of the Death Inevitable […].”26 Henryk Rzewuski (1791–1866, he used the pseudonym Jarosz Bejła), another remarkable prose writer of those times, believed the same. Two years after Kraszewski, he posted this sharp observation: “The Polish audience was not able to recognize Baka as one of their great poets. Instead, he was proclaimed the emblem of foolishness by scribblers […].”27 Both prose writers spoke of Baka and his Remarks (known to them from the 1807 or 1828 editions) in passing and not too much, but both, independently of each other, use the epithet “great” (Polish “wielka,” “wielki”). Interestingly, their contemporary poet, Syrokomla, held Baka in very low esteem, treating him as an emblem of atrophy of the Jesuits’ cultural potency. In a foreword to the fourth edition of Baka’s poetry, he characterized the poet in the following way: His time in Vilnius follows […] where he was a professor of poetics at the Academy. Sad proof of the fall and savagery of the Jesuit congregation just before their suppression! A cantor of inevitable death was seated on the chair of Sarbiewski and Naruszewicz! Judging by the patterns he left, what must have been his aesthetic concepts about poetry! What exposition! What exercises made by his pupils, young adepts of Apollo!28

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Józef Baka, Poezje: Uwagi rzeczy ostatecznych i złości grzechowych. Uwagi śmierci niechybnej, ed. Radosław Grześkowiak, accessed February 10, 2019, https://literat.ug.edu.pl/baka/ index.htm. “[…] jest myśl poetyczna wielka w Uwagach śmierci niechybnej […].” Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, “Ksiądz Baka S.J.,” in Idem, Wędrówki literackie, fantastyczne i historyczne (Wilno, 1839), 34. Cf. Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał, 215–217. “Publiczność polska nie umiała poznać się na jednym wielkim swoim poecie, na Bace, który został ogłoszony za godło głupstwa przez piśmidlarzy […].” Jarosz Bejła, Mieszaniny obyczajowe (Wilno: Teofil Glücksberg, 1841), I. 2, 391. “Następuje jego epoka pobytu w Wilnie, (…) gdzie był profesorem poetyki w Akademii. Smutny dowód upadku i odziczenia, w jakim znajdowało się zgromadzenie Jezuitów przed swą kasatą! Na katedrze Sarbiewskich i Naruszewiczów posadzono śpiewaka niechybnej śmierci! Sądząc ze wzorów, które zostawił, jakież musiały być jego pojęcia estetyczne o poezji! Jaki wykład! Jakie lukubracje młodych poetów, jego wychowańców w

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The supportive opinions are not very extensive, but one can read quite a lot of them, especially if confronting them with Syrokomla’s criticism. He consciously contrasts Baka with two outstanding Jesuit poets. Both Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640) and Adam Naruszewicz (1733–1796) were working for the Vilnius Academy as professors of poetics, just like the author of Remarks. Against the background of this educational-biographical parallel, the essence of Syrokomla’s claims is very clearly visible. If their contemporaries regarded both of these poets as worthy successors of Horace, consequently one should expect from Professor Baka also Apollonian poetry, harmonious, elaborate, suffused with the ideals of aurea mediocritas. Syrokomla is unpleasantly surprised by Baka’s poetics and interprets it with disgust as yet another symptom of the collapse of the once powerful congregation. The basis for such emotional criticism was the observation that Baka’s poetics are unexpectedly distant from the Lithuanian and Polish Jesuit poetry, which can legitimately be identified with the following concepts: Apollo, academy, tradition, art, cultural heritage. The separateness of the “cantor of inevitable death,” founded by this contraposition, is the reason why Syrokomla rejects this poetry. It is possible, however, that the same peculiarity is appreciated by Kraszewski, speaking of “great poetic thought” (against the unspoken background of poetry devoid of such greatness), as well as by Rzewuski, juxtaposing Baka with a group of “scribblers.” The thesis about Baka’s radical singularity, which was grounded in the 19th century, is repeated in the next century by the most eminent Polish poetsurrealist Aleksander Wat (1900–1967), who places Baka neither in the context of old Jesuit poets (Sarbiewski), nor against the background of his times (Naruszewicz), but sees him as a lonely precursor of the key tendencies of the 20th century: “[Baka] […] heads for […] memento mori ([…] and his memento mori is closer to Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode than to the Jesuit Baroque). […] sense of absurdity of being beyond death. […] the anticipation of Sartre’s and Beckett’s, and others’ philosophy”!29 The admiration of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891–1945), the most eminent Polish female poet before Wisława Szymborska, is much less contextual, and more metaphorical: “O priest Baka, my favorite poet […]! The abyss

29

Apollinie!” Władysław Syrokomla, “Parę słów przedwstępnych,” in Baka odrodzony (Orgelbrand: Wilno, 1855), 7. “[Baka] […] zmierza […] do memento mori ([…] bliższe ono Heideggerowskiego Sein zum Tode niż baroku jezuickiego). […] poczucie bezsensowności istnienia poza śmiercią. […] antycypacja filozofii Sartre’a, Becketta i in.” Aleksander Wat, “O przetłumaczalności utworów poetyckich,” Literatura na Świecie 7 (1983): 324.

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of sorrow! But what a style! What a brilliant macabre! Cobwebs, shadows and damp of basements, fungus, and mould – nervous fear clung to erect hair with claws of a playful, malicious bat… […] Words-hybrids, the refined absurd, create a strange and frightful mood […] Wind is blowing from the verses, the draught of open crypts. […] What a powerful expression in this onslaught of words!”30 Syrokomla’s phillipic is probably the only negative opinion on Baka’s poetry formulated by the poet or prose fiction writer. In the 18th century Baka was not read by other poets at all (no testimonies of such reading whatsoever), in the 19th century rarely, but over time he has gained enormous popularity and respect among the people of the pen. Traces of careful reading, and sometimes even fascination with Remarks, can be found in poems by poets as diverse as Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983), Stanisław Grochowiak (1934–1976), Jerzy Harasymowicz (1933–1999), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz (born 1935),31 to mention only the most outstanding authors of classics, whose works contribute to the canon of Polish literature. This is how Baka finally became a master of Polish poetry. It is symptomatic that his central position is recognized by the practitioners rather than theorists of creative writing, fellow writers rather than literature researchers. The 19th century may be considered to be the age of the history of literature in Polish culture. The unique position of poetry as the essential way of the nation’s existence was conducive to the development of research on the history of literature as well as to the emergence of synthetic lectures aimed at grasping the “essence” of national writing. In most of the synthetic textbooks on the history of Polish literature, written and published in the 19th century, Baka’s name does not appear at all. He was not mentioned by, for example, Feliks Bentkowski (1781–1852), Julian Bartoszewicz (1821–1870), Henryk Biegeleisen (1855–1934) or Piotr Chmielowski (1848–1904). The absence of Baka in Chmielowski’s and Biegeleisen’s work deserves particular emphasis. Both historians certainly knew Baka’s poetry, but none of them found a place for him in their presentations of the history of Polish literature, even though

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“Ulubiony mój poeto, księże Bako […]! […] Otchłań smutku! Ale co za styl! Jaka genialna makabra! Pajęczyny, cienistość i wilgoć podziemi, grzyb i pleśń – nerwowy strach, wszczepiający się w zdębiałe włosy pazurami rozigranego, złośliwego nietoperza… […] Słowa-hybrydy, wymyślne niedorzeczności, stwarzają nastrój obcy i przeraźliwy […] Wiatr wieje z tych wierszy, przeciąg krypt otwartych. (…) Jakaż siła ekspresji w tym ataku słów!” Maria Jasnorzewska, Szkicownik poetycki (Warszawa: J. Mortkowicz, 1939), 126–130. Cf. Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał, 288–322. Cf. Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał, 323–351.

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their books count six volumes each and about 1600 and almost 2000 pages of print respectively! Another eminent historian of literature, Leon Rogalski (1806–1878) proved to be even more dismissive of Baka than Biegeleisen or Chmielowski. In his book, entitled typically The History of Polish Literature, the author of Remarks is mentioned twice: for the first time in a chapter on Korsak, who was responsible for the above mentioned barbaric re-edition of Remarks, and for the second time in a chapter on Leon Borowski (1784–1846), a scholar who wrote an afterword to Korsak’s pathetic excess. Baka as a poet did not receive a single word. Aleksander Zdanowicz (1805–1868) was probably the only 19th-century literary historian who treated Baka’s Remarks with a certain respect. Unfortunately, he failed to explain this extraordinary metaphysical poetry adequately: “However, despite the funniest form and unrefined concepts, in this work there is a lot of originality, humor and beautiful thoughts.”32 The researcher confused horror with humor, trance with joy, and cruelty born of the danse macabre tradition with a lack of refinement! The author of the most important synthesis in the history of Polish literature, Ignacy Chrzanowski (1866–1940), also demonstrated an astonishing lack of understanding. In his textbook on the history of Polish literature, published for the first time in 1908, he wrote about Remarks and their author: “Baka’s name became proverbial: poems à la Baka mean stupid poems, and rightly so […].”33 The last testimony comes not from a textbook, but an influential anthology of Polish poetry of the 18th century, compiled by Zdzisław Libera (1913–1998), an outstanding researcher and internationally recognized expert in the field of Enlightenment. In his book, he published 38 poems by Ignacy Krasicki, 18 by Stanisław Trembecki, 19 by Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin. These numbers are not surprising. All three poets belong to the canon of Polish literature. On the other hand, however, none of them inspires the imagination of numerous contemporary poets! In addition to the classics in the anthology of Libera, there are, for example, five poems by a certain Piotr Alojzy Łoski as well as

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“Pomimo jednak najzabawniejszej formy i płaskich konceptów, wiele jest w tym dziełku oryginalności, humoru i pięknych myśli.” Aleksander Zdanowicz, Rys dziejów literatury polskiej (Wilno: J. Zawadzki, 1874–1877), I, 669. “[…] nazwisko Baki przeszło w przysłowie: wiersze à la Baka oznaczają głupie wiersze, i słusznie […].” Ignacy Chrzanowski, Historia literatury niepodległej Polski (965–1795) (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 11th ed.: 1971), 447. Cf. Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał, 338.

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five by Antonina Niemiryczowa, i.e., artists who are completely anonymous. And Baka is represented in the book by one piece only! What is more, in his biographical note Libera does not call Baka “a poet,” but “a verse-maker” [wierszopis]!34 Ultimately, therefore, Baka owes his prominent position in Polish literature to his younger writer colleagues rather than to professional literary scholars. It took centuries for the academic history of literature to get used to the Remarks’ savage poetic idiom. Czyż and Nawarecki take all the credit in this regard: the former because of numerous articles,35 the latter due to the already mentioned monograph, both as authors of the first correct reedition of Remarks published in 2000. Baka did not fit into the aesthetics and ideology of the Enlightenment, which dominated in his time. Interestingly, the romantic breakthrough did not significantly improve his position, although he was indeed much closer to romantic phreneticness and sublimity than to the classical ideals of harmonious beauty. I believe that the reasons why Baka was rejected by literary scholarship in the 19th century were more ideological than aesthetic. They are linked to the origin of the Polish history of literature as a humanistic discipline, which was born of patriotic emotions and concern for the survival of the nation in oppressive political circumstances. The author of Remarks was rejected not because he seemed funny to someone, or bizarre to someone else. He was rejected because of his gravity. It is true that the 19th-century history of literature set exceptionally serious tasks for Polish poetry: it was supposed to be a guide and a leader of the nation, a depository of its historical evolution and its essential nature. The metaphysics of this literature was the metaphysics of collective history. Love of the homeland remained its dominant sentiment. Even the pain in these poems was a pain in the name of millions, and the God of these poems invariably became the God of the Poles. And Baka suffered and prayed alone. Religious solemnity pervaded his poetry (as Krzysztof Koehler demonstrated).36 In repeated devotional exercises

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Zdzisław Libera, Poezja polska XVIII wieku: Antologia (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1983), 123. Antoni Czyż, “Groteska w poezji księdza Baki,” Przegląd Humanistyczny 3 (1981): 147–157; Idem, “Józef Baka – poeta jezuicki,” Przegląd Powszechny 1 (1984): 34–50; Idem, “Retoryka księdza Baki,” in: Retoryka a literatura, ed. Barbara Otwinowska (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984), 167–192. Krzysztof Koehler, “Józef Baka,” in: Historia literatury polskiej w dziesięciu tomach, vol. III: Barok, ed. Anna Skoczek (Bochnia, Kraków, Warszawa: Prowincjonalna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2003).

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the poet contemplates death, harnessing not only his unique talent, but also his philosophical education and, above all, Jesuit spirituality. In the era of metaphysics of history, the mystic was ignored, and it would be difficult to expect a different course of events. Baka’s case brilliantly reveals the ideological character of the 19th-century project of the history of national literature, exploited in the service of the great idea of nation. This is why the author of Remarks was better understood from the very beginning by other writers, i.e., people forced by their own everyday creative experience to regard literature as an individual act of subversive excess rather than an exercise of humble self-inclusion in an institutionalized discursive schedule. Thus, the presented history also tells us that Polish literary scholarship remained in the 19th century much longer than the calendar would indicate, and much longer than Polish literature. Baka’s long-term rejection by Polish literary studies was therefore ideological – it was the idea of an institutionalized national literature, focused on matters of the nation and serving the nation as an absent state that was responsible for all that. Lithuanians also ignored Baka for a long time. 19th-century Lithuanian nationalism needed, like oxygen, not only the institution of national literature but also – even more acutely – the institution of a national language. For this reason, until the end of the 19th century, Lithuanian literary studies were focused on texts which were Lithuanian in the linguistic sense, paying much less attention to those which would enjoy the quality of being Lithuanian for reasons other than linguistic ones. This rejection is also ideological – the idea of an institutionalized national language, an essential medium for the existence of a modern nation, stands behind it. Both Poles and, on a much more limited scale, Lithuanians overcame the issues of the 19th century. Baka found his place in the canon of Polish literature, and perhaps soon the same will happen in the canon of Lithuanian literature. Our understanding of the canon has also changed. The 19th-century concept of the canon can be compared to a mirror in which the nation was supposed to recognize itself to dwell there safely. The mirror was to be perfectly polished, flat and – what is obvious – aligned in one, strictly defined position. Today’s canon is also a mirror, but shapeless and broken into pieces. This is how it can reflect many faces of the same reality, while remaining undefined itself.37

37

This work has been supported by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) within the project “Lithuanian-Polish Literaty Bilingualism in years 1795–1918” (Project no. 2013/09/B/HS2/01206).

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Bibliography Baka, Józef. Poezje: Uwagi rzeczy ostatecznych i złości grzechowych. Uwagi śmierci niechybnej. Edited by Radosław Grześkowiak. Accessed February 10, 2019. https:// literat.ug.edu.pl/baka/index.htm. Baka, Józef. Poezje. Edited by Michał Hańczakowski. Kraków: Universitas, 2002. Baka, Józef. Uwagi. Edited by Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Test, 2000. Baka, Józef. Poezje. Edited by Antoni Czyż and Aleksander Nawarecki. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986. Baka, Józef. Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone. Warszawa: Drukarnia przy ul. Mazowieckiej, 1828. Baka, Józef. Nabożeństwo codzienne chrześcijańskie. Edited by Jan Legowicz. Wilno: w Druk. XX Bazylianów, 1808.38 Baka, Józef. Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone. Edited by Rajmund Korsak. [Wilno], 1807. Baka, Józef. Uwagi rzeczy ostatecznych i złości grzechowych przy nabożnych aktach, modlitwach i tekstach różnych. Uwagi śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone. Wilno, 1766. [Baka, Józef]. Wielki obrońca upadłey grzesznikow przed Bogiem sprawy abo gorliwy o zbawienie dusz ludzkich Missionarz S. Jan Franciszek Regis Soc. Jesu wyznawca. Wilno: w drukarni Akademii Soc. Jesu, 1755. Baka, Józef. Nabożeństwo do Ś. Jana Franciszka Regisa wyznawcy y missyonarza. Wilno: w drukarni Akademii SJ, 1744. Baka, Józef. Comitia Honorum Et Aviti Splendoris Palatinas ad Aedes Post peractos fortunata Coronide in Corde Regni ad Lechici Orbis tranquillitatem Pacificationis Conventus, Sub Triumphalem Ingressus Pompam Illustrissimi ac Excellentissimi Domini D. Joannis Ludovici de Broel Plater Palatini Livoniae Inter publicos sui Ducatus Plausus Totiusque Palaemonij Orbis Festiva Gaudia Celebrata a Devinctissima Plateriano Nomini et Honori Residentia Düneburgensi Soc. Jesu Panegyrico applausu Promulgata. Vilnae: Typis Universitatis Societ. Jesu, 1736. Bartoszewicz, Julian. Historia literatury polskiej potocznym sposobem opowiedziana. Warszawa: M. Glücksberg, 1861. Bejła, Jarosz. Mieszaniny obyczajowe. Wilno: Teofil Glücksberg, 1841. Bełza, Władysław. “Dziwadła literackie.” In Encyklopedia humoru i satyry polskiej. Edited by Antoni Orłowski, IV, 135–136. Warszawa: Tygodnik “Mucha,” 1914. Bentkowski, Feliks. Historia literatury polskiej wystawiona w spisie dzieł drukiem ogłoszonych. Warszawa-Wilno: Zawadzki, 1814. 38

This is the second edition. We do not know the first one.

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Biegeleisen, Henryk. Ilustrowane dzieje literatury polskiej. Wiedeń: F. Bondy, 1898–1908. Buchwald-Pelcowa, Paulina. “Baka Józef.” In Literatura polska: Przewodnik encyklopedyczny, vol. 1. Edited by Julian Krzyżanowski and Czesław Hernas, 44. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984. Bukowiec, Paweł. Metronom: O jednostkowości poezji ”nazbyt” rytmicznej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2015. Chmielowski, Piotr. Historia literatury polskiej. Warszawa, 1899–1900. Chrzanowski, Ignacy. Historia literatury niepodległej Polski (965–1795). Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1971, 11th ed. Czyż, Antoni. “Józef Baka – poeta jezuicki.” Przegląd Powszechny 1 (1984): 34–50. Czyż, Antoni. “Retoryka księdza Baki.” In Retoryka a literatura. Edited by Barbara Otwinowska. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984. Czyż, Antoni. “Groteska w poezji księdza Baki.” Przegląd Humanistyczny 3 (1981): 147–157. Grześkowiak, Radosław. ”Bramka Górskiego: O ubezwłasnowolnieniu staropolskich autorów przy wyborze podstawy krytycznego wydania.” Terminus 2 (2007): 103–122. Jasnorzewska, Maria. Szkicownik poetycki. Warszawa: J. Mortkowicz, 1939. Koehler, Krzysztof. “Józef Baka.” In Historia literatury polskiej w dziesięciu tomach, vol. III: Barok. Edited by Anna Skoczek. Bochnia, Kraków, Warszawa: Prowincjonalna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2003. Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy, and Władysław Syrokomla, eds. Baka odrodzony: Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej wszystkim pospolitej wierszem wyrażone. Wilno: Orgelbrand, 1855. Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy. “Ksiądz Baka S. J.” In Wędrówki literackie, fantastyczne i historyczne. Wilno, 1839. Libera, Zdzisław. Poezja polska XVIII wieku: Antologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1983. Nawarecki, Aleksander. Czarny karnawał: “Uwagi śmierci niechybnej” księdza Baki – poetyka tekstu i paradoksy recepcji. Wrocław, Warszawa, Kraków: Ossolineum, 1991. Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich. Edited by Filip Sulimierski, Bronisław Chlebowski, Władysław Walewski et al., I–XV. Warszawa: Kasa im. Józefa Mianowskiego, 1880–1914. Syrokomla, Władysław. Parę słów przedwstępnych. In Baka odrodzony. Wilno: Orgelbrand, 1855. Trys baroko saulėlydžio literatai: Pranciška Uršulė Radvilienė, Konstancija Benislavska, Juozapas Baka. Chrestomatija. Edited by Aida Ažubalytė, Brigita Speičytė, and Giedrė Šmitienė. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2003. Wat, Aleksander. “O przetłumaczalności utworów poetyckich.” Literatura na Świecie 7 (1983). Zdanowicz, Aleksander. Rys dziejów literatury polskiej. Wilno: J. Zawadzki, 1874–1877.

The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis Vaidas Šeferis

1

Introduction

Kristijonas Donelaitis (1718–1780)1 is considered to be one of the most important Lithuanian writers of all time. In the 18th century he composed the epic poem, Metai (The Seasons) and six fables.2 The literary quality of Donelaitis’s work is so extraordinary that it is often regarded as the very beginning of Lithuanian literature itself. Although many works were written in Lithuanian before Donelaitis, the literary merits of these works cannot be compared to The Seasons and his fables. For this reason, Donelaitis symbolically establishes Lithuanian literature in the narrowest sense, i.e., as the tradition of original Lithuanian literary works. To this day, Donelaitis’s The Seasons is one of the most well-known works in the Lithuanian language. Today, there remains no doubt that Donelaitis is a Lithuanian writer worthy of canonization. His work is included in mandatory Lithuanian literature curricula in Lithuanian schools; he is studied on the university level, and his work is often interpreted within the context of the Lithuanian cultural space. However, the process of bringing this important writer into the Lithuanian canon has not been easy: in the background of his texts, a never-ending, intriguing, and ever-changing debate on how his work should be interpreted continues. The aim of this paper is to reveal the most important moments of the canonization of Donelaitis in the early years of his literary reception

1 In historical sources, the name and surname of the author vary: along with today’s Lithuanian version Kristijonas Donelaitis the Latin form Christian Donalitius and two German forms Donaleitis and Donalaitis can be found. 2 For a textologically sound text of The Seasons, see Kristijonas Donelaitis, Raštai, I tomas: Metai. Dokumentinis ir kritinis leidimas [Writings. Volume 1. The Seasons. Critical edition], ed. Mikas Vaicekauskas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015), 2–217. For the texts of the fables, see Kristijonas Donelaitis, Raštai [Writings], ed. Kostas Korsakas et al. (Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas, 1977), 40–66. Full English translations of The Seasons: Kristijonas Donelaitis, The Seasons, trans. Nadas Rastenis (Los Angeles: Lithuanian Days Publishers, 1967); Kristijonas Donelaitis, The Seasons, trans. Peter Tempest (Vilnius: Vaga, 1985). Excerpts of English translations are also available on: http://www.lituanus.org/1964/64_1_02_Metai.html, accessed May 6, 2019.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_015

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(up to 1918) and to show the context in which this writer’s work and life were interpreted.3 Firstly it is important to remember that Donelaitis lived and wrote in Prussian Lithuania.4 This term applies to the eastern part of the former Prussian kingdom, where the ethnic Lithuanian minority lived in close quarters.5 The most important administrative and cultural centers in Prussian Lithuania were the towns Tilžė, Gumbinė, Įsrutis and Ragainė (Tilsit, Gumbinnen, Insterburg and Ragnit). Donelaitis was a citizen of the Kingdom of Prussia. He studied Theology at Königsberg University, then worked as a school teacher in Stalupėnai (Stalupoehnen), and from 1743 until his death he was the pastor of the parish in the village of Tolminkiemis (Tollmingkehmen).6 Donelaitis was a Prussian Lithuanian writer. At that time the larger part of the Lithuanian nation lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which after the division of 1795 became a part of the Tsarist empire. Cultural exchanges between Lithuanians living in Prussian Lithuania and ethnic Lithuania7 were relatively poor. These two ethnic Lithuanian groups were divided by a national border and by religion – Prussian Lithuanians were mostly Lutherans, while ethnic Lithuanians were mostly Catholics. The contemporary Lithuanian nation has grown out of Catholic Lithuania. This is where the national movement for Lithuanian reawakening formed at the end of the 19th century, and it was this movement that led to the declaration of Lithuania’s independence in 1918. Because of the important role of the Catholic church in ethnic Lithuania it was not easy to include the “Lutheran” work of Donelaitis in the literary paradigm of Lithuanian national rebirth. On the other hand, Donelaitis’s Lithuanian writings were difficult to incorporate into the German cultural context of the Prussian Kingdom as well. The importance of his work within the canon of German literature remains marginal. Donelaitis’s literary work is a typical expression of the phenomenon known as borderland culture: this work is tied to Lithuanian culture through language, though not through religion; it is tied to the Prussian cultural tradition through 3 For a comprehensive study of Donelaitis’s reception in the interwar period 1918–1939, see Viktorija Šeina, “Tarpukario Donelaitis” [Donelaitis in the interwar period], in Kristijono Donelaičio reikšmės [The meanings of Kristijonas Donelaitis], ed. Mikas Vaicekauskas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 159–176. 4 Literary history has a synonymous use of the name Lithuania Minor. 5 Today this is the Kaliningrad region and northern Poland. 6 More on Donelaitis and his writings at: http://www.mab.lt/Donelaitis/en-index.html, accessed January 28, 2019. 7 The term ethnic Lithuania indicates the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Lithuanian was spoken, which is more or less analogous to today’s Republic of Lithuania.

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religion, but not through language. Donelaitis’s cultural identity can only be adequately understood within the Prussian Lithuanian context, rooted in that tiny stretch of land between East Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The early stages of the canonization of Donelaitis’s literary work was quite complex. In order to better understand this process, we will first discuss the differences between the cultural and linguistic reception of Donelaitis work, and then we will look at the relationship between the paradigm of the cultural reception of Donelaitis in the Lithuanian and German tradition of interpretation. The sphere of cultural reception includes the interpretations of Donelaitis’s works, and focuses on literary and aesthetic aspects of his texts. The sphere of linguistic reception first and foremost includes those works on Donelaitis whose authors are interested in the peculiarities of the Lithuanian language used to write the poems and fables. These include aspects of grammar and lexicon among other points. Of course, it is not possible to make a strict delineation between these forms of reception, they are just different points of view that analyze the same literary phenomenon. However, in order to clarify the circumstances of the reception of Donelaitis’s literary work, it makes sense to separate the attitudes of linguists and literary researchers toward his writing.

2

Donelaitis’s Cultural Reception: Between Folklore and Intellectual Art

It is only possible to give approximate dates for the genesis of the texts of Kristijonas Donelaitis. The Seasons and the fables were written some time in the middle of the 18th century. While he was still alive Donelaitis did not publish either The Seasons or his fables. After his death (†1780) his work was published for the first time by Königsberg University Professor Ludwig Rhesa (1776–1840): The Seasons was published in 1818,8 and the fables were published in 1824.9 Rhesa arranged the parts of Donelaitis’s epic poem according

8 Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt Donalitius, in gleichem Versmaaß ins Deutsche übertragen von D. L. J. Rhesa, Prof. d. Theologie (Königsberg: Hartungsche Hoffbuchdruckerei, 1818). Accessible through the electronic archive at www.epaveldas.lt, accessed February 9, 2019. 9 Aisópas arba Pásakos iß Grykonû kalbôs perguldytos per D. L. J. Rhesa. Su Pridéjimu kellû naujû Pásakû (Karaláuczuje: Ißspaustas ir pardůdamas pas Augustą Artungą, 1824). Accessible through the electronic archive at www.epaveldas.lt, accessed February 9, 2019.

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to the flow of the seasons and came up with the title Metai (The Seasons).10 He also translated the entire epic poem into German and wrote a Foreword (Vorbericht) in German in which he analyzed Donelaitis’s life and work. This essay is rightfully considered the first scholarly study of Donelaitis.11 Rhesa’s imposed compositional structure on The Seasons, and the interpretative codes he proposed to read Donelaitis laid down the foundation for the entire tradition of the reception of Donelaitis’s literary work. Rhesa formulated two important claims that influence the discussion on Donelaitis’s place in Lithuanian literature to this day: a) Donelaitis’s work is a part of Lithuanian folklore; b) Donelaitis’s work is unique and does not follow any previous literary models. In his Foreword to The Seasons Rhesa consistently presents Donelaitis as a representative of the collective body of the Lithuanian nation. In the book’s dedication to Wilhelm von Humboldt he emphasizes Donelaitis’s ethnic Lithuanian origins, and he claims The Seasons as a Lithuanian national hymn.12 It is important to Rhesa that Donelaitis should be recognized not as an individual artist, but as an embodiment of collective Lithuanian national culture. Rhesa presents this position in his essay very clearly: So far the literature of the Lithuanian nation does not possess a special national work of art, which could be regarded as the enduring monument of the language, customs, intellectual culture and constitution of people, that dwell on the shores of the Nemunas river. Therefore, I dare to present the following poem […] to a broader audience.13

10

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12 13

The manuscript of Donelaitis’s epic consisted of four separate notebooks – one for each season. However, the poet did not leave any instructions for the ordering of the four parts. Also, he did not assign a joint title for his work, the title, The Seasons, was created by Rhesa. For more about the composition and structure of The Seasons, see Vaidas Šeferis, Kristijono Donelaičio “Metų” rišlumas [The Cohesiveness of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s The Seasons] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014). Liucija Citavičiūtė, “Martynas Liudvikas Rėza – pirmasis Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikuotojas” [Martynas Liudvikas Rėza: First publisher of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s work], in Martynas Liudvikas Rėza, Raštai IV: Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikavimas [Writings. Volume 4: Publishing Kristijonas Donelaitis’s creation], ed. Liucija Citavičiūtė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014), 35. Ludwig Rhesa, “An Freiherrn Wilhelm v. Humboldt,” in: Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, III. “Die Literatur des litthauischen Volkes hat noch kein besonderes Nationalwerk aufzuweisen, welches als ein bleibendes Denkmal der Sprache, Sitte, Geisteskultur und Verfassung jener Völkerschaft betrachtet werden kann, welche die Ufer des Nimenstromes bewohnet. Daher wage ich es, nachstehendes Gedicht […] dem größeren Publikum zu übergeben.” Ludwig Rhesa, “Vorbericht,” in: Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, V.

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From this quote we see that Rhesa’s horizon of interest first of all was national literature (“the literature of the Lithuanian nation”), and Donelaitis’s work is presented as part of this literature. In the opening sentences of Rhesa’s essay Donelaitis is already called to serve the Lithuanian nation and is interpreted as part of its folklore: It also would be to good advantage for linguistic, historic and geographic studies of the region, if every product of the national Genius would be brought into the light – not only written national documents, but also everything else: small songs, proverbs, myths and folk tales should be recorded and handed down for posterity.14 In this quote Donelaitis’s creative work is described as “written national documents,” while Rhesa’s intention is to collect more similar folklore: “small songs, proverbs, myths and folk tales.” Therefore, Rhesa considers Donelaitis’s work first of all as an aspect of collective representation and regards it as a specific “higher” form of folklore. The portrait of the poet painted by Rhesa is similarly peculiar: the author of The Seasons appears to him as a humble Lithuanian peasant, a naive poetic genius, who sings his Lithuanian hymns for the benefit of similar humble and honest Lithuanian peasants like himself. Rhesa categorizes The Seasons as a folk poem (Volksgedicht): It must be regarded as a thoroughly folk–poem though, since the persons talking in it belong solely to the lower class of the village folk. The poet lives and works only in the huts of peasants […].15 One can raise serious doubts as to whether Donelaitis himself would have found such an interpretation acceptable: the facts bear witness that Donelaitis considered his creative work as an intellectual pursuit, which was based on deep knowledge of the literature of antiquity, and that his work was intended

14

15

“Auch dürfte es für die Sprachforschung, Geschicht- und Länderkunde, von manigfaltigem Nutzen seyn, wenn nicht nur die schriftlichen Urkunden eines Volks aus der Verborgenheit hervorgezogen werden, sondern auch alles Uebrige, was der Genius einer Nation hervorgebracht hat: kleine Lieder, Sprichwörter, Mythen und Volkssagen aufgezeichnet und der Nachwelt überliefert werden.” Rhesa, “Vorbericht,” V. “Man muß es aber durchaus als ein Volksgedicht betrachten, weil die darin redenden Personen nur dem niedern Stande der Dorfbewohner angehören. Der Dichter lebt und webt nur in den Hütten des Landmanns […].” Ibid., VI–VII.

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for intellectuals like himself – Lithuanian pastors.16 Donelaitis definitely did not consider himself a peasant, nor was he particularly humble, at least as the local authorities of Prussian Lithuania are concerned. However, Rhesa’s image of a “peasant genius” was very convincing and did not lose influence until the very end of the 20th century. Rhesa’s second aspect of Donelaitis’s interpretation was equally influential – the unique quality of his works. Rhesa dismisses all the literary parallels that may have explained Donelaitis’s works, and considers them to be uniquely original: Our poet deserves the admiration even more, since he had not a single example or model for working his way up and had to make his separate path only through his own talent. […] But our Lithuanian man is an original on his own, with no Greek or Roman examples influencing his mind.17 Here too it is important to be cautious: it is possible to successfully interpret Donelaitis’s work through the prism of the cultural context of his era, namely the influence of the literature of antiquity, religious Pietism as well as other historical circumstances. However, because of Rhesa’s efforts Donelaitis became a poetic genius of the Lithuanian nation, who seemed to have evolved out of nowhere without the influence of external cultural forces. Rhesa’s canonization of Donelaitis’s ouevre, truthfully, shows no evolution: Donelaitis becomes a central figure in Lithuanian literature immediately from the very first publication of his poem. The consequence of this “sudden” canonization was a very persuasive interpretation formulated by Rhesa, that overshadowed other possible receptions of this writer for a long period of time. In the shadow of Rhesa’s interpretation in the 19th century little attention was paid to aspects of Donelaitis’s work that could not be explained through the prism of folklore, e.g., with regard to his literary individuality, his complex prosodic techniques or to the implicit elite audience of his work. Rhesa formed an image of Donelaitis as a vernacular genius in order to achieve specific goals. East Prussian politics toward Lithuanians in the 18th

16

17

For more on the intellectual self-awareness of Donelaitis and his potential audience, see Dalia Dilytė, Kristijonas Donelaitis ir Antika [Kristijonas Donelaitis and antiquity] (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2005), 45–71. “Unser Dichter verdient um desto mehr Bewunderung, als er ohne irgend ein Muster und Vorbild zu haben, sich durch sein eigenes Talent emporarbeiten und seine eigene Bahn brechen mußte. […] Unser Litthauer aber ist sein eigenes Original, dem weder ein griechisches noch römisches Muster vorschwebte.” Rhesa, “Vorbericht,” VII.

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and 19th centuries gravitated between two positions: some urged Lithuanians to be Germanized as quickly as possible while the other sought to maintain education of the Lithuanian minority in their native language.18 At the beginning of the 19th century, the politics of Germanization became stronger, and Rhesa was an active opponent to this political position. Wilhelm von Humboldt, to whom Rhesa dedicated the 1818 publication of The Seasons, was one of Rhesa’s strongest supporters in the struggle for education in the Lithuanian language. Fighting for it, Rhesa needed convincing evidence that the Lithuanian nation was creative and active: he needed to prove that it was actually a nation, and not just a smattering of individuals. For this reason, Rhesa included Donelaitis in the paradigm of Lithuanian vernacular culture as a part of the folklore, hoping in this way to strengthen the impression of a creative Lithuanian nation. The claim about the unique quality of Donelaitis’s literary work served Rhesa to achieve yet another goal, namely to disprove accusations of Lithuanian culture being primitive. Donelaitis’s first publisher actually rose up to fight an old cliché, namely that German culture is superior to the Lithuanian one: Even less possible for him [i.e., Donelaitis – V. Š.] was to use some German model, since German literature in the period when the author created his writings had not yet reached its golden age, and, except for Haller and Hagedorn, did not spawn any classic authors.19 According to Rhesa, Donelaitis not only did not borrow anything from German writers, but actually surpassed the German classics! Naturally, such a claim was a clear intellectual provocation. The first phase of Donelaitis’s literary canonization thus coincides with Rhesa’s activities in the field of Lithuanian studies. Donelaitis in this context is presented not as an individual intellectual artist, but as representative of collective creativity, namely Lithuanian folklore. His work is read strictly within

18

19

Further see Liucija Citavičiūtė, Karaliaučiaus universiteto Lietuvių kalbos seminaras. Istorija ir reikšmė lietuvių kultūrai [Lithuanian seminar of the University of Königsberg. History and impact to the Lithuanian culture] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2004), 46. “Ein deutsches Vorbild konnte er noch weniger zum Grunde legen, weil in jener Periode, als der Verfasser schrieb, die deutsche Literatur noch nicht ihr goldenes Zeitalter erlebt, und wenn wir Haller und Hagedorn ausnehmen, noch keinen klassischen Autor hervorgebracht hatte.” Rhesa, “Vorbericht,” VII.

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the cultural code of the Lithuanian peasantry and is of interest to readers first and foremost as being representative of Lithuanian ethnic culture.

3

The Linguistic Reception of Donelaitis: The End or the Beginning of Lithuanian Culture?

Linguists were the first interpreters of Donelaitis. It is noteworthy to mention that the first two dissertations written about Donelaitis belonged to the sphere of linguistics: Alexander Aleksandrov defended his Master’s thesis, Sprachliches aus Donalitius in 1886 at Tartu University. Karel Janáček defended his dissertation, Přízvukování u Donalitia [Accentuation by Donalitius] in 1928 at Masaryk University Brno (Czech Republic).20 However, the most noteworthy early linguistic researchers on Donelaitis were August Schleicher (1821–1868) and Georg Nesselmann (1811–1881). They each published a collection of Donelaitis’s works – Schleicher in 1865,21 and Nesselmann in 1869.22 In the history of linguistics, both scientists are known first and foremost as influential Lithuanian language experts: Schleicher wrote a Lithuanian grammar, which to this day is considered an epochal achievement in the field of Baltic studies,23 and Nesselmann is the author of an important Lithuanian dictionary.24 In the paradigm of linguistic reception, these scholars are not interested in Donelaitis in his own right, but as part of their wider interest in the Lithuanian language. And the interest in the Lithuanian language stems from the context of 19th-century comparative historical linguistics. This was the golden age of Indo-European studies. The development of Indo-European language research revealed that Lithuanian is an important link in the chain of comparative linguistics because its archaic features make it possible to explain many phenomena of the history of Indo-European

20 21 22

23 24

For more on this little-known dissertation, see Karel Janáček, Přízvukování u Donalitia. Donelaičio kirčiavimas, ed. Vaidas Šeferis (Brno: Tribun EU, 2009). Christian Donaleitis Litauische Dichtungen. Erste vollständige Ausgabe mit Glossar. Von Aug. Schleicher (St. Petersburg, 1865). Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar herausgegeben von G. H. F. Nesselmann (Königsberg: Verlag von Hübner & Matz, 1869). August Schleicher, Litauische Grammatik (Prag: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1856). Georg H. F. Nesselmann, Wörterbuch der Littauischen Sprache (Königsberg: Verlag der Gebrüder Bornträger, 1850).

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languages. The usual route of linguists to Donelaitis proceeds from studying ancient Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) and then moving through the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages, where they inevitably arrive at Donelaitis. That is exactly the path that led Schleicher to the Lithuanian language.25 Linguists emphasize Donelaitis’s beautiful use of the Lithuanian language – they call it lively, pure, authentic. It was the perfection of Donelaitis’s Lithuanian language in The Seasons and the fables that attracted Schleicher and Nesselmann to his work. The cultural content of the work is almost secondary: it is not important what Donelaitis writes about, but rather how he writes about it. In the field of linguistics, The Seasons becomes a linguistic material worthy of structural and historical analysis. Here, similarly to Rhesa’s interpretation, once again Donelaitis’s individuality as a poet is sacrificed to the “higher” collective interest – in this case to the representation of the Lithuanian language. Nesselmann describes this position most accurately when writing about the publication of the collective works of Donelaitis that Schleicher edited: Schleicher was a true genius of the form indeed, but a quite one-sided one. He was interested in the exact grammatical form of the words only, but not in the sense and content of the script manifesting itself through those words.26 Schleicher and Nesselmann also preserve another important aspect of Rhesa’s interpretation: they both interpret Donelaitis from within the context of Lithuanian folklore. It is symptomatic that both linguists first compile expansive collections of Lithuanian folklore and only later take on Donelaitis’s texts.27 Schleicher and Nesselman considered Donelaitis’s literary work to belong to the same genre as Lithuanian folklore, as though they created a homogeneous cultural discourse: Folklore and Donelaitis are inseparable within this 25

26

27

Joachim Dietze, August Schleicher als Slawist. Sein Leben und sein Werk in der Sicht der Indogermanistik (Berlin: Akademie–Verlag, 1966), 27, 29. Algirdas Sabaliauskas, “Augustas Schleicheris,” in Lituanistinis Augusto Schleicherio palikimas, vol. I, ed. Ilja Lemeškin and Jolanta Zabarskaitė (Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2008), 32. “Schleicher war ein zwar großes, aber ganz einseitiges Formgenie. Nur die genaue grammatische Form der Wörter hatte für ihn Interesse, nicht aber der durch die Worte repräsentierte Sinn und Inhalt einer Schrift.” Georg Nesselmann, “Vorrede,” in: Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen, VII. Georg H. F. Nesselmann, Littauische Volkslieder (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1853). August Schleicher, Litauisches Lesebuch und Glossar (Prag: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1857).

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point of view. Commenting on his collection of Lithuanian folklore, Schleicher in a single breath of inspiration adds: “I would gladly have incorporated also the single classical Lithuanian work, The Seasons by Důnaleitis (Donalitius) into my Reader.”28 Therefore, Rhesa’s cultural interpretation of Donelaitis and the way he is presented and received in Indo-European linguistics has one common root – in both cases Donelaitis was considered to be a part of Lithuanian folklore, only they emphasized different aspects of it. Rhesa was interested in the cultural information about Lithuanians that is preserved in The Seasons, while the linguists read Donelaitis’s poetry as a root source of the Lithuanian language. However, there is one essential difference between the cultural and the linguistic reception of Donelaitis. For Rhesa, Donelaitis was an example of the vitality of the Lithuanian nation and proof of the nation’s creativity. For Schleicher and Nesselmann Donelaitis was a sort of “The Last of the Mohicans,” or the last representative of a dying language. Commenting on The Seasons, this is how Schleicher described the state of the Lithuanian language: While reading this masterpiece one should sincerely pity that such a language perishes without leaving any literature, a language, which could easily rival the works of the ancient Greeks, the Romans or the Hindus in its formal perfection.29 In the 19th century many linguists made such declarations about the dying Lithuanian language. Typically these statements were based on an analysis of the situation of Prussian Lithuania without reflecting on the situation in ethnic Lithuania. The popular travel writer and translator of Donelaitis into German, Louis Passarge, described the dying language as follows: Also, the Lithuanian, the most archaic of all living European languages, retreats against the German. […] the time is foreseeable, when the Lithuanian will die out, as did the closely related language of the ancient Prussians. Fortunately it was possible to scientifically record the

28

29

“Gerne hätte ich das einzige klassische werk der litauer, die jahreszeiten von Důnaleitis (Donalitius) meinem lesebuche ein verleibt […].” Schleicher, Litauisches Lesebuch und Glossar, VIII. “Beim lesen dieses meisterwerkes bedauert man innig, daß eine solche sprache zu grunde geht, one eine literatur zu besitzen, die an formvolkommenheit mit den werken der Griechen, Römer und Inder hätte wetteifern mögen.” Ibid.

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language, although at the last moment […]. The Schleicher-Grammar, “dainos” (folksongs) collected by Nesselmann and Rhesa and the magnificent poem “The Seasons” by Donalitius constitute the treasure, which will be adored by far posterity as a valuable acquisition.30 In the middle of the 19th century almost nobody believed that a Lithuanian national rebirth was possible. Schleicher would have been extremely surprised to find out that not only did the Lithuanian language not go extinct, but that it took on a new cultural and social energy. The symbolic beginning of Lithuania’s national rebirth is considered to be the year 1883 when the newspaper Auszra [Dawn] made its appearance. From this moment on, it developed very quickly: by the end of the 19th century the process of the Lithuanian national rebirth was already taking the form of a mass movement and the “dying” Lithuanian language was suddenly ”rediscovered” by many Lithuanians as the innermost treasure of their own identity. This happened often with great emotional emphasis: in the first edition of Auszra Andrius Vištelis (who wrote under the acronym J. A. W. L.) published his hymn, “The Lithuanian Language,” which romantically adores the archaic quality of Lithuanian:31 O brangi lietuwiszkoji Szwenta kalba prigimtoji! Uź źemcziugus tu brangesnė Ir už viską meilingesne. […] Tu esi tarp daugio szimtu Kalbu swiete da garbintu Ir seniausia, ir graźausia Turtingiausia ir szwelniausia.

30

31

Oh dear Lithuanian Sacred native tongue! You are more precious than pearls And the most pleasant of all. […] Among many hundreds honorable Languages of the world You are the oldest, the most beautiful, The richest and the most tender one.

“Auch das Littauische, die alterthümlichste aller lebenden europäischen Sprachen, macht dem Deutschen Platz. […] und es lässt sich die Zeit absehen, wo das Littauische eben so ausgestorben sein wird, wie die ihm nahe verwandte Sprache der alten Preußen. Glücklicherweise hat man noch in der zwölften Stunde die Sprache wissenschaftlich fixiert […]. Die Grammatik Schleichers, die von Nesselmann und Rhesa gesammelten Dainas und das prachtvolle Gedicht von Donalitius “Das Jahr” bilden einen Schatz, der als ein reicher Gewinn noch von der fernen Nachwelt bewundert werden wird […].” Louis Passarge, Aus Baltischen Landen. Studien und Bilder (Glogau: Verlag von Carl Flemming, 1878), 255. J. A. W. L. [Andrius Vištelis], “Lietuviszkoji Kalba” [Lithuanian language], Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 10–11. Accessible on the electronic archive: www.epaveldas.lt, accessed January 23, 2019.

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It is a charming paradox that intentions of comparative linguistics, which were based on most pessimistic premises (i.e., to record as many facts about the Lithuanian language before it was too late), became a source of optimism and inspiration to the members of the Lithuanian national movement: they adopted the statements of the linguists about the archaic nature of the Lithuanian language and derived a source of pride from it, which strengthened their own national identity significantly. An emotional connection to the native language became the cornerstone for modern Lithuanian identity. The pessimistically tuned linguistic reception of Donelaitis was transformed into an optimistic cultural reception of this writer. A myth formed around the oldest and most perfect Indo-European language, and Donelaitis’s literary work as the soundest source of this language. The dying nation was suddenly reborn. This process could seem almost like a miracle. However, in truth it can be explained in terms of changes in the social-cultural dynamics: separate parts of Lithuanian culture “die” and are “reborn.” The pessimistic prognoses of the linguists were accurate in describing the death of the Lithuanian language in Prussian Lithuania: by 1878, one hundred years after Donelaitis passed away, the people of Tolminkiemis spoke only German. When Passarge traveled to Tolminkiemis he found just twelve very old people who still knew the Lithuanian language.32 At the same time, by the end of the 19th century ethnic Lithuania started to show significant cultural activity: it was this Lithuania that had been reborn, and produced hundreds of new recipients of Donelaitis’s literary heritage. Here it is relevant to quote one of the most popular figures of the national rebirth, Jonas Šliūpas (1861–1944), who traveled to Prussian Lithuania and was surprised that people there considered Lithuanian national rebirth an absurd idea: In Tilsit a group of men from the Lithuanian Writers’ Union gathered. They threw cold water on my hot heart, surprised that I would want to raise up Lithuania. […] We are not dying yet! I said to myself, and for no good reason you, little Prussians, sing to us: requiescant in pace!33 Once the movement of Lithuanian national rebirth began, the interpretation of Donelaitis changed radically within the Lithuanian cultural context: if he 32 33

Passarge, Aus Baltischen Landen, 313. “Tilžėje suėjau tulus vyrus iš Liet. Raštų Draugystės, ir tie lyg šaltu vandeniu mano karštą širdį apipylė, besidyvydami, kad aš norįs Lietuvą kelti. […] Tik mes dar nemirštame! tariau sau, ir veltui jųs, Pruseliai, mums giedate: requiescant in pace!” Jonas Šliūpas, “Minės apie mano prietikius prie Auszros” [Memories of my experiences with Auszra], Varpas, no. 3 (1903): 77–78.

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was the last great Lithuanian writer to Schleicher or Passarge, then for ethnic Lithuanians (Jonas Basanavičius, Jonas Šliūpas, Maironis, and others) he was the first great Lithuanian author, and his work symbolized the beginning of a new era of Lithuanian culture. Therefore, the first ever conflict of the interpretation of Donelaitis came about not because of the canonical status of this writer (neither the Germans nor the Lithuanians, and neither the linguists nor the representatives of the cultural reception had any doubts about this), but because of their differing views toward Lithuanian culture itself: is it actually dying or not?

4

Donelaitis amongst Germans and Lithuanians

The Lithuanian national rebirth took place in ethnic Lithuania where the cultural identity was strongly influenced by the Catholic faith. Catholic priests were the most famous writers of the nation experiencing rebirth.34 Therefore, it was not easy to incorporate the literary work of a Lutheran minister into the Catholic cultural canon. Furthermore, Donelaitis never even mentioned ethnic Lithuania or the Lithuanians who lived there. When he refers to Lithuania in his work, he means only Prussian Lithuania. This was accurately noticed in 1869 by an anonymous reviewer of Donelaitis’s work in the English press: It is remarkable that, notwithstanding his patriotic regard for his own race and language, there is not the slightest trace of any aspiration after national independence, or any allusion to the more numerous section of his countrymen then dwelling under the Polish sceptre.35 The early reception of Donelaitis’s literary work in ethnic Lithuania still clearly reflects the fact that he is a foreign writer. In Simonas Stanevičius and Donelaitis’s collection of fables (appeared in 1829 in Vilnius) two types of

34

35

Motiejus Valančius, Antanas Baranauskas, Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis, Juozas TumasVaižgantas, Vincas Mykolaitis–Putinas, Aleksandras Dambrauskas-Adomas Jakštas and others. [Anonymous], “Donalitius, the Lithuanian Poet,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art 28, no. 733 (November 13th, 1869): 643. Republished with a translation into Lithuanian: Leonas Gineitis, “Dvi G. Nesselmanno ‘Metų’ leidimo recenzijos” [Two reviews of The Seasons of Nesselmann], in: Lietuvių literatūriniai ryšiai ir sąveikos (series Literatūra ir kalba, vol. X), ed. Kostas Doveika (Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Mokslų Akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas, Vaga, 1969), 374.

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Lithuanian identity are clearly delineated – a Prussian identity and a Samogitian identity:36 this attitude manifests itself in the title of the collection, which says “Six Fables of the Samogitian Simonas Stanevičius and the Next Six of Donelaitis, the Prussian Lithuanian.”37 The author to the Foreword of this edition, on the one hand, praises Donelaitis’s work because it is written in his native Samogitian (i.e., Lithuanian), while on the other hand, he does not regard Donelaitis as a writer “of our land,” meaning an ethnic Lithuanian writer: There are men who have not forgotten their native Samogitian and have tried to write fables in this language […]. One of these men is Krizas Donelaitis, who is Lithuanian-born […]. However, it is necessary to explain why we put Simonas Stanevičius’s fables in the first position. There was no other reason except that he is a writer of our land while Donelaitis, although a Lithuanian, is a Prussian.38 However, in the process of the national rebirth, which was closing in on cultural activity during the 19th century, Donelaitis became more and more “close” to Lithuanians, and by the end of the 19th century, he was definitively incorporated into the culture of ethnic Lithuania: the fact that he belongs to “us,” to “our nation” does not raise any doubts anymore. The editors of the first collection of Donelaitis’s work prepared by ethnic Lithuanians (it appeared in 1897 in the United States) remark: The rebirth of our nation is an indisputable fact. […] The works of Kristijonas Donelaitis were in the past and will remain in the future a wholesome, appropriate nourishment for the Lithuanian mind. The 36 37

38

The terms Samogitia and Samogitian dialect were used until the 20th century as synonyms for ethnic Lithuania and the Lithuanian language. Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa (Wylniuje: Spaustuwoj B. Neumana, Metuse 1829). Accessible on the virtual archive at: www.epaveldas.lt, accessed February 9, 2019. “Rados winog wiray, kuri neužmirszdamys yr ne niekyndami prygymtos sawa žemaytyszkos kałbos, bande yr joj raszity pasakas […]. Tokiu wiru ira Kryżżas Donałaytys isz lituwyszku gimdytoju […]. Winog reikałs pasakity, kodiel Symona Stanewiczes pasakas, pyrmoj witoj padiejome? szytay, ne kyta kokia priżastys buwa, kayp tyktay kad Jys ira mûsu żemes raszitojys: kad tu tarpu Donałaytys nors Lietuvynynkas, bet Prûsas.” J. J. W. Lituwys, “Prakałba,” in: Szeszes pasakas, IV, IX. This introductory essay is the first original Lithuanian interpretation of Donelaitis, as it suggests new codes for reading his works, namely it requires a knowledge of the European context of the fable genre and supposes a high intellectual competence of the reader. Earlier texts in Lithuanian about Donelaitis were only compilations of theories by Rhesa, Schleicher and Nesselmann.

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broader distribution of the ideas of the author of “The Seasons” will bring only good to Lithuanian nationhood.39 The culture of reborn Lithuania integrated Donelaitis into its literary canon by using a single strong argument, namely the argument of his language: Donelaitis wrote his literary work in Lithuanian, therefore he is a part of the Lithuanian literary heritage. This is illustrated well by Maironis’s position on this question. Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis (1862–1932) was a Lithuanian Catholic priest and the most famous poet of the period of Lithuanian national rebirth. Additionally, he was an influential historian of literature and an active creator of the Lithuanian canon. This is what he wrote about Donelaitis: The 18th century was not altogether fruitless. In that century our greatest poet was born, lived, and wrote. To this day Lithuanians have full right to proudly and boldly present his name and work to other educated nations of Europe. This was Kristijonas Donelaitis. […]40 Maironis takes it for granted that Donelaitis is “our” poet, meaning a poet of the Lithuanian awakening, and that “we Lithuanians” may be proud of him. By doing so Mairionis clearly omits the problematic religious and national differences (Donelaitis is a Lutheran, and Donelaitis is a citizen of the Kingdom of Prussia): to him, the linguistic argument becomes ultima ratio. The concept of linguistic identity at the end of the 19th century was something very new to Lithuanian culture. This concept took hold with Jonas Basanavičius’s “Foreword” to the first edition of Auszra in 1883. Demanding equal rights for the Lithuanian language beside the Polish and Russian languages, he also introduced a new model for ethnic Lithuanian identity, which was based on linguistic criteria: you are only a Lithuanian, if you speak

39

40

“Atgijimas mųs tautos yra jau neužginamu faktu. […] Kristijono Donelaičio rasztai buvo ir bus sveiku, atsakancziu maistu lietuviszkam protui. Praplatinimas ‘Metų laikų’ autoriaus idejų lietuvystei tik ant gero gali išeiti.” Kristijono Donelaiczio Rasztai. Iszleista Kasztais Kunigų A. Burbos ir M. Miluko. 1897 Spaustuvėje “Garso Amerikos Lietuvių.” Shenandoah, Pa., 4. Accessible in the electronic archive: www.epaveldas.lt, accessed February 9, 2019. “Vienok ir XVIII amžius ne visai buvo bergždžias: jame gimė, pargyveno ir rašė mūsų didžiausias poėta, kurio vardu ir darbais Lietuviai ir šiandieną gali teisingai ir drąsiai didžiuotis prieš visas apšviestas Europos tautas. Buvo tai Kristijonas Duonelaitis.” Maironis, Lietuvos istorija. Su kunigaikščių paveikslais ir žemėlapiu [Lithuanian history. With images of dukes and a map] (Petropilis: Ekaterininski kan., 1906), 221–222. Accessible in the electronic archive: www.epaveldas.lt, accessed January 23, 2019.

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Lithuanian.41 This concept contradicts the old identity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was based on the criterion of citizenship: a Lithuanian is someone who lives within the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, no matter what language he speaks. Therefore, from the perspective of the national Lithuanian rebirth a person’s identity is not defined by state borders, but by his language. From this perspective Prussian Lithuania becomes an integral part of the common Lithuanian culture (that is exactly the reason why this region was named Lithuania Minor) and Donelaitis must be regarded as a phenomenon of ethnic Lithuanian literature. The fusion of language and ethnic identity is part of the ideological paradigm of modern nationalism, and Lithuanian culture in this case reflects changes in the wider European context (similar processes took place in German, Czech, Finnish and other cultures). Reflecting on the context of Donelaitis’s cultural reception, it is important to understand that at the end of the 19th century it was the idea of language–based identity that enabled Donelaitis to be incorporated into the corpus of Lithuanian literature. On the other hand, the early researchers who studied Donelaitis, the Germans, created a rather different portrait of the writer. The most important positions here are held by Louis Passarge and Franz Tetzner. Louis Passarge (also called Ludwig Passarge, 1825–1912) was the first among Donelaitis’s biographers to travel to Tolminkiemis, looking for archival sources.42 In Tolminkiemis Passarge discovered valuable documents written by Donelaitis – the autobiographical “Notes for my Successor,” numerous documents on the sc. case of land separation, and others.43 Also in 1894, Passarge translated and published a third collection of Donelaitis’s writings in the German language.44 Because of all this, Passarge became one of the most influential interpreters of Donelaitis’s work, and one of his greatest propagators in 19th-century Germany.

41 42 43

44

Jonas Basanavičius, “Priekalba,” Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 3–7. Accessible in the electronic archive: www.epaveldas.lt, accessed January 23, 2019. Rhesa, Schleicher and Nesselmann worked only with documents that were held in the Königsberg Archives. For Donelaitis’s Archive, see Donelaitis, Raštai [Writings] (1977), 401–594. In the past few years it has been possible to recover more documents on Donelaitis in Germany Archives. The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius is preparing a new publication of the Donelaitis’s Archive. Christian Donalitius’ Littauische Dichtungen. Übersetzt und erläutert von. L. Passarge, Halle a. S.: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1894. Two earlier translations of Donelaitis were published in Rhesa’s (1818) and Nesselmann’s (1869) publications of his work.

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Passarge’s interpretative paradigm in the scheme we are using belongs to the cultural sphere of Donelaitis’s reception: this scholar was rather interested in the literary aspects of Donelaitis’s work, and not in linguistics. For the most part, Passarge takes over Rhesa’s conception and considers Donelaitis’s literary work as a part of the folkloric heritage, seen as the symbolic space where the Lithuanian “national soul” manifests itself: “Nobody understood the Lithuanian ethnic soul as deeply, as did our poet […].”45 Similar to Rhesa, Passarge regards Donelaitis as a literary phenomenon who seemed to have emerged from nowhere and without any literary models, and most especially without any German literary influences: “[…] whereas Donalitius always reaches into the plenteous human life and seems to follow no other examples but nature itself, namely the nature of his Lithuanian homeland.”46 A specific aspect of Passarge’s interpretation, which was not used in the previous reception of Donelaitis, is the emphasis on Donelaitis’s bilingualism: “[…] so Donelaitis found himself compelled to resort – deliberately or unknowingly – to the German, his second native language, and to borrow and to draw from it everything he missed in the Lithuanian.”47 In this quote we clearly see specific features of Passarge’s thought: he not only constitutes that Donelaitis had two native languages – Lithuanian and German – but posits the hierarchical relationship between them. According to Passarge, Donelaitis improved upon the primitive Lithuanian language with examples from the more sophisticated German. Passarge here interestingly takes a step back from postulating on the unique quality of Donelaitis’s work – in the literary sense this work is completely original, but in the linguistic sense it belongs to the influence sphere of the German language. Statements about Donelaitis’s bilingualism are based on objective facts. Donelaitis’s first native language, without dispute, was Lithuanian. However, in everyday communication he used German more frequently: Donelaitis’s texts in German are written with perfect command of the language.48 It is 45

46

47

48

“Keiner hat die littauische Volksseele so verstanden wie unser Dichter […],” Louis Passarge, “Donalitius’ Leben und Dichtungen,” in: Christian Donalitius’ Littauische Dichtungen, 9. “[…] während Donalitius, immer in das volle Menschenleben hineingreifend, kein anderes Vorbild zu haben scheint als die Natur selbst, und zwar die Natur seiner littauischen Heimat.” Ibid., 7. “[…] so sah sich der Dichter – bewusst oder unbewusst – genötigt, auf das Deutsche, seine zweite Muttersprache gleichsam, zurückzugreifen und aus ihr zu entnehmen und zu entlehnen, was er in der littauischen vermisste.” Ibid. The analysis of Donelaitis’s handwriting shows that his German writing was significantly more evolved than his Lithuanian, which supports the claim on the predominant position of the German in Donelaitis’s linguistic identity, cf. Donelaitis, Raštai (2015), XIX.

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also symptomatic that his autobiographical notes (“Notes for my Successor”) were written only in German. Therefore, Passarge in speaking about Donelaitis as a bilingual writer was not exaggerating the facts. However, this takes on a polemical weight within the context of the Lithuanian national rebirth, especially when compared with Maironis’s interpretation. As mentioned earlier, it was only possible to include Donelaitis into the Lithuanian national canon by basing the argument on linguistic identity. This concept falls apart when Donelaitis is regarded as a bilingual writer. The model for Lithuanian national identity that was established by Auszra was strictly monolingual: there could be only one native language, whereas mixed linguistic identity was seen as something suspect. This is precisely how Maironis interprets the influence of other languages on Donelaitis’s work: “The Seasons is a poem of high art. At the same time, it has its faults: first of all, the poet decorates his language too much with German, Polish, and Russian words […].”49 It would be difficult to find a more eloquent example of interpretative conflict than these quotes from Passarge and Maironis. They illustrate well how the epistemic foundations of European culture between the 18th and the 19th century shifted. In the 18th century in Prussian Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it was self-evident that multiple languages could coexist within the psyche of one individual. However, in the 19th century the issue of a mixed identity becomes a problem. Passarge believes that the German language “improved” Donelaitis. Maironis believes that the German language “ruined” him. The context of Passarge’s interpretation betrays the position of German culture toward Lithuanians: the mission of German culture is to enrich and civilize the primitive Lithuanian language and culture, whereas Maironis’s position demonstrates a radical demand of linguistic and cultural purity that was typical of the modern nationalism. By positing that the influence of the German language ruins Donelaitis’s literary work, Maironis suggests a model for a perfect and pure Lithuanian culture where the influence of foreign cultures only serves to contaminate it and destroy it. Passarge sincerely admired the Lithuanian language and Donelaitis. However, it was quite typical that his admiration was nothing more than a fascination with a primitive and exotic culture, and not an expression of cultural dialog between two equal partners. In his opinion, Lithuanians never had a literature, and even more so, never had academic traditions: “Lithuanians never

49

“Keturi metai kaipo poėma stovi labai augštai; vienok turi ji teip-pat ir savo ydas: pirmą, poėta pardaug išmargino savo kalbą vokiškais, lenkiškais ir rusiškais žodžiais […].” Maironis, Lietuvos istorija, 226.

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possessed any literature, not to mention an Academy, which would have discovered and developed the laws of their language.”50 Passarge seems to forget the wide body of Lithuanian literature, which extended back from the 16th century in Prussia and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He ignores the fact that there was a Lithuanian language seminar that was taught at Königsberg University from 1718, and that, incidentally, Donelaitis had studied in that seminar.51 It is certain that Passarge was aware of these facts because he himself had attended that seminar and studied the Lithuanian language with Friedrich Kuršaitis.52 Therefore the cultural image of a primitive, yet fascinating Lithuanian culture suggested by Passarge should be regarded as a specific descriptive model that fits the German cultural context of the time. This model imposed a strict hierarchy on the relationship between the two cultures and associated Lithuanian culture only with folklore: The Lithuanian today is nothing but a vernacular and was even more so in Donalitius’s times. […] When Donalitius tried to write poetry in such language, he had first to find and to discover every single thing, he had, so to speak, to design the language from its most simple forms of dainos (songs) or from the hymns that were already available at that time.53 With Passarges descriptive pattern in the background, specific features of the posture of another important Donelaitis researcher, Franz Tetzner, emerge. Franz Tetzner (1863–1919) made an enormous contribution to the study of Donelaitis. Like Passarge, he studied the archive of the Tolminkiemis church. There he found Donelaitis’s unique documents and published them in the journals Altpreußische Monatsschrift and Unsere Dichter in Wort und Bild at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.54 Because

50

51 52 53

54

“Die Littauer haben nie eine Literatur besessen, geschweige eine Akademie, welche die Gesetze ihrer Sprache fand oder regulierte.” Passarge, “Donalitius’ Leben und Dichtungen,” 5. Citavičiūtė, Karaliaučiaus universiteto Lietuvių kalbos seminaras, 35–44. Passarge, “Donalitius’ Leben und Dichtungen,” 4. “Das Littauische ist gegenwärtig und war noch mehr zu Donalitius’ Zeit, nichts als eine Volksprache. […] Als Donalitius versuchte in einer solchen Sprache zu dichten, musste er alles erst aufsuchen und entdecken, er musste die Sprache gleichsam erst aus den einfachen Formen der Dainos, oder der damals schon vorhandenen kirchlichen Lieder heranbilden […].” Ibid., 6–7. The great merit of Tetzner is that he provided the full texts of Donelaitis documents, while Passarge only quoted from fragments of documents. Bibliographic information about all of Tetzner’s prepared publications of Donelaitis’s documents can be found in:

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the Tolminkiemis church archive perished in the flames of World War II, Tetzner’s published documents have become a unique source for all scholars of Donelaitis. Tetzner adhered strictly to the criterion of objectivity, when speaking about Donelaitis; however, even his texts respond to the epistemic changes in culture. The 19th century was a period of growing national and imperial ambitions for the German nation. The tendencies toward Germanization increased in internal Prussian politics. Tetzner’s texts about Donelaitis are distinguished within this context by a high degree of cultural emancipation. Unlike Passarge, this researcher does not imply the hierarchy of “mature” and “primitive” culture, when speaking about German and Lithuanian literature: his work reflects a strict egalitarian stance toward both cultures. Of all the early German researchers of Donelaitis, only Tetzner talks about the Lithuanian literature of his time as an expanding one – in his own words: “It is only in our days, that Lithuanian national literature comes to flourish […].”55 Next to Schleicher (let us recall his claim that “such a language perishes…”) and other pessimists, such a phrase immediately sets itself apart. It is difficult to discern whether Tetzner had in mind the evolution of processes in ethnic Lithuania, or if he was referring to the proliferation of Lithuanian publishing in Prussia in the second half of the 19th century. However, he does interpret Donelaitis as part of a lively and growing Lithuanian literature. Within the context of German cultural interpretation this was a new phenomenon. At the same time, for Tetzner too it was important to emphasize Donelaitis’s link with Prussian German culture and to show Donelaitis’s biculturalism. This becomes apparent, when analyzing the attributes he used to describe Donelaitis: 1896: Der größte litauische Dichter (the greatest Lithuanian poet)56 1896: Der litauische Nationaldichter (the Lithuanian national poet)57 1902: Der litauisch-deutsche Dichter (the Lithuanian-German poet)58 1914: Der Ostpreußische Dichter (the East Prussian poet)59

55

56 57 58 59

Kristijonas Donelaitis, Bibliografijos rodyklė [Bibliographic index], ed. Daiva Narbutienė (Vilnius: Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių biblioteka, 2015). “Die litauische Nationalliteratur erlebt erst in unseren Tagen ihr Aufblühen […].” Franz Tetzner, “Christian Donalitius,” in Unsere Dichter in Wort und Bild VI, ed. Dr. F. Tetzner (Leipzig: Robert Claußners Verlags-Anstalt, 1896), 17. Ibid. Idem, “Die Tolminkemischen Taufregister des Christian Donalitius,” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 33 (1896): 18. Idem, “Zu Christian Donalitius,” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 39 (1902): 138. Idem, “Zum zweihundertjährigen Geburtstag des ostpreussischen Dichters Christian Donalitius,” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 51 (1914): 171.

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Šeferis

We can see that in Tetzner’s texts the attribution of Donelaitis to Lithuanian literature (1896) in time shifts towards German cultural attribution (1902, 1914). Another one of Tetzner’s thoughts is also quite expressive: “Donalitius deserves our attention especially due to the fact that within his poetic work he moves on the German ground, and also he versified and wrote mostly in German […].”60 Like Passarge, Tetzner emphasizes Donelaitis’s bilingualism; in this quote he is even more radical than Passarge in considering Donelaitis primarily as a German-writing poet. This statement by Tetzner is quite controversial: we only know of three short poems written in German by Donelaitis61 – that is hardly enough to prove that the poet “versified mostly in German.” However, it is an objective fact that with the exception of poetry, Donelaitis wrote all of his other texts in German (only one letter written in Lithuanian is known). And in terms of the quantity of texts, there is far more material written in German than in Lithuanian (referring to the archive of Donelaitis’s documents). It is obvious that Tetzner’s interpretation reflects the German cultural tendency of that time, which encouraged incorporating Donelaitis’s literary work into the sphere of German culture. Another important element of Tetzner’s attitude, which is vital to the history of how Donelaitis was received, is his retreat from the folkloric cultural code. Tetzner was the first German researcher who considered Donelaitis to be a poet-intellectual, rather than a peasant genius: “The Poet, who felt himself a learned man, could barely have considered hymnals and dainos (folksongs) as poetry worth following.”62 Unlike Passarge, who considered folklore to be Donelaitis’s only source, Tetzner believed that it was worthwhile to search for the genesis of Donelaitis’s poetic vision within the context of the literature of antiquity. Summarizing Donelaitis’s cultural reception in the 19th century, we see several trends. The opinions of Lithuanian and German researchers clash; however, the conflict of their interpretations is not linear and is asymmetrical. Lithuanians include Donelaitis into their literature based on the argument of language: a writer who writes in Lithuanian belongs to Lithuanian literature,

60

61 62

“Donalitius verdient unser Interesse umsomehr, als er sich in seinen Poesien auf deutschem Boden bewegt und außerdem meist in deutscher Sprache dichtete und schrieb […].” Tetzner, “Christian Donalitius,” 17. For their texts, see Donelaitis, Raštai (1977), 263–269. For interpretation, see Dilytė, Kristijonas Donelaitis ir Antika, 21–36. “Gesangbücher und Dainos wird der sich als Gelehrter fühlender Dichter kaum für nachzuahmende Poesie gehalten haben.” Tetzner, “Zum zweihundertjährigen Geburtstag des ostpreussischen Dichters Christian Donalitius,” 175–176.

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while texts written in German by Donelaitis either do not belong to the belleslettres (archival documents) or they are completely insignificant compared with his work written in Lithuanian (the poems written in German). The German researchers, on the other hand, emphasize the influence of German culture on the genesis of Donelaitis’s mentality and regard him strictly as a bilingual writer. It is symptomatic that at the end of the 19th century, we do not see any evidence of dialog between these polemical groups: Passarge and Tezner do not mention the authorities of the Lithuanian national rebirth from ethnic Lithuania (neither Auszra nor Basanavičius nor Maironis), while the Lithuanians do not mention Tetzner or Passarge anywhere. Thus the German and Lithuanian interpretations run parallel to each other with each side ignoring the other. The asymmetry of the interpretive discourse manifests itself in the fact that both sides employ different cultural concepts of what Lithuanian culture is. The German researchers employ a construct of Lithuania that is limited to Prussian Lithuania. In their discourse they do not include the literary context of ethnic Lithuania – the work of Mikalojus Daukša, Konstantinas Sirvydas, Motiejus Valančius, Dionizas Poška, Stanevičius, Antanas Strazdas, Antanas Baranauskas, Maironis. At the same time, the new Lithuanian literary history was only interested in Donelaitis’s work written in Lithuanian and considered elements of his German identity as culturally irrelevant.

5

Conclusion

When considering Kristijonas Donelaitis’s path into the canon of Lithuanian literature, it is important to distinguish the cultural and linguistic reception of his work: the cultural reception began with Rhesa, who regarded Donelaitis as a specific part of Lithuanian folklore. Meanwhile, in the paradigm of linguistic reception Donelaitis was judged to be a source of the archaic, but alas declining Lithuanian language – Schleicher, Nesselmann, and other linguists were counting the final days of the Lithuanian language and in Donelaitis they saw a kind of unique archaeological find. However, it was exactly this pessimistic linguistic attitude that led to one of the most charming paradoxes of Lithuanian cultural history: the research on comparative linguistics gave birth to the narrative of the archaic nature of the Lithuanian language, which then became the basis of the mythology surrounding the movement toward Lithuania’s national rebirth and consolidated a large mass of Lithuanian society. The dying nation suddenly became a nation that was reborn, while Donelaitis was unexpectedly transformed from “The Last of the Mohicans” into the glorious originator of Lithuanian literature, maintaining this canonic status to this day.

252

Šeferis

Lithuanian and German positions on the cultural standing of Donelaitis differ. Lithuanians have incorporated Donelaitis into their literary history: the reading context of Donelaitis for Lithuanians incorporates not only the literature of Prussia, but that of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. German researchers deem Donelaitis to be a phenomenon of a strictly local East Prussian context: they did not deny Donelaitis’s inclusion in Lithuanian literature; however, they write only about Prussian Lithuanian literature and texts, they virtually did not reflect on the processes that were taking place in ethnic Lithuania. All the mentioned interpretative codes for reading Donelaitis are closely related to each other and create a complex view of the canonization of Donelaitis’s work. However, the complicated dynamic of Donelaitis’s reception can be explained very simply. It arises from a single source: from the epistemic shift of European culture, which took place between Donelaitis’s lifetime and his reception in the 19th century. This shift led from the dominating Pietist cultural code of Donelaitis’s epoch to the cultural model based on the epistemic paradigm of Romanticism. The reception of Donelaitis was profoundly affected by ethnic Romanticism and the rise of modern European national ideology. The basic values of Donelaitis’s works were rooted in the epistemic paradigm of Pietism, however, his work was read through the lens of the national rebirth. It is certain that for Donelaitis himself the most important categories of his fictional universe were devotion, industriousness and the moral virtue of human beings; however, his 19th-century readers were first and foremost concerned with the fate of the nation and its language. This epistemic asymmetry generates the entire polemical energy around the interpretation of Donelaitis. In the 19th-century Lithuania a new understanding of nationhood, which was based on the principle of linguistic identity, took root, and it was this principle that allowed Lithuanians to integrate Donelaitis into the national literary canon. The German reception, however, ignored this process and viewed Donelaitis to be strictly representative of the multilingual East Prussian culture. Both sides had difficulties managing to win Donelaitis over their opponents: for the Lithuanians Donelaitis’s work written in German raised complications, along with his Lutheran faith and his clear bilingualism. Meanwhile the Germans had a hard time integrating Donelaitis into their cultural context because of the language barrier presented by the Lithuanian, which was impenetrable for most German readers. How could one admit a poet, whose work only two or three intellectuals could manage to read in the original language, into the German literary canon? Donelaitis’s work simply did not fit into the new epistemic framework that the Lithuanian and German cultures found themselves in during the 19th century. The researchers from both na-

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tions working at the time had to expend much energy into trying to fit his literary work into an interpretative context that was acceptable to them. Translated by Laima Vincė

Bibliography Aisópas arba Pásakos iß Grykonû kalbôs perguldytos per D. L. J. Rhesa. Su Pridéjimu kellû naujû Pásakû. Karaláuczuje: Ißspaustas ir pardůdamas pas Augustą Artungą, 1824. [Anonymous]. “Donalitius, the Lithuanian Poet.” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art 28, no. 733 (November 13, 1869): 643. Basanavičius, Jonas. “Priekalba” [Preface]. Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 3–7. Citavičiūtė, Liucija. “Martynas Liudvikas Rėza – pirmasis Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikuotojas” [Martynas Liudvikas Rėza: First publisher of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s work]. In Martynas Liudvikas Rėza, Raštai IV: Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikavimas. Edited by Liucija Citavičiūtė, 19–48. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014. Citavičiūtė, Liucija. Karaliaučiaus universiteto Lietuvių kalbos seminaras. Istorija ir reikšmė lietuvių kultūrai [Lithuanian seminar of the University of Königsberg. History and impact to the Lithuanian culture]. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2004. Dietze, Joachim. August Schleicher als Slawist. Sein Leben und sein Werk in der Sicht der Indogermanistik. Berlin: Akademie–Verlag, 1966. Dilytė, Dalia. Kristijonas Donelaitis ir Antika [Kristijonas Donelaitis and antiquity]. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2005. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. Bibliografijos rodyklė [Bibliographic index]. Edited by Daiva Narbutienė, Vilnius: Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių biblioteka, 2015. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. Raštai. Metai. Dokumentinis ir kritinis leidimas [Writings. The Seasons. Critical edition], vol. I. Edited by Mikas Vaicekauskas, Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. Raštai [Writings]. Edited by Kostas Korsakas, Kostas Doveika, Leonas Gineitis, Jonas Kabelka, and Kazys Ulvydas. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas, 1977. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. Kristijono Donelaiczio Rasztai. Iszleista Kasztais Kunigų A. Burbos ir M. Miluko. 1897 Spaustuvėje “Garso Amerikos Lietuvių.” Shenandoah, Pa. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. Christian Donalitius’ Littauische Dichtungen. Übersetzt und erläutert von. L. Passarge. Halle a. S.: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1894.

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[Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar herausgegeben von G. H. F. Nesselmann. Königsberg: Verlag von Hübner & Matz, 1869. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. Christian Donaleitis Litauische Dichtungen. Erste vollständige Ausgabe mit Glossar. Von Aug. Schleicher. St. Petersburg, 1865. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt Donalitius, in gleichem Versmaaß ins Deutsche übertragen von D. L. J. Rhesa, Prof. d. Theologie. Königsberg: Hartungsche Hoffbuchdruckerei, 1818. Gineitis, Leonas. “Dvi G. Nesselmanno ‘Metų’ leidimo recenzijos” [Two reviews of The Seasons of Nesselmann]. In Lietuvių literatūriniai ryšiai ir sąveikos (series Literatūra ir kalba, vol. X). Edited by Kostas Doveika, 366–376. Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Mokslų Akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas, Vaga, 1969. Janáček, Karel. Přízvukování u Donalitia. Donelaičio kirčiavimas. Edited by Vaidas Šeferis. Brno: Tribun EU, 2009. J. A. W. L. [Vištelis, Andrius]. “Lietuviszkoji Kalba” [Lithuanian language]. Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 10–11. J. J. W. Lituwys [Stanevičius, Simonas]. “Prakałba.” In Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa, III–IX. Wylniuje: Spaustuwoj B. Neumana, Metuse 1829. Maironis [Mačiulis, Jonas]. Lietuvos istorija. Su kunigaikščių paveikslais ir žemėlapiu [Lithuanian history. With images of dukes and a map]. Petropilis: Ekaterininski kan., 1906. Nesselmann, Georg H. F. “Vorrede.” In Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar herausgegeben von G. H. F. Nesselmann, III–XIV. Königsberg: Verlag von Hübner & Matz, 1869. Nesselmann, Georg H. F. Littauische Volkslieder. Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1853. Nesselmann, Georg H. F. Wörterbuch der Littauischen Sprache. Königsberg: Verlag der Gebrüder Bornträger, 1850. Passarge, Louis. “Donalitius’ Leben und Dichtungen.” In Christian Donalitius’ Littauische Dichtungen. Übersetzt und erläutert von. L. Passarge, 1–26. Halle a. S.: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1894. Passarge, Louis. Aus Baltischen Landen. Studien und Bilder. Glogau: Verlag von Carl Flemming, 1878. Rhesa, Ludwig. “An Freiherrn Wilhelm v. Humboldt.” In Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt

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Donalitius, in gleichem Versmaaß ins Deutsche übertragen von D. L. J. Rhesa, Prof. d. Theologie, III–IV. Königsberg: Hartungschen Hoffbuchdruckerei, 1818. Rhesa, Ludwig. “Vorbericht.” In Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt Donalitius, in gleichem Versmaaß ins Deutsche übertragen von D. L. J. Rhesa, Prof. d. Theologie, V–XXI. Königsberg: Hartungsche Hoffbuchdruckerei, 1818. Sabaliauskas, Algirdas. “Augustas Schleicheris.” In Lituanistinis Augusto Schleicherio palikimas, vol. I. Edited by Ilja Lemeškin and Jolanta Zabarskaitė, 25–62. Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2008. Schleicher, August. Litauisches Lesebuch und Glossar. Prag: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1857. Schleicher, August. Litauische Grammatik. Prag: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1856. Szeszes pasakas Symona Stanewiczes Żemaycze. Yr antras szeszes Kryżża Donałayczia Lituwynynka Prusa. Wylniuje: Spaustuwoj B. Neumana, Metuse 1829. Šeferis, Vaidas. Kristijono Donelaičio “Metų” rišlumas [The Cohesiveness of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s The Seasons]. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014. Šeina, Viktorija. “Tarpukario Donelaitis” [Donelaitis in the interwar period]. In Kristijono Donelaičio reikšmės [The meanings of Kristijonas Donelaitis]. Edited by Mikas Vaicekauskas, 159–176. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Šliūpas, Jonas. “Minės apie mano prietikius prie Auszros” [Memories of my experiences with Auszra]. Varpas, no. 3 (1903): 77–93. Tetzner, Franz. “Zum zweihundertjährigen Geburtstag des ostpreussischen Dichters Christian Donalitius.” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 51 (1914): 171–176. Tetzner, Franz. “Zu Christian Donalitius.” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 39 (1902): 138–139. Tetzner, Franz. “Christian Donalitius.” In Unsere Dichter in Wort und Bild VI. Edited by Dr. F. Tetzner, 17. Leipzig: Robert Claußners Verlags-Anstalt, 1896. Tetzner, Franz. “Die Tolminkemischen Taufregister des Christian Donalitius.” Altpreußische Monatsschrift, no. 33 (1896): 18–35.

The Making of the Lithuanian National Poet: Maironis Aistė Kučinskienė

1

Introductory Remarks

The fact that one of my earliest childhood memories is of my grandfather singing songs composed from Maironis’s (real name Jonas Mačiulis, 1862–1932) poems to me and my sister before bed is not a coincidence. For over a century since the very start of Maironis’s literary career, this “national bard” of Lithuania never disappeared from the collective consciousness. He firmly occupies the position of first Lithuanian national poet and, according to Viktorija Šeina, is “the most significant representation and metonymy of the epoch of heroic national rebirth.”1 Maironis’s first published poems appeared in the periodical press in 1885, and in 1895 his first poetry books were published as separate books: the poetry collection, Pavasario balsai [Voices of spring], and the narrative poem, Terp Skausmu į Garbę [Through suffering toward honor]. In 1903 the famous critic and writer Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas (1869–1933) wrote a letter to his colleague Aleksandras Dambrauskas-Adomas Jakštas (1860–1938) in which he describes the great prestige of Maironis, which shows that the poet was quickly granted the status of national poet.2 His later canonization continues to enforce the cult image of Maironis as the “national bard,” as can be seen during the celebration of 25 years of Maironis’s work in 1913, when he was unequivocally considered the founder of Lithuanian lyricism, his works were referred to as classics, and critics quickly started writing about a post-Maironis generation.3 This article aims to contextualize the formation of Maironis’s position in the canon of national literature, and connect this process to the Lithuanian

1 Viktorija Šeina, “Maironis tarpukario Lietuvos mokykloje” [Maironis in interwar Lithuanian schools], Žmogus ir žodis 19, no. 2 (2017): 33–50. 2 Correspondence from Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas to Aleksandras Dambrauskas-Adomas Jakštas, September 2, 1903, MS F1-E118, Vilnius University Library Manuscript Department, Vilnius. 3 Redakcija, “Maironis. 1888–1913,” Draugija, no. 83 (1913): 226; Balys Sruoga, “Maironis. Kun. prelatas Jonas Maculevičius. 1888–1913,” Aušrinė, no. 28 (1913): 198; Kleopas Jurgelionis, “Padrikos pastabos” [Scattered remarks], Laisvoji mintis, no. 42 (1913): 990–991.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_016

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national rebirth, also raising the question as to the way external factors (sociocultural phenomena, such as the circulation of texts) interact with internal meanings encoded in the texts to form the status of a national poet. The main focus of this article will be his early reception – up to 1913.4 The definition of canon as a socio-cultural phenomenon (rather than understanding it as something “naturally occurring”) is recently becoming more widespread, so ideas about the “making” of Maironis are also arising, especially in view of all of Lithuania celebrating the 150th anniversary of Maironis’s birth in 2012. Brigita Speičytė’s research5 and Šeina’s texts6 dedicated to the canonization of the author are especially relevant to this article and the tradition of Maironis’s studies overall. Since the Lithuanian national bard has already received sufficient attention in other research, this article offers just a brief survey tracing the origins of the making of his canonical position.

2

Methodological Framework

This research considers the literary canon as a dynamic body of texts and authors that comes into being and is produced by taking into account the symbolic capital acquired in the cultural field.7 Two elements are important for the concept of the canon: its formation (the selection of authors and texts, the motivation behind the inclusion, prevailing on the public, and the establishment of the status of the author), and its maintenance. In this article we focus on the formative stage. Alongside the external, or what Ernst van den Hemel

4 I follow the classification of Tomas Andriukonis who divides the critical reception of Maironis into four stages: the first is from the start of his writing until 1913. Tomas Andriukonis, “Įvadas” [Introduction], in Apie Maironį. Maironio kritinės recepcijos rinktinė (1890–2010) [About Maironis. A collection about his critical reception (1800–2010)], ed. Tomas Andriukonis (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 11–43. 5 Among other important publications, noteworthy is Brigita Speičytė’s monograph Anapus ribos: Maironis ir istorinė Lietuva [Beyond the limit: Maironis and the old Lithuania] (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012). 6 Viktorija Šeina, “Maironio kanonizacijos dinamika XX a. I pusės lietuvių literatūros kritikoje” [The dynamic of Maironis’s canonization in Lithuanian literary criticism of the first half of the 20th century], Colloquia 37 (2016): 49–71; Eadem, “Maironio atminimo įamžinimas literatūrinės kanonizacijos aspektu (1932–1940)” [Memorialization of Maironis with respect to literary canonization (1932–1940)], Lituanistica 63, no. 2 (108) (2017): 95–115. 7 For example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–305; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 392.

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calls “the vertical” factors of literary canon formation, there is also the “horizontal” aspect that includes the texts themselves and their aesthetic value.8 In his article “Canonicity,” Wendell V. Harris emphasizes that there are at least eight types of canons (ranging from the “official” to the “personal”).9 It seems as though this does not pose a problem for the present research because we address the national canon, institutionalized in various ways, which formed at a moment when there was no clear distinction between “personal” and “official,” and was universally accepted by the national community. However, when considering the question of the poet as a part of the national canon, the selection of literary texts matters not in isolation, but rather in relation to ideas of national rebirth because the national canon is ideologically motivated. As Marko Juvan observes, “the national poet was one of the most distinctive cultural phenomena of European Romantic nationalism.”10 A national poet as an undoubtedly significant figure emerges in the 19th century in literatures with similar historical and cultural experiences: in Poland (Adam Mickiewicz), in Ukraine (Taras Shevchenko), in Russia (Alexander Pushkin), in Slovenia (France Prešeren), in Latvia (Jānis Rainis), etc. These examples are all prominent but by far not the only ones. In other words, Maironis is considered unique in the Lithuanian literary tradition – as occupying a particular position in the literary field (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms). However, in the broader context, as Juvan shows, national poets “share a pattern of functioning as national poets,” and they are all either directly or indirectly used with the goal of strengthening nationalism. The texts of these poets allowed ethnolinguistic communities to reinforce their sense of collective identity, which is why their reception in the 19th and early 20th centuries became an issue of national importance in the context of national rebirth.11 Virgil Nemoianu also argues that the position of a national poet is determined by the emergence of a nation-state which considered literature an essential

8

9 10

11

Ernst van den Hemel, “History and the Vertical Canon: Calvin’s Institutes and Beckett,” in How the West Was Won: Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, ed. Willemien Otten, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Hent de Vries (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), 39–54. Wendell V. Harris, “Canonicity,” PMLA 106, no. 1 (January 1991): 115–117. Marko Juvan, “Romanticism and National Poets on the Margins of Europe: Prešeren and Hallgrímsson,” in Literary Dislocations: 4th International REELC/ENCLS Congress, ed. Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser and Vladimir Martinovski (Skopje: Institute of Macedonian Literature, 2012), 592. Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 114–118.

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factor in defining itself.12 In turn, we must draw attention to the fact that the figure of the “national bard” is established “primarily in romanticism, when the dramatic appeal of biographies and aesthetic merits of selected poets were employed as cultural symbols in nation building.”13 Thus the biographical dimension of the poet-as-hero becomes just as important as the textual one. The Lithuanian national movement, similar to that of other countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states can be attributed to the paradigm of cultural nationalism,14 in which national literature, with its elected poet – the figure has to be that of a poet – becomes an obligatory component of national identity. In some cases, one can even claim that the literature does not merely reflect the ideas of the national movements, but that national consciousness is established and reinforced precisely through literature. Paulius Subačius thoroughly analyzes such a form of national consciousness namely in the case of Lithuanian culture, demonstrating how literary texts often articulate national ideas even before they circulate in social or political discourse.15

3

Why Maironis?

The Lithuanian national awakening, much like in neighboring Central and Eastern European countries, began in the 19th century and gained momentum in the second half of the century; however, the circumstances of Lithuanian culture and literature at the time of Maironis’s “appearance” was rather complicated. Starting from 1795, Lithuania was occupied by Tsarist Russia, and after the 1863–1864 uprising (The January Uprising), tsarist rule forbade all publications in Lithuanian and banned the Latin alphabet, which is why all Lithuanian publications were secret, underground ones right up until 1904. Publishing in the Lithuanian language in Latin script was carried out mainly in East Prussia during that time, and book-smuggling operations over the Prussian border and a secret periodical press that published Lithuanian texts authored under pen-names existed. The so-called second stage of national

12

13 14 15

Virgil Nemoianu, “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance,” in Romantic Poetry, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), 249–255. Juvan, “Romanticism and National Poets,” 592. Joep Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 559–578. Paulius Subačius, Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė: tautinio išsivadavimo kultūra [The smithy of Lithuanian identity: The culture of national liberation] (Vilnius: Aidai, 1999), 104.

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rebirth is often linked to the appearance of the first Lithuanian newspaper Auszra [Dawn] (1883). This stage, which lasted through the start of the 20th century, witnessed the publication of only about a dozen poetry books in Lithuanian, which included both poetry collections and narrative poems. Maironis himself, alongside publications in the periodical press (around 15 prior to the publication of his first volume of poetry, and of these only 6 used this pseudonym), published quite a few works during this period. In 1891, writing as Stanyslovas Zanavykas, he penned a historical book, Apsakymai apie Lietuvos Praeigą [Tales of Lithuania’s past].16 In 1895 he published the poetry collection Pavasario balsai together with the libretto “Kame išganymas” [Wherefrom salvation] as well as the poem Terp Skausmu į Garbę; a reworked version of this narrative poem was published in 1907 as Jaunoji Lietuva [Young Lithuania]. There were no new published collections between those years, so having published just one narrative poem and one collection of poems, Maironis was already declared the national bard. Given the cultural situation in Lithuania, it would be erroneous to believe that only published poetry books were important without acknowledging the significance of the periodical press and especially the circulation of texts by means of the spoken word and hand-written copies. Nevertheless, even in such specific circumstances, Maironis came to occupy the position of national poet rather quickly, which requires further investigation into what the reasons for his popularity were. A publication that includes a list of people who were punished for possessing or distributing forbidden books allows us to better understand the overall situation regarding the consumption of texts and the significance of Maironis.17 The Tsarist state confiscated books such as syllabaries, religious publications (lives of the saints, calendars, prayer-books), political brochures, and many hymn and songbooks as well as works of a truly widespread periodical press. Maironis’s books appear in these lists as some of the most frequently confiscated works of poetry (not counting collections of religious poetry and folk songs), and thus it is likely that he was one of the most widely read poets, even though other poetic works were also commonly confiscated. For example, Adomas Jakštas’s Dainų skrynelė [Treasure chest of songs] (1894) was equally widely read, other poetry booklets were also found among the people. Thus, several contemporary poets could have been rivals for Maironis, but the 16 17

Republishing the book in 1906 Maironis added a chapter on literary history “Trumpa lietuvių rašliavos apžvalga” [A short survey of Lithuanian writing]. Vytautas Merkys, Draudžiamosios lietuviškos spaudos kelias 1864–1904. Informacinė knyga [Routes of the forbidden Lithuanian press in 1864–1904] (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1994).

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majority of their texts clearly were of lesser quality, and quickly paled upon the emergence of Maironis. The important agent in the literary field, Tumas’s position shows how strong was the need for a national poet: still in the last decade of the 19th century in his reviews he attempted to ascribe the status of national herald to Jakštas, another religious poet (who is currently hardly ever mentioned as a poet in literary histories), however, as soon as Maironis was quickly incorporated into the canon, the possibility of Jakštas occupying such a role was dismissed. Later on, Tumas became the first to publish a study of Maironis’s texts and presented him as the “bard of the national awakening” in lectures to his students. Various national literary histories show how an author from an older period can be turned into a national poet by ascribing to him new values of “national bard.” In the case of Lithuanian literature, such poets could have been Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780), author of the first epic poem in Lithuanian, Metai (The Seasons) or Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). The latter did not become a national poet due to the fact that he wrote in Polish, and also because he was already “taken” as the Polish national poet. Donelaitis was integrated at the time of national rebirth into the historical canon as the forefather of Lithuanian literature.18 However, due to the topic of his poem, the distance in time, and cultural-religious reasons (Donelaitis was a Protestant minister who lived in the Prussian part of Lithuania), he was not selected as the national bard.

4

How Did Maironis Come to Be Recognized as the National Poet?

The textual public canonization of Maironis during the early period was rather inconsiderable;19 up until 1907, when Jaunoji Lietuva was published, only about ten reviews and critical texts of various nature were published about Maironis in the Lithuanian press, which attest to the rapid transition from a young, unknown author to “national bard.” At that time Lithuanian culture was marked by an intense cultural and political debate that took place between two ideological positions: the Catholic clergy versus secular scholars who followed a

18 19

For further reading see Vaidas Šeferis’s article in this volume “The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis,” 230–255. The same can be seen in other young literary traditions, for example: George G. Grabowicz, “Taras Shevchenko: The Making of the National Poet,” Revue des études slaves LXXXV–3 (2014): 423.

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positivist philosophy. This dichotomy can be readily seen in the earliest reviews of Maironis’s texts. The Catholic clergy wrote especially positively about Maironis in the press due to their ideological convictions (Maironis himself was a Catholic priest and participated in the political activities of the Christian Democratic Party). One of the most important and one of similar ideological tendencies was the aforementioned author Jakštas, who at that time was one of the most influential literary critics. In 1898 he published a poem full of pathos titled “For Maironis” in which he seeks to reinforce the status of the latter as the “national bard,” for example: “So full of sacred inspiration, / You’re the glorious bard of Lithuania, / Just don’t give up your great vocation, / Just don’t give up the greatest songs!”20 Faustas Kirša (1891–1964), a writer of the younger generation, sums it up: “Before World War I, the harsh critic Adomas Jakštas’s suggestion that Maironis is a poet sent by the grace of God became universally accepted.”21 More and more publications in which colleagues praised the poet’s texts appeared at that time. Maironis was presented as the national poet in other textual genres as well. For instance, Marija PečkauskaitėŠatrijos Ragana’s novella Viktutė (1903) includes episodes in which the poet’s texts are read, and Maironis is referred to as “the first real poet of Lithuania.”22 Ideologically similar writers defended Maironis’s texts in the press against their opponents’ criticism. This criticism was widely expressed by secular cultural scholars who found themselves in conflict with religious literary figures. For example, in 1895, Stasys Matulaitis (1866–1965) published a review of Terp Skausmu į Garbę, criticizing the poem’s ideological position and even calling the verses “rubbish.”23 This same critic had a much more lenient view regarding the poetics of Pavasario balsai in 1898, when he acknowledged the author “undoubtedly demonstrated poetic talent,” even though the ideas remained unacceptable to him.24 It is credible that after several years of Maironis’s canonization, and thanks to the successful distribution of his texts, even his harsh-

20 21

22 23

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“Tat pilnas švento įkvėpimo, / Garbingas dainiau Lietuvos, / Nemesk to aukšto pašaukimo, / Nemesk aukštos dainų dirvos!” Faustas Kirša, “Maironis mano kartos akimis” [Maironis from the perspective of my generation], in Maironis: jo gimimo šimtmečiui paminėti, ed. Antanas Vaičiulaitis (New York: [J. Pragulbickas], 1963), 82. Šatrijos Ragana, Viktutė (Shenandoah: V. Šliakio (Stagaro) spaustuvė, 1903), 53. Stasys Matulaitis, “Terp skausmu į garbę. Poėma iš dabartinių laikų. Parašė S. Garnys” [Through suffering toward honor. A Poem from recent times], Varpas, no. 8 (1895): 133–136. Idem, “‘Pavasario balsai.’ Eilės, parašė S. Maironis,” Varpas, no. 7 (1898): 9–11.

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est adversaries came to evaluate the priest’s lines differently.25 The transition toward universally acknowledging Maironis as the national poet can best be illustrated in the left-leaning critic Jonas Mačys-Kėkštas’s (1867–1902) poem “For S. Maironis” in which Maironis is called the nation’s poet to whom Vincas Kudirka (1858–1899) assigned a mission: “After all Vincas left you his strings!”26 Kudirka was a poet and ideologue of the positivist literary camp, and after his early death, the role of national herald was passed on to Maironis. It is especially symbolic that Kudirka’s “Tautiška giesmė” (“National hymn”) was designated as the anthem of Lithuania during the interwar period, while Maironis’s “Lietuva brangi” (“Dear Lithuania”) functions as the unofficial national anthem. We can learn more about the early canonization of Maironis from the places of his publications. The fact that the poet’s lines spread among people almost like wildfire because they were sung and assimilated as folk songs can be seen in remembrances and memoirs. However, the opposite may also be considered: Maironis’s works were sung because as soon as they appeared they were integrated into song collections. Anthologies of songs and sung poetry (many of these songs were folkloric, but a portion were written by his contemporaries) were especially popular among Lithuanians (this is evident from the lists of confiscated books). For example, even in 1893 Juozas Paukštis’s and Aleksandras Burba’s collection published in the USA, Lietuviszkos dainos isz visur surinktos [Lithuanian songs gathered from everywhere] included a significant number of Maironis’s poems (songs), while his poems also appeared in the periodical press with the musical scores. It is no coincidence that Maironis’s poems are often referred to as songs or hymns; the proximity of poem-hymn-song is emphasized in the author’s own poetic texts in which the nation’s herald-poets do not simply write, but sing; they do not compose poems, but rather songs and hymns. Moreover, with regards to canonization, Maironis’s lyrical subjects and heroes of the poems create not just any hymns, but “holy” ones,27 thereby emphasizing the role of the

25

26 27

Michael Dobson takes note of the same thing in a different context: at the start of the 18th century, the canonization of Shakespeare as the national author “was becoming such a widespread pursuit” that even his critics and those who did not support this opinion over time came to contribute to this “project” in one way or another. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 161–162. “Jug Vincas paliko tav savo stygas!” Researchers of other national poets have also singled out “holiness” as one of the important traits of a national poet that is transferred to them from religious stories and texts

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poet-genius as connected to divine inspiration. In this case, two aspects must be emphasized: first, there is the equating of poetry and folk songs characteristic of the Romantic tradition which proves especially important for nationalism. The rapid transition of Maironis’s texts to “folklore” resonates with the aims of cultural nationalism to establish common cultural identifiers, and becomes part of a broader paradigm of the collection and circulation of folklore. Secondly, Maironis’s significance was built up through oral tradition, and it can even be considered that “Maironis with his poetry fulfilled the mission of a historical national leader in Lithuania.”28 The fact that Maironis’s poems were published in other collections of texts addressing the nation such as yearly calendars for farmers, religious calendars, syllabaries, textbooks, and anthologies for children may also have contributed to this phenomenon. Even though the poetry that appears in these anthologies and textbooks is often anonymous or penned with a different pseudonym than Maironis’s, his folk poems gained popularity through these publications and became more easily recognizable. Both the public and private early reception of Maironis and his texts shows that he offered great models for collective “national behavior” for his contemporaries. That is to say, he himself contributed to the process of canonization by “creating a common frame of reference.”29 In short, such motifs that are encoded in the texts themselves also played a part in making Maironis a suitable candidate for the position of national poet, and the most important reasons are thematic and formal. I will begin by discussing the thematic reasons. In his poem Terp Skausmu į Garbę, and in certain other poems, the founding of the Lithuanian nation is portrayed as oriented toward the historic past by foregrounding noble, heroic examples. Keeping in mind that at the time of writing Lithuania was occupied by Tsarist Russia, some of the most relevant features of the poems are linked to national identification: the fatherland as the highest value and the individual’s obligation to establish it through common language, history, and landscape. The imperative to forge the future is frequent in Maironis’ texts, but so is the motif of the poet as a herald sent by God, which appears in many poems. At the same time, there are notions of intimate Romantic poetry that accentuate the sacrifice and suffering of giving up one’s personal happiness for the glory of

28 29

of collective identity formation. See Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason, National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Marijus Jonaitis (Šidlauskas), Poetas ir visuomenė XIX–XX amžių sankirtose [Poet and society in the intersection of 19th and 20th centuries] (Klaipėda: Eldija, 1994), 88–89. Harris, “Canonicity,” 116.

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the fatherland, and this becomes a point of identification for the emergent national community. In addition to these signs of national identification, equally important are those of youth and a cult of novelty that prophesied a better future. For example, in the poem Terp Skausmu į Garbę words with the root “jaun-” (young, youth and so on) appear around 50 times. Regarding Maironis’s “consecration” into literary history, Speičytė argues that from his first poem Lietuva [Lithuania] “he intended his work to take a position in Lithuanian literary history and beyond – in the long durée of history and not just in the periodical press or songs of the ‘here and now.’” Speičytė’s research shows how the poet’s work was an intense dialogue with the historical Lithuanian literary tradition since “his poetic form is saturated with traditional content.”30 Thus it is credible that Maironis’s reception was so successful in part because at the same time as he was an innovator of the lyrical tradition, he nevertheless remained historical, that is, his texts “resonated” with his readers. It seems to me that formal reasons merely support the notion of Maironis’s balancing between tradition and innovation: on the one hand, his poetry – especially his lyrical works – is deeply influenced by folklore (not just the themes, motifs, images, but even the tonality), which is to say that people of various social groups would easily recognize it. On the other hand, it is important that the poet was the first in the Lithuanian lyrical tradition to establish and perfect the syllabotonic metre, which made poetry a better fit and phonetically appealing for the Lithuanian language. For this reason, his poetry was appreciated as relevant in early literary studies, which were also emerging at the time. In an 1898 article about the specifics of versification, Kudirka employs examples from his own (under the pseudonym of V. Kapsas) and Maironis’s verses.31 Similarly, Jakštas, who used Maironis’s verses in his research on versification, presented them namely as a perfect example of mathematically calculated measures of good rhyme.32

5

Mačiulis Makes Maironis: Practices of Self-Canonization

In his research of early Lithuanian culture, Vincas Maciūnas takes note of the fact that very few intellectuals took part in the cultural field, and that because 30 31 32

Speičytė, Anapus ribos, 31, 93. V. Kapsas [Vincas Kudirka], “Tiesos eilėms rašyti” [Principles of writing poetry], Varpas, no. 1 (1898): 14–15; no. 2 (1898): 28–30; no. 3 (1898): 40–42. Adomas Jakštas, “Matematiškasis meno dėsnis” [The mathematical law of art], in Idem, Raštai [Writings], vol. 3, ed. Antanas Rybelis (Vilnius: Mintis, 1997), 240–241.

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of this the majority of them had to participate in various spheres – they were historians, writers, publicists, folklorists, teachers, and politicians all at once. Maciūnas calls this mode of activity their being jacks of all trades.33 Maironis stands out from other cultural scholars because he participated in literary life mainly as a poet and not as anything else (even though in the early stage of the cultural field he also took part as a historian). Unlike the majority of his contemporary cultural activists, Maironis played little part in the cultural press and only wrote a few responses to criticism that targeted him. So did Maironis “make himself,” did he himself aim for and uphold the position of “national bard”? According to Bourdieu, literary texts can reveal a lot about the relationships within the literary field,34 and George G. Grabowicz makes the same point when writing about Schevchenko: “In the most fundamental sense, and probably universally, a programming of the poet’s reception comes from the poetry itself.”35 Previous researchers of Maironis also draw on this idea, when they emphasize that the writer projected a national vision intensely through his characters as agents in the cultural field. Vanda Zaborskaitė writes that Maironis was perhaps the first to present the makers of national culture as objects of artistic representation, and the primary figure among the creators of culture is the Poet – the author’s own artistic self-projection.36 However, it is less frequently mentioned that the legitimization of the artist as the nation’s leader, and Maironis’s self-portrayal as a leader in his early works played an important role in the canonization process of Maironis as a national poet. The poem Terp Skausmu į Garbę, which he penned with the pseudonym S. Garnys, tells of nationally awakened young men’s determination to sacrifice themselves and fight for the good of the fatherland. In this work Maironis is mentioned several times as a poet who composed a wonderful hymn. Upon hearing this hymn “Jau slaviškos šalys iš miego pakilo” [The Slavic countries have already arisen from their slumber], the young people state that Maironis will be famous for his songs, and the poem’s hero, Juozas Vilaitis reinforces the image of Maironis as the national poet: “Maironis! You received 33

34 35 36

Vincas Maciūnas, “Jakštas bara Vaižgantą” [Jakštas scolds Vaižgantas], in Idem, Rinktiniai raštai [Selected works], ed. Jonas Šlekys (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003), 675. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 37–47. Grabowicz, “Taras Shevchenko,” 425. Vanda Zaborskaitė, “Maironis ir kai kurios lietuvių kultūros problemos” [Maironis and some of the problems of Lithuanian culture], in Literatūra ir kalba 21: Maironis, ed. K[ostas] Doveika et al. (Vilnius: Vaga, 1990), 50.

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your song from God, / May the Russians be jealous of you for it!”37 In turn, other “candidates” are criticized in the poem: Aleksandras Burba’s (1854–1898) poem Senkaus Jurgis (1889) is mentioned as a poem “not worth one’s time.” In the same year, 1895, Pavasario balsai was published and penned as Maironis (S. Maironis). Active intertextual ties develop between these two books: the tribute paid to Maironis in the fictional realm reinforces the making of Maironis as a national bard. An altered and updated version of the poem published in 1907 as Jaunoji Lietuva no longer mentions the hymns of Maironis as a character, and the function of poet-herald is handed over to other protagonists. Furthermore, this time the poem was penned with the pseudonym of Maironis. It is possible that because of the two books published in 1895, in which Maironis’s pseudonym is legitimized on several levels, this pen-name is selected as the “final one.” From around 1903 onward (at which point, as we see, Maironis has already gained prestige), Maironis takes to penning his work with this pseudonym. In the first edition of Pavasario balsai there are a number of texts in which the lyrical subject is the poet or his poetry is made relevant in other ways. At the same time the first keynote poem of the collection “Jo pirmoji meilė” [His first love] creates the prototypical image of a suffering poet who loves his fatherland and exalts it through song. Genealogically speaking, the treatment of the poet-genius as national leader comes from the Romantic tradition, however, in this concrete instance its effect in the making of the role of the national poet is especially significant. Speičytė writes that the sequence of the poems in the first publication – the keynote poem “His First Love” [No One Else Will Love You So], “Vilija,” “Lietuvos dainos” [Lithuania’s songs] – can be read as the unfolding of an intertextual plot which reveals the role of poetry in shaping emotions of national solidarity through metonymically referring to a common language.38 Thus, in Maironis’s texts we can find the idea that poetry written in the Lithuanian language is a means of unifying the nation’s community. It is the same with the libretto “Kame išganymas” in which the protagonist Zonis also satisfies the poet’s prototype who seeks to awaken and incite people to action through songs. I deliberately left the most important practice of self-canonization, which seems to have greatly influenced the maintenance of Maironis’s canon, for the 37 38

“Maironi! tu giesmę nuo Dievo gavai, / Tegul tau gudai jos pavyzdžia!” Speičytė, Anapus ribos, 94.

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end of this article: his own rewriting, editing, and corrections of his texts while keeping the same titles. Michael Gamer writes that this constitutes “a particular kind of authorial activity, where writers become editors and compilers not of others’ works but of their own […],” and by doing so they engage in “a project of remaking already existing selves: its practice of taking objects already in the public eye and giving them new forms and meanings. Such acts take on a double significance since they provide vehicles for transforming the cultural status not only of works but also of the authors appearing on their title pages.”39 Over the course of Maironis’s lifetime, four editions of Pavasario balsai appeared (the fifth was in Complete works). Even though there still is no comprehensive textual analysis of the changes in titles and the texts themselves, general tendencies are evident: in the 1895 compilation there are 45 poems, in Complete works (the canonical version of the compilation) there are 131 poems, and even those that are reprinted in different editions are often heavily altered, and at times even more than half of the text is rewritten or edited.40 Subačius calls Maironis’s practice of auto-editing his texts “cutting a gem,” and other researchers see these corrections as a search for more fluid rhymes, more poetic language, and better forms of expression as well as shifts in the author’s own thinking. Furthermore, auto-editing is linked to the aim of correcting the texts to align with the intensity of shifts in the formation of a common standardized language. Re-writes are interesting with regard to two more aspects: on the one hand, as Gamer points out, the repeated publication of Maironis’s well-known texts with the same title but with heavily altered content is a peculiar way of upholding his own name and status. On the other hand, variability is somewhat more characteristic of folk songs than of authorial texts. As we have already seen, Maironis’s work is often assimilated as folk song due to its very nature and mediums of dissemination. However, I believe that the variability that arises from the multitude of different versions of the same text is equally important. The idea that the author did not only alter texts and create their variations over time, but even upheld and established a principle of variability can be supported by the 1895 libretto “Wherefrom Salvation.” In this work, the main character Zonis suggests that the students sing his hymn instead of the “Gaudeamus igitur” that they were

39 40

Michael Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4. Paulius Subačius, “Nušlifuoti deimantą, arba kuo Maironis įdomus ne vien pokolonijiniams kraštams” [To cut a gem, or Why is Maironis interesting not only for the postcolonial lands], in Eina garsas: Nauji Maironio skaitymai, ed. Manfredas Žvirgždas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014), 89–113.

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used to. A similar, though slightly different “hymn” is published in the same book as one of the poems of Pavasario balsai titled “Jaunimo giesmė” [The song of youth]. Quotation in full of the fragments will allow for better comparison:41 Užtrauksme naują giesmę brolei! Kurią jaunimas tesupras! Neteip dainůsme kaip ligsziolei: Kitas auklęsime dumàs! […] Į darbą, brolei, vyrs į vyrą! Drąsei su noru teip gražiu! Paimse kardą, mokslą, lyrą Ir žengsme jau naujù keliu! […]

Brothers, let’s sing a new song, That only the young will understand! We’ll sing so differently than before, We’ll have our different thoughts! […] Brothers, let’s work together side by side! So bravely with our splendid will! Taking up the sword, studies and the lyre We’ll march together down a new path! […]

Užtrauksme naują giesmę, brolei! Kurią jaunimas tesupras! Neteip giedosme, kaip ligsziolei! Kitas auklęsime dumàs! […] Į darbą, brolei! vyrs į vyrą! Szarvoti mokslu įstabiù! Paimsme arklą, knygą, lyrą Ir eisme Lietuvos keliu! […]

Brothers, let’s sing a new song, That only the young will understand! We’ll chant so differently than before, We’ll have our different thoughts! […] Brothers, let’s work together side by side! Armed with fascinating studies! We’ll take up the plough, the book, and lyre And we’ll walk down Lithuania’s path! […]

Given the lack of publication experience of that time, we might think that this is merely an overlooked proofreading error. However, a comparison with later versions of the texts shows that they were both edited, albeit separately – each text followed its own path, and they were not aligned. On the one hand, this example metonymically represents Maironis’s frequent internal intertextuality, but at the same time it allows for a consideration about the aim to combine authorial poetry with folk songs and hymns not only because of semantic and prosodic or other features, but also because of its variations; moreover, such “becoming folklore” adds to the forging and maintenance of a canon. 41

St. Maironis, Pavasario balsai (Tilžėje: Kasztu autoriaus, 1895), 8–10, 58.

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Concluding Remarks

As we have seen, with the national movement in full swing, the role of the national poet was crucial. Maironis fit this role, and over the course of a very short period (less than a decade) he became recognized as the national bard at the same time that the modern writers started struggling against him as the first real Lithuanian poet. Especially interesting is the fact that Maironis expresses all of the most important aspects of national identity not only through poetic language, but also aims to establish the figure of the national poet in literature as an engine of cultural change. Such strategies including the legitimation of the role of the poet, and the practice of rewriting texts allowed Maironis to establish himself so firmly that even when later on other talented poets appeared, no one dared to topple him from the Olympus of national poetry. Translated by Vaiva Aglinskas

Bibliography Andriukonis, Tomas. “Įvadas” [Introduction]. In Apie Maironį. Maironio kritinės recepcijos rinktinė (1890–2010) [About Maironis. A collection about his critical reception (1800–2010)]. Edited by Tomas Andriukonis, 11–43. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Balandis [Motiejus Gustaitis]. “Maironiui.” Žinyčia, no. 4–5 (1902): 56. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Dović, Marijan, and Jón Karl Helgason. National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Gamer, Michael. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Garnys [Maironis]. “Redakcijos priedas.” Žemaičių ir Lietuvos apžvalga, no. 22 (1895): 173–175. Grabowicz, George G. “Taras Shevchenko: The Making of the National Poet.” Revue des études slaves LXXXV–3 (2014): 421–439.

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Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Harris, Wendell V. “Canonicity.” PMLA 106, no. 1 (January 1991): 110–121. van den Hemel, Ernst. “History and the Vertical Canon: Calvin’s Institutes and Beckett.” In How the West Was Won: Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger. Edited by Willemien Otten, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Hent de Vries, 39–54. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010. Jakštas, Adomas. “Matematiškasis meno dėsnis” [The mathematical law of art]. In Raštai [Writings] vol. 3. Edited by Antanas Rybelis. Vilnius: Mintis, 1997. Jonaitis (Šidlauskas), Marijus. Poetas ir visuomenė XIX–XX amžių sankirtose [Poet and society in the intersection of 19th and 20th centuries]. Klaipėda: Eldija, 1994. Jurgelionis, Kleopas. “Padrikos pastabos” [Scattered remarks]. Laisvoji mintis, no. 42 (1913): 990–991. Juvan, Marko. “Romanticism and National Poets on the Margins of Europe: Prešeren and Hallgrímsson.” In Literary Dislocations: 4th International REELC/ENCLS Congress. Edited by Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser and Vladimir Martinovski, 592–600. Skopje: Institute of Macedonian Literature, 2012. Kapsas, V. [Vincas Kudirka]. “Tiesos eilėms rašyti” [Principles of writing poetry]. Varpas, no. 1 (1898): 14–15; no. 2 (1898): 28–30; no. 3 (1898): 40–42. Kėkštas, J. M. “St. Maironiui.” Varpas, no. 9 (1900): 98. Kirša, Faustas. “Maironis mano kartos akimis” [Maironis from the perspective of my generation]. In Maironis: jo gimimo šimtmečiui paminėti. Edited by Antanas Vaičiulaitis. New York: [J. Pragulbickas], 1963. Leerssen, Joep. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Leerssen, Joep. “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 559–578. Maciūnas, Vincas. “Jakštas bara Vaižgantą” [Jakštas scolds Vaižgantas]. In Rinktiniai raštai [Selected works]. Edited by Jonas Šlekys. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003. Matulaitis, Stasys. “‘Pavasario balsai.’ Eilės, parašė S. Maironis.” Varpas, no. 7 (1898): 9–11. Matulaitis, Stasys. “Terp skausmu į garbę. Poėma iš dabartinių laikų. Parašė St. Garnys” [Through suffering toward honor. A Poem from recent times]. Varpas, no. 8 (1895): 133–136. Merkys, Vytautas. Draudžiamosios lietuviškos spaudos kelias 1864–1904. Informacinė knyga [Routes of the forbidden Lithuanian press in 1864–1904]. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1994.

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Nemoianu, Virgil. “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance.” In Romantic Poetry. Edited by Angela Esterhammer, 249–255. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. Redakcija. “Maironis. 1888–1913.” Draugija, no. 83 (1913): 225–227. Speičytė, Brigita. Anapus ribos: Maironis ir istorinė Lietuva [Beyond the limit: Maironis and the old Lithuania]. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012. Sruoga, Balys. “Maironis. Kun. prelatas Jonas Maculevičius. 1888–1913.” Aušrinė, no. 28 (1913): 197–208. St. Maironis, Pavasario balsai [Voices of spring]. Tilžėje: Kasztu autoriaus, 1895. Subačius, Paulius. Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė: tautinio išsivadavimo kultūra [The smithy of Lithuanian identity: The culture of national liberation]. Vilnius: Aidai, 1999. Subačius, Paulius. “Nušlifuoti deimantą, arba kuo Maironis įdomus ne vien pokolonijiniams kraštams” [To cut a gem, or Why is Maironis interesting not only for the postcolonial lands]. In Eina garsas: Nauji Maironio skaitymai. Edited by Manfredas Žvirgždas, 89–113. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014. Šatrijos Ragana. Viktutė. Shenandoah (Pa.): V. Šliakio (Stagaro) spaustuvė, 1903. Šeina, Viktorija. “Maironis tarpukario Lietuvos mokykloje” [Maironis in interwar Lithuanian schools]. Žmogus ir žodis 19, no. 2 (2017): 33–50. Šeina, Viktorija. “Maironio atminimo įamžinimas literatūrinės kanonizacijos aspektu (1932–1940)” [Memorialization of Maironis with respect to literary canonization (1932–1940)]. Lituanistica 63, no. 2 (108) (2017): 95–115. Šeina, Viktorija. “Maironio kanonizacijos dinamika XX a. I pusės lietuvių literatūros kritikoje” [The dynamic of Maironis’s canonization in Lithuanian literary criticism of the first half of the 20th century]. Colloquia 37 (2016): 49–71. Tumas-Vaižgantas, Juozas. Letter to Aleksandras Dambrauskas-Adomas Jakštas, September 2, 1903, MS F1-E118, Vilnius University Library Manuscript Department, Vilnius. Zaborskaitė, Vanda. “Maironis ir kai kurios lietuvių kultūros problemos” [Maironis and some of the problems of Lithuanian culture]. In Literatūra ir kalba 21: Maironis. Edited by K[ostas] Doveika et al. Vilnius: Vaga, 1990.

Cultivation of New Readers in the Early Criticism of Žemaitė’s Works (1895–1915) Ramunė Bleizgienė

Žemaitė (Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, 1845–1921) is one of the most famous women writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She has become a symbolic figure of the Lithuanian national movement for embodying two social groups – peasants and women – and their engaged participation in cultural activities. This writer’s biographical narrative, as it took root in literary history, can be summed up in the key phrase of one of her biographers: “a simple peasant woman became a great Lithuanian writer.”1 The start of this woman’s creative career is directly connected with the Lithuanian national movement of the end of the 19th century: in her own words, the impulse to write came from the illegal Lithuanian press, and a rather wide circle of Lithuanian intellectuals took interest in her work. Žemaitė’s path to fame as a writer was directly linked with the emancipation of the peasants, and their rise as a new reading public at the end of the 19th century. Although Žemaitė was born into a family of the gentry, she married an ex-serf and lived most of her life among the peasants. Thus, having written mostly about people living in villages, for literary critics Žemaitė became a perfect, and convenient example of a peasant writer. This article investigates the rise of the peasantry as new readers and Lithuanian intellectuals’ reactions to this phenomenon as they took the initiative in directing the peasants’ cultivation as readers. These intellectuals were concerned with the development of the peasants, and sought to form their reading habits, influence the readers’ choices as to reading material, and so on. This article goes on to analyze how Žemaitė’s status as a peasant writer was established during her early reception, and how the evaluation of her work depended on the imagined addressee. By analyzing the reviews and broader

1 Julius Būtėnas, “Ar Žemaitė buvo paprasta kaimo moteris?” [Was Žemaitė a simple village woman?], Lietuvos žinios, no. 250 (1936). Conflicts over Žemaitė’s biographical narrative are thoroughly discussed in the article: Ramunė Bleizgienė, “Kokia moteris gali būti rašytoja? Rašančios moters įvaizdis XIX a. pab.–XX a. pr. moterų rašytojų biografiniuose pasakojimuose” [What kind of woman can be a writer? The image of the writing woman in the biographical narratives of women writers of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries], Colloquia 25 (2010): 57–77.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_017

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studies of Žemaitė’s published works in the Lithuanian press from 1895–1915, this article aims to show that the formation of the common people as a potential and especially important national reading public was an integral part of her canonization process. Yet another important aim of this research is to reveal how the reception of Žemaitė’s works brought everyday village life peasant onto the horizon of modern Lithuanian culture, and how this became the foundation of one of the new literary styles in Lithuania, namely Realism.

1

The Spread of Literary Culture in Rural Lithuania in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the intensive formation of a national Lithuanian reading public. According to strategies for cultural and literary revival and writing prescribed by the young intellectuals, peasants were to play an especially important role. Since the mid-19th century already, the peasants had been a part of the audience for Lithuanian writing – works of didactic prose were intended for them, and Lithuanian calendars that began to be published at that time also targeted village residents. However, it is only at the end of the 19th century that the incorporation of peasants into the literary cultural world happened on a significant scale. The underground Lithuanian periodical press,2 together with larger print runs of Lithuanian books3 (a growing majority of which were composed of secular literature),4 all gradually

2 After the 1863 uprising, one of the ways that Tsarist Russia took to Russifying Lithuanian society was to forbid the printing of Lithuanian writing in the Latin alphabet. This ban was lifted only in 1904. During that time an illegal network for printing and distributing Lithuanian writings formed. The people who smuggled Lithuanian publications across the border and distributed them were called “book-smugglers” [“knygnešiai”]. 3 When comparing the number of Lithuanian books published between 1885–1894 and 1875–1884, the number doubled. See Vytautas Merkys, Lietuvos valstiečiai ir spauda XIX a. pabaigoje–XX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian peasants and press in the late 19th and early 20th centuries] (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1982), 22. In total the numbers show that in 1865–1904, 4000 books were published. Idem, “Masinės nacionalinio judėjimo formos. Valstiečių vaidmuo” [Massive forms of national movement. The role of peasants], in Lietuvių nacionalinio išsivadavimo judėjimas ligi 1904 metų [Lithuanian national movement for liberation until 1904], ed. Vytautas Merkys (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1984), 117–118. 4 The rise in the number of secular publications is supported by this data: “In 1864–1873 secular publications made up 33%, while in 1884–1893 – 60%, and finally between 1894–1903 – 76%.” Ibid., 118.

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percolated into the world of villagers in the last decades of the 19th century.5 At the same time, the role of peasants grew in significance for the creation of modern Lithuanian culture. The rise of this class as new readers was a process that occurred in two directions. First, at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of literacy among the lower classes and the dissemination of the illegal Lithuanian press, for the first time in history, literature became widespread and easily accessible to them. The ever growing rate of literacy is revealed by the rise in numbers of people getting caught in villages for propagating the Lithuanian press between 1866–1904: from the early 1890s the number of book smugglers increased from 43 in 1883 to 250 in 1898 or 1900.6 That period witnessed an increase in large-scale book smugglers as well as the growth of the illegal press, and a greater demand for it in rural areas.7 It can be said that in the mass struggle for the survival of the Lithuanian press, peasants made up the majority (86 percent of all people who were caught were peasants):8 they disseminated the illegal press and amassed secret libraries. At the end of the 19th century, village residents participated ever more actively in cultural activities, and became not simply passive consumers, but also producers who understood the significance of culture in their lives. The boom of peasants’ requests to terminate the ban on Latin letters in the Lithuanian press shows the developing consciousness of the new readers.9 The appearance of the illegal Lithuanian press marks a time when literary criticism began to spread alongside Lithuanian literature.10 Literary criticism, which consisted of short book presentations as well as longer reviews, was one of the ways to mediate the impact of written culture on the new readers. Reading the first texts of emerging Lithuanian literary criticism, one can detect rather obvious efforts on the part of the critics to control the penetration of secular literature into the circle of new readers. The aim to direct and

5

6 7 8 9 10

Despite the fact that the education of Lithuanian villagers took place under conditions of oppression, the dynamic of its development is similar to that of Western European countries. Martyn Lyons considers 1889 to be the turning point, when the generation of young peasants began to read and write more and more in comparison with the generation of their parents or grandparents. Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 154. Merkys, Lietuvos valstiečiai ir spauda, 21. Ibid., 32. Idem, “Masinės nacionalinio judėjimo formos,” 18. Merkys saw a direct connection between the activeness of peasants and the question of the press raised in Varpas [The bell] and Ūkininkas [Farmer]. Ibid., 115, 116. Adolfas Sprindis notes that already in the first issue of Aušra [Dawn], a section called “Our books” appears.

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shape readers’ choices and preferences, or even to control their reading habits, stemmed from the belief that the newcomers into the world of Lithuanian literary culture that was just coming into being lacked experience and were therefore easily influenced or even deceived. Given this image of the inexperienced reader, the new Lithuanian intellectuals took on a paternalistic stance towards all neophytes entering the cultural field (peasants, laborers, women), and Lithuanian criticism saw it as its role to be in charge of caring for them. For instance, this attitude can be seen in the example when one staff member of Aušra [Dawn] referred to less-educated people living in the villages as “little brothers,” and attempted to mobilize all intellectuals toward collective action in helping these little ones with the slogan “let’s show them the way.”11

2

What Is to Be Done with Our Little Brothers?

In the first Lithuanian newspapers Aušra (1883–1886), Varpas [The bell] (1889–1905), and especially in the newspaper intended for peasants, Ūkininkas [Farmer] (1890–1905), the printed texts show that intellectuals who were invested in the greater dissemination of texts (both newspapers and books) in Lithuanian print through villages had to put in a lot of effort in habituating peasants to the content of secular writings. It is evident that all the way up to the end of the 19th century the most important reading materials for them had been books with religious content. The appearance of secular writing was celebrated in a review of the Lithuanian version of the book Jaunasis Robinzonas [Robinson der Jüngere 2, v. 1779–1780], published in 1883, wherein the author nevertheless reluctantly acknowledged that the main reading material for children remained hymn and prayer books.12 According to Vincas Kudirka,13 villagers should be habituated gradually and from a young age to read other texts besides those with religious content. He believed that a child who learned to read even without any opportunities to continue his studies would at least not 11 12

13

J. Maczys (Kēksztas) [Juozas Mačys-Kėkštas], “Dvasē ir medega” [Spirit and content], Auszra, no. 6 (1886): 162. M. [Jurgis Mikšas], “Musu knigos. Jaunasis Robinzonas, pasiskaitimo knigeles, lietuwiszkai suraszitos E. Radźiuno, mokįtojo Tusieniuos. Klaipedoj spaudįtos pas Holcą bei Szernių 1883, Prekis 50 Pf. Arba 30 kap.” [Our books…], Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 20. What separated intellectuals, for whom Varpas was written, from the barely literate village folks was the reading materials; villagers were considered to read only prayer books. Vincas Kudirka (1858–1899) was one of the most famous figures of the late 19th century; he was the editor of Varpas, a co-founder of the newspaper Ūkininkas, a prose-writer, poet, columnist, and the author of the Lithuanian national anthem.

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avoid “secular” literature in the future, if excerpts of such texts were published in syllabaries that children could easily understand.14 How were peasants to be coerced to read books different from the ones they were used to? In what language should they be addressed? What might be interesting and useful for readers of newspapers? These are the questions that Kudirka raised in the first issue of the newspaper Ūkininkas. Kudirka’s address and his formulation of the problem expresses the imaginaries of the newspaper’s publishers as to what rural people read and enjoy reading. They speculated that easily understandable, humorous tales (without much purpose) would be most popular among these future readers. However, the introductory article shows that the publishers chose not to take the easiest path and give in to the so-called “poor” taste of the peasants.15 Upon deciding to print serious, useful texts they nevertheless worried that villagers would not understand them. Kudirka’s introductory article raises late 19th-century intellectuals’ doubts about the rural populace’s ability to understand texts with serious content that are written in a more complicated language. The poor reading ability of peasants can be seen in the very first issues of Ūkininkas where occasional articles emphasized the utility of reading books and newspapers, and encouraged purchasing works written in Lithuanian. Thus, staff writers of Ūkininkas suggested that peasant men who fritter away their time in a tavern or playing cards could instead read newspapers or books, and women who often squander money on fashion should instead spend it on books.16 Village residents were encouraged to organize and establish a library in each village not only to create an alternative to “harmful” activities (in taverns, or at cards), but also to increase access to secular literature in villages.17 The commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the start of the ban on Lithuanian books and newspapers in Latin script is linked to another especially important date for peasants – the abolishment of serfdom in 1861. When explaining the harm of the ban to readers, an intellectual of the younger generation stressed that the Russian government aimed to force Lithuanians to renounce their native language, their Catholicism, and assimilate into the Orthodox church and the Russian language, that is to say, essentially force them 14

15 16

17

V. K. [Vincas Kudirka], “Literaliszka perźvalga. Lietuviszkas Łamentorius dēł maźu vaikeliu o łabjausej dēł didesniuju naujej iszdůtas ir ajszkej pervejzetas per K. L. S.” [Literary review…], Varpas, no. 9 (1889): 133. v-k- [Vincas Kudirka], “Prakalba” [Preface], Ukinįkas, no. 1 (1890): 1. Pulvis [Pranciškus Petras Būčys], “Žodis i Lietuvos ukininkus” [A word to Lithuanian farmers], Ukinįkas, no. 8 (1891): 338–346; J. O. K. Nas. [Jonas Vileišis?], “Broliai į darbą!” [Brothers, let’s go to work!], Ukinįkas, no. 10 (1891): 434–442. Ibid.

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to become Russian.18 According to this argument, the importance of writing in the Latin alphabet is based on the threat of losing Lithuanian identity, at the center of which are Catholicism and the Lithuanian language.19 This text supports the research of historians who argue that peasants, as a social group, first and foremost identified themselves as Catholics. Restrictions on the freedom of the press also placed limitations on the peasants’ opportunities for education. The more practical books are not prioritized in efforts to prove their utility. Those that teach one to be a good Catholic are mentioned first, followed by those that cultivate national consciousness, and then history books. Following these categories come books of social science and scientific ones which would now include the fields of geography, astronomy, and physics. Only then does one find those with any practical instructions for maintaining one’s well-being and that of one’s livestock for productive farming. Such a sequence of books highlights their order of importance and expresses the positions of the newspaper’s publishers on how best to educate the rural population. At the end of the 19th century, intellectuals put a lot of effort into proving the usefulness of reading and education because peasants did not yet understand that there is a direct link between reading and education, nor did they grasp the overall necessity of education.20 Perhaps this is why almost a decade after the first Lithuanian newspaper appeared, it was stated that the influence of books and newspapers on the lives of people in the villages is still barely noticeable.21 The image of the helpless, irresponsible and unenlightened peasant is especially vivid in Kudirka’s journalistic publications. Even though in the introduction of Ūkininkas he tried to claim that he did not look down on his readers as if they were children, his texts published in Varpas draw a parallel between children and peasants rather frequently. From the very first issue of Varpas it was stressed that the intended public would only be educated Lithuanian intellectuals,22 and that is why the style of the same author writing for both Varpas and Ūkininkas shifted radically depending on which audience he was

18 19 20 21 22

M. Didźjonis [Jonas Krikščiukaitis], “Keli źodźiai apie musu knigas” [Few words on our books], Ukinįkas, no. 3 (1890): 33. Ibid., 34. Ibid. J. O. K. Nas. [Jonas Vileišis?], “Broliai į darbą!”, 440. Aušra was also intended for intellectuals, and it was acknowledged that “for the reader with little education and preparation the content of the newspaper was too difficult.” See Edvardas Vidmantas, “Inteligentijos vaidmuo. Jos idėjinė diferenciacija” [The role of intelligentsia. Its ideological differentiation], in Lietuvių nacionalinio išsivadavimo judėjimas ligi 1904 metų, 161.

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addressing. In Varpas, intellectuals were encouraged to take on all the responsibility for their “little brothers,” and set them a positive example.23 As Brigita Speičytė notes, “in the worldview of the writer, ‘village folk’ belonged to the same social category as children; they were not held to high standards of responsible behavior, and oftentimes the responsibility for their actions was directed to intellectuals who acted as society’s ‘parents.’”24 The seemingly gentle and even affectionate tone of the educated caretaker speaking of the “poor people” actually reveals the young intellectuals’ lack of trust in the villagers’ independence and their ability to survive without the care and protection of their older brothers. As can be seen in one article that draws attention to the punishment that local officials inflicted on peasants, Kudirka draws a dramatic image: on one side stand hungry wolves sharpening their teeth (i.e., the officials), while on the other side is gathered a flock of sheep (i.e., the village folk) who are naively and utterly convinced that the sole purpose of their existence is to be eaten by the wolves.25 The rhetoric employed reinforces the image of the lower classes as lacking in consciousness, unable to evaluate adequately a threatening situation, and even more as incapable of taking any overt action of resistance. Understandably, intellectuals considered their “little brothers” to be very passive figures who were not accountable for their behavior. For this reason, they were held to a completely different set of expectations than educated people.26 It needs to be emphasized that the majority of authors who wrote columns that were especially critical of the peasantry had themselves grown up in villages. Historical research shows that the most active Lithuanian intellectuals of the late 19th century were for the most part educated peasants. Statistics show that of the 71 people who were involved in the publication of Aušra, 47

23 24

25 26

Q. D. ir K. [Vincas Kudirka], “Isz tēvyniszkos dirvos” [From the fatherland’s ground], Varpas, no. 7 (1889): 106. Brigita Speičytė, “‘Neužvydėtina dalia juodo pranašo’: tezė ir ironija Vinco Kudirkos raštuose” [“Invidious fate of the black prophet”: Thesis and irony in works of Vincas Kudirka], in “Tegul meilė Lietuvos…”: Vincui Kudirkai – 150 [“Let the love of Lithuania”: 150th anniversary of Vincas Kudirka], ed. Rimantas Skeivys (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2009), 288. Vincas Kudirka, “Tēvynēs varpai” [Fatherland’s bells], Varpas, no. 4 (1893): 57. For example, when criticizing the intellectuals’ laziness in replying to letters, Kudirka immediately notes that his accusations are not intended for peasants, because they do not understand the importance of this issue (Q. D. ir K. [Vincas Kudirka], “Isz tēvyniszkos dirvos” [From the fatherland’s ground], Varpas, no. 8 (1889): 117). As can be seen, the rules and etiquette of the literate world did not apply to the “little brothers.”

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were of peasant origin,27 while up until the abolishment of serfdom, intellectuals of noble origin had dominated.28 However, the aim of quickly mobilizing a large mass of people in a short amount of time did not allow the young intellectuals to forge their own path upon joining the ranks of educated leaders of society. It can be argued that the project of educating the peasants as presented in the illegal Lithuanian press stemmed from the idea of mass (self)education. On this path of self-taught learning-through-reading the Lithuanian press and other Lithuanian writings, a special role was granted to the mediator – literary criticism. For the inexperienced reader, the critic was to become a guide who would not let the reader lose his way in the world of literary culture.

3

Early Reception of Žemaitė: A Battlefield between Different Ideological Positions

The image that newspapers formed of the peasantry as a social group in need of special care influenced the perspective of the emergent literary criticism toward the new readers. Likewise, critics’ imaginaries of their readers influenced the reception of literary works. For the most part, the image of the new reader correlated with the critics’ chosen strategy of leading the village folk toward written culture. Research on the history of criticism shows that from the very start of the Lithuanian press, the view of intellectuals toward the functions of literature and education differed, and there was also variation in how readers were imagined and how literature was evaluated. For example, we can clearly see the polarization of critics’ ideological positions in Aušra: some of them took a more conservative (right) position, while others were drawn to ideas of a not-yet-crystalized, but nevertheless recognizably socialist left. Representatives of the conservative camp put a lot of effort into awakening the national consciousness through their writing; they were drawn to Romantic poetry and linked the transformation of society to the nurturing of historical self-consciousness. Representatives of the left-leaning ideological camp called for greater attention to materialistic questions – the conditions of people’s everyday lives, the economics of the household, and they were more affiliated with the formation of realism in literature.29 In literary studies, because of the 27 28 29

Vidmantas, “Inteligentijos vaidmuo,” 159. Rimantas Vėbra, Lietuvių visuomenė XIX a. antroje pusėje [Lithuanian society in the second half of 19th century] (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1990), 188–189. Adolfas Sprindis, “Literatūros kritika Aušroje” [Literary criticism in Aušra], in “Aušra” ir lietuvių visuomeninis judėjimas XIX a. pabaigoje [Aušra and the Lithuanian movement at the end of 19th century], ed. Jonas Kubilius (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1988), 165–166.

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different priorities of the literary tendencies that revealed themselves in the critics’ attitudes and texts, these are labeled as the Romantic and the Realist strands of literary criticism.30 In the vision this latter group of critics had for the spread of education, there is the clear imaginary that the new readers, the peasants, lack sensitivity and are of a low consciousness: it was even said that to feed the calloused and hardened sentiments of a peasant with patriotic hymns is the same as singing a song to a tree stump.31 These critics insisted that books must be cheap, written in simple language, and most importantly, useful for improving the conditions of everyday life; they should be about working the earth, raising livestock, crafts, and trading. These critics encouraged authors to write literary fiction that had a direct connection with the quotidian life of peasants.32 The positivist direction of criticism became even more pronounced in Varpas, and it is thought that the circulation of this newspaper encouraged the growth of Realism.33 The evaluation of Žemaitė’s works depended on which ideological strand the critics belonged to. The worth of the written work directly correlated to how critics understood what sort of influence the discussed text might bring to peasant readers. For instance, in an 1895 issue of Varpas, the doctor, publicist, and left-leaning critic Stasys Matulaitis (1866–1956), wrote a reply about the first publication of Žemaitė’s short story “Rudens vakaras” [An autumn evening] and evaluated it positively because it “encourages people to read,”34 since literate characters in the story are portrayed as pleasant people. As can be seen from the very start of Žemaitė’s reception, deliberations about her status as a writer were linked to the problem of new readers; without a doubt, Žemaitė herself provided a sure stimulus for this as she incorporated themes 30

31 32

33 34

Kostas Doveika, “Lietuvių literatūros kritika 1883–1904” [Lithuanian literary criticism 1883–1904], in Lietuvių literatūros kritika (1547–1917) 1, ed. Kostas Korsakas and Kostas Doveika (Vilnius: Vaga, 1971), 108–111; Juozas Girdzijauskas, “Kultūrinis literatūros kontekstas” [Cultural context of literature], in Lietuvių literatūros istorija. XIX amžius [History of Lithuanian literature. 19th century], ed. Juozas Girdzijauskas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2001), 217. Kal. [Juozas Andziulaitis-Kalnėnas], “Kas daryti?” [What should we do?], Auszra, no. 12 (1885): 394. In J. Mačys-Kėkštas’s opinion, the “reams of hymns and songs” that were published at that time are completely unnecessary. J. Kēksztas [Juozas Mačys-Kėkštas], “Musu vargai” [Our sufferings], Auszra, no. 9 (1885): 258. Sprindis, “Literatūros kritika Aušroje,” 171. Sėbraitis [Stasys Matulaitis], “1. Lietuvos ukininkų kalendorius; 2. Tikrasis Lietuvos ukininkų kalendorius ir 3. Tikriausias Lietuvos uk. Kalendorius 1895 metams” [1. Lithuanian calendar for farmers. 2. The real Lithuanian calendar for farmers. 3. The most real Lithuanian calendar for farmers], Varpas, no. 1 (1895): 18.

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of the spread of the illegal Lithuanian press through the villages in her very first compositions. If Žemaitė’s works seemed worthy of attention to liberal, leftist critics, she raised a lot of doubts among representatives of the Catholic right-leaning press, and it took a while for them to acknowledge the worth of this author’s works. In an 1896 Catholic newspaper Tėvynės sargas [Guard of the fatherland] Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas35 discusses the newspaper Ūkininkas and bemoans the fact that there are very few prose pieces in it, only briefly mentioning Žemaitė’s short story included there. It seems as though the critic had not yet made up his mind about the author’s abilities to write and tersely states: “it seems she might be capable of writing.”36 Of course, the very fact that he mentioned her at all and called for more works to be published in the newspaper can be considered as recognition in itself. It could be the case that what drew Vaižgantas’s attention was the theme of the short story – a tale about the spread of the illegal press, how peasants habituate themselves to reading, and the audience of Ūkininkas brought him to single it out as worthy of note. Concluding his review, Vaižgantas stressed the usefulness of this newspaper and encouraged peasants to purchase it.37 Several years later Vaižgantas again addressed Žemaitė, saying that he had received the copies of her work that she sent, however, he refused to publish them because the piece was too negative and too naturalistic. According to Vaižgantas, the piece leaves a “revolting” impression and might demoralize readers. Even though he suggested the piece was unfit for publication anywhere, he nevertheless no longer doubted the value of Žemaitė’s work, saying that “she wins first place” and was pleased about the author’s desire to collaborate with the editorial board of Tėvynės sargas.38 At the start of the 20th century, Žemaitė was already a well-known author. This is clear from the presentation of her work both in the Catholic as well as in the liberal press. For instance, in a liberal newspaper, Vienybė lietuvninkų [Lithuanian unity], printed in America in 1904, Žemaitė is mentioned as our well-known and talented novelist.39 Her name is easily recognized, and her

35 36 37 38 39

Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas (1869–1933) – one of the founders of Tėvynės sargas and the editor of this newspaper from 1897–1902; he was also a literary critic, historian and writer. Vaišgantis [Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas], “Musų Raštai” [Our writings], Tėvynės sargas, no. 8 (1896): 33. Ibid. [Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas], “Atsakymai. P. Žemaitėi” [An answer to Žemaitė], Tėvynės sargas, no. 10–11 (1900): 88. “Nauji rasztai” [New writings], Vienybė lietuvninkų, no. 3 (1903): 36.

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work no longer needs broad introduction: “It seems that the name Žemaitė no longer requires much talk about her sketches.”40 The short story discussed in the newspaper is praised for its beautiful Lithuanian language and “good mood,” and it was wished the same sort of success as her previous works. Regardless of the negative attitude of the Catholic literary critics toward specific works, Žemaitė’s status as a writer was no longer challenged at that time, and she was recognized as a true artist.41 With her education and consciousness, Žemaitė the writer was presented as someone who had overtaken her addressees – the common folk. The latter were considered simple Lithuanians, lacking critical thought, naive, and easily deceived.42 Just as in 19thcentury France, so too in the emerging culture of modern Lithuania the new, inexperienced readers were held to be easy targets for unscrupulous publishers and propagandists who had no regard for rules; hence the fear that the peasantry might be tempted by undesirable ideas.43 It was imagined that these people who had just entered the world of literature read unwisely, and were unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or truth from fantasy (Lyons calls these fears bourgeois neuroses). Greater requirements were imposed upon Žemaitė not only because she was considered a true artist, but also because her addressees were peasants who had not yet developed the necessary reading skills. Her task was to cultivate the sentiments and tastes of the new readers. Critics complained that in some of her negatively evaluated works the author distorted the “proportions” of reality and did not fulfill her important mission, but rather “misled” the inexperienced readers by teaching them unacceptable behavior (such as theft), and hence the critics saw their own task as protecting the peasants from such deception.44

40 41

42

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“Nauji rasztai,” Vienybė lietuvninkų, no. 11 (1904): 132. Ant. K-as [Antanas Kaupas], “Kritika ir bibliografija. Kunigo nauda velniai gaudo, paraše Žemaitė, ‘Uk.,’ no. 10, 1903, Kritiškas paišinys. Sutaisė D. D.” [Criticism and bibliography…], Dirva-Žinynas 4 (1904): 77. The priest, public figure and co-worker of the Catholic press in the USA, Antanas Kaupas (1873–1913), distinguishes two types of writers: on the one hand are those that uphold ethics and do not try to deceive gullible readers. These writers are able to create work that does not distort the proportions of reality. Other writers are “political and artistic swindlers,” their motivation for writing is blind narcissism and greed. Ant. K-as [Antanas Kaupas], “Kritika ir bibliografija. Kunigo nauda velniai gaudo, paraše Žemaitė,” 77. Lyons, Readers and Society, 11. Because of the excessive representations of fondling, one of the critics thought that Žemaitė’s play Trys mylimos [Three beloveds] was unfit for village residents because it might become a “stoker of passions.” He supported his misgivings with “true” facts: in 1910 Viltis newspaper received a notice from Šiauliai that wrote about the unsuccessful pro-

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The 1908 reviews of Žemaitė’s work in right-leaning publications45 show that the author’s name is mostly linked with her early short stories that were called Paveikslai [Pictures].46 When reading these texts, it seems as though Žemaitė’s fame and the spread of her writing depended directly on people’s literacy and on her own ability to write “correctly”: “Žemaitė’s talent and her style of writing are well known to every Lithuanian who knows how to read. Everyone rejoices upon getting their hands on even the shortest of her compositions and admires her work. Žemaitė knows the people, and is able to feel and show this without any exaggeration.”47 The critics had no doubts that the readers of Žemaitė’s works were those who were still striving for literacy or those who had just learned to read. For this reason, when evaluating Žemaitė’s talent, the figure of the reader – the peasant – is always present. The language of her work is always called “beautiful,” because it is the same as that of her readers, i.e., it is “simple”: “As for the language of that little story! You read and marvel at it: how beautiful everything is, how Lithuanian, without a hint of foreignness, as if straight from the mouths of the folk.”48 Here we see an important aspect of the evaluation of Žemaitė’s work, which is also linked to her addressee. Because peasants were considered the social class that had maintained the purest form of Lithuanian, the “purity” of Žemaitė’s works, written in dialect, is raised in connection to her ties to the village. The legitimation of this writer is finalized by comparing her with another author of the 19th century – the creator of didactic prose, Bishop Motiejus Valančius (1801–1875), who came from a peasant background himself. The addressee of his works was also the peasantry, and one of his greatest merits, as emphasized by in-

45

46

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duction of the theatrical spectacle based on Žemaitė’s play Trys mylimos. The public was outraged because one of the actors who had a lead role was drunk, and probably because of this fondled too much on stage. Šiaulietis [?], “Teatras. Šiauliai” [Theater. Šiauliai], Viltis, November 28, 1910, 137. L. N. [Liudas Noreika], “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitė, Kent kaltas, kent nekaltas, Lietuvos Ukininko išleidimas,” Vilnius, 1907 m.” [Bibliography and criticism…], Draugija, no. 15 (1908): 307. Žemaitė’s early short stories, mostly intended for raising awareness of village women’s life problems are written as parts of a cycle titled Laimė nutekėjimo [The happiness of marriage]. Until 1913 they did not have separate titles and once the Writings were published, they were simply referred to as Paveikslai [Pictures]. All of them were written between 1895–1899. “Bibliografija ir kritika: ‘Kent kaltas, kent nekaltas,’ parašė Žemaitė, ‘Liet. Ūkininko’ išleidimas, Vilniuje, 1907 m. 39 p. 12 kap.” [Bibliography and criticism…], Viltis, February 20, 1908, 22. L. N. [Liudas Noreika], “Bibliografija ir kritika,” 307.

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terwar critics, was that he helped to bring village folk into the world of print culture.49

4

The Limits of Žemaitė’s Realism

The reviews of Žemaitė’s works in the periodical press are all rather similar: they provide a brief summary of the content followed by a verdict. The evaluation of the work depends on whether the reviewer believes that what is represented is real or not. Critics who were convinced by the realism of the narrative argued that the theme of the work was taken from people’s lives.50 They considered Žemaitė’s artistic telling as a reflection of lived reality or simply its extension. Such a conflation of the artistic world and lived reality is part of realistic prose, which became ever more prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Lithuanian literature. It was not just critics who forged the direct link between artistic and lived reality, but also the publishers of Žemaitė’s writings who presented her short stories as “countryside impressions” and “little tales from the life of country folk.” The original titles of the works were cloaked in references to a reality beyond the text, strictly insisting that the works and “the lives of peasants” are inseparable. According to the scholar of Realism, Pam Morris, the prose that flourished in the 19th century was based on an impulse of democratic modernism: it involved both readers (who emerged from the lower classes of society) and characters who were represented in novelistic works.51 The orientation of Žemaitė’s work toward “simple” folk (both as characters in the works and as her readers) is considered to be an expression of such democratization of the literature. Critics call this aspect of her work as containing “folk character” and consider it to be an inseparable part of her “realism.”52 The recognized and critically acknowledged naturalism of Žemaitė’s works, as can be seen

49

50

51 52

The avant-garde poet Kazys Binkis published a booklet, Bishop Motiejus Valančius, once Lithuania gained independence in which he affirms: “Valančius taught the Lithuanians to read, and after that they never forgot how to.” Kazys Binkis, Vyskupas Motiejus Valančius (Šiauliai: Vilties spaustuvė, 1935), 59. A review of Žemaitė’s short story that was published in a 1910 issue of Draugija concludes with the assertion that “it was a lovely sketch from life in the country.” A. N. [?], “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitė, Gera galva, Vilnius, 1910, kaina 10k.” [Bibliography and criticism…], Draugija, no. 48 (1910): 444. Pam Morris, Realism (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. Meilė Lukšienė, Jono Biliūno kūryba [Writings of Jonas Biliūnas] (Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1956), 96.

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from her reception, belonged to the world of villagers. Her status as a writer of realistic prose who accurately represented peasant life in the literary field was most thoroughly and substantially bolstered by Jonas Biliūnas.53 His theoretical insights, which later became the pillars of Lithuanian Realism, are based on the recounting of his first encounter with Žemaitė’s work, and this memory arises as a particularly vivid and expressive personal experience: I remember how, not so long ago, while visiting a good acquaintance, I found Žemaitė’s Paveikslai on his table, and upon opening the first page, began to read. … I do not recall whether it was haying or rye-cutting, but it was described so realistically and in such a wonderfully simple folk language, that it surprised me. I was surprised because, first of all, nowhere had I read such a wonderful and realistically drawn image of nature in the Lithuanian language. That image revealed the true and pure nature of Lithuania; it brought forth in my mind clear memories of the most joyful yet at the same time most difficult time for peasants when the hurried work merges with the songs of young Lithuanian girls that disperse through the gloomy groves and forests, the fragrant fields and lush meadows. As I read, it seemed that I saw a vision of sweating workers swinging their sickles and scythes to-and-fro. I felt the warm rays of the sun on my back. I heard the men talking, the women bustling about, and the young peoples’ laughter. In short, that simple but realistically and beautifully drawn picture awakened those sentiments in me which I had myself experienced time and again during the summer months in the countryside.54 Biliūnas sought to demonstrate how Žemaitė’s piece affected him and tried to articulate the especially realistic visual, acoustic, and even tactile sensations that it aroused. The critic’s recounting taught other potential readers how one might be able to read / experience this author’s work. The testimony about the work’s ability to create a realistic illusion relies on the critic’s own childhood experience of village life. From this unidentified composition from Žemaitė’s early work, the power to awaken especially realistic sensations serves as proof of how close to reality all of Žemaitė’s works are. Biliūnas is one of the first to 53 54

Jonas Biliūnas (1879–1907) was a writer, literary critic, and founder of the socialdemocratic party. Jonas Niuronis [Jonas Biliūnas], “‘Žemaitės paveikslai.’ Iš J. Biliūno palikimo” [Works of Žemaitė. From the heritage of Biliūnas], Vilniaus žinios, August 26, 1908, 190. Quoted from: Jonas Biliūnas, Raštai 2 [Writings], ed. Meilė Lukšienė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1980), 6–7.

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assert Žemaitė’s status as a talented writer of realistic prose: “it’s not just any simple person who is writing, but a writer with a gift [emphasis mine, R. B.].” The language of her works (which aligns with the language of regular village folk) as well as her descriptions of nature, farm work, and typical characters (who embody easily recognizable and understandable village folk and their relationships) – all become hallmarks proving the realistic nature of Žemaitė’s work. In later critical writings, the tendency to conflate real life with the reality of the artistic work remains, and Žemaitė’s best works are considered completely realistic tales about village life. The opposite could be said as well: those stories that depict a worldview, which readers recognize as completely realistic, come to be labelled as the best.55 Žemaitė’s earliest short stories are considered to be such. Just like Biliūnas, later critics also considered the most successful parts of Žemaitė’s stories to be those episodes that depict nature, rural labor (i.e., rye cutting, potato digging), and the relationships between peasants. It is repeatedly emphasized that the characters of Žemaitė’s works are typical village folk. These characteristics of Žemaitė’s work mostly matched the readers’ worldview, or as Morris puts it, she provided the readers with the greatest joy of recognizing reality. Often critics were so taken by the author’s works’ objectivity, that they recommended her works to readers as ethnographic accounts that would allow one to know the Samogitian character, their lives, and interpersonal relationships.56 Works that often did not make the critic’s cut were those that depicted priests or other characters connected to the Church. This part of Žemaitė’s work is considered by her critics to be especially biased wherein the author’s own position is too stark regarding what is being represented: “Žemaitė can’t stand the Catholic Church. Confession, fasts, belief in miracles, and evil spirits seem like mere superstition to her.”57 In contrast to the typical characters of village folk in Žemaitė’s work, the depiction of representatives of the clerical class are often held to be a distortion of reality by critics, to the point that these protagonists appear as caricatures.58 For instance, in the Catholic-leaning American-Lithuanian newspaper, Draugas [Friend], a review of Žemaitė’s newest works in 1910, which mocked the greed of priests and the

55 56 57 58

P. Kragas [Petras Gerulis], “Žemaitė,” Draugija, no. 51 (1911): 213. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 228. A. J. [Aleksandras Dambrauskas], “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitės Apsiriko. Dviejų aktų komedija, ‘Liet. Uk.’ Išl. Nr. 27, m-18, 37 psl. Kaina 20 kap.” [Bibliography and criticism…], Draugija, no. 65 (1912): 76.

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darkness of peasants, the reviewer often used the word “unnatural” when describing the characters, their utterances, experiences and circumstances that befell them. Because of their over-the-top bias, these works are considered to be demagogical - distorting reality on purpose, and thus inaccurate. Such unrealistic works that were poorly evaluated by critics were also considered to be useless because they could not teach anything, or might prove to be too difficult to understand for inexperienced readers.59 The year 1915 marks Žemaitė’s 70th birthday, but it is also considered the moment when her talent and works became universally recognized, and her early works took on the status of classics. Paradoxically, at the same time, Žemaitė’s work was receding from the actual canon, as noted in Jonas Jablonskis’s60 text, which was printed in three issues of the journal Vairas [Steering wheel].61 In the article he analyzes Žemaitė’s short story that revolves around the life of priests. This story differs from other works devoted to a similar problematic in the fact that alongside the completely negative characters of priests, a positive hero makes a brief appearance – a young priest. He is concerned with the spread of newspapers, organizes Lithuanian evenings, does not seek profit, and acts conscientiously with his parishioners. However, Jablonskis still evaluates this work of Žemaitė in a negative light, regardless of the shift he mentioned in his own article. He gauges the entire plot according to his own experience, just as earlier critics did, and almost all of the events and characters described in the piece appear unrealistic to him. In his article he repeatedly states that he has never seen or heard such a thing, and that is why he is left without a clear understanding of the characters or their motivations. It seems as though a person of the same generation as Žemaitė openly and insistently declares that he no longer understands her story, and drawing on his especially negative impression of the analyzed work concludes that Žemaitė is moving away from “our reality.” Jablonskis claims that the current inspiration for her work has become newspapers. The works that are marked by their lack of realism are contrasted with her earlier works whose quality was evaluated thus: “in them we used to see the real life of our country people [emphasis mine, R. B.].” In this text by Jablonskis, Žemaitė appears as a writer of the past whose current works pale in relevance and are increasingly not understood as ours. 59 60 61

P. Kragas [Petras Gerulis], “Žemaitė,” 226. Jonas Jablonskis (1860–1930) was a linguist, the creator of standardized Lithuanian language, one of the first editors of Žemaitė’s Writings. Rygiškių Jonas [Jonas Jablonskis], “Žemaitės ‘Nelaimė.’ Pastebėjimai del rašytojos ‘kunigų’” [Žemaitė’s misfortune. Observations on her ‘priests’], Vairas 4–6 (1915).

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The story of Žemaitė as a peasant writer culminates in her friend’s Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s62 journalistic texts. In them she repeatedly states that the young generation from the villages learned to read from Žemaitė’s work. Bitė first articulates this thought in 1907 in her published memoirs about the beginning of the Lithuanian national rebirth: “Now if you were to ask a young villager whether he knows who Žemaitė is, he would answer smiling – ‘How so?… it’s with her writings that I taught myself to read.”63 Bitė mentions the influence that Žemaitė’s work had on peasants’ literacy in order to show Vincas Kudirka’s significance in awakening the intellectuals’ consciousness at the start of the rebirth. The polarization of these two writers is evident in the text: Žemaitė is a writer for the peasants, Kudirka – for intellectuals. In a 1913 review of Žemaitė’s Raštai [Writings], Bitė adds to her earlier point: “Žemaitė’s writings taught a majority of the young people to read and taught them to love and cherish books.”64 The writer’s works are presented not only as the peasants’ gate into the literary world, but also it is because of them, according to Bitė, that village folk truly became readers who understood the value of books and reading. This thought is repeated in a text from 1915 on the occasion of the anniversary of Žemaitė’s birth – in it Bitė emphasizes that this writer’s work was important not only for raising the literacy of the peasantry, but also for raising a new generation of people who contributed to the formation of young Lithuania.65 At the time when the cultural and social significance of Žemaitė’s work was recognized, the circle of her readers also widened. Writing about the importance of her early work, Jablonskis highlighted that both simple people as well as intellectuals were moved by and delighted in Žemaitė’s images of everyday life. He encouraged Žemaitė to maintain her good reputation as a writer by returning “closer to our real life” (that is to say by writing only about villagers), and insisted that this is what the entire nation desires.66

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Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė (1861–1943) was a writer, on the staff of Lithuanian newspapers, a public figure, a philanthropist, and together with Žemaitė wrote plays, which they penned under the pseudonym Dvi moteri [Two women]. Gabrielė Petkevičaitė, “Ypatiškų atminimų sauja. Iš mųsų atgyjymo pradžios [tęsinys]” [Some special memories. About the beginning of our awakening], Vilniaus žinios, December 4, 1907, 210. G. P. [Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė], “Žemaitės Raštai” [Žemaitė’s writings], Lietuvos žinios, July 9, 1913, 80. Eadem, “Žemaitės 70 metų sukaktuvės” [Žemaitė’s 70th anniversary], Lietuvos žinios, June 3, 1915, 62. Rygiškių Jonas [Jonas Jablonskis], “Žemaitės ‘Nelaimė,’” Vairas 6 (1915): 92.

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Žemaitė finally became a writer of the entire nation and not just the peasantry through the texts of the younger generation of writers. In that same issue of Lietuvos žinios [Lithuania’s news] marking Žemaitė’s anniversary, Balys Sruoga67 suggests regarding Žemaitė from a different perspective and valuing her anew: “It’s time to stop seeing the artist Žemaitė as the defender of the weary and the weak; it’s time to see in her the proclaimer of the spirit of being Lithuanian!”68 The shift in Žemaitė’s audience from the folk to the nation came about because of a huge change in society’s self-consciousness – when the peasantry became recognized as the foundation of the nation. Sruoga stated that the psychological forms of the Lithuanian nation are deep-seated in the folk, because this group is the least affected by foreign influence. Thus Žemaitė’s works that depict the life of peasants became the avenue of approach to the pure national spirit. In texts of the interwar period, Sruoga’s idea was frequently reiterated: in his own modification of this thought, Vaižgantas asserted that Žemaitė is “pure gold” because her work is untouched by any outside influence,69 and Vincas Mykolaitis was sure that one could find the expression of the ethnic Lithuanian character in her work.70

5

Conclusion

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, peasants entered into the field of the emergent modern Lithuanian culture and immediately became an object of concern for educated intellectuals. Literary criticism took to protecting these inexperienced and uncritical new readers in order to help them not lose their way in the world of secular writing. An analysis of the early criticism of Žemaitė’s work shows how the peasantry was integrated into the formation of modern Lithuanian culture. Žemaitė, who had spent the majority of her life in the village, and having mostly written about villagers, became a perfect “means” to acculturate the new readers. From the very start of the reception of her work, there was no doubt that her addressees were villagers (the folk). Thus Žemaitė’s works were also evaluated by taking into consideration the

67 68 69 70

Balys Sruoga (1896–1947) was a poet, playwright, writer, and literary critic. Balys Sruoga, “Sukuriuose. Žemaitės 70 metų pagarbai” [In the swirls. Conmemorating Žemaitė’s 70th anniversary], Lietuvos žinios, May 31, 1915, 61. Vaižgantas, “Žemaitės savaimingumas” [The self-contained Žemaitė], Sekmoji diena, December 18, 1921, 42. Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Naujoji lietuvių literatūra 1 [The new Lithuanian literature] (Kaunas: Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetas, 1936), 340.

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needs, expectations, and literary abilities of the readers. These judgements could be radically different depending on the ideological position of the critic. When determining the value of Žemaitė’s works, critics invoked the criteria of how realistic they were, which was also directly linked to the problem of new readers. As the early critical writings demonstrate, Žemaitė’s short stories that depicted villagers, their everyday life, environment, and interpersonal relations were most trusted and believable. In this way, by canonizing Žemaitė’s works, the life of village folk became not only visible and recognizable to the Lithuanian reading public, but also came to be regarded as a credible topic for realistic prose. The works about priests and people linked to them (religious zealots, priests’ mistresses, etc.) were considered to be furthest from reality and therefore of little worth. These texts that were mostly criticized by the Catholic right were considered not only worthless, but even dangerous for the new readers. The culmination of Žemaitė’s reception is marked by the established attitude that a whole new generation of peasants learned to read from her works, and thanks to her, became full-fledged participants in literary culture. This assertion reveals not only the size and scope of the awareness of Žemaitė’s works, or the influence that it had on the culture of all of Lithuania, but also attests to the fact that peasants had already become a part of the Lithuanian reading public. Translated by Vaiva Aglinskas

Bibliography A. N. [?] “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitė, Gera galva, Vilnius, 1910, kaina 10k.” [Bibliography and criticism…]. Draugija, no. 48 (1910): 444. [Andziulaitis-Kalnėnas, Juozas] Kal. “Ką daryti?” [What should we do?]. Auszra, no. 12 (1885): 393–394. “Bibliografija ir kritika: ‘Kent kaltas, kent nekaltas,’ parašė Žemaitė, ‘Liet. Ūkininko’ išleidimas, Vilniuje, 1907 m. 39 p. 12 kap.” [Bibliography and criticism…]. Viltis, February 20, 1908, 22. Biliūnas, Jonas. Raštai 2 [Writings]. Edited by Meilė Lukšienė. Vilnius: Vaga, 1980. [Biliūnas, Jonas] Jonas Niuronis. “Žemaitės paveikslai. Iš J. Biliūno palikimo” [Works of Žemaitė. From the heritage of Biliūnas]. Vilniaus žinios, August 26, 1908, 190. Binkis, Kazys. Vyskupas Motiejus Valančius [Bishop Motiejus Valančius]. Šiauliai: Vilties spaustuvė, 1935. Bleizgienė, Ramunė. “Kokia moteris gali būti rašytoja? Rašančios moters įvaizdis XIX a. pab.–XX a. pr. moterų rašytojų biografiniuose pasakojimuose” [What kind of

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woman can be a writer? The image of the writing woman in the biographical narratives of women writers of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries]. Colloquia 25 (2010): 57–77. [Būčys, Pranciškus Petras] Pulvis. “Žodis i Lietuvos ukininkus” [A word to Lithuanian farmers]. Ukinįkas, no. 8 (1891): 338–346. Būtėnas, Julius. “Ar Žemaitė buvo paprasta kaimo moteris?” [Was Žemaitė a simple village woman?]. Lietuvos žinios, no. 250, December 5, 1936. [Dambrauskas, Aleksandras] A. J. “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitės Apsiriko. Dviejų aktų komedija, ‘Liet. Uk.’ Išl. Nr. 27, m-18, 37 psl. Kaina 20 kap.” [Bibliography and criticism…]. Draugija, no. 65 (1912): 76. Doveika, Kostas. “Lietuvių literatūros kritika 1883–1904” [Lithuanian literary criticism 1883–1904]. In Lietuvių literatūros kritika (1547–1917) 1. Edited by Kostas Korsakas and Kostas Doveika, 108–111. Vilnius: Vaga, 1971. [Gerulis, Petras] P. Kragas. “Žemaitė.” Draugija, no. 51 (1911): 208–236. Girdzijauskas, Juozas. “Kultūrinis literatūros kontekstas” [Cultural context of literature]. In Lietuvių literatūros istorija. XIX amžius [History of Lithuanian literature. 19th century]. Edited by Juozas Girdzijauskas, 13–235. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2001. [Jablonskis, Jonas] Rygiškių Jonas. “Žemaitės ‘Nelaimė.’ Pastebėjimai del rašytojos ‘kunigų’” [Žemaitė’s misfortune. Observations on her ‘priests’]. Vairas 4–6 (1915). [Kaupas, Antanas] Ant. K-as. “Kritika ir bibliografija. Kunigo nauda velniai gaudo, paraše Žemaitė, ‘Uk.,’ Nr. 10, 1903, Kritiškas paišinys. Sutaisė D. D.” [Criticism and bibliography…]. Dirva-Žinynas 4 (1904): 74–78. [Krikščiukaitis, Jonas] M. Didźjonis. “Keli źodźiai apie musu knigas” [Few words on our books]. Ukinįkas, no. 3 (1890): 33–35. Kudirka, Vincas. “Tēvynēs varpai” [Fatherland’s bells]. Varpas, no. 4 (1893): 57–58. [Kudirka, Vincas] v-k-. “Prakalba” [Preface]. Ukinįkas, no. 1 (1890): 1–2. [Kudirka, Vincas] V. K. “Literaliszka perźvalga. Lietuviszkas Łamentorius dēł maźu vaikeliu o łabjausej dēł didesniuju naujej iszdůtas ir ajszkej pervejzetas per K. L. S.” [Literary review…]. Varpas, no. 9 (1889): 132–134. [Kudirka, Vincas] Q. D. ir K. “Isz tēvyniszkos dirvos” [From the fatherland’s ground]. Varpas, no. 8 (1889): 117–120. [Kudirka, Vincas] Q. D. ir K. “Isz tēvyniszkos dirvos” [From the fatherland’s ground]. Varpas, no. 7 (1889): 104–106. Lukšienė, Meilė. Jono Biliūno kūryba [Writings of Jonas Biliūnas]. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1956. Lyons, Martyn. Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Palgrave, 2001. [Mačys, Juozas Kėkštas] J. Maczys (Kēksztas). “Dvasē ir medega” [Spirit and content]. Auszra, no. 6 (1886): 161–164.

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[Mačys, Juozas Kėkštas] J. Kēksztas. “Musu vargai” [Our sufferings]. Auszra, no. 9 (1885): 257–261. [Matulaitis, Stasys] Sėbraitis. “1. Lietuvos ukininkų kalendorius; 2. Tikrasis Lietuvos ukininkų kalendorius ir 3. Tikriausias Lietuvos uk. Kalendorius 1895 metams” [1. Lithuanian calendar for farmers. 2. The real Lithuanian calendar for farmers. 3. The most real Lithuanian calendar for farmers]. Varpas, no. 1 (1895): 16–18. Merkys, Vytautas. “Masinės nacionalinio judėjimo formos. Valstiečių vaidmuo” [Massive forms of national movement. The role of peasants]. In Lietuvių nacionalinio išsivadavimo judėjimas ligi 1904 metų [Lithuanian national movement for liberation until 1904]. Edited by Vytautas Merkys, 114–143. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1984. Merkys, Vytautas. Lietuvos valstiečiai ir spauda XIX a. pabaigoje–XX a. pradžioje [Lithuanian peasants and press in the late 19th and early 20th centuries]. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1982. [Mikšas, Jurgis] M. “Musu knigos. Jaunasis Robinzonas, pasiskaitimo knigeles, lietuwiszkai suraszitos E. Radźiuno, mokįtojo Tusieniuos. Klaipedoj spaudįtos pas Holcą bei Szernių 1883, Prekis 50 Pf. Arba 30 kap.” [Our books…]. Auszra, no. 1 (1883): 20. Morris, Pam. Realism. London, New York: Routlege, 2003. Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas. Naujoji lietuvių literatūra 1 [The new Lithuanian literature]. Kaunas: Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetas, 1936. “Nauji rasztai” [New writings]. Vienybė lietuvninkų, no. 3 (1903): 36. “Nauji rasztai” [New writings]. Vienybė lietuvninkų, no. 11 (1904): 132–133. [Noreika, Liudas] L. N. “Bibliografija ir kritika: Žemaitė, Kent kaltas, kent nekaltas, Lietuvos Ukininko išleidimas, Vilnius, 1907 m.” [Bibliography and criticism…]. Draugija, no. 15 (1908): 307. [Petkevičaitė, Gabrielė Bitė] G. P. “Žemaitės 70 metų sukaktuvės” [Žemaitė’s 70th anniversary]. Lietuvos žinios, June 3, 1915, 62. [Petkevičaitė, Gabrielė Bitė] G. P. “Žemaitės Raštai” [Žemaitė’s writings]. Lietuvos žinios, July 9, 1913, 80. Petkevičaitė, Gabrielė. “Ypatiškų atminimų sauja. Iš mųsų atgyjymo pradžios [tęsinys]” [Some special memories. About the beginning of our awakening]. Vilniaus žinios, December 4, 1907, 210. Speičytė, Brigita. “‘Neužvydėtina dalia juodo pranašo’: tezė ir ironija Vinco Kudirkos raštuose” [“Invidious fate of the black prophet”: Thesis and irony in works of Vincas Kudirka]. In “Tegul meilė Lietuvos…”: Vincui Kudirkai – 150 [“Let the love of Lithuania”: 150th anniversary of Vincas Kudirka]. Edited by Rimantas Skeivys, 281–293. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2009. Sprindis, Adolfas. “Literatūros kritika ‘Aušroje’” [Literary criticism in Aušra]. In “Aušra” ir lietuvių visuomeninis judėjimas XIX a. pabaigoje [Aušra and the Lithuanian move-

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ment at the end of 19th century]. Edited by Jonas Kubilius, 162–171. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1988. Sruoga, Balys. “Sukuriuose. Žemaitės 70 metų pagarbai” [In the swirls. Conmemorating Žemaitė’s 70th anniversary]. Lietuvos žinios, May 31, 1915, 61. Šiaulietis [?]. “Teatras. Šiauliai” [Theater. Šiauliai]. Viltis, November 28, 1910, 137. [Tumas, Juozas-Vaižgantas] Vaižgantas. “Žemaitės savaimingumas” [The selfcontained Žemaitė]. Sekmoji diena, December 18, 1921, 42. [Tumas, Juozas-Vaižgantas]. “Atsakymai. P. Žemaitei” [An answer to Žemaitė]. Tėvynės sargas, no. 10–11 (1900): 88. [Tumas, Juozas-Vaižgantas] Vaišgantis. “Musų Raštai” [Our writings]. Tėvynės sargas, no. 8 (1896): 28–33. Vėbra, Rimantas. Lietuvių visuomenė XIX a. antroje pusėje [Lithuanian society in the second half of 19th century]. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1990. Vidmantas, Edvardas. “Inteligentijos vaidmuo. Jos idėjinė diferenciacija” [The role of intelligentsia. Its ideological differentiation]. In Lietuvių nacionalinio išsivadavimo judėjimas ligi 1904 metų [Lithuanian national movement for liberation until 1904]. Edited by Vytautas Merkys, 143–171. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1984. [Vileišis, Jonas?] O. K. Nas. “Broliai į darbą!” [Brothers, let’s go to work!]. Ukinįkas, no. 10 (1891): 434–442.

Postmodernist Representation of the Central European Multiethnic Milieu: Marek Piaček Apolloopera – A Melodrama about Bombing for Choir, Actor and Trombone Renata Beličová

1

Introduction

Art forms greatly contribute to the creation of collective – or a nation’s memory. In historiography, the artistic rendition of historical events is viewed more as a distortion of the historical truth. In actuality, historical memory is distorted to some extent even in the hands of the historians because it is culturally conditioned and inevitably subject to certain unwritten rules. For example, in our culture, it is taken for granted, and it is even viewed as an obligation, to annually remember and commemorate certain significant events or persons, and we also have a habit to forget evil things and never speak ill of the dead. As early as in the Middle Ages, this tradition was strongly institutionalized and commemorative books – the so-called Libri memorialis – were written with the names of the deceased and the dates of the Masses offered in their memory (and in their honor). Works of art also become part of these cultural processes. History is not only a sequence of historical events, but also their interpretation, integration of individual historical events into the context of a particular history of society, landscape, region or nation. The Annales School1 turned the attention of historiography to microhistory and anthropology and focused on the history of mentality and the history of sensibility.2 Jacques Le Goff did devote himself to the research of the Middle Ages, but at the same time he was aware of the importance of art as a source of historical research. In one of his books, he deals with the methods of research on historical sources and notes that historians neglect and underestimate the fine arts. Works of art are important witnesses of history, and they have the same value as historical documents. What is their historical significance? Le Goff sees this in the

1 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). 2 Idem, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1977), 36–47.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004457713_018

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fact that art documents collective sensibility.3 He understands it as a universal value of art, which in specific cases may represent the cultural values of a nation. Collective sensibility (ethnic, regional, local, national), however, should not be seen only as a value, i.e., the quality of art. It can also be seen as an agent, which, although being latent, enters the process of creation of national cultures through the development of the corpus of canonical works of art. The artistic canon – literary or musical – is an essential component of collective identity and its co-founding force. It is therefore not surprising that this constructive value of the artistic canon (universally European and specifically national) is actively claimed as a mental heritage by the deconstructive poetics of postmodernism. The fact of the matter is that collective sensibility not only has the power to shape and strengthen the collective memory, it also tends to distort it. Aleida Assmann discusses storage4 in the context of collective memory and its institutionalization. But the storage of history is not a reliable safe-haven. Even here, collective sensibility is quietly changing into a memory deformation tool. The official history is often distorted by the fact that the events or persons annually remembered by each nation are preselected in a politically correct way. Thanks to their socio-cultural and political context, many events are deliberately forgotten or neglected institutionally (and often through official historiography), and thus erased from the nation’s memory. However, they are seldom erased without a trace from the collective memory. Their fragments remain as a fixed component in the psychosocial buildup of the living individuals. Such deliberately forgotten, but deeply rooted psychosocial historical experience often becomes the source of artistic inspiration. The memory sediments marginalized by the group into the area of reflections are still present in individual memory or in its fragments. These very memories are a valuable material for art – a material that can be reintroduced into the nation’s memory after being artistically transformed. Art forms have the power to revive collective history and remind us of the rich living reality of our past in all its complexity and controversy.

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The Musical Canon and Postmodernism

In my text I will focus on the specific artistic form of reviving urban collective memory into a multiethnic milieu, typical of the Central Europe of the past. 3 Jacques Le Goff, Hledání středověku (Praha: Nakladatelství Vyšehrad, 2005), 33–34. 4 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Arts of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119–135.

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How is the collective nation’s memory (and the collective forgetting) tackled in the poetics of postmodern art? How is the nation’s memory and apparent end of its grand narratives becoming an object of artistic deconstruction? The interpretation of one work of art is insufficient for receiving credible answers. However, it may discover the processes through which the postmodern creativity captures the contents of individual memory and how it uses them to shape and redefine (construct or deconstruct) the strong stories in our history. The modernist poetics of music were implemented through divergent compositional methods and experiments. The confusion of values, which has deepened vis-a-vis the postmodernist deconstruction and the end of the grand narrative, is a logical result of the coexistence of this diversity (which is full of contrasts). The traditional musicological understanding of the musical form as an organic form has had some crucial axiological consequences. The artistic values were firmly tied to the socio-political content and the compositional procedures were understood as a show on the ideologically-colored background.5 The very rejection of this bond, or its ignoring to say the least, is considered to be a typical gesture of postmodern music. The rejection, though, is not happening through forgetting or deletion / erasure. On the contrary, even in postmodern music, the traditional compositional canon remains a stable reference base of the musical language. The formation of music (at all levels of musical structure) often explicitly recall the compositional tradition as it also refers to the conventional ideological contexts of musical language. Especially in the pastiche – a popular postmodernist compositional technique – the socio-political values of musical structure are at play. The principal intertextuality of the pastiche in the deconstructive mode is a major challenge for reception because the work of music opens up to the entire value spectrum as metatext. This interpretative width also depends on the artistic canon, which is institutionalized on the one hand, but retains the echoes of historical (auditive) memory on the other. In Central Europe, the institutional memory does not always overlap with the historical one. A pastiche is therefore an appropriate compositional technique that can unite both ”memories” (institutional canon and cultural memory): “Postmodern pastiche is about cultural memory and the merging of horizons past and present.”6 Contrary to popular belief, postmodern music is not always directed to postmodern irony. The conventional compositional techniques do not only serve as clues to this unambiguous meaning. The interpretation of postmodern music should always

5 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 6 Ingeborg Hoesterey, “Introduction,” in Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), xi.

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make use of deconstruction of aesthetic ideology and not aesthetics alone (in Adorno’s sense: “Art, however, does not sink to the level of ideology, nor is ideology the verdict that would ban each and every artwork from truth”).7 In the postmodern musical language of pastiche, the particular canonical works may have a structurally distinct function from mere simple quotations. The original structural units may turn into phraseological units and idioms. In fact, the canonical language of music represented by a particular work has the function of an artifact and is a sign of a certain discourse. A canon is not typically discussed in connection with music.8 “Canon, to musicians, means something else.”9 This is the statement that begins Joseph Kerman’s text on the canon-formation in Western music of 1983. I think that many professional musicians share this understanding of canon (judging by my own experience). Musical theorists realize the ambiguity of the term “canon,” but Kerman draws our attention to its specific meaning: “[…] that Western art music be viewed not in terms of a canon but rather as a field of social and cultural activity.”10 In his aptly titled set of studies Rethinking Music, William Weber tried to explore the canon in music in terms of “the idea of a musical classic…”11 He distinguishes three types of “canon in musical culture”:12 scholarly, pedagogical and performing. In this text, I will use the term “canon” in all three senses identified by Weber. This corresponds to the approach of composer Marek Piaček who works with the concept of “canon” in his Apolloopera in a comprehensive way – not only by making references to canonical works of music, but also by using canonical compositional techniques and canonical ways of performance. When discussing the libretto, i.e., literary texts, I use the term “canonical national literature” within the meaning of the Gold Fund of Literature corpus. In the case of vocal-instrumental compositions, the tradition of music is connected with the literary one and their synergy gives way to works with a strong artistic expression. In the course of history, opera has been subject to permanent structural and stylistic transformation as a multimedia genre. On the one hand, the musical apparatus of 7 8

9 10 11 12

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 134. Anselm Gerhard, “‘Kanon’ in Der Musikgeschichtsschreibung, Nationalistische Gewohnheiten Nach Dem Ende der Nationalistischen Epoche,” Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 57, no. 1 (2000): 18–30. Joseph Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (September 1983): 107. Ibid. William Weber, “The History of Musical Canon,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 341. Ibid., 339.

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opera is constantly changing (in some cases radically) as a result of innovative compositional techniques and necessary stylistic updates of musical poetics. On the other hand, opera is inevitably subjected to the new requirements in the context of European culture, which are often revolutionary and tied to the history of theater and development of performing arts.

3

Compositional Strategies in the Works of Marek Piaček

The composer Marek Piaček is a Slovak, born in Bratislava, and a typical Central European local patriot. His entire work is committed to the multicultural and multinational Central European traditions of his hometown. In addition to composing, he is also active as a performer. In 1995 he founded the Provincial Chamber Orchestra Požoň Sentimentál together with three other Slovak composers. “The word sentimental implied light entertainment, and it disrupted the idea then prevalent in the Slovak academy that contemporary art music needs to be original, complex, aesthetically elevated, and progress the canon.”13 The Czech musicologist Jaroslav Št’astný characterizes the music of this ensemble within the context of the said confluence of values, and refers to the relationship of Požoň Sentimentál to New Music, the possible “neoconservativism” and student entertainment.14 In their manifesto, the musicians of this band declare their local patriotic sentiments and link their music to the pre- and inter-war period of old Bratislava, and to the times “when we were in a single state with such historic towns like Trento, Trieste, Pécs, Sankt Polten, Kutná Hora, Slavkov and Zakopane.”15 Not only the music for Požoň Sentimentál (e.g., some instrumental pieces of the Urban Songs cycle 1. The Birth of the Genius Loci, 8. Variations on the Genius Loci, 14. Apotheosis of Genius Loci),16 but also the more extensive musical compositions by Piaček refer to historical events connected with Slovakia, Bratislava, and Central Europe at large. This includes his operas: Posledný let, 12 pohǏadov na M. R. Š. [The last

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14 15 16

Barbara Rose Lange, “Urban Nostalgia in the Music of Požoň Sentimentál,” in Local Fusions: Folk Music Experiments in Central Europe at the Millennium (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 104. “Požoň Sentimentál,” accessed January 15, 2019, http://www.pozon.sk/?l=en. “Manifest MKO Požoň Sentimentál,” last modified July 13, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C-pljaNMM6I. Marek Piaček, Piaček M.: Urban Songs and Other Works / E. Bondy, Požoň Sentimental Orchestra. Slovak Music Fund SF00312131. Urban Songs is a cyclic composition of 15 vocal and instrumental pieces.

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flight. 12 views of M. R. Š.] (2001, about Milan Rastislav Štefánik17 and his role in the establishment of a joint state of Czechs and Slovaks), 66 sezón [66 seasons] (2013, about the key historical events of the Slovak nation in the 20th century seen through the history of the City Swimming Pool in Košice), Lest’ rozmyslu [The trick of mind] (2011, the meeting of Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar in the Tugendhat villa and the division of Czechoslovakia), Apolloopera (2013, the bombing and destruction of the Bratislava refinery Apollo by allied forces at the end of World War II).18 As Piaček claims, if the composer is considering “big” issues, a big musical form – opera – is offered to him as a logical solution in terms of the genre.19 In the historical memory of European music, opera has almost always been a complex, that is, a great opus (opera as the plural form of the Latin word opus). The opera concepts of Piaček accept the opera canon, the traditional formal structure of opera (overtures, arias, choruses, etc.), but also deconstruct the canon through reduction (sometimes ad absurdum). The compositional types homonymous with absolute music (polyphonic structures such as stretto, composed types of preludes) but also with popular mainstream (swing, folk, dance music) are represented in Piaček’s operas. By their incorporation into the dramatic plot and thanks to authentic stylistics, they have interesting expressive means and a markedly dramatic function. A characteristic feature of the historical operas by Piaček are the librettos, which are unusual from a literary perspective. The opera libretto in his concept of opera abandons the authentic form of the newly formed literary texts. Piaček not only composes music, but also composes the libretto (together with the librettist), using quotes, paraphrases and textual fragments from various historical materials. The libretto is based on contemporary archival material, and is supplemented by fragments of texts from the canonical national literature. Piaček’s preparation for each opera and its historical story lies primarily in research, which is nothing uncommon in the history of art – the art historians term it “artistic research.”20 As the research methods used by the opera 17

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19 20

Milan Rastislav Štefánik was a Slovak diplomat, aviator and general in the French Army. He started to organize the Czechoslovak Legions to fight against Austria-Hungary and Germany. During World War I he was the Minister of War for Czechoslovakia. He was a leading Slovak politician who contributed decisively to the Czechoslovakian sovereignty in 1918. See the composer’s discography: “Marek Piaček, Personality Profile,” Music Center Slovakia, last modified April 4, 2018, https://hc.sk/en/hudba/osobnost-detail/8-marek -piacek. From the author’s of this article interviews with Piaček. Sabina Soušková, Anna Šubrtová and Rostislav Švácha, Věda a umění (Praha: Ústav dějin umění Akademie věd, 2017).

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authors precede their artistic work, it might seem that the creative imagination of the librettist and composer is consequently somewhat discriminated. In fact, the search for authentic materials is incorporated into the creative work of the team.21 The aim of their historical research is to discover the unknown sources of text material on the chosen topic. The documents are an important source in the formation of the storyline and plot twists. Their dramatic and lyrical potential also affects the choice of compositional techniques and the stylistics of the work. The documentary sources for the libretto predetermine the structural form of particular musical formations of the opera, and the nature of the librettos. When building the plot, the lesser-known historical facts and plots discovered by the authors during the archival research on the subject are important. The unusual circumstances of unknown events involve historically real characters – “insignificant” for big history but dramatically attractive to the opera plot. The historically true marginals bear the living truth of the opera story, show the ambiguity of the fate of ordinary people, and thus partially relieve the fatality of the real story.

4

Apolloopera – A Melodrama about Bombing for Choir, Actor and Trombone

On the first plane, the work Apolloopera – A Melodrama about Bombing for Choir, Actor and Trombone composed by Piaček refers to an almost forgotten historical event – the bombing of the Apollo refinery in Bratislava (June 16, 1944). What is also forgotten is the interwar life in Bratislava and its multiethnic genius loci. The multilingual character of historic Bratislava not only serves as a colorful background for this tragic event, but it is the central characteristic feature of the work, which adds dynamics to the subject, characterizes the libretto, and influences the composition technique. Several historical facts the work references: (1) Interwar life of the Bratislava workers – employees of the Apollo refinery. (2) Multiethnic community of old Bratislava, which was able to cultivate rich social life and develop industry with the latest advancements in technology in some sort of a multinational and multilingual blend (and perhaps thanks to it). (3) War events, the bombing of the Apollo refinery by the Allies on June 16, 1944. 21

Graeme Sullivan, “Research Acts in Art Practice,” Studies in Art Education 48, no. 1 (2006): 19–35.

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(4) Current life in the city represented by a lack of respect and humility, the cynical attitude to one of its monuments – the destroyed refinery – and the human victims by forgetting the genius loci and the multiethnic history of the city. Apolloopera consists of nine parts with sketches from the life of interwar Bratislava – epic, lyrical and meditative images of the tragedy of war, and the present in the form of contemplation of the atmosphere and life of a modern Central European city. The national, European and universal human symbolism is most apparent in the language component of Apolloopera, i.e., in its libretto. For the most part, the libretto consists of quotations selected from the Gold Fund of European literature, which symbolizes the ethical foundations of our culture: from the universal biblical John’s Revelation – the Apocalypse, through Dante Alighieri, Horace, William Blake, Samuel Beckett, up to the literary canon of the nations living in Bratislava – Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians and Czechs. In the first part named Adam, the choir invokes the name Adam, which both represents the human archetype and the historical character of a gardener from the Klinger Colony, a residential neighborhood for the Apollo workers. The composition of this part is characterized by a creeping melody, which traces the peripheral lines of voices through harmony, resulting in attractive and seemingly random vocal coincidences. The magic of layering the unusual horizontal sound lines is the author’s handwriting and composition principle, which can be explained in the tonal sense as a constant accumulation of modulations. This section of Apolloopera is composed in the polychoral style, with one relatively static and another syncopically dynamic choir. In Part 2, The Factory, the many rhetorical allusions are accompanied by a polyphony and a dramatic composition element known from the Baroque fugues (stretto). As a typical element of the canonical language of Baroque music and representing a dramatic climax, it blends and mixes the literary canon of the nations, which created the atmosphere of historical Bratislava – Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans. At first glance it could offer a typical postmodern interpretation of the literary pastiche, resulting in cynicism and irony (e.g., as a typical cliché of false national pride), however, the sheet music does not fuel such meanings. The peaceful and swinging rhythm of popular culture, the melodic peace, and the declamatory nature of the lyrics in four different languages is an expression of different poetics – the one that is working with the deconstruction in a positive sense. This distorts one of the most permanent cultural and historical stereotypes – the cliché of Slovak history emphasizing the unjust domination of larger nations over the Slovaks, which even

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today is the source of frequent manifestations of ethnic intolerance, and a kind of nervousness or distrust toward national minorities. The melodrama narrative is enriched in Part 4 The Meeting. The life of Bratislava’s labor groups is represented by the images of their sociopolitical agenda (numerous quotations from Das Kapital by Karl Marx), and once again without irony, which could be expected in the historical memory of a political battle for the workers’ labor rights. The social life of the workers at the refinery is enhanced by poetic images (documented by numerous contemporary documents) of the contemporary cultivated entertainment with dance allusions to tango, polka and waltz, which make genuine use of the traditional multinational cultural symbols of the interwar times. The bombing of the Bratislava refinery and the circumstances surrounding and following it are presented in four parts (the parts 5. Pilots, 6. Act, 7. Confession, 8. Spiroula). The carefree atmosphere of the air raids over Bratislava is musically borne in a wanton musical style. The documentary statements of the frequent “harmless” air raids of the Allies (the voiceover text) is accompanied by the atmosphere of American pop-cultural incursion into the cultivated and very serious Central European world portrayed in the previous parts. The devastating bombing, which came by surprise and unexpectedly, is rendered through an easy off-beat melody, which gives a shocking impression on the background of the existentially dark voiceover text. The dehumanization of the military action, the air raid, which is “only” a consistently executed military task, is accompanied by a libretto with cynical sentences by Blake (Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In the traditional canonical language of the Baroque music, the climax is yet again represented by the stretto in a deconstructed form with a paradoxical expressive climax formed by a decreasing (sic!) melody. Apolloopera receives its expressive power from the literary and musical sources by equally using the pop-cultural clichés on the first plane and a sophisticated hermeneutic “drift.” This is launched by accumulating the quotes in a juxtaposed mix of canonical texts from European and national literature, e.g., the apocalyptic vision of St. John (“quis poterit stare”) placed next to the satirical sentences by Horace (“Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur”),22 but also the scattered fragments of quotes, such as the wanton Blake’s image of a busy bee, which has no time for sorrow, used as a metaphor of the air attack by the Allies (“busy bee has no time for sorrow”).23 Brentan’s lullaby with

22 23

Part 7 Confession. Part 5 Pilots, Part 7 Confession.

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dark onomatopoeia (“wie die Bienen summen, murmeln…”),24 which suddenly changes into a pacifying mantra, appears to be threatening in the neighborhood of other quotes.25 In many parts, the pastiche technique is almost taken to perfection, except for Blake’s images of obligations without moral scruples.26 The blurred image of Trixi, a tragic figure of a spy emerging from a mix of quotes from the poems by Karl Hynek Mácha27 and Ivan Krasko28 is extremely effective (Part 2 The Factory).29 These verses are almost surrealistically assembled from poetic fragments, which further strengthens the canonical tragic overtones of the well-known verses from Czech and Slovak national poetry (the spy Trixi was a Czech named Beatrix Pospíšilová, a secretary in the refinery). The old-time pathos of the Romantic gesture offers the recipient artistic semiotic games with endless metaphors, whose borders are only defined by his own reception experience. The textlessness of sizable sections of the libretto, in which the text is replaced by vocalizations (-á-, pa-pa-pa), goes hand in hand with the emotionally strong texts. The Italian in Dante’s Hell or the Latin in Horace and the New Testament, sung by a large mixed choir, have an effect similar to textless vocalizations. The text in a foreign language, which the viewer cannot decrypt (or understands it only with difficulty), is semiotically close to vocalizations. However, even the phonetic quality of vocalizations is capable of expression, and it has an effect equivalent to the literary text. The use of the polytextual principle and multilingualism is a sophisticated artistic expressive means typical for art in the High Middle Ages (moteto). This principle appears at numerous places in Apolloopera, e.g., in the motetlike composition in Part 2 The Factory. It is a simultaneous meeting of all interwar languages used in Bratislava: Slovak (Ivan Krasko), Hungarian (Sándor Petöfi30), Czech (Karel Hynek Mácha), German (Clemens Maria Brentano31). 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31

Part 5 Pilots. Part 5 Pilots: “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne, die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.” Part 5 Pilots: “Think in the morning / Act in the noon / Eat in the evening / Sleep in the night.”; “[…] Dip him in the river who loves water… Dip him in the river, dip him in the water.” Karl Hynek Mácha (1810–1836), a Czech Romantic poet and a representative of the Czech National Revival. Ivan Krasko (1876–1958), a Slovak poet and founder of modern Slovak poetry. Part 2 The Factory: “Behold, the pale Moon is quietly setting over the black mountain: today, just like last year. The willow is bending in silence, watching the water.” (Free translation by Martin Mačura). Sándor Petöfi (1823–1849), a great Hungarian poet with Slovak roots and significant involvement in the Hungarian revolution of 1848. Clemens Maria Brentano (1778–1842), a German writer, poet and playwright.

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In Part 9 The Two Towers the libretto is newly created – a text authored by Martin Ondriska and Piaček. At this very place, the pastiche technique uses clear contours because the text significantly imitated the artistic language of the Slovak national poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav32 with typical archaisms, biblical expressions, and poetic neologisms. The instrumental way of use of the choir is an important expressive means in Apolloopera. The textless vocalizations replace musical instruments, harmony, rhythmic accompaniment, and at several places they simulate the audio background. The only musical instrument in Apolloopera is the trombone. It has multiple functions in a composition; it serves as a solo instrument for the fanfares and at the same time as voice support to the choir. Of course, it also has a function in the harmony in the context of the said authorial poetics of disrupting the harmonic balance – it outlines the provisional tonal centers and obscures, or even cancels the resolution of the sensitive and leading tones. In accordance with the poetics of text, even the musical composition of Apolloopera draws on the universal traditions of European art. In many places, the semiotics of this vocal-instrumental work recalls the musical rhetorical figures and refers to the formalized shaping of the musical motion (within the meaning of the Renaissance and Baroque musical canon). In all parts of the melodrama, expression is achieved through traditional compositional procedures, with a programmatic use of compositional solutions canonized by the music historiography in connection with creating the corpus of musical masterpieces. However, its intensification remains fully directed by postmodernist rationalization and ignoring or rejecting the tradition of modernism, which builds its dark metaphysics vis-a-vis horror and cruelty. The postmodern artistic means in Apolloopera do not rely on the interpretation and decoding of symbols. Very often, and with outright joy, they use physicality and corporeality of expression, and appeal to the directly expressed and shared feelings. We need to mention yet another aspect of postmodern poetics – the egalitarian gesture. The famous lines by the giants of the European spirit meet in one verse with an average literary text by a regional author.33 The book of short stories was an important source of memories the refinery workers had of the contemporary events. The egalitarian gesture is also present on the musical 32 33

Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849–1921), a Slovak poet and leading figure of Slovak culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Dušan Kraus, Klingerova kolónia (Bratislava: Lorca, 2000). The text by Dušan Kraus The Klinger Colony is a series of short stories of negligible artistic value about the residents of the working quarters, which was home to the workers of the Apollo refinery.

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composition plane, in which the task of the artistic means (canonical composition of the Middle Ages – motet, a canon of Baroque compositions – stretto), both of which are used as equivalent means of compositional banalities: the fill-up and accompanying and background musical cliché. The poetics of Apolloopera is typical for a strong pathos ranging with exhibitionism of quotes from the canonical literary works, augmented by additional allusions to canonical poetic and musical styles and techniques. All this results not only in a musical but also literary polyphony, simultaneous lines of contradictory poetic approaches, out of which one is pop-cultural and the other even presupposes a cryptanalysis of text and music. Adam in Part 1 is the symbol of the individual fate of a Slovak gardener, and a universal symbol of humanity; the emphasized multinational and multilingual character of Bratislava is a formative cultural factor of urban society. In the sections that present the events of the war, the regional multilingualism is replaced by Pan-European cultural unity and the linguistic universals of Latin, Italian and English. The last part The Towers leaves behind the multinational history of the city and represents only its nationally clear, but significantly globalized Slovak present. The specific situation of a multinational Central Europe is also translated into the specific structure of the artistic canon. It consists of musical and literary works that are not only institutional, but also regarded as symbols of national identity by the general public. The modern connections between the canonical works of national identity and, consequently, the national language, however, creates a special situation in their reception. In Central Europe, the “imaginary” national boundaries do not overlap with the regional borders of nation states. This reality mostly affects the reception of those “national” works that represent the so-called national minority culture in the nation state. The corpus of the Central European and naturally multicultural artistic canon collapsed through the strengthening of the majority and marginalization of the minority national identities. Today we find ourselves in a situation where, e.g., the Bratislava audience hardly knows, and therefore hardly appreciates, the traditional canonical works of the nations that shaped the regional identity of one of the cultural centers of Central Europe, that Bratislava was in the past (Pozsony / Pressburg / Prešpurok were the historical names of the city). Jozef Tancer used an apt title for one of the section in his book Rozviazané jazyky: Ako sme hovorili v starej Bratislave [Loosend tongues: The way we spoke in Old Bratislava]: “People who spoke only one language were like white crows.”34 After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the pragmatic attach34

Jozef Tancer, Rozviazané jazyky: Ako sme hovorili v starej Bratislave (Bratislava: SLOVART, 2016), 17–25.

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ment to the language of a nationally defined state caused a gradual loss of competent reception of the original multilingual and representative literary corpus. Opera as complex artistic work combining words with music is nowadays an ideal way to reconstruct the traditional artistic canon of the region. Just like language and speech, the expressive means of musical language are the continuous features of a particular identity. Unlike speech, however, musical manifestations are not discriminated against on the basis of an arbitrary35 means of expression such as language.

5

Conclusion

It is obvious from the above that postmodern artistic expression is not primarily dependent on detecting its hermeneutic potential. The planes of profane experience of today’s listeners are sufficiently expressively functional, which can only be based on a purely human, credible and consistently nonmetaphysical experience. This is mostly achieved by the idiomatic musical language of Apolloopera and its libretto. The pastiche technique as an emblematic means of expression in postmodernism fully uses the representative function of the artistic canon and the symbolic function of the canonical corpus of national literatures. The specific musical canon is most notably linked to the canonical compositional techniques and the canonical way of performance. Both are strongly linked on the reception plane to contemporary social and political contexts. The libretto of an opera piece is a literary puzzle of sorts. The numerous fragments of literary works are equally represented by the canonical works of domestic national literatures of Central Europe and the Gold Fund of literary works, which puts the values in both of these areas on the universal basis of humanity. The explicit straightforward expression of the Apolloopera is extremely accessible from the perspective of reception, and even more “advanced” listeners can feel the great interpretative challenges of the hermeneutic “drift” of this work. To understand the Apolloopera one only needs the strength of artistic expression, and not necessarily its hermeneutic decoding. But even the interpretation depth does not provide the listener with ultimate answers to eternal “national” ques-

35

Ibid., 26–29. The germanist Tancer has long been analyzing the issue of language in multiethnic regions in the context of multilingual communities in Slovakia. He explores the arbitrariness of language use in real everyday life in the nationally-mixed population. He derives it from the historical constellations and linguistic ideologies.

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tions. Fully in line with postmodern poetics, the work only brings more and more questions. The worrying human fate in the turmoil of national and human history in Apolloopera is represented by the personal, national, and universal human contexts, when solving existential situations. The metaphysically argued satisfaction of contemporary solutions is hidden in the deep layers of the work and seeps to the surface in the form of a pragmatic and profanely experienced life.36

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Alighieri, Dante. “La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata a cura di Giorgio Petrocchi.” In Dante Alighieri: La Commedia. Inferno. Purgatorio. Edizione Nazionale a cura della Societa Dantesca Italiana. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1966–1967. Last modified July 18, 1998. http://world.std.com/~wij/dante/index.html. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Beličová, Renáta. “The Nitra Theory of Translation by Anton Popovic as a Methodological Inspiration for Interpretating Contemporary (Post-modern) Music.” In SGEM 2016: Proceedings from 3rd International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts. Arts, Performing Arts, Architecture and Design. Extended Scientific Sessions. Vienna, 6–9 April, 2016. Sofia: STEF92 Technology. Beličová, Renáta. “Umelecká forma – jedinečný priestor utvárania historickej pamäte: Apolloopera, melodráma o jednom bombardovaní pre zbor, herca a trombón.” In Performativita válek a konfliktů. Edited by Lenka Jungmannová, 207–215. Praha: Akropolis, 2016. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Library of Congress, Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room. http://memory.loc.gov/service/rbc/rbc0001/ 2003/2003rosen1799/2003rosen1799.pdf. Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1977.

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This paper was made possible thanks to the project VEGA 1/0461/16 titled “Reinterpretation of Images of the Cultural Mind in Contemporary Aesthetic and Artistic Reflection.”

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Gerhard, Anselm. “‘Kanon’ in Der Musikgeschichtsschreibung, Nationalistische Gewohnheiten Nach Dem Ende der Nationalistischen Epoche.” Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 57, no. 1 (2000): 18–30. Kerman, Joseph. “A Few Canonic Variations.” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (September 1983): 107–125. Krasko, Ivan. Nox et solitudo. Verše. Bratislava: Tatran, 1975. Kraus, Dušan. Klingerova kolónia. Bratislava: Lorca, 2000. Lange, Barbara Rose. Local Fusions: Folk Music Experiments in Central Europe at the Millenium. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Le Goff, Jacques. Pamět’ a dějiny. Translated by Irena Kozelská. Praha: Argo, 2007. Le Goff, Jacques. Hledání středověku: Rozhovory. Translated by Věra Dvořáková. Praha: Vyšehrad, 2005. Mácha, Karel Hynek. Máj. Kramerius. Digital library of the National Library CR. http:// kramerius4.nkp.cz/search/i.jsp?pid=uuid:5e5c5d90-0cad-11dd-81b7-000d606f5dc6. “Manifest MKO Požoň Sentimentál.” Last modified July 13, 2011. http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=C-pljaNMM6I. Piaček, Marek. Apolloopera. Slovak Philharmonic Choir, narrator Štefan Bučko, trombones Albert Hrubovčák and Michal MotýǏ, conductor Jozef Chabroň. Audio recording which took place in the Small Concert Hall at the Slovak Philharmonic on November 20, 2016. The archives of the Slovak Philharmonic. Accessed January 26, 2019. https://stream.filharmonia.sk/video/?v=SS201611201600. Piaček, Marek. Apolloopera – A Melodrama about Bombing for Choir, Actor and Trombone. Score, manuscript provided by the composer, 2013. Piaček, Marek: Piaček M.: Urban Songs and Other Works / E. Bondy, Požoň Sentimental Orchestra. CD Slovak Music Fund SF00312131. “Požoň Sentimentál.” Accessed January 15, 2019. http://www.pozon.sk/?l=en. Reid, Christopher. “The Enigmatic Samuel Becket Still Thrills: The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett.” NewStatesman, October 11, 2012. http://www.newstatesman.com/ culture/culture/2012/10/enigmatic-samuel-beckett-still-thrills. Sullivan, Graeme. “Research Acts in Art Practice.” Studies in Art Education 48, no. 1 (2006): 19–35. Tancer, Jozef. Rozviazané jazyky: Ako sme hovorili v starej Bratislave. Bratislava: SLOVART, 2016. The Bible. Old and New Testament: Revelation of John. Translated by Commission of Slovak Lutheran Church, published by Slovenská biblická spoločnost’, Banská Bystrica, 1991. Weber, William. “The History of Musical Canon.” In Rethinking Music. Edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 336–355. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Index of Names Abrams, Meyer Howard 174 Adamówna, Wilhelmina 121, 126 Adascalitei, Mirela 145 Addison, Joseph 207–208 Adorno, Theodor W. 297n., 298 Ady, Endre 159 Aglinskas, Vaiva XVI, 6, 270, 291 Akelaitis, Mikalojus 56–57 Alapy, Gyula 155 Alecsandri, Vasile 141, 145n. Aleksandravičius, Egidijus 73n.28 Aleksandrov, Alexander 237 Alexander II 64, 68, 77 Alighieri, Dante 302, 304 Almási, Gábor 177n.39 Anca, Mircea 146n.32 Anderson, Benedict 2, 78, 169, 183n.2 Andriukonis, Tomas 257n. Andziulaitis-Kalnėnas, Juozas 281n.2 Antim, St. 148 Anttonen, Pertti 4n.12 Anz, Thomas 11n.42, 19n.77 Apter, David E. 165, 166n.2 Ardamica, Zorán 153–154 Arminas, Anicetas 94n.21, 103 Arnauld, Antoine 31n.17 Arnold, Heinz Ludwig 12n.47, 15n.60 Árpád (Prince) 172 Ásgúthy, Erzsébet 160 Assmann, Aleida 1, 11n.42, 46, 296 Aszkenazy, Tobiasz 123n.15 Attila 173 Ažubalytė, Aida 221n.24 Bagdonavičius, Vacys 99n.39 Bąk, Edgar 114n.21 Bak, János M. 175n.30 Baka, Józef XV, 215–227 Baliński, Michał 53, 55, 57–58 Balogh, Piroska XVIII Bałucki, Michał 201 Balys, Jonas 89n.12, 100n.42 Baranauskas, Antanas 81, 82n.54, 91, 242n.34, 251 Baran-Szołtys, Magdalena XX

Barber, Karin 183, 184n.3, 188n.14 Barnard, F. M. 3n.7 Barta, Lajos 155 Barta, Sándor 155 Bartók, Béla 159 Barton, David 188n.14 Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev, Olga X, XII, XVII, 135 Bartoszewicz, Julian 224 Bartsch, Christian 87, 90 Basanavičius, Jonas 59, 87, 90–91, 93, 242, 244, 245n.41, 251 Baudelaire, Charles 138 Baycroft, Timothy 4n.12 Beauvois, Daniel 29n.6 Beckett, Sammuel 223, 303 Bejła, Jarosz 222 Beličová, Renata XV, XVII, 295 Bełza, Władysław 109, 113–114, 218–219 Bendix, John 165, 166 Bendix, Reinhard 165, 166n.2 Beneš, Edvard 152 Benson, Timothy O. 139n.14 Bentkowski, Feliks 29–32, 224 Berkan-Jabłońska, Maria 77, 78n.44 Berzsenyi, Dániel XIV, XVIII, 170–173, 176 Beylin, Karolina 209n.6 Białoszewski, Miron 224 Białynia Chołodecki, Józef 120n.5 Biegeleisen, Henryk 224–225 Bielak, Franciszek 74n.29 Bielawski, Józef 202, 206, 212 Bieliński, Józef 32n.22 Bieńka, Maria Olga 210 Biggs, Maude Ashurst 82n.55 Biliūnas, Jonas 286–287 Binkis, Kazys 93, 285n.49 Biržiška, Mykolas 90, 93 Blaga, Lucian 141 Blake, William 302–304 Blažević, Zrinka 175n.32 Bleizgienė, Ramunė XIV, XVII, 273 Bliziński, Józef 201 Blobaum, Robert 123n.17 Bloom, Harold 71n.20 Bobinac, Marijan 175n.32

312 Bogusławski, Wojciech 201 Bohomolec, Franciszek 206, 212 Bohusz, Ksawery 42–47, 50–51, 53, 58–59 Boia, Lucian 137n.5 Borowski, Leon 225 Bourdieu, Pierre 257n.7, 258, 266 Boyarin, Jonathan 188n.14 Brandes, Georg 71n.20 Brătianu, Ion I. C. 141 Brazys, Teodoras 93 Brentano, Clemens Maria 304 Brković, Ivana 175n.32 Brodziński, Kazimierz 32–36 Brzozowski, Karol 87 Buchwald-Pelcowa, Paulina 217n.11 Būčys, Pranciškus Petras 277n.16 Būčys, Žygintas 68n.8 Budrewicz, Zofia 108–109 Bukowiec, Paweł XV, XVII, 215 Burba, Aleksandras 263, 267 Burke, Peter 30n.10, 295n.1 Burkšaitienė, Laima 90n.15 Burzyńska, Anna R. XV, XVIII, 200 Būtėnas, Julius 273n.1 Būtėnas, Pranas 100n.41 Butler, Nicholas Murray 166–168, 178 Cadzow, John F. 172n.21 Călinescu, George 137n.6, 140, 145n.29 Callahan, Ewa 118n.2 Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (Carol I of Romania) 136 Cârstocea, Raul 143, 144n.25 Casanova, Pascale 8, 11, 39n.1, 40n.3 Cernat, Paul 139n.14, 140–141, 142n.20 Childs, Peter 138n.10 Chlebowski, Bronisław 217n.8 Chłopicki, Edward 76 Chmielowski, Piotr 224–225 Chodźko, Ignacy 74, 77, 80 Choraczyńska, Helena 29n.8 Chrzanowski, Ignacy 225 Cieślak, Jacek 200n.1 Cioraneanu, Petre 148 Citavičiūtė, Liucija 233n.11, 236n.18, 248n.51 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea 144, 147 Cook, Nicholas 298n.11 Corneille, Pierre 32n.20

Index of Names Cornis-Pope, Marcel 49n.29, 169n.10, 175n.31 Costin, Jacques G. 143 Crăciun, Camelia 144n.26 Crainic, Nichifor 140n.17 Cravens, Craig 175n.30 Creangă, Ion 141 Csetri, Lajos 172n.22 Cuza, A. C. 144–145 Cuza, Alexandru Ioan 136 Czacki, Tadeusz 43–44, 48, 53, 73 Czartoryski, Adam 207–208 Czeczot, Jan 70 Czernow, Anna Maria 108, 116n.27 Czyż, Antoni 221, 226 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas XIX, 96–98 Čiurlionytė, Jadvyga 90n.15 D’haen, Theo 136n.3 Dambrauskas, Aleksandras (Jakštas, Adomas) 114, 242n.34, 256, 287n.58 Damrosch, David 79, 80n.50 Dan, Sergiu 143 Daniliauskienė, Vida 90n.15 Dănoiu, V. 145–147 Darkó, István 159 Daškus, Marius 82n.54 Daukantas, Simonas 87, 91 Daukša, Mikalojus 251 DeBevoise, M. B. 8n.31, 39n.1 Delaperrière, Maria 198n.8 Derrida, Jacques 169, 177, 178n.42 Detering, Heinrich 15n.60 Deutsch, Karl W. 165, 167 Dietze, Joachim 238n.25 Diez, Gunther 177n.38 Dilytė, Dalia 48n.26, 235n.16, 250n.61 Długosz, Jan 79n.46 Dmuszewski, Ludwik Adam 208–209 Dobossy, László 157 Döbrentei, Gábor XIV, 170–174 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin 146 Dobry, Judit XII, XVIII, 152 Dobson, Michael 265n.25 Dołęga, Benedykt 78 Domańska, Antonina 108 Domonkos, Leslie S. 172n.21

Index of Names Donelaitis, Kristijonas XIII, XIV, XX, 45n.17, 47–52, 54, 230–252, 261 Doveika, Kostas 242n.35, 266n.36, 281n.30 Dović, Marijan XIII, 170n.15, 264n.27 Driscoll, M. J. 189n.15 Drobot, Stefan 31n.13 Duda, Agata 201 Duda, Andrzej 201 Dukić, Davor 175n.32 Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, Wincenty 76, 81 Ďurišin, Dionýz 154 Dziadek, Magdalena 73n.26 Eco, Umberto 122, 212 Edlund, Ann-Caterine 189n.15 Edlund, Lars-Erik 189n.15 Ehrlich, Lothar 14n.56 Eichhorn, Johan Gottfried 29n.8 Eisen, Matthias Johann 189 Eley, Geoff 1n.2 Elteto, Louis J. 172n.21 Emanuel, Susan 266n.34 Emden, Christian 66n.6 Eminescu, Mihai 138, 141 Erdélyi, Ilona T. 177n.39 Erll, Astrid 1n.2, 46n.20 Esterhammer, Angela 169n.10, 259n.12 Even-Zohar, Itamar 9n.35, 12n.43, 154 Everist, Mark 298n.11 Fabian, Johannes 188n.14 Fábry, Zoltán 155–157, 160 Faehlmann, Friedrich Robert 186 Feliński, Alojzy 206 Finer, Samuel E. 168 Foltz, William J. 167n.7 Fondane, Benjamine XVII, 143, 146 Fónod, Zoltán 157n.14, 157n.15 Forbáth, Imre 157 Forgács, Éva 139n.14 Fórizs, Gergely XIII–XIV, XVIII, 42n.8, 165, 187n.11 Fórmanek, Mateusz 82 Fortunatov, Filip 87, 89 Foucault, Michel 177n.41 Fowkes, Ben 2n.4 Frank, Tibor 174n.28

313 Fredro, Aleksander 200–201, 203–204, 210, 212 Fundoianu, Benjamine → Fondane, Benjamine Gad, Henri 143n.23 Gailiūtė-Bernotienė, Gabrielė 60 Gamer, Michael 268 Gates, Henry Louis 9n.33, 12n.45 Gaudrimas, Juozas 95n.25, 101n.46 Gbúr, Ján 176n.36 Geary, Patrick J. 175n.30 Geertz, Clifford 166n.2 Gellner, Ernest 169 Genette, Gérard 169 Gerhard, Anselm 298n.8 Gerould, Daniel 205n.3 Gerulis, Petras 287n.55, 288n.59 Gineitis, Leonas 242n.35 Gira, Liudas 90 Giradet, Raoul 137 Girdzijauskas, Juozas 281n.30 Goerlandt, Iannis 136n.3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 9, 194, 196 Gömöri, George 176n.35 Gömöri, Jenő 155 Gomulicki, Wiktor 108 Gorak, Jan 12n.46, 16n.64, 39n.1 Görözdi, Judit 159n. Grabes, Herbert 1n.2 Grabowicz, George G. 261n.19, 266 Grabowski, Michał 77 Graham, Karolina 41n.5 Greenblatt, Stephen 39n.1 Grefkowicz, Alina 120n.4 Grigas, Kazys 87n. Grimm, Erk 12n.47 Grimm, Jacob 6, 30 Grinius, Kazys 100n.40 Griškaitė, Reda 68n.8, 75 Grochowiak, Stanisław XVIII, 224 Groddeck, Gottfried Ernst 41–42 Grześkowiak, Radosław 220n.17, 222n.25 Gudeman, Alfred 29n.7 Guillory, John 13n.53, 14–15, 17, 19, 257n.7 Gutkowski, Tadeusz 209n.8 Győry, Dezső 156–157, 159

314 von Hagedorn, Friedrich 236 Hagen, William W. 123n.18 von Haller, Albrecht 236 Hamann, Johann Georg 186 Hamilton, Mary 188n.14 Hanák, Péter 174n.28 Hańczakowski, Michał 221n.22 Hanka, Václav 175 Hann, Christopher 118n.2 Harasymowicz, Jerzy 224 Harris, Wendell V. 258, 264n.29 Hasselblatt, Cornelius 185n.7 Hatvany, Lajos 155 Haugen, Susanne 189n. Hefter, Alfred 146 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6 Heidegger, Martin 223 Heine, Johann (Jan) 208–209 Helgason, Jón Karl 170n.15, 264n.27 van den Hemel, Ernst 257, 258n.8 Henrikson, Paula 170n.17 von Hentig, Harmut 14n.55 Herder, Johann Gottfried XI, 3, 5–6, 8, 29, 34, 40, 42, 45, 48, 86, 186 Hernas, Czesław 217n.11 Herrmann, Leonhard 15n.59, 17n.67 Heumann, Christoph August 29n.8 von Heydebrand, Renate 1n.1, 5, 12n.44, 13n.50, 14n.56, 15–16, 18n.73, 20 Hibel, Katarzyna 122n.13 Hitchins, Keith 136n.4 Hobsbawm, Eric 55n.42 Hoesterey, Ingeborg 297n.6 Homer 6 Honko, Lauri 6, 7n.26, 185n.7 Hopkin, David 4n.12 Horace 223, 302–304 Horváth, Andor 137–138, 139n.13 Hroch, Miroslav VII, 2–3, 41n.5, 184, 185n.6 Hübner-Wojciechowska, Joanna 128n.28 van Hulle, Dirk 7n.27, 170n.16 von Humboldt, Wilhem 233, 236 Hunyadi, János 171–172 Hurt, Jakob 187n.12, 189–191 Hutchinson, John 2, 3n.8 Hviezdoslav → Országh, Pavol Iacobescu, D. 146 Iancu, Marcel 141, 143, 148, 149

Index of Names Ignotus, Pál 155 Insler, Abraham 124n.19 Ivanauskaitė, Vita 93n.18, 102n.49 Ivinskis, Laurynas 91 Jablonskis, Jonas 288–289 Jachowicz, Stanisław 109–110 Jacob, Hans-Joachim 11n.39 Jadwiga, Teresa 108 Jakobson, Carl Robert 191, 194 Jakštas, Adomas → Dambrauskas, Aleksandras 114, 242n.34, 256, 260–262, 265 Jakubowska, Urszula 125n.23 James, Patrick 165n. Janáček, Karel 237 Janáček, Pavel 159n. Jankovics, Marcell 155 Jankowski, Placyd 77 Janota, Johannes 13n.50 Jansen, Ea 191n.20 Jasnorzewska, Maria 223, 224n.30 Jaworski, Roman XIX Jędrzejewski, Tomasz 30n.11 Jenkins, Gerraint H. 55n.42 Jensen, Lotte 41n.5, 42n.8, 170n.17 Johnson, Randal 257n.7 Johnston, Ian C. 65n.1 Jonaitis (Šidlauskas), Marijus 264n.28 Jordan, Johann Gottfried 47 Jovaišas, Albinas 48n.24 Jucevičius, Liudvikas Adomas → Jucewicz, Ludwik Adam Jucewicz, Ludwik Adam 53–56, 87–88, 89n.8 Jurgelionis, Kleopas 256n.3 Juška, Antanas 87, 91, 98 Juška, Jonas 87, 91, 98 Juvan, Marko 10n.36, 258, 259n.13 Kaczér, Illés 155 Kalvaitis, Vilius 89, 91 Kamusella, Tomasz Xn.1 Kania, Agnieszka 114n.21 Kaniowska-Lewańska, Izabela 109n.5 Kant, Immanuel 30 Kartus, Triinu 183n.1 Kasprowicz, Jan 120n.7 Kassák, Lajos 155, 159

315

Index of Names Kaupas, Antanas 183n.41 Kauranen, Kaisa 189n. Kawałkowski, Aleksander 119n. Kerman, Joseph 298 Kersék, János 155 Kikas, Katre XIII–XIV, XVIII, 183, 189n., 193n.23 Kirkor, Adam Honory 68, 69n.10, 72, 81 Kirša, Faustas 262 Kłak, Czesław 124n.21 Klaniczay, Gábor 175n.30 Klaus, Václav 300 Klimańska, Zofia 78 Klimowicz, Mieczysław 208n. Kloch, Zygmunt 31n.17 Kniaźnin, Franciszek Dionizy 225 Koch, Erduin Julius 29n.8 Kochanowski, Jan 35–36, 200 Kocur, László 154 Kodály, Zoltán 159 Koehler, Krzysztof 226 Kogălniceanu, Mihai 135 Koidula, Lydia 194, 196 Kolberg, Oskar 87 Kondratowicz, Ludwik → Syrokomla, Władysław Konopnicka, Maria 109, 111–112 Kopczyński, Krzysztof 74n.31, 75n.34 Korotyński, Wincenty 77, 80, 81 Korsak, Rajmund 221, 225 Korsakas, Kostas 230n.2, 281n.30 Korte, Hermann 10n.39, 12n.47, 13n.53, 15, 17n.66, 18n.72, 19n.78 Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa 27n. Kosztolányi, Dezső 159 Kott, Jan 207n. Kovács, Kálmán 175n.32 Kozłowska, Marta 82 Kozłowski, Maciej 122n.14, 125n.23 Kramář, Karel 152 Krasicki, Ignacy 225 Krasiński, Zygmunt 201 Krasko, Ivan 304 Krassowska, Bogumiła 120n.5 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy 68n.9, 69, 70, 76–78, 80, 82, 221–223 Kraus, Dušan 305n.33 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold XIV, 175, 183, 187, 191–197

Krėvė-Mickevičius, Vincas 90 Krikščiukaitis, Jonas 278n.18 Kristeva, Julia 122 Krzyżanowski, Julian 217n.11 Krzyżanowski, Stanisław 58n. Kubilius, Jonas 280n.29 Kučinskienė, Aistė XIII–XIV, XVIII, 256 Kudirka, Vincas 94–95, 176, 263, 265, 276–279, 289 Kudlicz, Bonawentura 210 Kuismin, Anna 189n. Kulakauskas, Antanas 73n.28 Kulczycka-Saloni, Janina 29n.8 Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina 107 Kun, Béla 152 Kunder, Juhan 194 Kurrik, Juhan 191n.19 Kuršaitis, Friedrich 248 Kutzmutz, Olaf 19n.77 Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė, Sofija 98 de La Harpe, Jean-François 33 Lancelot, Claude 31n.17 Landsbergis, Vytautas 95n.24 Lange, Barbara Rose 299n.13 Lanoux, Andrea 71, 78n.43 Latour, Bruno 28n.4 Laugaste, Eduard 185n.8, 186n.10 Le Goff, Jacques 295, 296n.3 Łebkowski, Tadeusz 127n. Leerssen, Joep 3, 7n.27, 8n.30, 11, 168n.9, 170n.15, 178, 258n.11, 259n.14 Legowicz, Jan 217n.6 Lemeškin, Ilja 238n.25 Łempicki, Zygmunt 29n.9, 71 Lentricchia, Frank 13n.53 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 169, 177 Lewartowska, Zofia 120, 131n.38 Libera, Zdzisław 27n., 31n.13, 225–226 Liivaku, Uno 184n.5 Lipiński, Tymoteusz 53n.37, 55n.43 Lipiński, Wacław 120 Löffler, Philipp 13n.52 Löffler, Sigrid 13n.48 Long, Elizabeth 75n.36 Lönnrot, Elias 7n.26 Łoski, Piotr Alojzy 225 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 173n.25 Lovinescu, Eugen 139–140

316 Luca, B. (Bernstein, Luca) 146 Ludanyi, Andrew 172n.21 Lukšienė, Meilė 285n.52 Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen XIIIn.3, 10n.38 Lyons, Martyn 275n.5, 283 Maceina, Antanas 99 Mácha, Karl Hynek 304 Maciūnas, Vincas 43n.12, 44n.14, 265–266 Mačiulis, Jonas → Maironis Mackrott, Henryk 208 Macpherson, James 30, 43 Macura, Vladimír 175 Mačura, Martin 304n.29 Mačys-Kėkštas, Jonas 263, 276n.11, 281n.32 Mádl, Antal 177n.38 Magocsi, Paul R. 118n.1 Maiorescu, Titu 138n.11 Maironis (Mačiulis, Jonas) XIII–XIV, XX, 242, 244, 247, 251, 256–270 Makkai, Adam 171n.18 Makowski, Stanisław 29n.8 Makuszyński, Kornel 120–121, 127–129 Mansbach, Steven 135n., 140n.16, 149n. Marchwiński, Grzegorz 71n.17, 72n.25, 75 Margócsy, István 177n.39 Marjanović Brođanin, Stjepan 175 Markowska-Fulara, Helena IX, XIX, 27, 30n.12 Martin, Mircea 137n.6, 146n.30 Martinovski, Vladimir 258n.10 Martišiūtė-Linartienė, Aušra 98n.35 Marx, Karl 303 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 152 Mathijsen, Marita 170n.17 Matulaitis, Stasys 262, 281 Maxy, M. H. 143 Mayenowa, Maria Renata 31n.17 Mayne, Jonathan 138n.9 Mazanka, Paweł, CSsR 70n.15 Mažiulis, Antanas 102 Mécs, László 156, 159 Mečiar, Vladimír 300 Meldžukienė, Audronė 72n.22 Mendelsohn, Ezra 144n.26 Merkys, Vytautas 260n.17, 274n.3, 275n.6 Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhard 39n.1 Michułka, Dorota 108, 115, 116n.27

Index of Names Mick, Christoph 39n.1 Mickiewicz, Adam XI, 49–53, 55, 64, 73–76, 79, 80, 82, 109–110, 176, 200–201, 204, 205n., 258, 261 Mickūnas, Algis 39n.2 Micu, Dumitru 138 Mihăilescu, Vintilă 137n.6 Mikkola, Kati 189n. Mikšas, Jurgis 59n.50, 276n.12 Mikšytė, Regina 82n.54 Miller, Vsevolod 87, 89 Miłosz, Czesław 224 Mittelstroβ, Jürgen 13n.53 Molière 200, 202–203, 206, 210 Moniuszko, Stanisław 73n.26, 76, 81 Morgan, Prys 55n.42, 56n.44 Morris, Pam 285, 287 Mrożek, Sławomir 200, 203 Müller, Anja 107 Murray, Christopher John 176n.35 Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas 101, 242n.34, 290 Mylonas, Harris 165n. Năchescu, Voichița 141n. Nakienė, Austė 95, 96n.27, 97n.29 Narbutienė, Daiva 249n.54 Naruszewicz, Adam 222–223 Nastasă, Lucian 142n.21, 145n.28, 147 Nawarecki, Aleksander 218n.13, 219n.15, 221, 222n.26, 224n.30, 225n.33, 226 Nemoianu, Virgil 169n.10, 170n.15, 258, 259n.12 Nemțeanu, Barbu 146 Nesselmann, Georg 237–240, 242n.35, 243n.38, 245n.42, 251 Neubauer, John VIIIn.2, 49, 169n.11, 170n.15, 175n.31 Neubauer, Pál 160 Neumeuer, Ferdynand 120, 124–125 Niemiryczowa, Antonina 226 Nietzsche, Friedrich 65, 70 Noreika, Liudas 284n.45 Normann, Erna 185n.8, 186n.10 Norris, Stephen M. 176n.33 Norwid, Cyprian 200–201 Nowicka, Elżbieta 73n.26, 79n.47 Noyes, George Rapall 73n.27, 110n.9 Nünning, Ansgar 1n.2, 46n.20

Index of Names O’Connor, Kevin 176n.34 Obertyńska, Beata 114n.20 Odyniec, Antoni Edward 53, 74, 77, 80 Oișteanu, Andrei 145n.27 Okulicz-Kozaryn, Małgorzata XIX Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław IX–XI, XIX, 64, 73n.26, 76n.38, 82, 114n.23 Olech, Joanna 114n.21 Ondriska, Martin 305 Oppnam, Artur 120n.6 Orłowski, Antoni 219n.14 Ornea, Zigu 136n.4 Országh, Pavol 176, 305 Osiński, Ludwik 32–36 Otten, Willemien 258n.8 Otwinowska, Barbara 226n.35 Palli, Heldur 1084n.4 Palotai, Boris 160 Passarge, Louis 239, 240n.30, 241, 245–251 Paukštis, Juozas 263 Pavlovich, Konstantin 209 Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Maria 223 Pečkauskaitė, Marija → Šatrijos Ragana Peéry, Rezső 157 Petkevičaitė-Bitė, Gabrielė 289 Petöfi, Sándor 304 Petreu, Marta 136n.4 Piaček, Marek XV, 295, 298–301, 305 Píchová, Hana 175n.30 Pietraszkiewicz, Onufry 70 Podbereski, Romulad 78 Poltermann, Andreas 15n.3, 10n.38 Pomogáts, Béla 153, 156n.12 Poniatowski, Józef 130 Poniatowski, Stanisław August 202, 205, 210 Pop, Ion 139n.14 Poška, Dionizas 251 Pospíšilová, Beatrix 304 Praniauskaitė, Karolina 77, 81 Pražák, Albert 176 Prešeren, France 258 Prusin, Alexander V. 123n.17 Przyborowski, Walery 108 Pushkin, Alexander 258 Puzynina, Gabriela 76–77, 79 Pyrker, Johann Ladislaus 176–177

317 Racine, Jean 200, 203, 206 Rácz, Pál 155 Rainis, Jānis 258 Randeria, Shalini 28n.2 Ranger, Terence 55n.42 Rapacki, Wincenty 210 Rasimavičius, Mindaugas 72n.22 Rastenis, Nadas 230n.2 Rebreanu, Liviu 141 Rhesa, Ludwig 47–52, 87–88, 89n.12, 93n.18, 98, 104, 232–236, 238–240, 243n.38, 245n.42, 246, 251 Rigney, Ann 11, 170n.15 Rimgailė-Voicik, Radvilė 72n.22 Robinette, Nicholas 45n.16 Ronetti-Roman, Moise 146 Rossel, Sven H. 54n.41 Roudiez, Leon S. 122n.11 Ruhnken, David 14n.55 Runden, Charity Eva 166n.4 Rusinek, Michał 114n.21 Ruthner, Clemens 16n.62 Rybelis, Antanas 265n.32 Rychterová, Pavlina 175n.30 Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek 28n.3, 224 Rzewuski, Henryk 74, 222–223 Saal, Andres 191 Sabaliauskas, Algirdas 238n.25 Sadauskienė, Jurga XI, XIX, 86, 92n., 93n.18, 102n.49 Sadoveanu, Mihail 141 Samulionis, Algis 97n.31 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz 222–223 Sartre, Jean-Paul 223 Sauka, Leonardas 99n. Saul, Nicholas 13n.49 Schildt, Judith 14n.56 Schiller, Friedrich 9, 18, 194, 196 Schlegel, Friedrich 6 Schleicher, August 237–241, 243n.38, 245n.42, 249, 251 Schmidt, Erich XIIIn.3, 10n.38 Schmidt, Ricarda 13n.49 Schoolfield, George C. 54n.41 Schroeder, Artur 120–121, 130 Schults, Hans Anton 189–197 von Schultz-Bertram, Georg Julius 186

318 Sheridan, Alan 169, 177 Shevchenko, Taras 258 Sichert, Margir 1n.2 Sigismund I the Old 35 Sigismund II Augustus 35 Siipsen, Märt 189, 193–197 Sirvydas, Konstantinas 251 Skeivys, Rimantas 279n.24 Skoczek, Anna 226n.36 Skrodenis, Stasys 94, 95n.23, 101n.45, 102 Slavici, Ioan 141 Słoński, Edward 128 Słowacki, Juliusz 200–201, 212 Smith, Anthony D. 2, 3n.10, 16–17, 169 Śniadecki, Jan 30–31, 32n.18, 33–34, 36 Soušková, Sabina 300n.20 Sowa, Jan 126n.26 Specht, Benjamin 14n.56 Speičytė, Brigita IX–X, XIX, 39, 88n.5, 114n.22, 221n.24, 257, 265, 267, 279 Spiering, Menno 8n.30 Spiridon, Monica 136n.3 Sprindis, Adolfas 275n.10, 280n.29, 281n.33 Sruoga, Balys 93, 97–98, 101, 256n.3, 290 Stanevičius, Simonas 52, 54, 87, 90, 104, 242–243, 251 Stanislaus August 35 Steuerman-Rodion, Avram 146 Stojmenska-Elzeser, Sonja 258n.10 Stolzman, Małgorzata 72n.24 Storostas-Vydūnas, Vilhelmas 94 Strauss, Johann 200 Strazdas, Antanas 45n.17, 91, 251 Streitman, Henric 146 Struger, Jürgen 16n.62 Stryjkowski, Maciej 73 Subačius, Giedrius 43n.12, 44n.14 Subačius, Paulius 259, 268 Sugar, Peter F. 174n.28 Sulimierski, Filip 217n.8 Sullivan, Graeme 301n. Sunderland, Willard 176n.33 Suny, Ronald Grigor 1n.2 Syrokomla, Władysław (Kondratowicz, Ludwik) 66, 67n., 68–70, 74, 76–78, 80–82, 221–224 Szabó, Dezső 159 Szalatnai, Rezső 157–158 Szarota, Jan 130n.33

Index of Names Szeberényi, Zoltán 157n.13 Széchenyi, István XIV, 173–174, 176 Szekfű, Gyula 159 Szemere, Pál 175 Szenes, Erzsi 160 Szenes, Piroska 160 Szeredai Gruber, Károly 155 Sziklay, Ferenc 155 Szmydtowa, Zofia 175n.33 Szucsich, Mária 160 Szvatkó, Pál 156, 158 Szymborska, Wisława 223 Šalkauskis, Stasys 99 Šámal, Petr 159n. Šatrijos Ragana 262 Šeferis, Vaidas XIII–XIV, XX, 49n.28, 230, 233n.10, 237n.20, 261n.18 Šeina, Viktorija IX, XX, 1, 231n.3, 256–257 Šimkus, Stasys 96n.28 Šimkus, Vladas 101 Šlekys, Jonas 266n.33 Šliūpas, Jonas 59, 241–242 Šmitienė, Giedrė 221n.24 Štefánik, Milan Rastislav 152, 300 Šubarić, Lav 177n.39 Šubrtová, Anna 300n.20 Švácha, Rostislav 300n.20 Ślizień, Mieczysław 69 Ślizień, Otton 70 Ślizień, Rafał 70 Świrko, Stanisław 70n.13 Taine, Hippolyte 71n.20 Tancer, Jozef 306, 307n. Tarailienė, Dalia 114n.24 Tarnowski, Stanisław 71n.20 Tasner, Antal 176 Telek A., Sándor 155 Tempest, Peter 230n.2 Tetzner, Franz 245, 248–251 Tihanov, Galin 29n.5 Tilly, Charles 165, 168n.8 Tomaszewski, Dyzma Bończa 55 Tőzsér, Árpád 154–155 Trembecki, Stanisław 225 Tripplin, Teodor 80 Trzynadlowski, Jan 79n.46

319

Index of Names Tumas-Vaižgantas, Juozas XIX, 93, 242n.34, 256, 261, 282, 290 Turczel, Lajos 152n., 160n.23 Tyszkiewicz, Eustachy 58, 68, 71–72 Tyszkiewicz, Konstanty 82 Tyszyński, Aleksander 75, 77 Uliasz, Stanisław 124n.21 Umiński, Władysław 108 Undusk, Jaan 185–186, 197 Urbanowska, Zofia 108 Urr, Ida 160 Vaderna, Gábor 171n.20 Vaicekauskas, Mikas 230n.2, 231n.3 Vaičiulaitis, Antanas 262n.21 Vaižgantas → Tumas-Vaižgantas, Juozas Valaitis, Ada 21 Valančius, Motiejus 242n.34, 251, 284, 285n.49 Valiūnas, Silvestras Teofilis 91 Valk, Ölo 175n.31 Vanderjagt, Arjo 258n.8 Vėbra, Rimantas 280n.28 Végh, Balázs Béla 158, 160n.24 Velsker, Mart 194n.24 Veske, Mikhel 191, 194 Vidmantas, Edvardas 278n.22, 280n.27 Vienažindys, Antanas 91 Vileišis, Jonas 277n.16, 278n.21 Villemain, Able F. 34 Vincė, Laima 104, 253 Vinea, Ion 141, 143n.23, 147 Vištelis, Andrius 59n.50, 82, 240 Viszota, Gyula 174n.27 Volovici, Leon 146n.32 Voltaire 32n.20, 203, 206 Volteris, Eduardas 91 Vozári, Dezső 158 de Vries, Hent 258n.8 Wachler, Ludwig 29n.8 Walewski, Władysław 217n.8 Walicki, Andrzej 36 Wapiński, Roman 126n.26, 129n.30 Wass, László 157 Wawrzkowicz, Eugenjusz 119n.

Weaver, George Sumner 166–168, 178 Weber, William 298 Weeks, Theodore R. 176n.33 Werner, Michael 28 Wierzejska, Jagoda XI, XX, 118 Williams, Raymond 9 Winko, Simone 5, 15, 18n.74, 20n.80 Witkowska, Alina 70n.14 Wnęk, Konrad 118n. Wolf, Friedrich August 29 Wolska, Maryla 114n.20 Wolski, Ludwik 113n.20 Wyka, Marta 124n.20 Wyspiański, Stanisław 201, 204 Zabarskaitė, Jolanta 238n.25 Zabawa, Krystyna XI, XX, 107 Zabłocki, Franciszek 201 Zaborskaitė, Vanda 101n.43, 266 Zadara, Michał 200 Zakrzewska, Helena 120–122, 125, 130 Zaleska, Maria 108 Zaleski, Bohdan 53 Zaleski, Kazimierz 77 Zan, Tomasz 77 Zapolska, Gabriela 201n. Zdanowicz, Aleksander 225 Zelenková, Anna 176n.36 Zeyringer, Klaus 13n.52 Zimmer, Ilonka 11n.39, 16n.63, 18n.75 Zimmermann, Bénédicte 28 Zrínyi, Miklós 175 Zupančič, Alenka 211–212 Zyblikiewicz, Lidia A. 118n.2 Zymer, Tomasz 37 Żbikowski, Piotr 27n. Żuk-Skarszewska, Kate 111n.12 Żurakowski, Bogusław 110 Žemaitė (Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, Julija) 273–274, 280–291 Žvirgždas, Manfredas 268n.40 Миллер, Всевoлод → Miller, Vsevolod Фортунатов, Филип → Fortunatov, Filip