| Abstract [eng] |
Summary: The traditional worldview of Lithuanian literature sees a person who is far from his / her homeland in the archetypal situation of Paradise lost. 19th-century Lithuanian literature interprets the archetype of Paradise lost as a chance to deepen national identity. The tone for such an interpretation was set by the strong patriotic inversion in Adam Mickiewicz's poem Pan Tadeusz (1834): "Lithuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee. To-day thy beauty in all its splendour I see and describe, for I yearn for thee" (translated by George Rapall Noyes). We truly appreciate what we have lost – this is the logic behind the literary topos of looking at Lithuania from afar. An aesthetic distance is created: the loss of the homeland gives a possibility to grasp its essence. We see such a view of Lithuania from afar in the works of Julius Anusavičius, the exiled poet, and in Antanas Baranauskas' Journey to St Petersburg (Kelionė į Petaburką, St Petersburg, 1858–1859), and in Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis' poem "Evening (On the Lake of the Four Cantons)", and in Pranas Vaičaitis' poems "There is a Country" and "Leaving the Homeland". In these works, Lithuania is seen through the eyes of an exile or quasi-exile, and this literary technique deautomatizes poetic perception. In the context of the Soviet occupation of the 20th century, a Lithuanian far from his / her homeland was a Siberian exile or a refugee to the West. The writers of the Exodus left Lithuania fleeing from the repression of the aggressor, from death, and perceived themselves as exiles of the West. The literary Exodus essentially did not leave Lithuania; for many works of the Exodus, Lithuania is the center of literary worldview. After Lithuania regained its independence and the Soviet Union's "iron curtain" fell, a wave of migration of writers surged (Zita Čepaitė, Dalia Staponkutė, Gabija Grušaitė, etc.). This migration is quite different from the Exodus; a modern writer migrates with a high degree of freedom. For the traditional literary mentality, the center of the migrant's world is Lithuania, while the contemporary works of émigré writers are in many cases multicentric: alongside Lithuania as a starting point of literary worldview, there are also other cultures as additional (dialogical) starting points. In contemporary émigré literature, the novels of Valdas Papievis, who has been living in Paris since 1992, are distinguished by philosophical depth. For this writer, leaving Lithuania is not only a variation of the homo viator archetype, but also a peculiar philosophical metaphor for leaving oneself. The French environment is fundamentally important to the writer: Provence in the novel To Go (Eiti, 2010) is a unique reality that transforms colors into radiance; multilayered Paris is the protagonist of the novels One Summer Emigrants (Vienos vasaros emigrantai, 2003) and Odilė (2015). Valdas Papievis' novels interestingly modify the concept of looking from afar: the aim is to gain distance by looking at oneself – the distance is important as a condition of seeing oneself. To leave home is to look at oneself from the outside and thus understand oneself. |
