History of the Literary Cultures of East-central Europe: Junctures And Disjunctures in the 19th And 20th Centuries, Vol. 2 (Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages)

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe VOLUME II

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2006 President/Président Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Indiana University) Acting Vice-President/Vice-Président par intérim Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Secretary Treasurer/Secrétaire Trésorier Gábor Bezeczky (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Acting Treasurer/Trésorier par intérim Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Committee Liaison Eugene Chen Eoyang (Lingnan University) Members/Membres assesseurs Richard Aczel, Jean Bessière, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Margaret Higonnet, Elrud Ibsch, Eva Kushner, Vivian Liska, Inôcencia Mata, Laura Cavalcante Padilha, Fridrun Rinner Past Presidents Mario J. Valdés (Toronto), Jacques Voisine (Paris), Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana), Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries György M. Vajda† (Budapest), Milan V. Dimić (Edmonton) Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy

Volume XX (Volume II in the subseries on Literary Cultures) History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries volume iI

Edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope Virginia Commonwealth University

John Neubauer University of Amsterdam

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe : junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries / edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer.    p.   cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 20)  Includes bibliographical references.   1. Europe, Eastern--Literatures--History and criticism. 2. Europe, Eastern--History. 3. Literature and history--Europe, Eastern. I. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 1946-. II. Neubauer, John, 1933-. III. Comparative history of literatures in European languages ; 19PN849 .E9H577   2004 891.8--dc22 2004041186 ISBN 90 272 3453 1 (alk. paper) CIP © 2006 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Table of contents

Editors’ Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Note on Documentation and Translation

xiii

Table of contents, Volume 1

xv

In Preparation

xix

Introduction: Mapping the Literary Interfaces of East-Central Europe Marcel Cornis-Pope 1.

Cities as sites of hybrid literary identity and multicultural production

–

Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities – Marcel Cornis-Pope Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna: the Myth of Division and the Myth of Connection – Tomas Venclova The Tartu/Tallinn Dialectic in Estonian Letters and Culture – Tiina A. Kirss – Postscript on a Marginocentric Experiment: The Frontier School of Tartu – Jüri Talvet Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga – Irina Novikova Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Testing Ground for Pluralism – Amy Colin, with Peter Rychlo on post–1940 Czernowitz ‘The City That Is No More, the City That Will Stand Forever’: Danzig/Gdańsk as Homeland in the Writings of Günter Grass, Paweł Huelle, and Stefan Chwin – Katarzyna Jerzak On the Borders of Mighty Empires: Bucharest, City of Merging Paradigms – Monica Spiridon Literary Production in Marginocentric Cultural Node: The Case of Timişoara – Marcel Cornis-Pope with John Neubauer and Nicolae Harsanyi Plovdiv: The Text of the City vs. the Texts of Literature – Alexander Kiossev The Torn Soul of a City: Trieste as a Center of Polyphonic Culture and Literature – Anna Campanile Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest – John Neubauer and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Prague: Magnetic Fields or the Staging of the Avant-Garde – Veronika Ambros Cities in Ashkenaz: Sites of Identity, Cultural Production, Utopic or Dystopic Visions I. Jewish Visions of the City – Seth L. Wolitz

– – – – – – – – – – – –

1

9 11 28 37 40 57 77 93 105 124 145 162 176 182 182

Table of contents

vi II. III. IV. V. VI. 2.

Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania – Seth L. Wolitz Kiev: City in Ashkenaz – Seth L. Wolitz The Hebrew Literary Circle in Odessa – Zilla Jane Goodman St. Petersburg in the Russian Jewish Literary Imagination – Brian Horowitz Jewish Warsaw – Seth L. Wolitz with Zilla Jane Goodman

Regional sites of cultural hybridization Introduction: Literature in Multicultural Corridors and Regions – Marcel CornisPope A.

B.

C.

The Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic – Marcel Cornis-Pope with Nikola Petković (on Kyselak and Krleža) Upstream and Downstream the Danube – John Neubaeur The Intercultural Corridor of the ‘Other’ Danube – Roxana M. Verona Regions as Cultural Interfaces Transylvania’s Literary Cultures: Rivalry and Interaction – John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, with Sándor Kibédi-Varga and Nicolae Harsanyi The Hybrid Soil of the Balkans: A Topography of Albanian Literature – Robert Elsie Up and Down in Croatian Literary Geography: The Case of the Krugovaši – Vladimir Biti Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe – Seth L. Wolitz Representing Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Regional Spaces The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness – Guido Snel Jan Lam and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Galicia in the Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Writers – Agnieszka Nance Macedonia in Bulgarian Literature – Inna Peleva Transformations of Imagined Landscapes: Istra and Šavrinija as Intercultural Narratives – Sabina Mihelj

3.

The literary reconstruction of East-central Europe’s imagined communities: Native to diasporic

–

Introduction: Crossing Geographic and Cultural Boundaries, Reinventing Literary Identities – Marcel Cornis-Pope Kafka, Švejk, and the Butcher’s Wife, or Postcommunism/Postcolonialism and Central Europe – Nikola Petković

–

185 188 194 195 200

213

217 224 232

245 283 301 314

333 344 357 364

375 376

Table of contents – – –

–

Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Spatial Construction of Bulgarian National Identity in the Nineteenth Century – Boyko Penchev Paradoxical Renaissance Abroad: Ukrainian Émigré Literature, 1945–1950 – George G. Grabowicz Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos: The Case of Polish and Romanian Literatures – The Manifold Faces of Romanian Paris – Monica Spiridon – Paris and the Polish Emigration – Agnieszka Gutthy – Syllogisms of Exile: Cioran and Gombrowicz in Paris – Katarzyna Jerzak A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality: Bucharest–Paris–Auschwitz, or the Case of Benjamin Fundoianu – Florin Berindeanu

vii

390 413 428 428 433 436 443

Works Cited

453

Index of East-Central European Names: Volume 2

495

List of Contributors

511

Editors’ Preface

The literatures of East-Central Europe have often interplayed ethnocentric ambitions and regional aspirations, but are perhaps best served today by a historical approach that deemphasizes national boundaries and seeks instead analogies, points of contact, and mediations among various cultures. Volume II in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe follows the latter impulse, focusing on topographic sites (cities, border areas, corridors, and regions) with a multicultural and multiethnic history. We have carefully avoided both a nationalist and a globalizing treatment, pursuing instead the interaction between native and foreign, local and global, national and regional. While highlighting the intercultural history of these areas, the contributors to this volume have tried not to idealize the transnational impetus, suggesting that the multicultural literary achievements of cities and regions were usually temporary and contested, mixing the “myth of connection” with the “myth of division.” In the General Introduction to Volume I of our History, we focused on the identity of the region and its different mappings. More specifically, we discussed the conflicting constructions of the region’s identity, pointing out the limitations of the topographic macrostructures that have been used to define it, each implying different borders and, above all, a different set of perspectives and connotations. Thus, the notion of a pan-Germanic Mitteleuropa backgrounded other ethnic traditions (Slavic, Romance, Hungarian, etc.); the Soviet-inspired notion of Eastern Europe disconnected the region from its traditional interactions with Central and Western Europe; and the mostly utopian concept of “Central Europe” was revived periodically (most recently in the 1980s) to differentiate the region from the Eastern and Southern imperial powers, Czarist/Soviet and Ottoman. In opposition to these definitions, the editors adopted the term “East-Central Europe” to designate the transitional space between the imperial powers in the west, east and south-east (German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman). In their view, East-Central Europe stretches from the Baltic countries in the north to the South Slavic countries and Albania in the south, and from the Czech Republic in the west to the Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova in the East. The article that follows the General Introduction, Robert Paul Magocsi’s “Geography and Borders” (1: 19–30), further mapped the geographic, cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and political “spheres” of East-Central Europe, emphasizing both the “foundations” of the region’s literary cultures and the way these foundations are being redefined over time. The rest of Volume I explored the literatures of this in-between region under temporal and genre categories. The temporal nodes (1776, 1848, 1867, 1918, 1944, 1956, 1968, and 1989) are “crossroads” at which various narrative strands come together, without forming an organic unit. They emerge as “nonhomogeneous” entities that connect cultures across national boundaries while at the same time allowing them to experience similar events with different rhythms and even directions of development. The second part of Volume I approached literary periods and genres through a similarly nontotalizing perspective, offering paradigmatic studies in periods and genres that attempt to exemplify how traditional national categories may be reconsidered within transnational approaches to literary history. Instead of seeking the “core” of a national or regional genre

x

Editors’ Preface

(the “essence” of Polish lyric poetry or of the Romanian novel), we focused on “boundary transgressions,” highlighting the emergence of new (sub)genres like the reportage, the lyrical novel, the fictionalized autobiography, parody, and literary theory, or examining literature’s transgression of its own boundaries in the subsection on the multimedia arts of opera and film (for a complete Table of Contents of Volume I, see below). Volume II returns to the topographic concerns of Volume I’s “General Introduction,” but moves from a focus on the region’s macrostructures to a microstructural focus on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations (multicultural cities, border areas, geocultural corridors). In doing so, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies established transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirmed, perhaps inadvertently, the very national borders they tried to deemphasize. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories, to some extent even in deviation from our overall project. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, we focus here on pinpointed local traditions, on geographical nodal points. We believe that this approach is a powerful corrective to the limitations of national literary histories because it identifies the presence of “foreign” elements in centers of national cultures. Our histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Budapest and Timişoara, to name only a few, show how each of these cities was during the last two-hundred years also a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding these non-national or hybrid traditions, we implicitly call not so much for the practice of regional, continental, or global literary histories but for a diversification, pluralization, and, to a certain extent, “de-nationalization” of the national and local ones. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history will involve, in our view, the recognition that “treading on native grounds” means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people. In the current context of new interethnic conflicts and lingering divisions in East-Central Europe, the work undertaken in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe will, hopefully, foreground alternative ways of identity-making in the area, which emphasize local, regional, and transnational possibilities. The two remaining volumes will amplify this dialectic: Volume III deals with the conflictual founding, dismantling and reconstruction of literary institutions typical for the region, while Volume IV, concerned with literary figures (historical and imaginary), acknowledges the simultaneity of the local and global positionings of self and other. The institutional nodes described in Volume III are not shared institutions but region-wide analogous institutional processes (national awakening, modernist opening, communist regimentation, the (ab)uses of folklore, the theater, and censorship) that were asynchronous and different in specifics. The literary figures (national icons, figures of male and female identity, figures of the other) considered in Volume IV are not static entities but shifting subjects that enter literary history through canonization or marginalization. Our History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe appears in a new subseries on regional histories within the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. It was initiated and guided in its early development by the Literary History Project at the University of Toronto led by professors Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon. Both affiliations have been very

Editors’ Preface

xi

productive for our project, offering us a preliminary conceptual framework, continuous encouragement, and rigorous evaluative feedback along the way. Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to a number of organizations that have generously supported the elaboration and production of this volume: – – – –

–

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto for providing the original grant; The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) for providing five Fellowships during the academic year 1999–2000; The Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) for providing a subsidy towards the incidental costs of the project; The Netherlands Research Board (NWO), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), NIAS, the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Theater Institute, and the Allard Pierson Foundation for contributing to the costs of a working Conference that was held in the summer of 2000 at the NIAS Institute in Wassenar, the Netherlands; Virginia Commonwealth University, its College of Humanities and Sciences and its English Department, for granting one of the editors paid study-research leave and helping with editing and travel costs.

We would also like to thank Virgil Nemoianu for his comprehensive external evaluation of our project, Randolph Pope and Fridrun Rinner for their critical response to several essays in this volume, Steven T. Collis for his copyediting of the entire manuscript, and Roel Schuyt for his careful checking of all proper names, titles, and references in this book. Last but not least, we would like to express our thanks to Isja Conen at John Benjamins Publishing Company for helping set up the new sub-series, in which this History appears, and for guiding this volume through the editing and printing process in a professional, patient, and genial manner. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer

Note on Documentation and Translation

As in Volume I, we give the full original title for all works mentioned in the text, followed by an English translation and the date of publication in brackets. Original book titles are italized; articles are given in quotation marks. We follow the MLA Style Manual and use no footnotes. Quotations and references in the text contain only the page number(s) and the minimum amount of information readers will need in order to find the full bibliographical entry in the final consolidated WORKS CITED. The list of WORKS CITED records all the works mentioned and/or quoted. We have opted for one composite bibliography in lieu of separate ones at the end of chapters or sections, both for reasons of consistency and in order to provide quick and complete information. The entries are listed alphabetically, following the general order of the Latin alphabet. The alphabetization ignores the effect that diacritical marks have on the order of the alphabet in a number of languages. Books The bibliographical entries start with the author’s name, the title in italics and its English translation in brackets; this is accompanied, wherever necessary, by the original date of publication, followed by the place, the publisher, and the year of publication of the edition used in the volume. In a number of cases we list subsequently the standard English translation, though no systematic effort has been made to find all the existing translations. Quotations are documented to the first edition, whenever possible, or to a reliable reprint. Articles in collections The name of the author is followed by the original title in quotation marks and the English translation in brackets. This is followed by the name of the editor, unless all of the essays in the volume are by the same author. The place of publication, publisher, and year are followed by the page range of the article in the volume. Articles in journals The name of the author is followed by the original title in quotation marks and the English translation in brackets. The subsequent Title of the Journal is given in italics, followed, where sensible, by the translation of the title and/or the place of publication. The entry concludes with the volume and, where needed, the issue number, preceded by a dot. The year of publication is given in brackets, followed by the page range.

xiv

Note on Documentation and Translation

Collective volumes without an editor Listed alphabetically under the original title. Other considerations Where no place or publisher could be found we enter n.p. For serialized works that run through a great many issues we indicate only the volume and issues of the journal without the pages. Special issues of journals are occasionally listed under their title (e.g., the “Budapest Roundtable published in Cross Currents). Places of publication that have commonly accepted English forms, are rendered in English. We have eliminated from the publisher’s name the initials and first name, as well as words meaning “publisher” or “press.” Unless stated otherwise, translations in this volume are provided by the authors of the individual articles. Films Listed alphabetically under their English title, followed, in brackets, by the original title. Both titles are italicized. We then specify the country where the film was produced, the director’s name, and the year the film was released.

Table of contents, Volume I

Table of Contents

vi

Editors’ Preface

xi

Preface by the General Editor of the Literary History Project

xiii

Note on Documentation and Translation

xvii

In Preparation

xix

Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, “General Introduction”

1

Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Geography of East-Central Europe”

19

PART I Nodes of political time Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Introduction 1. 1989 Marcel Cornis-Pope, “From Resistance to Reformulation” Włodimierz Bolecki, “1989 in Poland: Continuity and Caesura” Epp Annus and Robert Hughes, “Reversals of the Postmodern and the Late Soviet Simulacrum in the Baltic Countries — with Exemplifications from Estonian Literature” Monica Spiridon, “Models of Literary and Cultural Identity on the Margins of (Post)Modernity: the Case of pre–1989 Romania” Péter Krasztev, “Quoting Instead of Living: Postmodern Literature before and after the Changes in East-Central Europe” 2.

3.

33 39 39 51 54 65 70

1956/1968 Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer with Jolanta Jastrzębska, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Svetlana Slapšak, and Alfred Thomas, “Revolt, Suppression, and Liberalization in Post-Stalinist East-Central Europe

83

1948 Tomislav Z. Longinović, Dagmar Roberts, Tomas Venclova, John Neubauer, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Introduction: The Culture of Revolutionary Terror” Letiţia Guran and Alexandru Ştefan, “Romanian Literature under Stalinism” Renata Jambrešić Kirin, “The Retraumatization of the 1948 Communist Purges in Yugoslav Literary Culture”

107

83

107 112 124

Table of Contents, Volume I

xvi

Alexander Kiossev, with Boyko Penchev, “Heritage and Inheritors: the Literary Canon in Totalitarian Bulgaria” 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

1945 John Neubauer with Marcel Cornis Pope, Mieczysław Dąbrowski, George Grabowicz, Boyko Penchev, Dagmar Roberts, Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, Marcena Sokolowska-Paryż, and Tomas Venclova, “1945”

132 143 143

1918 John Neubauer with Marcel Cornis-Pope, Dagmar Roberts, and Guido Snel, “Overview” Margaret R. Higonnet, “Women Writers and the War Experience: 1918 as Transition” Guido Snel, “The Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip: The 1914 Sarajevo Assault in Fiction, History, and Three Monuments” Katherine Arens, “Beyond Vienna 1900: Habsburg Identities in Central Europe” Veronika Ambros, “The Great War as a Monstrous Carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk” Dorota Kielak, “Polish Literature of World War I: Consciousness of a Breakthtrough”

177

1867/1878/1881 John Neubauer with Vladimir Biti, Nikolai Chernokozhev, Gábor Gángó, Albena Hranova, Nenad Ivić, Ewa Paczoska, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Tomas Venclova, “1867/1878/1881”

241

1848 John Neubauer with Mircea Anghelescu, Gábor Gángó, Kees Mercks, Dagmar Roberts, Dinko Župan, “1848”

263

1776/1789 John Neubauer, “Introduction” Larry Wolff, “The Spirit of 1776: Polish and Dalmatian Declarations of Philosophical Independence” Svetlana Slapšak, “The Cultural Legacy of Empires in Eastern Europe” Vilmos Voigt, “The Jacobin Movement in Hungary (1792–95)” Dagmar Roberts, “1776 and 1789 in Slovakia” Inna Peleva, “1789 and Bulgarian Culture”

293 293

177 191 202 216 228 236

241

263

294 307 311 313 315

PART II Histories of literary form 1.

John Neubauer, Introduction

321

Shifting periods and trends

325

Table of Contents, Volume I Roman Koropeckyj, “Between Classicism and Romanticism: The Year 1820 in Polish Literature” Péter Krasztev, “From Modernization to Modernist Literature” Robert B. Pynsent, “Czech Decadence” Endre Bojtár, “The Avant-Garde in East-Central European Literature” 2.

3.

4.

Shifting genres Diana Kuprel, “Literary Reportage: Between and beyond Art and Fact” Guido Snel, “Gardens of the Mind, Places for Doubt: Fictionalized Autobiography in East-Central Europe” George G. Grabowicz, “Subversion and Self-Assertion: The Role of Kotliarevshchyna in Russian-Ukrainian Literary Relations” Miro Mašek, “Poeticizing Prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism” Svetlana Slapšak, “Stanislav Vinaver: Subversion of, or Intervention in Literary History?” Galin Tihanov, “The Birth of Modern Literary Theory in East-Central Europe” Arent van Nieukerken, “Polish Poetry in the Twentieth Century” Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Antony Polonsky, “Polish-Jewish Literature: An Outline” Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Shifting Perspectives and Voices in the Romanian Novel” Boyko Penchev, “Forms of the Bulgarian Novel” The historical novel John Neubauer, “Introduction” Sándor Hites, “The Hungarian Historical Novel in Regional Context” Jasmina Lukić, “Recent Historical Novels and Historiographic Metafiction in the Balkans” Igor Grdina, “The Historical Novel in Slovenian Literature” Marcel Cornis-Pope, “The Search for a Modern, Problematizing Historical Consciousness: Romanian Historical Fiction and Family Cycles” Zofia Mitosek, “The Family Novel in East-Central Europe, Illustrated with Works by Isaac B. Singer and Włodzimierz Odojewski” Histories of multimedia constructions John Neubauer, “Introduction” John Neubauer, “National Operas in East-Central Europe” Dina Iordanova, “East-Central European Cinema and Literary History” Nevena Daković, “The Silent Tale of Fury: Stalinism in Yugoslav Cinema” Katherine Arens, “Central Europe’s Catastrophes on Film: The Case of István Szabó”

xvii

325 332 348 364 375 375 386 401 409 414 416 424 435 441 456 463 463 467 480 493 499 505 513 513 514 524 541 548

xviii

Table of Contents, Volume I

Works Cited

559

Index of East-Central European Names

623

List of Contributors

645

In Preparation

Volume 3 PART IV Institutional Frames PREFACE NOTE ON DOCUMENTATION AND TRANSLATION

v vi

Introduction John Neubauer with Zofia Mitosek, Inna Peleva, Robert Pynsent and Mihály Szegedy Maszák

10

1. Publishing and Censorship John Neubauer, Introduction

20 Publishing

Neil Stewart, “The Cosmopolitanism of Moderní revue (1894–1925)” József Szili, “The Uncompromising Standards of Nyugat (1908–41)” Marcel Cornis-Pope, “A Contest within Romanian Modernism: Sburătorul vs. Gândirea” Tomislav Brlek, “Krugovi: A Croatian Opening (1952–58)” Kersti Unt, “Underground Publishing in Estonia under Soviet Censorship” Dagmar Roberts, “Slovak Literary Journals” Robert Elsie, “Albanian Literary Journals”

36 42 52 56 58 60 62

Censorship Jan Čulik, “Shifting Modes of Censorship in Bohemia” Kees Mercks, “Censorship: A Case Study of Bohumil Hrabal’s Jarmilka” Dagmar Roberts, “Forms of Censorship in Slovakia” Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, “The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary (1945–49)” Violeta Kelertas, “Censorship in Soviet Lithuania (1944–90)” Włodzimierz Bolecki, “Getting Around Polish Censorship (1968–89)” Karl E. Jirgens, “Censorship after Independence: the Case of Aleksander Pelēcis”

65 71 82 85 95 103 106

In Preparation

xx 2. Theater as a Literary Institution Dragan Klaić, General Introduction

110

Professionalization and Institutionalization in the Service of a National Awakening Dragan Klaić, Introduction Zoltán Imre, “Building a(s) Theater: the Pesti Magyar Színház in 1837” Lado Kralj, “Slovenia: from Jesuit Performance to Opera” Ondřej Hučín, “Czech Theater Supports the National Revival in a Paradoxical Manner” Dagmar Roberts, “In Slovakia, Theater Starts as an Amateur Endeavor” Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, “Polish Drama Sustains Spiritual Unity in a Divided Country” Audroné Girdzijauskaitė, “Lithuania: School, Court, and Clandestine Performances” Jaak Rähesoo, “Politics and Artistic Autonomy in Estonian Theater” Marian Popescu, “Theater Speaks Many Languages in Romania” Joanna Spassova-Dikova, “From the chitalista to the National Theater in Bulgaria”

112 113 117 118 122 123 125 126 128 130

Modernism: the Director Rules Dragan Klaić, Introduction Nikola Batusić, “The European Horizons of Stjepan Miletić” Zoltán Imre, “Reform within: the Thália Társaság 1904–1908” Ondřej Hučín, “Modernist Inroads into Czech Theater” Veronika Ambros, “Fuzzy Borderlines: the Čapeks’ Robots, Insects, Women, and Men” Dagmar Roberts, “Interbellum Emancipation of the Slovak Stage” Marian Popescu, “Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Clash on the Romanian Stage” Joanna Spassova-Dikova, “Institutionalization and Innovation in the Bulgarian Theater” Ewa Wąchocka, “Polish Modernist Drama” Eleonora Udalska, “Monumentalism, Intimacy, and Plasticity in the Polish Modernist Teacher” Violetta Sajkiewicz, “Stage Design in Polish Modernism” Dorota Fox, “Popular Amusement and Avant-garde in the Polish Cabaret” Michael Steinlauf, “Yiddish Theater” Audroné Girdzijauskaitė, “Stage in Independent Lithuania” Baņuta Rubess, “Kicking with Poetry: Female Trailblazers on the Latvian Stage” Jaak Rähesoo, “Ebbs and Flows of Modernist Energy in Estonian Theater” Sibila Petlevski, “Branko Gavella: Director as Thinker”

131 134 137 138 143 148 150 151 153 156 159 160 162 166 167 168 170

In Preparation

xxi Theater under Socialism

Dragan Klaić, Introduction Libor Vodička, “The Short Interlude of Liberalizing Czech Theater” Dagmar Roberts, “Slovak Drama: Reconciling the Absurd with Socialism” Marian Popescu, “Communism and After in Romanian Theater” Joanna Spassova-Dikova, “Mandatory Socialist Models vs. Stylist Eclecticism on the Bulgarian Stage” Robert Elsie, “Enver-Hoxha Dictatorship Stifles Albanian Theater” László Bérczes, “From Provincial Backwaters to Budapest and World Reputation” Ewa Wąchocka, “After Witkacy and Gombrowicz: Faces of Postwar Polish Drama” Eleonora Udalska, “Wyspiański’s Offsprings” Violetta Sajkiewicz, “The Visual Richness of the Polish Stage” Audroné Girdzijauskaitė, “With Independence, Lithuanian Directors Earn International Recognition” Jaak Rähesoo, “Estonian Theater Loosens the Soviet Straightjacket” Lado Kralj, “Ideological Critique and Moral Rectitude in Slovene Dramas” Aleksandra Jovićević, “Ingenious Dramatic Strategies Reach across the Yugoslav Theater Space” Dragan Klaić, “Epilogue: After Socialism”

171 174 178 180 181 183 186 190 192 194 196 197 200 206 214

3. Forging Primal Pasts: The Uses of Folklore John Neubauer, Introduction: Folklore and National Awakening Ülo Valk, “Levels of Institutionalization in Estonian Folklore” Endre Bojtár, “Mythologizing Contemporary Baltic Consciousness” Karl E. Jirgens, “National and International Traits in the Latvian Trickster Velns” Tamás Berkes, “The Ideal of Folk Culture in the Literature of the Czech National Rebirth” Dagmar Roberts, “Folklore in the Making of Slovak Literature” Marcel Cornis-Pope (with Otilia Hedeşan on St. Friday), “The Question of Folklore in Romanian Literary Culture” Vilmos Voigt, “The Heidenrösleinkrawall: a Debate in 1864 on the Origins of Folk Ballads” Albena Hranova and Alexander Kiossev, “Folklore as a Means to Demonstrate the Existence of a Nation: The Bulgarian Case” Robert Elsie, “The Rediscovery of Folk Literature in Albania” Jolanta Sujecka,“’Sons of Black Death’: The Semantics of Foreignness in Twentieth-Century Bulgarian and Macedonian Writings”

217 227 231 235 238 249 253 262 264 273 276

In Preparation

xxii 4. Literary Histories and Textbooks John Neubauer, Introduction Epp Annus, Luule Epner, and Jüri Talvet, “Shifting Ideologies in Estonia’s Literary Histories, Textbooks, and Anthologies” Agita Misāne, “Latvian Literary Histories and Textbooks” Jolanta Jastrzebska, “Polish Literary Histories” Robert B. Pynsent, “Nineteenth-Century Czech Literary History: National Revival and the Forged Manuscripts” Dagmar Roberts, “Overcoming Czech and Hungarian Perspectives in Writing Slovak Literary Histories” John Neubauer, “The Narrowing Scope of Hungarian Literary Histories” Monica Spiridon, “Career of a Latecomer: Romanian Literary Histories” Nenad Ivić, “Thinking up the Canon of Croatian Literary History, 1900–50” Svetlana Slapšak, Guido Snel, and John Neubauer, “Widening the Rift between Criticism and Serbian Literary Histories” Robert Elsie, “Albanian Literary History: A Communist Primeur” Alexander Kiossev, “National Identity and Textbooks of Literary History: the Case of Bulgaria” Endre Bojtár, “Pitfalls in Writing a Regional Literary History of East-Central Europe”

281 288 292 294 299 309 317 324 326 335 340 341 349

WORKS CITED

357

INDEX

426

Volume 4 PART V Figures 1.

The writer as national icon Dvir Abramovich, “Bialik, Poet of the People” Jeremy Dauber, “Creating a Yiddish Canon: Authors as Icons in Modern Yiddish Literature” George G. Grabowicz, “The ‘National Poet’: The Cases of Mickiewicz, Pushkin and Shevchenko” Roman Koropeckyj, “Adam Mickiewicz as a Polish National Icon” Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, “Mihai Eminescu: The Conflicting Sides of a Foundational Lyrical Discourse” Robert Pynsent, “Macha” Thomas Salumets, “Jaan Kross: Negotiating Nation”

In Preparation

xxiii

Thomas Salumets, “The Estonian Poet Jaan Kaplinski: A National Icon Without Nation — A Poet Without Poetry” Artūras Tereškinas, “The Gendering of the Lithuanian Nation in Maironis’s Poetry” 2.

Heroes (figures of male identity) George Grabowicz, “Cossacks and Cossacophilism in 19th century Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Literature” Karl E. Jirgens, “Petty Demons and Other Tricksters in Latvian Literature”

3.

Figures of collective self Włodzimierz Bolecki, “The Idea of the Homeland and the Poet Joseph Mackiewicz” Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on the Self-colonizing Cultures” Miro Mašek, “Models of Collective Identity in the Novels of Milos Crnjanski”

4.

Figures of trauma Jūra Avižienis, “Performing Identity: Lithuanian Memoirs of Siberian Deportation and Exile” Nevena Daković, “Remembrance of the Past and Present: War Trauma in the Yugoslav Cinema” Jolanta Jastrzebska, “Traumas of World War II” Tiina A. Kirss, “Family Trauma in Twentieth-century Estonian Literature” Lado Kralj, “Goli Otok Literature” Jasmina Lukić, “Gender and War in South Slavic Literatures” Renata Jambrešić Kirin, “Gender and Traumatic Memories in Yugoslavia”

5.

Figures of female identity Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Women at the Foundation of Literary Culture: From Muse to Writing Agent” Lada Čale Feldman, “Women’s Corpuses, Corpses or (Cultural) Bodies?” Sandra Meškova, “Figure of the Daughter: Representation of the Feminine in Latvian Women’s Autobiographical Writing of 1990s” Sandra Meškova, “Constructing a Woman Author Within the Literary Canon: Aspazija and Anna Brigadere” Inna Peleva, “The Image of the Mother in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Bulgarian Literature” Robert Pynsent, “Czech Feminist Antisemitism: the Case of Božena Benešová (1873– 1936)” Agatha Schwartz, “A Desire of Their Own? Representations of Sexuality by Hungarian Women Writers at Two Fin-de-Siècles” Svetlana Slapšak, “Women’s Memory: The Alternative Kosovo Myth” Metka Zupancić, “Feminist Dystopia: Berta Bojetu-Boeta, a Slovene Model”

6.

Figures of the other Dvir Abramovich, “Tlushim: The Alienated and the Uprooted” Craig Cravens, “From Golems to Robots”

In Preparation

xxiv Nevena Daković, “Love, Magic, and Life: Gypsies in Yugoslav Cinema” 7.

Figures of mediation Pia Brânzeu, “Lovely Barbarians: British Travelers in Romania” Gábor Gángó, “József Eötvös: Thinker of a Multinational State” Gabriella Schubert and Miro Masek, “Slavic Weimar/Jena” Péter Hajdu, “On the Ethnic Border: The Image of Slovaks in Kálmán Mikszáth’s Writing” Lida Stefanowska, “Antonych”

PART VI Spatial and temporal coordinates 1.

Epilogue and outlook 1989– Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Literary and Cultural Reconstructions after 1989: Postmodernism, Postcommunism, Postcoloniality” Boyko Penchev, “Bulgarian Literature of the 1990s” Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, “Postmodernity and Postcommunism in Hungary” Katherine Arens, “Austria in the Central European Imagination after 1989: ‘The Balkans Begin at the Gürtel’” Dagmar Roberts, “The 1990s in Slovak Literature” Karl E. Jirgens, “Psychic Dismemberment: Anti-Colonial Identities in Latvian Writing since 1990” Artūras Tereškinas, “Threatening Bodies/Bodiless Nation: Erotics of National Disembodiment in Postcommunist Lithuania” Tamara Trojanowska, “Polish Theater and Drama at a Turning Point” Domnica Rădulescu, “Tragicomic and Performative Dimensions in Romanian Theater after the 1989 Revolution”

2.

Chronological tables

A. B.

Chronological Table of the National Literary Traditions Chronological Table of Interchanges

3.

Comprehensive index

Introduction: Mapping the Literary Interfaces of East-Central Europe Marcel Cornis-Pope

It is space, more than time, that now hides consequences for us. Edward Soja, “Inside Exopolis” (94)

The events that have unfolded since the tearing down of the Berlin Wall bear out Edward Soja’s warning: the post–Cold War period has freed our imagination from traditional ideological polarizations, but has often replaced them with nationalistic or ethnocentric concepts that promote violent divisions. Much of this new ethnic and nationalist fundamentalism has emerged in direct reaction to the pressure of “globalizing” ideologies in the First World, which, far from being “deimperialized,” reinforce the “international division of labor and appropriation […] benefiting First World countries at the expense of Third World” (Ebert 286) and — we could add — Second World postcommunist societies. The new tensions between global interdependency and ethnocentrism, First World centers and Third World peripheries, indicate a state of continued crisis at the level of the ideological frameworks that we use to relate to one another. While time remains an important dimension in the narratives that order our understanding of particular worlds (and East-Central Europe has had its share of conflicting historical narratives — see “Nodes of Political Time” in vol.1: 33–320 of our History), this crisis is most evident in our topographic imagination, often stuck in traditional notions of delineation and demarcation. Our work as literary historians must, therefore, consider the implications of spatial definitions that can become contentious, creating the sort of predicaments we have witnessed more recently in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, or the Middle East. Geography cannot and should not displace history; it suffices if it brings “a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significant different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege” (Soja, Postmodern Geographies 11). This type of work is especially important for the East-Central European literary cultures that have been all too often held hostage to conflicting mappings, either enforced on them or of their own making. The cultural identity of this region has been based on divergent histories and narratives of demarcation that have periodically oscillated between centripetal and centrifugal pulls. From the time of the Roman Empire, through the Ottoman and Habsburg rule, and from the intrusions of the Republic of Venice, Napoleon, Hitler, and Mussolini to the Soviet occupation after World War II, East-Central Europe was subjected to various military, ideological, and imaginary mappings, with borders frequently overlapping or clashing. Its cartography reflects complex processes of negotiation that often opposed “Occidentalism” to “Orientalism,” Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy, Christianity to Judaism and Islam. This mental polarization was subsequently challenged by integrative-federalist projects, political unions, or by cross-cultural hybrids (Greek

2

Introduction

Catholicism in Eastern Europe, Latinity in Romania, integrative movements on the Western model of nationhood, “oriental” influences in Western music, “Eastern” hybridization of Western metropolitan centers, etc.) that cut across the imaginary dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe. And yet, no matter how porous or artificial, cultural oppositions have a tendency to perpetuate themselves, “pitting one place against another, closing down this space, fortifying that space, […] and exploiting the place of the Other” (McLeod 85). It is in the nature of boundaries to insist on separation even as they articulate a connection. As an interface between competing religions and cultural-literary ideologies, East-Central Europe has often felt the pressure to redefine itself by streamlining its past and integrating its ethnic complexities into some coherent concept of regionalism or Europeanism. Not surprisingly, most of these efforts have created new divisions in the very act of integrating differences. In Milan Kundera’s well-known 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” the region between Russia and Germany features as the most European part of Europe, made up of families of small peoples determined not by geography but by culture and destiny. But this idealized image is obtained through a double act of differentiation: Central Europe is opposed first to Eastern Europe, embodied for Kundera in the “other” civilization of orthodox, pan-Slavic Russia that missed the two defining moments of modern Europe, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it is also opposed to a post-war Western Europe “kidnapped” by the American influence (Kundera’s republished essay was called “A Kidnapped West or a Culture Bows Out”). Even as he tries to retrieve a Central Europe rendered invisible by the Cold War polarization, Kundera creates new divisions that transform Central Europe into a solitary island rather than a connecting bridge, a utopia rather than a reality: “Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary” (35). In a scathing response, Joseph Brodsky took Kundera to task for trying to be “more European than the Europeans themselves” (“Milan Kundera” 31) and creating a false opposition between civilized anti-Slavic Slavs (the Czechs) and aggressive pan-Slavic Slavs (the imperialist Russians). But Brodsky’s own perspective enhances the divide even further: in his description, Central Europe is simply a region of Asia — “Western Asia.” That these divisions are not merely academic has become painfully clear after a new round of Balkan wars that opposed Catholic Slavs against Orthodox Slavs, and Orthodox Slavs against Muslim Slavs and non-Slavs (on the debate surrounding the concept of “Central Europe,” see also vol. 1: 5, 396, 398 of our History). The perspectives proposed by the Western writers and politicians have not been more helpful. Especially when inspired by theories of cultural untranslatability, these perspectives insinuate new ideological divisions in East-Central Europe. In his controversial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997), Samuel P. Huntington divides the world into nine distinct civilizations that are coterminous, unique, and self-interested. Huntington’s perspective introduces a certain relativism in the evaluation of civilizations (no civilization is universal or necessarily superior — 20–21), but at the same time denies any true exchange between them because they are allegedly “non-translatable.” Though avoiding both the Cold War polarization into Western and non-Western and the post-Cold War fragmentation into hundreds of colliding nations, Huntington’s mapping is no less conflicted, pitting larger cultural entities against one another. For Huntington, the “clash of civilizations” is not only unavoidable but also necessary: “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are” (20). Thus, the solution he recommends against ethnic fundamentalism is not a focus on shared transcultural values, but rather a fortification of

Introduction

3

one’s own identity. American culture, Huntington argues, must enter a rapport with other civilizations not by cultivating multicultural diversity at home or universalism abroad but rather by strengthening its own identity, “the unity of [its] people” (306). Only at the very end of his book, does Huntington move from “civilization in the singular” to the idea of intercivilizational “supplementation,” urging “peoples in all civilizations [to] search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions, and practices they have in common with peoples of other civilizations” (320). The application of Huntington’s perspective to East-Central Europe reinforces civilizational divisions, splitting the region along religious, geographic, and cultural “fault” lines. Thus for George Schöpflin and others Central Europe remains a “part of Western Christianity” (20) — i.e., Catholic and Protestant rather than Eastern Orthodox, also Christian rather than Judaic or Muslim — an understanding of the region that leaves out not only Romania and most of the Balkans, but also the East-Central Jewry, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic. In addition to reinforcing old stereotypes that cast the peoples of East-Central Europe as Western Europe’s uncouth others, such a perspective flattens history, wiping out the memory of Ancient Greek democracy, overlooking the role that Byzantium played in preserving the Greco-Roman heritage and synthesizing it with oriental influences, minimizing the significant contribution of East-Central European Jewry to Western culture, and ignoring the aspirations to European integration that the Balkan countries have periodically felt while defending the South-Eastern margin of the continent against the Ottomans. It is clear that, in deciding which East-Central European countries to admit first into its fold (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltic States), the European Union has been swayed more by this dividing perspective than by Miłosz’s integrative vision according to which the “baroque Wiłno” connects by invisible cultural lines with the “differently baroque Prague or the medieval-Renaissance Dubrovnik” (“Central European Attitudes” 116). In her seminal book Imagining the Balkans (1997), Maria Todorova takes to task those Western scholars who have applied an “Orientalist” approach to the literary cultures of certain areas of East-Central Europe, especially the Balkans, describing their “cross-bred” identities and “mongrel” creations as Europe’s untamed “other” (3, 124). The Balkans appear to them as a “no man’s land between East and West” (49), mapped into ill-defined countries, veritable geocultural blanks like Agatha Christie’s fictional Herzoslovakia: “Principal rivers, unknown. Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions” (The Secret 9–10). Little wonder, therefore, that the “statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off a hundred million Europeans from these blank areas in the loss column” (Miłosz, The Witness 7); or that after 1989 a “new curtain [has fallen] across eastern Europe, dividing north from south, west from east, rich from poor and the future from the past” (Longworth 1, 6). Against both Huntington’s essentialization of the East-West opposition as a “fault-line” and the “Balkanization” inside the area, with the various ethnic groups defining themselves in opposition to their more “Eastern” neighbors (58), Todorova emphasizes the perspective of those Western and local writers who acknowledge the role of the Balkans as a “bridge” (as in Andrić’s 1945 novel Na Drini ćuprija [The Bridge on the Drina]), a “junction of western and oriental cultures,” and a “crossroads of continents” (59). These writers turn the “handicap of heterogeneity” (133) into a positive cultural feature, foregrounding the region’s different legacies (Byzantine, Orthodox, Ottoman) and the role of the latter in allowing the other two to develop further. But in her effort to retrieve the hybrid middle ground of the Bal-

4

Introduction

kans as a possible model for mapping East-Central Europe, Todorova creates her own divisions between Balkan people (primarily Bulgarian) who accept their geopolitical situation sensibly and others (Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs) who reject it, and ends up defending the “passionate and reckless nationalism” of the former (114) because it embraces the Balkan condition. The work of rearticulating the history of East-Central European literatures around consistent cross-cultural principles must include a reexamination of such ideological mappings (and what mappings are not ideological?) in order to find ways to break across old or new division lines. We must transcend not only the bipolar structure of Europe inherited from the Cold War but also divisions inside the former Eastern Europe, such as those between the lands associated with western Christianity and those associated with eastern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The term “East-Central Europe,” which we have adopted for this history, allows us to retrieve the complex cultural shifts and exchanges in an area that stretches beyond the region traditionally associated with Central Europe, including the Baltic Countries, Bucovina, Moldavia, the Ukraine, Romania, and the Balkans. As an interface of heterogeneous cultural and literary traditions, East-Central Europe offers an important case study in cultural “translatability” and “supplementation” (pace Samuel P. Huntington). If one of the chief characteristics of East-Central Europe is its “vocation of the ‘in-between,’ of the interval, of the state of geographic but also historical suspension” (Babeţi, Dilemele 39), its literatures are best served by an approach that deemphasizes national boundaries and historical moments, replacing them with crossings, durations, and points of contact between various cultures. Comparative literary study may well be “one of the few ways through which literary developments can be studied in a manner not restricted to or determined by a national frame” (Clearly 10). But in order to successfully perform this task, it will need to venture into such complex areas as “geographically intermingled cultures,” “partitioned states,” “romance-across-the-divide,” the “extraordinary dilemmas” of nationalism, and “the borderless world” that contemporary globalization is supposedly creating (Clearly 10–12). The present volume, titled Shifting Topographies of Literary Cultures (the second in our History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe), proposes to do just that, retrieving those areas of intercultural exchange that were obfuscated by nationalist treatments of literature. Like in Volume I of our History, the focus here is on analogies, mediations, hybrid and transitional phenomena that traditional literary histories have either ignored or deliberately suppressed. Without neglecting the corresponding areas of disjunction and conflict, contributors to this volume foreground the topographic interfaces that have encouraged the interaction of local literary productions, as well as the literary dialogue across the larger provinces of Europe (Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern). A particularly productive example of this type of interactive cultural space is offered by multiethnic nodal cities like Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna, Cernăuţi/Czernowitz, Danzig/Gdańsk, Lviv/ Lwów/ Lemberg, Sibiu/Nagyszeben/Hermannstadt, Timişoara/Temesvár/Temesburg, Ruschuk/Ruse, Novi Sad/Újvidék/Neusatz, Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg, and Trieste/Trst — to name only a few — that were genuinely multiethnic before the emergence of national cultures and continued to challenge the national cultural paradigm from the margin, ascribing to it a dialogic dimension, both internally (a dialogue with other ethnic traditions) and externally (a dialogue with larger geocultural paradigms). It is their very marginality, we may add, as well as their multiethnic composition that has

Introduction

5

allowed these cities to establish a fertile nexus between Eastern and Western literary traditions. Such “marginocentric” cities encouraged a de/reconstruction of national narratives, a hybridization of styles and genres, and alternative social and ethnic relations (for examples, see articles in Section 1). It is also true that these “marginocentric” cities had to withstand increased pressures of assimilation to the national literary tradition, especially at the end of the nineteenth century and again after World War I; these pressures greatly undermined their multicultural potential (see the cases of Czernowicz and Plovdiv). Paradoxically, the Soviet-touted “internationalism” after World War II did not help retrieve genuine multicultural traditions of literature. Local ethnic interests were encouraged only to the extent they served the Soviet policies of division and control. Otherwise, ethnocultural differences were leveled out, assimilated into a monolithic Soviet concept of literary culture. Equally important for facilitating a cross-cultural dialogue have been those larger topographic interfaces (crossroads, borderlands, multiethnic areas, federations of states) that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of transnational literary messages. The articles in Section 2 on “Regional Sites of Cultural Hybridization” suggest that regionalism played an important counterbalancing role as the cultures of East-Central Europe went through a nation-building phase, both in the nineteenth century and after World War I. Some of the emerging nation states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania) remained more multicultural than they cared to admit, so that their literatures revealed a certain “hybridity,” a number of multicultural crossings (see articles on Albania, Croatia, Istra, Transylvania, and the Danube corridor). Despite the increased pressures of nationalism after World War I, regionalism continued to play a lingering centrifugal role in the provinces of Bessarabia, Galicia, Transylvania, Banat, and Slovakia, resisting the program of national centralization coming from Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest, and Prague. The literary and artistic production in these areas involved a negotiation of tensions between nationalism and regionalism, metropolitan influences and local patriotism. Regionalism often worked as a corrective, turning potentially chauvinistic projects into intercultural ones. A good example is provided by Béla Bartók’s search for the ethnic roots of Hungarian culture, which — once Bartók realized that most of the Hungarian peasant music was formed by means of constant interaction with the music of other peoples in the region — was turned into a campaign to collect and study Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, Ruthenian, and even Turkish and Arab folk songs (see vol. 1 of our History, p. 18). Unfortunately, under the homogenizing pressures of successive right-wing and left-wing dictatorships, the regionalist impulse in East-Central European literatures was seriously eroded during and after World War II, becoming a negligible counter-force in most areas of the communist bloc. Regional experiments, such as the establishment of an Autonomous Hungarian Region in Eastern Transylvania, failed because their role was not to reinvigorate the local ethnic cultures but rather to provide the Soviet power with enclaves easier to control. As a result of forced emigration, ethnic purging, and assimilation, the alternative models of literary culture — hybrid, multicultural, transitional — were all but eliminated from the topographic reality of the region in the latter decades of the twentieth century. And yet they reemerged in the topographic imaginary of some of the region’s writers: in the new debates around the real-imaginary toponyms of Central Europe, Pannonia, Galicia, the Balkans, but also in the new imaginary communities of the diaspora that have greatly expanded the boundaries of East-Central Europe (see Section 3, “The Literary Re-

6

Introduction

construction of East-Central Europe’s Imagined Communities: Native to Diasporic”). These topographic supplements of East-Central Europe have refocused attention on the shifting boundaries of the region and the changing identities of its literatures. The collapse of the Soviet block in 1989 has released certain regional aspirations, reviving the interest in the East-Central European area rendered invisible by the Cold War polarization. However, it also brought to the surface ethnocentric resentments that had lain dormant for several decades under the “internationalist” pressures from Moscow. In the current context of new interethnic conflicts and idiosyncratic divisions of East-Central Europe, the work undertaken in the present volume is meant to retrieve those areas of multicultural convergence suppressed by the political passions of the present and past. The good news is that our work does not take place in a vacuum. Similar efforts to recover the idea of a multicultural “Third Europe” as a buffer between countries with hegemonic ambitions and as a response to local ethnocentrisms are undertaken in East-Central Europe by several groups of literary scholars, some (e.g., those associated with the University of Sofia, the Slovenian Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, the Bucharest “New Europe Institute,” the Timişoara “Third Europe” group, or the Central European University in Budapest) represented or discussed also in our History. For these scholars, East-Central Europe is, at its best, not a fault line but a region of convergences, a forma mentis structured around a “phenomenology of the middle way” and a “transregionalism purged of mistrust in specificity” (Spiridon, “Response to an Inquiry” 31–32). This somewhat idealized notion of a “Third Europe” echoes the concept of “third space” articulated by postcolonial/postmodern theorists like Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja. As a version of radical liminality (“in-betweenness”), interposed between defensive localism and leveling globalism, the notion of a “Third Europe” foregrounds complex negotiation between East and West, central and peripheral, global and local. Postcolonial theory itself is useful to a discussion of EastCentral European literary cultures, which used to be located at the intersection of three imperial systems, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Tsarist/Soviet (see the articles by Venclova, Novikova, Kirss, Colin, Mihelj, and Petković in this volume; also Slapšak, “The Cultural Legacy of Empires” in vol. I of our History, and the Epilogue to our forthcoming vol. IV), as long as this approach is applied to them with a nuanced understanding of their “semi-colonial” status through the nineteenth and twentieth century, which acknowledged the presence of foreign masters but allowed a certain degree of variance from the hegemonic culture. Coupled with a focus on transitional spaces, the postcolonial framework encourages the retrieval of “cultural difference” in the East-Central European region, replacing hierarchical models of development with a more flexible understanding of the relationship between dominant and minor culture, center and periphery. It can also offer a better response to the new geopolitical polarizations that sprung up after 1989 than the concepts proposed by global theorists. While rejecting the dichotomous world order of the Cold War, advocates of globalism perpetuate stereotypical divisions between a civilized West and a culturally retrograde East. For example, in his 1993 essay, “Culture, Community, Nation,” Stuart Hall has difficulty dealing with the social movements (politico-religious and ethnic) that emerged in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia at the end of the twentieth century. While noting the parallel development of nationalist movements in post-Cold War Western Europe and the non-Western world, Hall carefully divides nationalisms into big and small (or “good” and “bad”). He regards the emerging na-

Introduction

7

tionalisms of small countries (as a result of the National Liberation Movements or, more recently, of the collapse of the Soviet Empire) as failed imitations of big nation-building strategies. Like Huntington, Hall laments the absolutism of the Orthodox and Muslim world but seems to overlook the “othering” violence perpetrated by Western Catholic and Protestant states in their imperial expansion. As Václav Havel put it in his keynote address at the Conference on Europe’s New Democracies (July 13–19, 2001), the Euroamerican West “has exported to the rest of the world, in addition to numerous remarkable values […] also rather problematic ones: from the principle of the forced eradication of other cultures and the repression of other religions to the cult of permanent economic expansion, without concern for its qualitative effects” (12). Therefore, we need to move away from the stereotypal divisions between a civilized West and a culturally backward East, regarding them as coequal regions in a “multicultural and multipolar world” (12). In Havel’s view, the new world order should encourage the development of regional groupings, emphasizing simultaneously “decentralization and integration.” Participation in a “supra-national region” does not diminish the individual countries’ sense of cultural identity; on the contrary, it “eases their access to a vaster and more complex geopolitical horizon and assists in external recognition of their individuality” (Carter, Jordan and Rey vii). In similar ways, regions themselves should maintain their identity, contributing their specific features to a multicentered Europe. In order to be successful, cooperation must take place between “clearly delineated regions and historically grounded entities” (Havel 13). The various contributors to this volume subscribe to this concept of dynamic regionalism, treating East-Central Europe both as a [multi]center and an “interface” between two other major regions in Europe (Carter, Jordan, and Rey vii). They conceive of the region’s literatures as interrelated components rather than as competing entities, emphasizing the flow of cultural products across borders, physical and otherwise. The literary mappings they offer have their lines of demarcation continually crossed, blurred, and (re)mapped. Still, both the individual literatures that participate in this interaction and the larger regional entities maintain their identity, contributing to a dynamic form of transculturality that preserves creative differences. Each essay acknowledges the simultaneity of the local and regional positionings of authors, texts, and their representations. Authors, texts, and the figures they represent are not static but moving entities that enter various relationships within and across the national boundaries. Their dynamic identity questions traditional definitions of particular literary cultures, redefining them as dialogic, products of regional interaction. A final word on the structure of this volume: the essays are arranged around a cluster of theoretical ideas (from a problematization of the definitions of East-Central Europe to an analysis of its contradictory mappings) and a geographic-topographic progression (from cities to regions, intercultural corridors, and diasporic spaces). The various subsections follow similar progressions: from actual to imaginary places, from eastern to western, from northern to southern locations, from national to transnational. The primary focus remains on authors and their literary texts but in the process of their analysis these essays periodically confront the problems of defining and mapping East-Central Europe, proposing a number of alternatives to nationalistic or imperialistic cartographies. The concept and structure of this volume has developed slowly over a period of several years, but we want to acknowledge here the essential contribution that the year the two coeditors of this

8

Introduction

volume and other colleagues spent as fellows of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (1999–2000) made towards clarifying and refining this work. With the help of NIAS, we were able to organize a final conference of our project (June 28–July 1, 2000) that brought together more than 30 contributors from North America, Western Europe, and East-Central Europe. A number of them are featured in this volume. We also want to thank Virginia Commonwealth University and the College of Humanities and Sciences, for allowing one of the coeditors to take a year-long study/research leave and for generously supporting this project in its subsequent stages; the area editors (Seth Wolitz, Alexander Kiossev, Monica Spiridon); and all the other contributors to this volume for their challenging rereadings of East-Central European literatures and cultural identities.

1. Cities as Sites of Hybrid Literary Identity and Multicultural Production

Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities Marcel Cornis-Pope As the articles in Section 1 suggest, the multiethnic cities of East-Central Europe have often been presented fragmentarily in literary histories, from the perspective of only one national culture. This type of treatment defeats their lingering multiculturality, their role as relays of literary modernization and pluralization in the region. As Cornel Ungureanu, founding member of the “Third Europe” research group in Timişoara, has argued, provincial cities like Czernowicz/Cernăuţi/ Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi, Braşov/Brassó/Kronstadt, Oradea/Nagyvárad/Grosswardein, Timişoara/ Temesvár/Temesburg, Lugoj/Lugos/Lugosch, Novi Sad/Újvidék/Neusatz, and Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg, tried to resist — more or less successfully — the nationalistic leveling of culture after World War I, but also imperialistic, pan-Germanic definitions of Mitteleuropa, opposing to them a more genuinely polycentric concept of culture (“Cutia Pandorei” 57). Metropolitan centers like St. Petersburg, Istanbul/ Tsarigrad, Bucharest, Budapest, or Prague (as the contributions by Brian Horowitz, Boyko Penchev, Monica Spiridon, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, and Veronica Ambrus suggest) have also functioned at times as “liminal cities” for several cultures and “magnetic fields” that interfaced Eastern and Western literary trends in a continuous though mostly unequal dialogue (the Eastern or “oriental” input functioning often as the tolerated or opposed other). In order to better understand the multicultural potential of these “liminal” cities, which has developed unequally through different historical periods and in relation to the conflicting cultural dynamic in the larger regions adjacent to them, the reader is invited to read in parallel the essays on Transylvania, the Danube corridor, the Balkans, etc., in Section 2 of this volume. I have called the nodal cities discussed in the first section “marginocentric” because of their tendency to challenge the hegemony of the metropolitan centers, offering an alternative to their national pull (see in this sense the essay contributed by Tiina A. Kirss, which counterposes Tartu to Tallinn, seeing in their “dialectic” confrontation a generative paradigm for Estonian culture; also Jüri Talvet’s treatment of Tartu as a “frontier” city that occasioned a revolutionary multicultural “school” in literary theory). The “marginocentric cities” challenge our preconceived notions of literary and cultural topography. Topo-graphy (the “writing of a place”) makes use of complex acts of naming and delineation that further “relate to the politics of nationalism as they involve border demarcations and territorial appropriations” (Miller, Topographies 4, 5). When these acts of delineation are applied to marginocentric cities that are culturally hybrid, located at the crossroads of civilizations and at the interface of fiction and reality, culture and nature, they tend to break down. Like the postcolonial metropolis described by Salman Rushdie, the East-Central European marginocentric city challenges traditional boundaries between periphery and center, bringing together “things that seem not to belong together,” setting “alongside each other in odd, often raw juxtapositions all sorts of different bodies of experience to show what frictions and sparks they make”

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(Rushdie, in Appignanesi and Maitland 8). The characteristic literary descriptions of Vilnius (discussed by Tomas Venclova), Riga (Irina Novikova), Czernowicz (Amy Colin), Gdansk (Katarzyna Jerzak), Timişoara (Marcel Cornis-Pope), or Trieste (Anna Campanile), emphasize a margin in which reverberate, with different intensities, “the reflexes of the Center. The favorite topoi are the Main Street, the café, the barracks, the high school, the theater, the hotel; the dominant figures — the functionary, the officer, the merchant, the artist; ‘great’ but also ‘small’ themes reiterated continually — cosmopolitanism, multiethnicity, plurilingualism, […], the Jewish presence, trust in the values of civilization and culture, even if sometimes in the style of a ‘central-European version of bad taste’” (Babeţi, “Cuvânt înainte” 9). Lest we fall into nostalgic idealism, we should add that the same topographic sites often reverberate with ethnic conflict, the horrors of pogroms, and the dictatorial repression of diversity, whether fascist or communist (see especially the essays on Vilnius, Czernowicz, Gdańsk, Timişoara; also the cluster on the “Cities in Ashkenaz” contributed by Seth L. Wolitz, Zilla Jane Goodman, and Brian Horowitz). The marginocentric cities represent a challenge not only to traditional models of linear and totalizable historiography, disrupting them with their ex-centric evolutions, but also to literary representation itself. To apply Alexander Gelley’s insightful analysis of urban topographies to our discussion, such cities function as partly non-totalizable “aggregates” that “challenge textual articulation. [They] induce a kind of vertigo, a blockage at the level of representability” (240). We are confronted with an inexhaustible topographic, political, cultural-religious, and imaginary spectacle. The resulting “city text” (240) problematizes our representational practices and our definitions of the modern city. The East-Central European “city text” harkens back to the Enlightenment concept of urbanity (descriptions of Timişoara linger on its array of restaurants, cafés, and theaters that exude a small- scale Viennese atmosphere; and Bucharest or Budapest were at one time called the “Paris of the Balkans”), but it also challenges the techno-rationalistic discourse of the Western city. Anticipating the postcolonial/postmodern redefinition of the Western city as multifaceted and decentered as a result of immigration, East-Central European literary representations have periodically emphasized the heteroglossic potential of marginocentric cities, bringing together in odd juxtapositions center and periphery, nature and culture, reality and fiction (see, for example, the essays on Riga, Plovdiv, Timişoara, and Trieste). Even though, as Kiossev’s article on Plovdiv reminds us, the plurivocality and multiculturality of the East-Central European cityscape does not always translate into a multicultural text, the different national literatures tending to develop in ignorance of one another, the very existence of diverse language and literary traditions challenges the monoglossic perspective on these places. This process is well illustrated by the essays in our volume that, even when focused on one primary literature, intersect other literatures, being expanded and challenged by them (see in this sense the discussion of the Ashkenaz literature that supplements/revises the treatment of the national literary traditions in cities like Vilnius, St. Petersburg, Odessa, or Warsaw). A sobering overtone can be felt in many of these essays, as they reexamine the literary cultures of marginocentric and metropolitan cities from a post–1989 perspective. A number of articles (Alexander Kiossev’s on Plovdiv, Katarzyna Jerzak’s on Gdańsk, Tomas Venclova’s on Vilnius, Seth Wolitz’s on the cities of Ashkenaz, mine on Timişoara) mourn, implicitly or explicitly, the loss of the traditional multiculturality of these city-texts, as a result of forced emigration (particularly of the German ethnics), pogroms and ethnic purgings of “inassimilable” others, and nationalistic pro-

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grams of realignment. They suggest poignantly that the literary victories of multicultural cities are temporary and contested, mixing — in the words of the prominent Lithuanian poet and essayist Tomas Venclova — the “myth of division” with the “myth of connection” (see his essay below).

* * *

Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna: The Myth of Division and the Myth of Connection Tomas Venclova “Wilno […] was eccentric, a city of crazily commingled strata that overlapped each other, like Trieste or Chernowitz” (Miłosz, Beginning with My Streets 27), a famous Polish poet wrote about Vilnius, the city of his youth between the two world wars. The city retains this character even now, though its fate underwent an extraordinary change: from provincial Polish town it turned into the capital of Lithuania. Such a radical change of an urban paradigm is not new for Vilnius. One can even say that after many centuries the city reverted to its original status. Grand Duke Gediminas founded it in the fourteenth century precisely as the capital of the independent Lithuanian state. Later, Vilnius was one of the two capitals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (sharing this rank with Cracow); it further functioned as the center of the so-called Northwestern region of the Russian Empire, and in the twentieth century it changed hands many times. Twice Vilnius was occupied by Germany (1915–18 and 1941–44) and three times by the Soviet Union (1939, 1940–41 and 1944–91). All these vicissitudes led to the destruction of the established cultural models and often to an almost complete change of population. Not only streets and buildings disappeared in Vilnius but also whole ethnic groups. The most tragic of these losses was the demise of the large Jewish community not so long ago — during World War II. Still, through all the changes of regimes, cultures, and languages Vilnius remained a borderland city, mixed and multilingual. It has been and apparently will remain a city of dialogue. Attempts to render it monologic, monoethnic, and monocultural — whatever form they took — always ended in defeat. Culturological studies often use the term “city text” in discussions of urban spaces (see Toporov 259–399; also the studies in Lotman, Lotmanovskii sbornik 483–835). The Russian school of semiotics has described the Moscow and St. Petersburg texts, and one can also speak of a Vilnius text. It can be defined, first of all, as polycultural and polychronic. These traits are evident in the very architecture of the city, which can be interpreted as both a substratum of the Vilnius text and as its essential part. Despite wars, periods of occupation and demolitions, Vilnius preserved its architectural peculiarities. Unlike other Baltic cities, it belongs to the Italian and mid-European rather than to the Germanic-Scandinavian cultural sphere. Vilnius is one of the largest Baroque cities north of the Alps (also the northernmost and the easternmost city of the European Baroque). However, one can find there virtually every other style of European architecture, from Gothic to Classicist. As a rule, these styles reached the peripheral Lithuanian regions quite late but were often preserved in marvelous monuments. Vilnius’s Baroque style emerged on medieval grounds. In

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addition, the “Latin” spirit of Vilnius was balanced by a certain Eastern flair. The city always had Orthodox churches, synagogues, even mosques, which sometimes imitated the Western Baroque, but more often followed their own paradigms. Homogeneity and consistent urban development are not typical for the Lithuanian capital. The city was formed largely at whim, as an architectural palimpsest where buildings of different ages and types seem to merge and exchange qualities. The city was built against a hilly northern landscape that abounds in forests and lakes perceived as “wild.” Nature often intrudes upon the urban fabric, creating certain “uncultured” enclaves within it. One can observe multiple layers and disorder in other parameters of the “Vilnius text.” In Bakhtinian terms (the philosopher spent his childhood in Vilnius) one can speak about the city’s carnival tradition, which entails hybridization of styles and genres, constant re-encoding and superimposition of different cultural discourses. Vilnius is a paradoxical city in many respects. As I have suggested, East and West are combined here. These conventional terms have a certain real content in Vilnius. Starting from the Middle Ages, the city has existed on the very border of Catholicism and Orthodoxy that mingle, clash, and even conflate in the phenomenon of the Uniate Church. The Catholic tradition in Vilnius finds its expression in the cult of Our Lady of Ostra Brama that is an important part of the city myth. However, the Reformation also left its marks on Vilnius. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vilnius was probably the most significant world center of Judaism. Small but still important communities of Karaites and Muslims also lived in the city. In the rest of Europe, such a religious heterogeneity existed only in the Balkans. In Vilnius, however, the co-existence of different religions was and still is mostly peaceful. It should be noted that Lithuania was the last country in Europe to be Christianized: this happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Initially Vilnius was a pagan city with small Christian and, apparently, Jewish enclaves. Later, until at least the nineteenth century, certain pre-Christian beliefs and customs were preserved in its immediate vicinity. This fact in and of itself became a myth of a kind, reflected especially in Romantic and Modernist poetry. Linguistic heteroglossia always complemented (and supported) the religious one. Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, and Belorussians all consider Vilnius their center of tradition and their cultural capital. Ethnic differences coincide here to a large degree with religious differences. One can speak of three or four different variants of the Vilnius myth, a collective narrative that creates and warrants a national identity. These variants have always competed and were often used for political manipulation. However, their mutual intersections were oftentimes culturally fruitful, and their confrontation turned into connection. This happened, for example, to the Polish and Lithuanian Vilnius myths that in essence merged into a certain dyadic system. The paradoxical unity of East and West in Vilnius is reflected in the fact that the city is from time immemorial perceived as both “western,” “cosmopolitan” (against the backdrop of a “backward” Eastern Europe), and “peripheral,” “provincial” (against the backdrop of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth). Lithuania was connected to world culture through Vilnius first and foremost. From the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until the present day the city has been imbued with universalist ideologies and international trends (which, it has to be said, sometimes took on warped forms). On the other hand, this westernized city happened to be the locus of a starkly nationalistic, isolationist mentality. It should also be stated that nationalism in Vilnius was usually complemented and corrected by regionalism. Every ethnic group found in Vilnius an alternate

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identity. For the Poles, the Wilno identity was always opposed to the identities of Warsaw and Cracow (in a broader context, the outskirts of Poland, the kresy, were opposed to Central Poland, the “Crown”). For Lithuanians, the diversity and openness of Vilnius were opposed to the self-enclosed, “native,” and peasant Lithuania (later a new opposition emerged between the “eccentric” Vilnius mentality and the narrower mentality of Kaŭnas, the “true Lithuanian center”). For Jews, there was an important opposition between the intellectual Wilno “mitnaggedim” (also Jewish enlightenment and secularism) and the Galician tradition of “Hasidim.” For Belorussians, the opposition between Vilnius and Minsk was in the foreground: more recently it acquired a special significance during the conflict between the Belorussian democrats and the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. One of the signs of Vilnius’s “special character” is the fact that the majority of the city residents speak several languages more or less well: Lithuanian, Polish, Russian (earlier also Belorussian and Yiddish). Unlike other Baltic capitals, colonial cities created by the conquerors from the West, Vilnius was founded by locals and grew naturally. Besides, it was not a Hanseatic center. Its functions were not primarily commercial but rather administrative and spiritual. In the Jewish tradition Vilnius is known as the “Lithuanian Jerusalem” (for a detailed discussion of the Jewish culture and literature in Vilnius, see below Seth L. Wolitz’s article on “Vilna”). It should be noted, however, that for other peoples Vilnius also was a kind of Jerusalem — the locus of cultural achievements and historic aspirations. The status of a mythologized, sacral city is more typical of Vilnius than of Riga, Tallinn, Lviv, or Gdańsk. Here one can also detect a paradox: while a capital, Vilnius has always been in an “eccentric,” peripheral position. Thus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania consisted of a smaller Western part (pagan, later Catholic) and the Eastern (Orthodox) part, which was fifteen times bigger, reaching as far as Smolensk and the Black Sea. After the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was formed, the city found itself in the East of it and played the role of the bulwark of the Catholic civilization at the border of the Russian plains. From 1795 to 1915, Vilnius was close to the Western borders of Czarist Russia, being both a kind of a bridge to Western Europe and a barrier against it — a citadel of Russian imperialism in the conquered Catholic province. When the Empire collapsed and the city became part of the restored Poland, the Vilnius region happened to be its faraway Eastern periphery, squeezed between Lithuania and the Soviet Union, with weak connections to the central Polish lands. Under the Soviet regime the situation of the czarist times virtually repeated itself, although now Vilnius mostly served as a bridge (the role of the barrier was relegated to Königsberg/Kaliningrad). Finally, Vilnius is nowadays by the Eastern border of the independent Lithuania, barely thirty kilometers away from Belarus (Kaŭnas is in the center of the state). In short, whatever historic changes take place, Vilnius always turns out to be on the border, although the border itself migrates. Moreover, it usually turns out to be on the other side of the border for some ethnic groups connected to Vilnius, becoming for them a subject of nostalgic hopes. In the 1920s and 30s Lithuanians represented such a group, nowadays it is Poles and Belorussians. In addition to its marginal situation, Vilnius has always had the status of an ethnic enclave. In spite of its polyethnicity, one or several groups usually play the dominant role, while a different culture and a different language reign in the Vilnius metropolitan area. Thus, from the eighteenth century until World War II, Vilnius was a Polish and Jewish city while Lithuanians and Belorussians lived in the metropolitan area; nowadays it is a Lithuanian city, but within a radius of at least

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fifty kilometers the majority of the population speaks Polish. One could say that Vilnius is an ideal subject for a structuralist: as in the case of border shifts, the structure remains despite a complete — or a nearly complete — change of components. Both the role of “bulwark of civilization” and that of “imperial province” have been fruitful for Vilnius. The same is true about its enclave situation. Each of its identities generated all kinds of symbolic paradigms that have transcended temporality and continue to influence the city’s destiny and its citizens’ consciousness. These paradigms expressed a striving for self-assertion and recognition of the Other, meeting and parting grounds of ethnic entities, social and psychological conflicts, fears and traumas. Vilnius is a city of an exceptionally rich tradition, yet this tradition easily turns into a ground for arguments and seems itself to be fragile. Vying nationalistic discourses tend to pass over certain parts of Vilnius’s historic memory. The Other, always present in Vilnius, is often demonized (such a demonization befell Jews, Poles, Russians, and Lithuanians as well). Modern Lithuania faces a difficult yet solvable problem: to create anew the Vilnius identity, incorporating the whole of the city’s past and its cultural potential. It is still impossible to say today whether this task will be fulfilled successfully or whether narrow ethnocentric models will get in the way. However, it is certain that only if this problem is solved successfully will the city have a fruitful future. Only then will it become the true capital, fulfilling the designs of its historical creator and many of its citizens. Let us take a closer look at Vilnius’s cultural topography, putting it into historical perspective (more precisely, into several complementary historical perspectives) and correlating it with this project. The mythic and historical beginnings of the city coincide with the beginnings of the Lithuanian state and the Lithuanian people. However, the history of a state and the history of an ethnos are different subjects even though many have tried, and are still trying, unsuccessfully to equate them. As already mentioned, Prince Gediminas, who called himself “rex lithuanorum et multorum ruthenorum” is considered to be the founder of the city. He was also the founder of the dynasty that ruled Lithuania and then Poland for more than two hundred years. Many Belorussian and Russian aristocratic families trace their pedigree back to Gediminas. Gediminas spoke Lithuanian (although he certainly knew Slavic languages as well), adhered to the Baltic pagan faith (although considered baptism several times), and thought of his city as the Lithuanian capital (although many Eastern Slavs also lived there and Gediminas invited merchants and craftsmen from Western Europe). The city undoubtedly existed — possibly played a sacral role — before Gediminas, yet it was precisely the “rex lithuanorum et multorum ruthenorum” who endowed it with the status of a capital. Lithuanian chronicles preserve a myth about “Gediminas’s dream” (tired after a hunt, the Prince dreamed of an iron wolf whose howling was interpreted as an injunction to build a capital). Apparently, this myth goes back to the same source as the myth of the founding of Rome (see Greimas, “Apie folklorą” 47–50). Transformed by the Romantics, it still preserved its influence until recent times, serving as a source for populist symbolism and providing a traditional semiotic framework for twentieth-century Lithuanian culture and politics, especially between the two world wars and during the collapse of the USSR (see Greimas, Iš arti ir toli 367). The image of Gediminas himself acquired an analogous semiotic rank, comparable to the image of Peter in the St. Petersburg mythology (see Venclova, “Les Héritiers de Gediminas”). The pagan Vilnius era (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) is the basis of the Lithuanian historical narrative. The ideologists of the Lithuanian national movement postulated an immediate

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connection and continuity between that epoch of “ethnically pure” (Baltic, not Slavic) Vilnius and the modern times. Other times seemed to have been excised from the stream of history and were considered deviations from the “normal course of events.” This view was propagandized by Lithuania’s official ideology between the two world wars and in the early stages of post-Soviet independence. It became a mythologem that is still present in the popular consciousness. This consciousness manifests an acute interest in pre-Christian archeological finds on the city grounds. The remains of a temple in the catacombs underneath the Cathedral or of a pagan altar in the courtyard of the Jesuit monastery are pet topics of today’s media. It should be noted that these finds are often of a dubious nature, as was the reconstruction of the pagan Vilnius in the nineteenth-century Romantic stories to which they usually refer. More reliable support for the idea of a pre-Christian Lithuania comes from the digs beyond the city limits. The Vilnius “pagan substratum,” however, certainly carries a special weight for the Lithuanian narrative. During Soviet times, part of the Lithuanian intelligentsia created a half-official society called “Ramuva,” which strove for the restoration of pre-Christian beliefs and traditions. The Communist regime limited its activities yet in part supported it to fight Catholicism. “Ramuva” played a certain role in the restoration of Lithuanian independence, although this role should not be overstated. This artificial “paganism” still enjoys a certain popularity in Vilnius and in Lithuania as a whole. There have been attempts to make it one of the traditional, state-sanctioned religions (like Shintoism in Japan). Quasi-pagan rituals have been used, for example, in governmental ceremonies. All this can be labeled a “curiosity” but it is a very telltale curiosity. The vicissitudes that befell the name of the city are also quite typical. Apparently, its most ancient name was Vilnia (after the river near the Gediminas castle). It is reflected in the Polish name Wilno and the Russian-Jewish Vilna. For a few centuries the city was known by these Slavonicized names. Nowadays it has regained its Lithuanian name — not the ancient one, but a new, artificially constructed one. In a similar fashion, the city’s original linguistic and religious unity is a mythological construct created by Lithuanian Romantics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vilnius’s polycultural character does not agree with monological ethnic narratives, always calling them into question and rejecting them. As I have suggested, the realm of Lithuania never coincided with the realm of “purely” Lithuanian ethnicity. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a very unusual state reminiscent of states at the time of the Great Migration of the Peoples — a backward state against the general European backdrop, chaotic and heterogeneous. Its written culture was not Lithuanian from a linguistic point of view. Gediminas’s letters, which can be considered the first Lithuanian literary monuments, were written in Latin. The chronicles that preserved the pagan legends, including the myth of the founding of Vilnius, were recorded in an East Slavic written idiom that is sometimes called an early stage of the Belorussian language. The same language was used to write down the Lithuanian Statute, the codex of state laws. The Lithuanian language, which belongs to a different language branch and is unintelligible for Slavs, did not exist in written form for a long time. An East Slavic language was also dominant at Gediminas’s feudal court and at the courts of his immediate descendants. Later this situation resulted in attempts to create monocultural narratives competing with the Lithuanian narrative. Thus, nineteenth-century Russian scholars called the Grand Duchy of Lithuania a Western Russian state that avoided the Tartar Yoke. In the beginning of the twentieth century,

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the Belorussian national movement perceived it as the nascent Belorussian state and considered Vilnius its historical capital. Independent Belarus, which emerged from the wreckage of the USSR in 1991, proclaimed the Grand Duchy to be its immediate predecessor. Belarus chose the Chase (a charging horseman) — Lithuania’s medieval coat-of-arms — as its present day coat-of-arms. The same Chase (“Vytis” in Lithuanian, “Pogoń” in Polish) was the coat-of-arms of the independent Lithuania from 1918 to 1940 and again in the post-Soviet period. This curious circumstance that the same coat-of-arms served two very different states could have become a prelude to a conflict of the Balkan kind: the nationalist Belorussian intelligentsia started staking its territorial claims for Vilnius. The situation changed with the Lukashenko regime (which reverted to the Soviet coat-ofarms), yet in the national mythology created by the opposition in present-day Belarus, Gediminas and other princes of the ancient Lithuania are considered part of Belorussian history. The potential dangers of such a competition between national narratives is obvious. They are based on a mistake in logic: the national idea predicated on a linguistic criterion is transposed onto the times when this criterion did not play the decisive role. This false teleological understanding of history is still popular in East-Central Europe: the events of the past are alleged to lead logically to a certain ideal goal, which is the creation of a modern, linguistically uniform state. Not only the remnants of the Romantic worldview, but also the influence of Soviet historic scholarship with its emphasis on foretelling the future, lend support to this idea. One can only hope that nationalism will again be corrected with regionalism and polyculturalism, as it has happened before more than once. The linguistic and cultural topography of the city became more complicated after Lithuania was Christianized in the period 1387–1413 (some regions had to be Christianized for the second time in the second half of the sixteenth century). After that, Lithuania entered a dynastic union with Poland that eventually led to a certain cultural unity. Polish language replaced Ruthenian in state life (officially this happened only in 1697). Still, the Lithuanian part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created its own cultural variant: the Grand Duchy was opposed to the Polish Crown (and, accordingly, Vilnius to Cracow) in terms of its state and societal structure, civilizational model, customs, architecture, literature, and so on. In the popular consciousness this opposition often took the shape of the contrast between “forested,” “barbarian” Lithuania and “agrarian,” “enlightened” Poland (“barbarism” could carry positive connotations: backwardness was interpreted as antiquity and nobility). Lithuanian regional patriotism manifested itself, for instance, in the (failed) project to proclaim not Polish but Latin as Lithuania’s national language. During the sixteenth century, it was noted that Lithuanian (which preserved some archaic IndoEuropean features) had certain points of contact with Latin. This observation served as one of the foundations for a pre-scholarly theory of Lithuanian’s Roman origins, which expressed the separatist tendencies of the Lithuanian magnates (see Jurginis). By this time Vilnius became a Renaissance city, open to the Orient as well. It was marked by a larger variety of ethnic and religious communities typical for the cities of the Polish Crown. Vilnius had German, Russian, Jewish, and Tartar streets (these old names have been preserved until today, although some had to be restored after the Soviet era). Characteristically, there was no Lithuanian or Polish street — neither group was regarded as minority. Significant was also the role played by an Italian community that appeared in the city with Queen Bona Sforza in the first

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half of the sixteenth century and retained some influence until the nineteenth. During that period Vilnius architecture acquired certain Italian traits that characterize it even now. Although Vilnius was not founded by colonizers, it had some features pertaining to a colonial center: an administrative, ecclesiastical, aristocratic capital opposed to the peasant surroundings. The perception of Vilnius as a Polish-speaking enclave in the midst of the Lithuanian and Belorussian region goes back to the Renaissance and Baroque times. However, Polish — the language of the Polonized aristocracy and culture — had been for a long time supplemented by the Lithuanian and East Slavic dialects. The Vilnius area in a broad sense included Samogitia that preserved a Baltic dialect, and the cities of Western Russia: Polotsk, Vitebsk, Smolensk, even Novgorod and Kiev. The Orthodox faith of the Grand Duchy’s Eastern outskirts for the most part coexisted peacefully with the Catholic and later Uniate confessions of the so-called Lituania Propria. For a while, the same was true about the different Reformation trends that became a considerable force in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Lithuania. In 1563, the Vilnius Sejm accorded complete freedom to all the denominations; some scholars (e.g., Vytautas Kavolis) argue that at that moment Lithuania became the center of religious tolerance and liberalism in Europe. Lithuanian tolerance combined archaic traits inherited from the time of Gediminas with a radicalism exceptional for that age. Vilnius University, founded in 1579, was the brainchild of the Jesuit Counter-Reformation, yet the college and the Department of Philosophy were still open to the Protestants and the Orthodox. Only the Department of Theology was purely Catholic. An exclusively Catholic spirit came to dominate the university much later, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth entered the stagnation period (the second half of the seventeenth to the first half of the eighteenth centuries). The university was the intellectual center of a large region, and it has its place in the history of European science and thought. Both its faculty and student community were quite international. The faculty list included not only Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians, but also Germans, Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Swedes, Norwegians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and others. Among its students, there were even Finns and Tartars. When king Władysław IV visited the University in 1648, he was greeted in eighteen languages — among them Lithuanian, Polish, Church Slavic, Old Belorussian, and, of course, Latin, the language of teaching. A large corpus of Latin texts, recently recognized as a living literary heritage within and outside Lithuania, is also connected with the University. Epic poems, epithalamia, elegies, panegyrics, threnodies, epitaphs, satires, epigrams, historical works, sermons, speeches, and all kinds of “ludi literarii” were produced in Vilnius. Lithuanian life was presented through the prism of ancient conventions, in the style of Horace, Ovid, and Titus Livius. The Gediminas Castle became the Capitol; city dwellers were called the Quirites. In this respect, Latin literature in Lithuania did not differ from similar literatures in other Eastern and Western European countries. Despite the international character of this cultural phenomenon, there were frequent attempts to “monopolize” certain authors, especially when their local ethnic origins were obvious or when the work had some “local” coloring. For instance, Nicolaus Hussovianus, apparently a Pole who studied in Vilnius before the university was founded and who wrote the poem “Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis” (A Song About a Bison’s Appearance, Ferociousness, and the Hunt), was named among the founders of both Lithuanian and Belorussian literature; Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Mathias Casimirus Sarbievius, nicknamed Horatius Sarmaticus) was described as both a Polish and a Lithuanian poet; Andrzej Rymsza, who composed in Latin, in

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Polish, and in Ruthenian, and also Jan Eysymont, who adhered to Latin and Polish, were declared Lithuanians because of their Baltic last names; and so on. These naïve attempts to monologize the cultural discourse are based on the same teleological concept of historical development and of the development of national cultures as the attempts to construct a “purely Lithuanian” or “purely Eastern Slavic” past of the city. They can only simplify and impoverish the city’s multilayered cultural topography where the disjunctive “either-or” usually gives way to the copulative conjunction “and-and.” Latin literature in Renaissance and Baroque Vilnius was supplemented by multiple texts in the vernacular. The first rector of the Vilnius/Wilno University, Piotr Skarga, was a famous Polish preacher, and the second rector, Jakub Wujek, translated the Bible into Polish. Maciej Stryjkowski, who had many ties to Vilnius, wrote the first comprehensive history of Lithuania in Polish. City Judge, Daniel Naborowski, a Calvinist who possibly studied with Galileo in Padova, created brilliant Baroque verses in Polish, comparable to the poetry of the English metaphysical school. At the same time, Mikalojus Daukša (Mikołaj Dauksza) published in Vilnius the first Lithuanian Catholic texts, including a translation of a large collection of Wujek’s sermons. A university Professor, Konstantinas Širvydas (Konstanty Szyrwid), wrote a book of sermons in Lithuanian and translated it into Polish. Širvydas also was the first Lithuanian lexicographer. Even prior to the foundation of the university, Vilnius became a center of East Slavic Enlightenment: Franciszek Skoryna printed the very first book in the city, Apostol — a translation of the New Testament into the Old Church Slavic with elements of Old Belorussian vernacular. It is typical for Vilnius that almost all the literary figures mentioned above were polyglots. Daukša, for example, provided his collection of sermons with a preface that is considered a manifesto of the rights of the Lithuanian language; it belongs to the same order of things as the Renaissance manifestos that justified the use of Italian or French vernacular. However, this preface, unlike the rest of the collection, is written in Polish. In one of his Polish poems, Naborowski used a pun on the Lithuanian etymology of a Vilnius toponym, “Werki” (from the verb “verkti” — to weep). There are Lithuanian fragments in Stryjkowski’s history that is based on the East Slavic chronicles, and so on. Later Vilnius culture, until the very end of the Commonwealth (1795), was similarly polylingual, sometimes almost in a carnivalesque way. University students staged Polish dramas with comic interludes in Lithuanian; Michał Franciszek Karpowicz delivered both Lithuanian and Polish sermons. During the 1794 insurgence led by Tadeusz Kościuszko the rebels’ manifesto appeared in both languages. At the same time, however, Lithuanian (like Belorussian) was pushed in the eighteenth century to the cultural margins, becoming the “peasant language.” The written form of Lithuanian was a creolized variant, Baltic in grammar but virtually identical with Polish in its vocabulary. This variant was discarded by purists in the 1880s to 1920s. The Jewish community in Vilnius, the most influential and active diaspora group since the times of Babylon and medieval Cordoba, occupied a special niche. The Jews had apparently been invited — along with other Western merchants and craftsmen — to the city by Gediminas (the origins of a part of Lithuanian Jews and especially of Karaites may be linked, on the other hand, with the era of the Khazar kingdom). In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, Vilnius and its vicinity became the center of world Judaism, replacing the Rhineland in this respect. Approximately a quarter of the European askenazim nicknamed litvaks lived in Lithuania. The descendants of Gediminas and later the Lithuanian Statute granted them privileges that provided for

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a peaceful existence of the Jews among the peoples of other religions. The Jewish community served as a mediating link between Lithuania and Europe. The Vilnius ghetto lived its own life, yet every day it came into contact with its surroundings: the Jews knew local languages, and Hebrew was taught at Vilnius University together with Greek and Latin. Along with the Jews converting to Christianity (such as the sect of the Frankists) there were also reverse conversions. One such occurrence, however, had a tragic ending: Count Walenty Potocki, who converted to Judaism, was burned at the stake in the Vilnius Cathedral Square in 1749. The eighteenth century saw one of the most important Jewish spiritual authorities, Gaon of Vilna Elijah, whose orthodox Judaism prevailed over the Hasidic tradition in Lithuania. The Jewish community contributed significantly to the polycultural heritage of the city and to its very image. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the Karaites and the Muslims, who appeared in Vilnius as prisoners of war and were also granted certain privileges. After the Renaissance and the Baroque, the Romantic era constituted the city’s new Golden Age. Polish Romanticism, which took shape precisely in Vilnius, occupies a defining place in its cultural topography. The works of Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki were a noteworthy phenomenon in European literature and acquired, therefore, an emblematic meaning for the city residents, whatever language they spoke and whatever tradition they adhered to. The very word “Polish” applied to this branch of Romanticism needs qualifications: a closer examination reveals its paradoxical and multi-layered character. Both Mickiewicz and Słowacki studied at Vilnius/Wilno University, which turned at the end of the eighteenth century from a Latin-speaking theological institution into a Polish-speaking center of secular enlightenment. The Enlightenment in Vilnius was short-lived, yet it left its marks on the city (including first-rate architectural monuments). The pan-European crisis of Rationalism that followed the French Revolution, showed itself in Vilnius as well. It was deepened by a political catastrophe, the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian occupation. The work of Vilnius Romantics was in many respects a response to this historical challenge. The irrationalism of the Romantic Weltanschauung was supplemented by a regionalism opposed to the cult of antiquity and to the striving for centralization typical of the Enlightenment. The cult of Reason was replaced by an interest in the “dark,” “nocturnal” aspect of the human psyche, reencoded as an interest in geographical and historical exotica that was to replace the European “center.” Lithuania presented fruitful material in this sense. This region with its rich and peculiar past, far removed from Western capitals, was analogous to Scotland, Brittany, and partially to the Orient. The Romantics (in part based on the existing tradition) perceived Lithuania as “the Other” in relation to civilized Poland — in other words, as one of the countries that made it possible to reevaluate all of European culture. Mickiewicz and, to a lesser degree, Słowacki, who was mostly oriented toward the Ukraine, presented the Lithuanian chronotope as the locus of the magic, the mysterious, and the terrible. The local folklore with its pagan remnants and the medieval past of the Grand Duchy played a special role here. The world of pre-Christian Lithuania was easily comparable to the world of the Northern barbaric tribes and to the world of Islam. The myth of a Romantic poet-prophet received an additional interpretation: the intrusion of transcendental, subconscious forces into the psyche and into everyday life was identified with the intrusion of a peripheral genius into the “central” culture (see Venclova, “Native Realm Revisited”).

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The opposition of consciousness and sub-consciousness, nature and culture, in the works of the Vilnius Romantics was complemented with the opposition of past and present, of different religions, social estates, and languages. As in previous times, a complex interplay of national, religious, ethnic, and regional identifications continued. A borderline was, however, gradually drawn between regional and ethnic (linguistic) patriotism. The Polish Romantics postulated a unique spiritual connection between Lithuania and Poland. They could consider themselves Lithuanians as Mickiewicz did, yet the category “Lithuanian” was included in the category “Polish” and was, overall, vague: both Baltic and East Slavic (Belorussian) lands formerly incorporated into the Grand Duchy were considered “Lithuanian.” Mickiewicz, who was born in the ethnically Belorussian region from a father who belonged to the Lithuanian family of the Rymwids, combined nearly all the Vilnius cultural layers, since the Jewish theme also played a role in his works. According to some sources, his mother was a Frankist (i.e., a baptized Jew) and Mickiewicz was fully conscious of that. In his ballads, Mickiewicz used Belorussian folklore motives and in Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve; 1832) he included Belorussian rituals that he called Lithuanian. Non-Slavic, Baltic mythology was used also in the works of a later Romantic poet Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. The motives of Lithuanian medieval history were certainly employed, and those were hard to correlate with any particular ethnos. However, “Lithuanian” (as well as Belorussian) history, ethnography, mythology, and folklore were perceived as a regional variant of the Polish. Still, it was precisely during Romanticism that the borderlines between ethnic identities were first drawn, leading in later times to the emergence of nation states. Mickiewicz and other Polish Romantics played an unexpected and largely paradoxical role in this process. Vilnius’s cultural topography of the nineteenth century was complicated and enriched by the Lithuanian and later by the Belorussian national movements. The forerunner of Lithuanian nationalism was a Vilnius/Wilno student, Mickiewicz’s classmate Simonas Daukantas (Szymon Dowkont), who became a historian and ethnographer. Being a Romantic in views and temper, he believed that Lithuanian identity is defined through language primarily. Despite his fluency in Polish, Daukantas wrote his works in Lithuanian only; many remained unpublished for a long time, yet they were extensively read, copied, and discussed. This choice accorded him the status of an archetypal “father of the nation” (the Vilnius square, where the President’s Palace is situated, now bears Daukantas’s name). In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new layer of Lithuanian intelligentsia emerged, made up of people of peasant descent; they continued the cultural work of Daukantas and his few comrades-in-arms. These people carried out the “linguistic revolution” in Lithuania, comparable to those in Finland and Bohemia. The new national movement inherited from the Polish Romantics the myth of the Lithuanian “golden age,” the belief in the special values of Lithuanian mythology and folklore. It also created its own counter-myth: the union with Poland was regarded as the consequence of a treacherous conspiracy that forced upon Lithuania the Polish language and culture and thus pushed its original national identity to the brink of extinction. Although the majority of Lithuanian activists were, like Daukantas, polyglots, the choice of language became an ideological sign. By the same token, Mickiewicz and other Polish Romantics, their influence upon Daukantas and his followers notwithstanding, became “the Other.” It should be noted that since mid–nineteenth century until 1905, the Lithuanian movement developed not so much in Vilnius (that is, in an enclave dominated by Polish and partly by Yiddish) but to the west of the city, where Lithuanian language maintained its strong position. Vilnius,

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however, remained a mythologized capital — a “Jerusalem,” an unquestionable center of national life and of the future national state. In its extreme version, the Lithuanian counter-myth did not allow for any alternative historical narratives. It was precisely at this time that the Polish-Lithuanian conflict over Vilnius or Wilno emerged; by the end of the nineteenth century a narrowly nationalistic branch of the Polish movement that did not take into account the polycultural, dialogical character of the city had also arisen. Like the Poles, Lithuanians claimed the whole of the history and tradition of the Grand Duchy. Later, this conflict became reflected in the historical destiny of the Lithuanian capital. To a certain extent, the Belorussian national movement imitated the Lithuanian one and was built according to its model. It differed, however, in that the Belorussian-speaking and reading layer of the intelligentsia was thinner, and a true “linguistic revolution” in the Belorussian lands did not occur, due not only to the obstacles created by the Russian government or Polish-speaking nobility but also to the proximity of Belorussian dialects to the Russian language. The very concept of Belorussia (Belarus) as a special ethnic region emerged only around 1830. Among the forerunners of the Belorussian movement one can name Jan Czeczot, who had also been a student at Wilno University, a contemporary (and a friend) of Mickiewicz. He wrote in Polish and in Belorussian, but unlike Daukantas, he considered the demise of local languages (Belorussian and Lithuanian) to be sad but necessary, since their preservation would have impeded the development of Polish and harmed its purity. If by the beginning of the twentieth century Lithuanians already had extensive media and literature of their own, the contemporary production of texts in Belorussian involved very few people usually connected with Vilnius. The paradigm of the city’s cultural life shifted significantly after the suppression of two insurgencies aimed at the restoration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the 1830–31 insurgence the university was closed; the 1863 insurgence led to severe repression and intensified Russification. The centralized Russian Empire, unlike the Austro-Hungarian one, granted neither cultural nor administrative autonomy to its minority subjects. The city found itself in provincial backwater. The change in its image was symbolized by the erection of a monument to Catherine II (according to the official imperial myth, she returned to Russia, its Western-Russian region, i.e., Lithuania, taken away by Poland) and to Mikhail Muraviev, nicknamed the Hanger (according to the same myth, he destroyed the remains of harmful separatism). Both monuments survived until World War I. The new situation produced a paradoxical effect on the development of the Lithuanian and Belorussian national movements. On the one hand, it propelled them further (the spurned hopes for the restoration of the Commonwealth and the anti-Polish governmental policy were conducive to ethnic differentiation); on the other hand, it created exceptionally difficult conditions for both of them. For forty years, from 1865 to 1904, Lithuanian literature was printed abroad, in Germany and in America, and was smuggled into Lithuania; Belorussian literature was also banned. Other ethnic groups lived under no less difficult circumstances. Polish media and cultural institutions in Vilnius were destroyed. Anti-Semitism and the Russification of Jews were on the rise. Although the imperial cultural policy was, as a matter of principle, monological, it did not succeed in suppressing the Vilnius dialogue: on the contrary, to a certain degree it came to incorporate in it the Russian voice as well. Vilnius/Wilno University influenced Russian culture already at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Such important though dubious Russian literary figures as

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Osip Senkovsky and Faddei Bulgarin, both of Polish origin, were connected with the University. In the multilayered fabric of the city, the Russian architecture of the Orthodox churches also has its place. The Russian Theater that replaced the Polish one left its mark as well, and so did the artistic school of Ivan Trutnev, where Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz, among others, received their first lessons. The Russian writers who lived in Vilnius were influenced by the Polish-Lithuanian city myth and in their works often turned to the local tradition (see Lavrinets). Unlike many cities of Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, Vilnius has almost no monuments of Jugendstil. Prior to World War I, it was dominated by buildings of provincial barrackstyle architecture ill matched with the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque heritage. The culture of cafés, cabarets, and clubs was relatively undeveloped, especially in comparison to the AustroHungarian world. Modernism, however, did not bypass the city: it found an expression in Vilnius literature, art, music, and theater. The modernist revolution coincided with the political revolution of 1905 that complicated the city’s cultural topography by bringing to the foreground the ethnic traditions and movements until then banned or suppressed. Polish language was allowed in schools (although not as a mandatory subject), and all kinds of Polish media, theaters, and publishing houses appeared again. For the Poles, the city was “less than first-rate but more than provincial” (Romanowski 13); while culturally it was less important than Warsaw, Cracow, and Lviv, it stood out against the background of the former Commonwealth, first of all as the capital of Polish Romanticism connected with the name of its most significant poet, Mickiewicz. The Wilno variant of Polish Modernism, represented by the writers Czesław Jankowski and Helena RomerOchenkowska, painter, decorator, and director Ferdynand Ruszczyc, sculptor Antoni Wiwulski; composer Ludomir Michał Rogowski, and photographer Jan Bułhak, was oriented primarily toward its Romantic heritage. Along with the cultural activity of the Polish ethnic group, the activity of Lithuanians and Belorussians also grew quite visible. For them, Vilnius became a first-rate center, incomparable to any other in its organizing and symbolic role. The Lithuanian-speaking population in Vilnius was fairly insignificant (at the beginning of the twentieth century Lithuanians as well as Belorussians remained a peasant people), but the city became the center of the Lithuanian intelligentsia and then of Lithuanian political separatism. This development paralleled and sometimes outstripped analogous trends in Poland. The first Lithuanian daily newspaper Vilniaus Žinios (News of Vilnius) was legally published beginning in 1904, a year earlier than the first Vilnius/Wilno Polish daily newspaper Kurier Litewski (The Courier of Lithuania). A Lithuanian artistic society was formed in 1907, a year earlier than the analogous Polish society. An important modernist painter and composer, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis stood out amongst its members. The Lithuanian Scientific Society was formed in the same year as the Polish one (1907); it was led by Jonas Basanavičius, a historian and a publicist who was also the first person to sign the Lithuanian Declaration of Independence in 1918. Typically, while Vilnius/Wilno University was being reopened, there were arguments about the language of teaching — Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian were suggested. From 1906 to 1915, a weekly called Nasha Niva (Our Field) was published, and this periodical gave a name to the whole era of Belorussian culture; the writers Janka Kupala, Jakub Kolas, and Václav Lastouski, the author of the first history of Belorussia and of Belorussian books, lived in Vilnius. It was in Vilnius that the Belorussian literary language was created, and in 1918, the first Belorussian grammar was published there. The city’s cultural paradigm shifted yet again — this time toward diversity: prior to the revolution of 1905 there were only

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12 Russian periodicals published in Vilnius, while in 1911 there were 69 periodicals, 35 of them Polish, 20 of them Lithuanian, 7 Russian, 5 Jewish, and 2 Belorussian (Romanowski 319). The class conflict between the Polish-speaking aristocracy and Lithuanian- or Belorussianspeaking peasants was understood in terms of a national confrontation. The Polish historical narrative emphasized the significance of the Polish-Lithuanian union: the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries and the first half of the nineteenth century were its marked golden age. The Lithuanian historical narrative, as I have suggested, took shape under the influence of Mickiewicz’s Romantic mythology, yet it inherited from Daukantas the perception of the union era as the a-historical “black hole”: only paganism was its golden age. The Belorussian narrative, on the whole reminiscent of the Lithuanian, emphasized not the Baltic, but the East Slavic element of the pagan times. Behind these arguments were political struggles and different concepts about the city’s and the country’s political destiny. The Polish conservative nobility accepted neither the Lithuanian nor the much weaker Belorussian separatism. The Lithuanian (and in part Belorussian) peasant intelligentsia, on the contrary, perceived this conservative nobility as a colonizing and assimilative force. Both sides created their own “enemy image” that seriously complicated the historic development of Lithuania and Vilnius and can still be felt today. The cultures that spoke different languages tended toward isolation: there were far fewer contacts than there could have been. Nonetheless, the spirit of dialogue did not die in Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna. For example, the movement of krajowcy emerged among Polish intellectuals like Michał Roemer and others. They supported the tradition of the Grand Duchy as a polycultural organism different from Poland. Gazeta Wileńska (Wilno Gazette), the periodical published by this movement, tried to maintain the same attitude toward all nationalisms: the reviews of the Lithuanian press were written by Mykolas Biržiška (Michał Birżyszka), a member of the Lithuanian national movement. There were Lithuanian periodicals in Polish, Litwa (Lithuania) and Lud (The People), which employed Poles as well. They preached almost the same “Swiss” idea of Lithuania as did the krajowcy, and yet they were attacked by the Polish press and had no success. Basanavičius, Čiurlionis, and Janka Kupala wrote not only in their native languages but also in Polish. Antoni Wiwulski, creator of the famous Vilnius monument “The Three Crosses,” considered himself, not without reason, to be both a Polish and a Lithuanian artist. Ferdynand Ruszczyc, one of the early admirers of Čiurlionis, devoted an issue of the Polish cultural magazine Tygodnik Wileński (Wilno Weekly) to Lithuanian modernist art. It is also rather curious that the Polish satirical and anti-governmental magazine Perkunas had a Lithuanian name (Perkunas was a pagan deity). The Pole Ludomir Michał Rogowski published a collection of Belorussian folk songs, organized a Belorussian concert in 1910, and even wrote music for Kupala’s poem “Who Is Coming,” which was considered the Belorussian anthem. It should be noted that the Vilnius Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Rogowski and by a local Russian, Konstantin Galkovsky, who wrote “Lithuanian Rhapsody” and a choral piece in honor of Basanavičius. As far as Lithuanian-Belorussian contacts are concerned, those were very close: many translations between these languages were printed; Litwa even published a “Chronicle of Belorussian life” in Belorussian. The Jewish national movement, more isolated because of differences in religion, language, alphabet, and customs, was also intertwined with other movements. During all of the nineteenth century Vilnius/Vilna continued to play the role of the largest center of Jewish culture and spiritual life. Suffice to mention the famous printing house of the Romm family, where the Babylonian

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Talmud was published. Jewish printing houses also issued books in other languages, including Lithuanian. Alongside the orthodox trends, the movement of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) played a significant role. At Vilnius University, the Jews could study medicine and sometimes the natural sciences; somewhat later, the only Jewish Institute for Teachers in the Empire was founded in this city. From 1860 to 1880 the Hebrew weekly Ha-Karmel (Fruit Garden) was published in Vilnius, in 1892 the famous library of Mattityahu Strashun was founded, and beginning in 1904 a daily newspaper was published. The Vilna Jewry gave the world the sculptor Mark Antokolski, the violinist Jasha Heifetz, many writers in Hebrew and in Yiddish, not to mention organizers of religious life, doctors, journalists, and state and social activists not only of Lithuania but also of other countries, including Israel. One can even say that Israel to a great degree is the product of Jewish Vilna since from the beginning of the twentieth century Vilna was the main center of Zionism in the Russian Empire. The originality of Jewish life was better preserved in the poor but intimate Vilna ghetto than anywhere else; this tradition played a major role in the founding of the nation state. On the other hand, it was precisely in Vilnius that the concept of cultural autonomization of the Diaspora Jews was elaborated, and in 1897 the Bund was founded — a socialist party that used Yiddish in its activity. Vilna Yiddish was the normative idiom: the city became the symbolic capital of the culture created in that language. Particularly significant was the establishment of a Jewish national theater in Yiddish: the Vilna troupe, constituted in 1916, performed successfully in different countries the play Der Dibuk (The Dybbuk; 1920) by S. An-Ski (Solomon Rapaport). Although in Vilnius, as in the rest of Europe, there was a long tradition of perceiving Jews as the mysterious and demonic Other, and though anti-Semitism was on the rise in the Russian State from the end of the nineteenth century, the coexistence of Jews with other ethnic groups was far more peaceful here than in the South of the Empire or in central Poland. Politically (for instance at the Duma elections), the Jews worked together with Lithuanians and Belorussians. There were also examples of common cultural initiatives, such as exhibitions, music events, etc. (see Atamukas 94–113). The national movements of other groups undoubtedly influenced both the Zionist movement and the development of Yiddish culture. This peculiar period in the life of Vilnius ended with World War I. With the downfall of the Russian Empire, the Polish and Lithuanian national movements achieved their goal: independence was restored. But now the two independent countries found themselves at once in a protracted conflict. The federalist idea promoted by Joseph Piłsudski, the head of the Polish state, failed. In 1920, Vilnius was taken over by the Polish army that ousted the Lithuanians, and the city became a provincial locality on the border, although it retained the memories of its time as a capital. The Lithuanian border was closed until 1938. The Lithuanian state continued to stake out claims for Vilnius as its capital during the entire interwar period of twenty years: Kaŭnas, where the government was seated, acquired the peculiar status of a “temporary capital.” Belarus became a Soviet republic with all the consequences thereof, and “Litvakia” — the territory inhabited by Lithuanian Jews — was divided between Poland, Lithuania, and the Belorussian Soviet Republic, which maintained almost no relationship among themselves. At that time, the cultural dialogue of the city completely disintegrated into several competing monologues, the principal ones being Polish and Lithuanian. The Vilnius myth, as well as the Catholic myth of Our Lady of Ostra Brama, were used in diametrically opposed political discourses. In the literature of independent Lithuania (Balys Sruoga, Jonas Aistis, Antanas Miškinis),

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Vilnius was described as the imprisoned city: the roots of this imprisonment were traced back to the times of the Union when Vilnius was in the hands of the aristocracy and the foreign language– speaking Polish Church, and became alienated from its surroundings. Many verses and political satires called for the liberation of Vilnius. It is curious, however, that the flair of “alienation” did not disappear: Miškinis’s popular poem Keturi miestai (The Four Cities; 1938) proclaimed as the capital of an ideal future Lithuania not the liberated Vilnius but some imaginary city of Naujapilis. The Polish official myth and official political rhetoric insisted upon the eternal and unbreakable connection of Wilno with the Polish state, resurrected heroically and almost miraculously by Piłsudski. The city’s past, especially at the time of Romanticism, was viewed as preparation for this resurrection (the fact that Piłsudski was born in the region and knew the Polish Romantics by heart acquired a particular significance). This triumphant discourse, however, was being undermined by hints of doubt and anticipation of a future catastrophe. The mythopoetic image of Wilno was supplemented by the socially critical, the naturalistic, as well as the ironic and grotesque (as in the works of poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński). Although many constraints disappeared after the downfall of the Russian Empire, the city’s cultural life developed almost exclusively in Polish. It was fairly rich and lively if one takes into account the restored university, theaters, conservatory, literary evenings at the so-called “Konrad’s cell,” exhibitions of modern art, cabarets, and so on. In 1937 there were 114 newspapers and magazines published in Vilnius, of them 74 Polish, 16 Jewish, 12 Belorussian, 9 Lithuanian, and 3 Russian. Aside from this, however, non-Polish cultures in Vilnius were marginal and isolated. Characteristically, Lithuanian or Jewish authors who lived in Vilnius at that time describe their cultural enclaves only (see Ciċenas, esp. 157–190; Dawidowicz). Lithuanian and Belorussian scientific societies as well as Lithuanian and Belorussian schools still existed, and there were also a Lithuanian bookstore and a theater “Vaidila” that performed in Lithuanian, but both Lithuanians and Belorussians — especially after 1930 — faced more and more visible restrictions. The famous institute YIVO founded in 1925 for the study of Yiddish and of the local Jewish cultural tradition, folklore, and ethnography, became a unique phenomenon of the Vilnius/Vilna cultural topography; it existed in an atmosphere of isolation and later amidst growing anti-Semitism. We can also mention examples of cultural interaction. Vilnius’s dialogical tradition was supported by the still active movement of krajowcy and by some other groups. The Institute for the Scientific Studies of Eastern Europe (1929–1940) fully realized the variegated and polycultural character of the former Grand Duchy territory. A group of young Polish poets called Żagary (Lithuanian for “brushwood”) was very critical of Polish nationalism: one of its members, Czesław Miłosz, who still calls himself “the last citizen of the Grand Duchy,” became in time the symbol of a Polish-Lithuanian amalgam, just as Mickiewicz was in the nineteenth century. In the Jewish cultural sphere, Żagary’s role was played by the group Jung Vilne (Abraham Sutzkever and others). Lithuanian painters Jurgis Kairiūkštis and Vladas Drėma belonged, in essence, not only to Lithuanian but also to Polish Modernism. On the whole, however, narrowly nationalistic discourses and mutual alienation ran rampant. These developments became a prelude to the catastrophe that befell Vilnius in 1940. The bulldozer of Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation wrought deep changes in the city’s image and forced its citizens into a position more difficult than ever in the city’s history.

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The Vilnius population changed almost entirely. The Jewish community perished, the majority of Poles were forced to leave, and many Russians arrived; the city’s ethnic composition changed significantly as a result. Though the city was populated mostly by Lithuanians, for many years after the war they were immigrants in their own capital. Only a small fraction of the inhabitants had a long-standing connection with Vilnius or with its immediate surroundings; the rest moved in from Kaŭnas and from other Lithuanian towns and villages (a small number of Belorussians migrated there as well). Although the Vilnius myth was important for many residents, they had fairly vague ideas about the city’s traditions and about city life in general. Only the new generations (dominant nowadays) born in Vilnius, became intimately connected with the city. After Poland’s downfall (1939) and before the first Soviet occupation (1940), when independent Lithuania achieved its goal and acquired its historic capital, Vilnius went through a brief period of Lithuanization. Lithuania’s official ideology (much like Poland’s) proclaimed a monoethnic state as the highest end of historic development. Vilnius had to go back to the Lithuanian language and to a “purely Lithuanian” culture. This project was nearly as chimerical as it would be if one tried to return all of Dublin to the Gaelic language. In literature, however, this idea underwent certain corrections. A half-official poet Bernardas Brazdžionis, who wrote the epic poem Kunigaikščių miestas (The City of Princes; 1939) about Vilnius, acknowledged that everybody was important in it: a Lithuanian, a Russian, a Jew, a German and a Belorussian. Characteristically, a Pole was absent from his list. The Soviet ideology of “friendship among all peoples” placed this enthocentric paradigm under an official ban (although Lithuanian Communist authorities supported it to a certain extent). It resurfaced again after Lithuania’s independence was restored in 1990. However, in democratic Lithuania this paradigm turned out to be much weaker than in the authoritarian Lithuania of 1939– 40. National minorities, including Poles and Russians, live now side by side in Vilnius, coexisting better than they have since the times of the Grand Duchy. Part of the credit goes to the Vilnius tradition that has always influenced its citizens, even if not openly. Vilnius’s heterogeneity contributed to the city’s “peculiarity” even in Soviet times. Though after the war the city was half-destroyed, its Gothic, Baroque, and Classical monuments survived, and so did its Orthodox churches. Only the Jewish ghetto disappeared, together with its famous Big Synagogue (its shell was razed already in Soviet times). Later, by the end of the Soviet period, this neighborhood was partly restored, although its Jewish past was passed over in silence. Despite these losses, the city’s multilayered architectural image made it more humane, more suitable for a dignified life than Minsk, Kaliningrad, or even Moscow. Vilnius never succumbed fully to Soviet standardization. Even the literature of Socialist Realism took this feature of Vilnius into consideration. Later, the authors of the new generation who rejected the Zhdanov-style stereotypes (Judita Vaičiūnaitė, for instance) created a genuine cult of the “old Vilnius,” discovering gradually for themselves and for their readers not only the city’s architecture but also the multicultural past linked to this architecture. Their work was paralleled in Poland (in more mature artistic form) by the nostalgic literature connected with the traditions of pre-war Wilno: Tadeusz Konwicki, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, and, in the Polish emigration, Czesław Miłosz. Within the Soviet Union, Vilnius, like Tallinn and, to a degree, Tbilisi, played the role of a decentralizing city. Especially after 1956, it was the transmission channel for Western as well as Polish liberalizing influence. The best jazz in the country was performed in Vilnius (by Vyacheslav

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Ganelin’s trio). The city also boasted a school of art and graphics that tended toward Surrealism; unusual movies were produced here; and by the end of the Soviet period a still-extant theatrical Avant-garde movement was crystallized, which gave the world a first-rate master, Eimuntas Nekrošius. Joyce and Borges, banned in Russia and in almost every other Soviet republic, were translated into Lithuanian. Young philosophers connected with Vilnius University (the school of Eugenijus Meškauskas,) handled Marxism more freely than was done in other official institutions in Russia. Finally, the artistic Bohemian crowd that disappeared at the end of the 1930s, became an important factor of city life; more recently, it has been trying (with moderate success) to come up with postmodern codices of life and work. All these variegated cultural trends touched upon and interacted with the nationalistic and Catholic dissent. The human rights movement in Lithuania was almost as visible as it was in Russia, and the political underground was even stronger, though significantly narrower in range. The experience of Vilnius’s relative openness was important for people from Moscow and Leningrad: Joseph Brodsky, for example, dedicated to Vilnius his poems “Lithuanian Divertissement” and “Lithuanian Notturno” (Collected Poems 41 and 215). For many, Vilnius was the “third city of the Empire,” opposed to its two bureaucratic capitals (curiously, Vilnius played the same role in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century). Vilnius’s culture created a necessary counterbalance to the Lithuanian “peasant” culture with its tendency toward isolationism and the archaic. Just as before (although to a lesser degree) not only ethnic Lithuanians but also people of other nationalities, of different languages, contributed to this culture. Thus, the Vyacheslav Ganelin Trio was Russian-Jewish. The Vilnius theatrical Avant-garde nurtured well-known Russian directors (now working in Moscow) such as Kama Ginkas and Roman Viktiuk. Vilnius also gave an important Polish poet Alicja Rybałko and a Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich writing in Russian. The Vilnius tradition of cultural intersection and mutual reencoding continued as well; thus, Rybałko’s poetry interacted with Lithuanian poetry, and the director Rimas Tuminas created a brilliant stage rendition (with Lithuanian actors) of one of Kanovich’s novels. This polycultural tradition still coexists strangely with a counter-tradition of alienation, cultural monologism, and denial, which will, one hopes, gradually die away as Vilnius returns to its status as a cosmopolitan European capital. The role that the Lithuanian national movement played in the process that resulted in the collapse of the USSR is widely acknowledged. Still, it should be noted that Vilnius itself, with its cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, contributed significantly to this process. Lithuanian culture is only now creating a narrative that takes fully into account the remarkable features of its historical center. We could recall in this context another Vilnius myth embodied in the city’s coat-of-arms, banned by the Soviet regime, which represents the figure of St. Christopher carrying Christ over the waters. According to a popular but hardly reliable interpretation, the origins of this coat-ofarms go back to pagan times, and it depicts some local hero and his wife. We can read this coatof-arms also in the spirit of a modernized Baroque rhetoric, as an allegory representing the single Vilnius culture carried through centuries by its multilingual inhabitants. Translated by Tatyana Buzina

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The Tartu/Tallinn Dialectic in Estonian Letters and Culture Tiina A. Kirss, with a postscript by Jüri Talvet The opposition between Tallinn and Tartu, the coastal capital city and the university town located in the heartland on the river Emajõgi, is a dynamic cultural myth of respectable vintage in Estonia. As a binary opposition located in the half-lit regions of popular consciousness, it is a curious piece of mental furniture intelligible to even the moderately educated inhabitants of Estonia. It has sufficient currency in the folklore of everyday life that it allows some other dynamics of internal difference, and other struggles for influence or dominance among “topographical nodes” to recede into obscurity. The daily conversance with this dialectic at least partly accounts for its discursive power in journalism in the newly independent republic with its competitive image-making and a burgeoning tourist industry. The consciousness of regional and local identity is also intensified by Estonia’s entry into the European Union, a process that involves administrative rezoning and “remapping” on multiple levels. In the first part of this article, I propose to outline the historical dynamics of this paradigmatic opposition in Estonian cultural life and letters, illustrating its relationship to the rhetoric of nationalism and to cultural institutions directed toward nationalist ends. Arguing that the analysis of memoirs and autobiographical writings provides more illuminating material for deciphering the discursive function of the Tartu-Tallinn dialectic than literary representations of the two cities in canonical texts, I will then read examples from the writings of Hella Wuolijoki and Artur Adson to track moments in the mental mapping of these “topographical nodes.” Further, I will suggest that the Tartu-Tallinn dialectic historically and currently resonates with hesitations about the role of internal and external “others” in the construction of the Estonian Republic’s identity and public image, and is a chosen signifier for accommodating those ambivalences. The origins of the construction of the sparring between the two cities separated by a “mere” 200 kilometers are hard to pinpoint, though there are several compelling historical antecedents in the 1930s, when this opposition crystallized into a stable, paradigmatic formation of cultural and political discourse. In probing the dynamics of the binary opposition and the mutual rhetorical construction of the difference between Tartu and Tallinn, it is, of course, impossible to chart the original positions. Which city assumed the role of “self-identical positive term” and which one the role of the “other,” which one was or is redressing its perceived inferiority or marginalization through the more quotidian power struggles between politicians, journalists, and leaders of the Writers’ Union? Tartu’s intellectual image and identity seems at first blush to be more coherent, because it hosts an older cultural institution, the University of Tartu, to which Tallinn can offer no single counterpart, despite various Soviet efforts to diffuse Tartu’s symbolic power, including situating the Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences in Tallinn. Since the late 1990s, budget-driven plans to consolidate institutions of higher learning have posed a greater implicit threat to Tallinn, where the Pedagogical University, Academy of Art, the Conservatory of Music, and the Tallinn

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Technical University have been joined by a proliferating number of smaller institutions modeled on Western colleges, than to Tartu, where the university holds uncontested intellectual authority. During the first independent Estonian republic (1919–40), pride in an “Estonian university” overcame the university’s prior history as an institution controlled by hegemonic foreign powers: since its establishment in 1632 by King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, it was administratively a Baltic German institution, and later a Russian czarist-imperial one. It was only after 1874 that the Estonian language became an officially recognized subject of study there; in the 1870s the number of students of avowed Estonian descent (some listed themselves as Germans as a sign of upward mobility) fluctuated between 2 and 14; in the 1880s, between 5 and 27 (Karjahärm and Sirk 43–44). Only between 1905 and 1914 did the numbers of ethnic Estonians start to climb, with the (male) Estonians reaching 41.7% of the total student population by 1918 (Karjahärm and Sirk 155). Perhaps the paradox of the lack of access to university education for the Estonian native population was one factor that inspired Friedrich Robert Faehlmann, Friedrich Drëma, Reinhold Kreutzwald, and a few interested others to establish in 1838 the Learned Estonian Society in Tartu, which was instrumental in the movement of “national awakening” (ärkamisaeg). This period was temporally centered on the 1860s, and geographically in the heartland university town; its symbolic zenith was the first Estonian song festival held there in 1869. A second wave of nationalist consciousness at the turn of the century was specifically dubbed the “Tartu Renaissance.” It was during this period that the deliberate cultivation of a second geographical locus for nationalist thought and strategy in Tallinn first set up the structure for a Tartu-Tallinn competition. The naming and claiming of a “Tartu Renaissance” and the role of two newspapers, Postimees (The Postman) in Tartu and Teataja (The Messenger) in Tallinn, in the early construction of the opposition deserve closer analysis. The term “Tartu Renaissance” is attributed to the psychiatrist and man of letters Dr. Juhan Luiga. It gained currency among the fiercely patriotic fraternity the Eesti Üliõpilaste Selts (Estonian Students’ Union), established in 1870 in conscious dissent from the customs of the Baltic-German Burschenschaften. In the words of the professor of medicine Aadu Lüüs: “We may record the beginning of this era when Jaan Tõnisson came to be editor-in-chief of the newspaper Postimees in 1896; it ended with the beginning of the First World War, in 1914. Of the members of the Estonian Students’ Union, those who formed and participated in this era were Jaan Tõnisson, Villem Reiman, Oskar Kallas and Heinrich Koppel. They were the chief actors, so to speak” (Lüüs 143). Key events in the Tartu Renaissance, again according to Lüüs, included the seeding and nurture of many cultural institutions with nationwide range and import — agricultural societies, the temperance movement, credit unions, an Estonian-language theater, an ethnographic museum — all championed and fostered by Tõnisson. The opening of the Vanemuise theatre in Tartu in 1906, the enthusiastic dispatching of the Estonian delegates to the first Russian Duma in the spring of 1906, and the emergence of a spectrum of moderate options to pursue political strategies for nationalist ends from the crucible of the 1905 revolutions, forged an Estonian path through the increasingly coercive bureaucratic labyrinth of the period of Russification (1870s to World War I). Though Tartu was Tõnisson’s home and chosen headquarters, it would be a myth to limit the scope of the Tartu Renaissance to Tartu, just as Tartu cannot truly appropriate the nationalist awakening of the 1860s. Võru, the home of epic-writer Kreutzwald, Pärnu, site of J. W. Jannsen’s newspaper, Perno Postimees (The Perno Mailman), and Viljandi, home of C. R. Jakobson and

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his newspaper Sakala (named after a province in southern Estonia) played pivotal roles in this renaissance, not to mention the community of Estonian intellectuals in St. Petersburg, and the young Estonian men educated at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The use and appropriation of the term “Tartu Renaissance” by the Estonian Students’ Union betrays the latter’s efforts to construct a prehistory of the achievement of national independence, in which they clearly played a strong institutional and ideological role. When Konstantin Päts set out in 1902 to found Tallinn’s first Estonian-language daily newspaper, Teataja (The Messenger), he was consciously building a foothold for national consciousness alongside Tartu, where the intense intellectual atmosphere and close collaborations of the 1860s had spearheaded a national awakening, although the ideological schism and the repressive policies of Russification had all but dried it up by the 1870s. Päts’s newspaper, renamed Tallinna Teataja (The Tallinn Messenger) after its reopening subsequent to the 1905 crackdown, adopted the nationalist ideals enunciated by Jaan Tõnisson and Villem Reiman in Postimees but also stressed the economic and social dimensions of the pursuit of Estonian autonomy, including the self-interest of the individual and class interests. The Tallinn municipal government and various special-interest societies provided additional loci for the gatherings of nationalist-minded intellectuals in Tallinn. At stake in the competitive and complementary discussions in Tartu and Tallinn was the question of whether Estonian national identity should be centered in urban or rural (village) culture. This debate emerged at the turn of the century, when the socialists and the Young Estonia movement became recognizable players in public discourse. In the Tallinn Estonian circles there were supporters of both urban-based and village-based nationalism, though the question was not posed in categorical terms (see Karjahärm and Sirk 220). For the Tartu intellectuals, led by Tõnisson and Reiman, the peasant (talupoeg) remained the backbone of the Estonian nation: a sense of national identity would persist as long as the land belonged to the indigenous farmer, a goal toward which Tõnisson directed his political strategies. If the foundation of the national economy was to be agricultural, the content and substance of national culture was to be “maakultuur” (the culture of the land), in direct antithesis to city-based “high culture,” which was seen as a source of vice and evil (Karjahärm and Sirk 220). The Young Estonia movement, led by the Tartu-based socialist intellectuals Gustav Suits and Friedebert Tuglas, both of whom spent a decade in exile in Finland and France during the repressions following the 1905 revolution, saw no such overt pollution in city culture. Regarding “maakultuur” as narrow-minded and isolationist, they advocated European cosmopolitanism as the basis of the Estonian cultural flowering: Let us be Estonians, but let us become Europeans! The sharp polemic between Tõnisson’s and Reiman’s conservative agrarian cultural politics and the Young Estonians, both “Tartu-based,” can be traced in the journalism of the years preceding the Estonian independence in 1918. As Toomas Karjahärm and Väino Sirk point out, “Actually, the ideological disagreements between Tartu and Tallinn, the so-called “men of ideals” and “men of commerce” were not as sharp as they were represented at the time and thereafter” (212). By the 1930s, however, the Tartu vs. Tallinn opposition extended beyond discussion circles and political interest groups; it became a preferred signifier in literary politics as well, when the location of key cultural institutions — the headquarters of the Estonian Writers’ Union and its literary periodical, Looming (Creation), were the subject of intense debate. In addition to an unavoidable mixture of personal rivalries and

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animosities, these discussions about the symbolic geography of cultural institutions echoed the parliamentary and journalistic rhetoric of the day. We should also mention that in the closing years of the first Estonian Republic, referred to as vaikiv ajastu (the era of silence), during the right-wing bid for power by the Veterans of the Estonian War of Independence (vabadussõdalased), and president Konstantin Päts and Prime Minister Eenpalu’s consequent imposition of greater centralized control over the press, freedom of speech, and the academic freedom of the University of Tartu under the 1938 Constitution, the Tartu-Tallinn dialectic intensified and became significantly more bitter. A fascinating fictional representation of Tartu during this era, which embroiled the Estonian Students’ Union in sharp internal polemic, is provided by Jaan Kross’s 1995 novel Mesmeri ring (Mesmer’s Circle). The various ruling powers have exploited the polarities of provincial and metropolitan, heartland vs. coastal locations with unmitigated ruthlessness, adjusting policies to secure the geographical advantages of Tallinn as a choice military port, and suppressing or shutting down the power of Tartu as a center of intellectual authority. In her laconically worded memoirs of the World War I era, Elsbet Parek, returning at the age of fourteen to her birthplace, Tallinn, from Tartu in the summer of 1916, summarizes the contrasting effects of war on the streetscapes in Tallinn and Tartu: “In Tartu one could see primarily refugees and the wounded. Tallinn was full of soldiers, mostly naval personnel; that was the dominant picture in the streets. New fortifications for the military port were being built continuously. The overall impression in Tallinn was Russian language and naval uniforms” (13). Parek is well placed to contrast the two milieux: as the daughter of an actress who was part of a group of “defectors” from the Tartu Vanemuise theater troupe because of internal dissensions and sought alternative employment in the Tallinn theatre world, she was multilingual and culturally literate without belonging to the political or academic elite. After completing her secondary education in Tallinn’s Commercial High School for Girls, Parek attended the University of Tartu from 1922 to 1926; in the second volume of her memoirs, she provides a measured and revealing perspective on a category of Tartu students who did not aspire to academic careers but were, in the words of August Annist, kultuuritahtelised (intentionally cultured). Many of them, including critic Daniel Palgi, gathered around Gustav Suits’s Akadeemiline kirjanduse selts (Academic Literary Society) and were members of the coeducational literary-cultural fraternity Veljesto. During the Soviet era, the deliberate muting of cultural institutions in all but one metropolis in each Soviet Republic made Tartu a safe backwater exile for the brilliant semiotician Yuri Lotman from Leningrad, who proceeded to put Tartu more firmly on the map for western intellectuals than the official capital, Tallinn, would ever be (see Jüri Talvet’s postscript below). In addition, Lotman became a revered public intellectual among Estonians through his skillful mediations of Russian culture in a series of radio and television broadcasts in the 1980s. The location of the Tartu School of Semiotics also facilitated the emergence of a more cosmopolitan paradigm for analyzing the dynamic interaction of the Estonian and Russian cultures, a paradigm that transcends the rhetoric of narrow nationalisms while validating impulses to protect ethnic and linguistic particularities in a colonial situation. Lotman’s semiotics of culture, disseminated through lectures and texts at Tartu University, shaped several prominent Estonian cultural analysts and literary historians, among them Peeter Torop and Tiit Hennoste. Even more important for the everyday life and popular consciousness of the late Soviet period was that northern Estonia and Tallinn were able

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to receive Finnish television and radio broadcasts without interference throughout the 1980s; the signals could not reach Tartu, however, further supporting perceptions that Tartu was provincial and inward-looking whereas Tallinn was cosmopolitan and outward-looking. Recalling the factors that influenced his own departure from Tartu to pursue a degree in literary study, critic Oskar Kruus contrasts nostalgically Tartu’s lively cultural life in the 1930s with its state-orchestrated cultural impoverishment in the 1950s: Of those who graduated from the university in 1953, there were many who became Tallinnites, but they did not go to any café, nor did they interact socially in other ways; perhaps the Bolshevic mania for mistrust and suspicion had borne fruits. Understandably, in learning to get used to a strange city we would have needed, of course, the support of a circle of acquaintances and the social habits of university days. However, Tartu traditions had weakened a great deal; during our university years fraternities (korporatsioonid) were strictly forbidden, and we did not dare create underground organizations. The officially-mandated disciplinary “discussion circles” within the university did not create much feeling of fellowship; rather, from arguments in those settings a cloud of silent and mutual resentment gradually grew. At any rate, I have read Bernard Kangro’s Tartu-novels with a strong feeling of envy: with what camaraderie people could associate in the 1930s! (30)

The Tartu novels mentioned by Kruus in this revealing passage constitute an elegiac trilogy set in the Tartu of the 1930s, written and published in the early 1960s by Bernard Kangro, a member of the “Arbujad” literary group, who went into exile in Sweden in 1944. In addition to publishing prolifically prose, poetry, and criticism, Kangro was the founder of the Stockholm-based publishing house Eesti kirjanike kooperatiiv (Estonian Writers’ Cooperative) and, until his death in 1994, the editor-in-chief of the cultural periodical Tulimuld (Fire-Earth). Kangro’s novels about Tartu constitute a nostalgic monument to the atmosphere or aura of the 1930s, mapped against an imaginary cityscape. Quite tellingly, there has not been a comparable literary monument to Tallinn in diaspora prose. Granted, Karl Ristikivi’s “Tallinn trilogy” — Tuli ja raud (Fire and Iron; 1938); Õige mehe koda (A Righteous Man’s Dwelling; 1940); Rohtaed (Herbarium; 1942) — predated his own exile in 1942, and constitutes a crucial mapping of rural-urban relations in the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, Ristikivi’s route from the geographically grounded trilogy to the atopic paradigmatic modernist novel, Hingede öö (All Souls’ Night) in 1953, led to the discarding of the nostalgia-freight and, with it, of the realist habits of landscape description. The most significant literary representation of Tallinn, rich in prosopopoeia and other modes of figural geography, is Jaan Kross’s four-volume novel about the sixteenth century chronicler Balthasar Russow, Kolme katku vahel (Between Three Plagues; 1970–79), in which Tallinn, personified as a richly diverse and multicultural collective subject, often steals the show from the novel’s protagonist. In contemporary Estonia, what I would cautiously call the Tallinn-Tartu dialectic continues to smolder under the surface of popular discourse, sometimes emerging in playful remarks or allusions in which intellectual or public figures align themselves with the “Tartu spirit” (Tartu vaim) or espouse the brasher commercial and political ethos of Tallinn. To the outsider, even the tourist who has made a thorough acquaintance with both cities, this dynamic of rival allegiances may appear contextless, an elusive matter of conversational nuance, so internal to the Estonian cultural system as to be virtually untranslatable. However, it has, unarguably, complex meanings associated

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with alternative, potentially complementary clusters of values, residing in mappable geographical nodes. The rhetorical appeal of this polarity continues to be exploited in contemporary journalistic discourse. The Estonian press recently noted key departures among the thirty-something “generation of winners” from the stress of the fast-paced and business-minded Tallinn to the calmer, more soul-enhancing Tartu, an option viewed with a twinge of condescension as “opting out” and, on a more positive note, as a conscious choice in favor of a life focused on creativity and the intellect. The plans to move the Ministry of Education to Tartu (completed in 2001) provoked ripples of semi-serious discussion as to whether Tartu should become the capital city of the republic as well. These shifts in institutional geography are driven both by economic and administrative pragmatism, and by a conscious appropriation of the Tartu-Tallinn myth for political ends. On a more humorous note, Mart Kivastik staged in December 1999 a “tragic farce” entitled The Tartu Spirit at the Vanemuise Theater, with singer and performance artist Peeter Volkonski in the title role of the “Spirit.” The Spirit dies in the first ten minutes, reappearing as a detective who falls in love with the Spirit’s widow and takes long, romantic walks with her on the Toome Hill. In an interview in Postimees of December 30, 1999, Kivastik admitted that the play could only have been staged in Tartu: “If we performed ‘Tartu Spirit’ at a theatre in Tallinn, things would get mean. Why should the Tallinn Theater make fun of the Tartu spirit? Only people from Tartu are allowed to do this” (4). Asked about the precise temporal and spatial location of The Tartu Spirit, Kivastik responded that its home is in the writers’ clubs of the 1930s, the era when professors and writers lived in the beautiful Tähtvere section of town. He added with a twist of Soviet-era nostalgia, that the heyday of the spirit of the 1960s, centered in the Pälson student residence and the Püssirohu bar is past. Evoking much-ridiculed changes in both cityscapes over recent years, young writer and self-appointed bad boy Karl-Martin Sinijärv deliberately contradicts the perception that new ideas and energy come from the entrepreneurial spirit of Tallinn, while Tartu is the bastion of intellectual virtues and the political conservatism of statesman and newspaper editor Jaan Tõnisson. As he wrote in Postimees (December 30, 1999), “Everything the least bit progressive that has existed in Estonia was born out of the Tartu spirit. […] The Tartu spirit is spiritus in every way. It is no accident that Tartu’s highest building is flask-shaped, while Tallinn’s is shaped like a guillotine” (5). II As a topographical node in the field of Estonian culture, Tartu can be seen as a crossing point for several vectors: a marker for the linguistic border between southern and northern dialects of the Estonian language, and a porous boundary between rural and urban cultures. As suggested above, Tartu emerged earlier than Tallinn as the center of discussion and strategy for the movement of nationalist consciousness-raising, the 1860s “Era of Awakening.” Tartu became in subsequent decades the site of negotiations between a “nativist,” village-based model for culture (referred to by its critics as pastlakultuur) and a will toward European cosmopolitanism as articulated in the manifesto of the Young Estonia movement. This debate was not polarized neatly along geographical lines, but occurred within the crucible of Tartu, a fact in itself significant. Likewise, the coastal location of Tallinn has, throughout its history, created the conditions for lively commercial and cul-

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tural connections with the world outside Estonia, from Finland and Scandinavia to continental Europe and points beyond. As a corollary to this role, Tallinn functions in more contemporary terms as a filter for outside influences and as a city in which the interface between the Russian majority and the Estonian minority population has historically been more palpable than elsewhere inland. A closer look at Tartu and Tallinn, particularly through the autobiographical writings of intellectuals from the first period of Estonian independence (1918–40), may reveal some of the lines of energy along which the opposition was constituted between these two topographical nodes. Such an inquiry recognizes, of course, that autobiographical writings are highly mediated. Landscape descriptions of significant locations must be seen in the context of the rhetorical project of the autobiographers, their construction of subjectivity, and the interaction between implied author and implied addressee. Thus the meanings of a particular location can seldom, if ever, be read in a straightforward documentary manner, only as inscriptions of that subjectivity, with particular attention to the positioning of the subject in relation to the locale. In what follows I will focus on the role of Tallinn and Tartu as topographical nodes, and their paradigmatic opposition in relation to Estonian culture’s constant struggle to define itself in the context of external and internal others. I will focus also on the self-definition of literary groupings, particularly in the 1930s, and the implications of their “site choice” and symbiosis with one or the other location. Documentary literary history must qualify Karl-Martin Sinijärv’s provocative attribution of cultural innovation to Tartu. Major literary groupings of the twentieth century were located in both Tartu and Tallinn, and in most cases, spent time in both cities. The regional roots of the leaders of these movements had doubtlessly an important bearing on the site choice. For intellectuals like Artur Adson, the journalist and chronicler of the Siuru group, who grew up in rural southern Estonia, Tartu provided the first mental map or model for a town, and his later autobiographical impressions of Tallinn are filtered through this initial encounter with urban reality. As Adson notes in his Siuru-Book, the bohemian Siuru group (which took its name from a magical bird in Estonian folklore) met during and immediately after World War I in poet Marie Under’s Tallinn salon (ironically on Old-Tartu Street) and staged public readings in Tallinn’s Estonia Theater. However, they also frequented Tartu’s cafés, and some of their more flamboyant members were implicated in a public scandal at the Vanemuise Theater during World War I. In a hilarious carnivalization of the Tallinn cityscape, Adson recounts the birth of Siuru in May 1917, with the members of the group seeking to place their headquarters in the empty Pikajala Tower that straddles one of the roads of access to Toompea, the upper part of Tallinn’s Old Town. To pay the rent, the poets proposed to sell off the considerable deposit of guano accumulated by the dynastic families of pigeons in the Tower’s upper floor (Adson 104). In Adson’s description, Siuru was nevertheless a nomadic group, with makeshift and mobile accommodations, and an inclination to take spontaneous “road trips” into the countryside and to other towns in Estonia, quite out of step with Under’s staid bourgeois residence. By contrast, the neoclassical group of poets Arbujad (Logomancers) of the 1930s was more thoroughly and consistently Tartu-based. This grouping of poets (Heiti Talvik, Betti Alver, Bernard Kangro, Paul Viiding, Uku Masing, August Sang, and Kersti Merilaas) crystallized at the university, emerging from the first generation of Estonian intellectuals to have received their entire education in a free, independent Estonia. In the first volume of her two-volume autobiography, written in prison during World War II, while awaiting the verdict of a German military court, Hella Wuolijoki provides a fascinating

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look at the mental map of urban and semi-urban Estonia at the turn of the century. Born Hella Murrik in Helme, southern Estonia, Wuolijoki lived part of her childhood in the border town of Valga and attended the prestigious Pushkin High School for Girls in Tartu (1901–04). The first volume sets her intellectual development in the context of Tõnisson’s nationalist thought and his charismatic role in gathering Estonian youth and catalyzing their nationalist formation. Although she later dissented sharply from Tõnisson’s views, her treatment of her Estonian roots and former mentor is respectful, even effusive. The description she gives of her school town, Tartu, stresses its multicultural and class diversity. Wuolijoki had not only a high tolerance for “otherness” but also a remarkable courage to cross cultural and ethnic boundaries, be they with schoolmates or with co-residents in a rooming house. The link between this aptitude for cross-cultural navigation and her eventual permanent choice of exile is a fertile nexus for further research. Her paradoxical reputation, suspended between the Estonian and Finnish literary canons, is rendered still complex by her Marxist convictions and her association with Bertolt Brecht. The position of (imprisoned) exile doubtlessly shapes her representation of “remembered landscapes” and the attendant explanatory frameworks in complex ways: Tartu was [at the turn of the century] the heart of Estonia. Schools and the university were there, the newspaper Postimees and Jaan Tõnisson; it was where the Young Estonia movement began. Most of those who were present at the creation of independent Estonia grew up there, the Estonia about which no one dared to dream There were other cities in Estonia as well: in northern Estonia, there was Tallinn, where the Russian state had founded large factories, but the city was governed by the old German city council, and the land surrounding it was marshy and poor for tilling. The people who lived there were those depicted by Tammsaare or a mysterious coastal folk about whom little was known in Southern Estonia. In prosperous Viljandimaa, Estonia’s breadbasket, and in Pärnumaa, where ships were built and where the entire commerce in flax was pursued between southern Estonia and England, Tallinn was always viewed with a bit of scorn. Viljandi and Pärnu gave rise to the movement of Estonian national awakening. […] But the schools were in Tartu, and they were the first thing we had to conquer before the people could slowly begin to take the land back from the Germans and from the czar. Only 40 years ago… (19)

In contrast to the more impressionistic perspectives on the Tartu cityscape found in the memoirs of Aadu Lüüs, Johan Kõpp, and Bernard Kangro, Wuolijoki firmly articulates the socioeconomic and material relations between the major Estonian towns and cities, by implication privileging these elements in the cities’ profiles. A Tallinn-Tartu axis, let alone a paradigmatic conflict between them, is as yet invisible. In her vision, at least four urban centers — Pärnu and Viljandi in addition to Tartu and Tallinn — circulate cultural and economic energies of vital importance. Tartu’s pivotal role revolves around its educational institutions. Wuolijoki rightly corrects the perception that this was primarily due to the University of Tartu (which was inaccessible to her for reasons of gender, in addition to other institutional barriers and challenges to Estonian students). Tartu’s high schools, where Russian was enforced as the language of instruction and extracurricular communication between students, were battlegrounds for the consciousness of ethnic and political identity. This explains Wuolijoki’s use of the embattled third person plural as she identifies passionately with Tõnisson’s struggle. Wuolijoki’s confident and unflappable stance towards her teachers, the

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Georgian physician Svili, her Polish and Russian aristocratic classmates, and the Chwolson and Liosko families where she was housed, reveal in the later chapters of the Tartu volume of her autobiography a heroic persona grounded in origins solidly “of the people,” a role she largely abandoned in later life. However, the construction of subjectivity in Wuolijoki’s autobiography allows a view of the great diversity in her high school milieu, and a model of how to transact it in a “cosmopolitan” manner, which is somewhat at odds with the conservative and inward-looking nationalism she considers formative. In his 1989 introduction to the first album of the revived cultural-literary fraternity, Veljesto (Wellesto), the Tallinn professor and linguist Mati Hint restates the importance of the “Tartu spirit” to the Estonian “national intellectuals’” sense of identity, using the rhetoric of purity of origins and rebirth: To every Estonian, Tartu means something very special. Tartu is the cradle of the Estonian national awakening. Across generations, Tartu has been the shaper of national consciousness. That has not been changed by the recent politics of “leveling” Tartu, which is as dangerous for us as the politics of leveling Estonia. Especially in Tartu, the spirit has opposed this shutting down more directly than anywhere else in Estonia […]. Tartu is the only larger Estonian city that is still Estonian, the internationalization of which has never been successfully completed, and hopefully never shall be. (95)

In the context of the “second National Awakening” of the late 1980s, the symbolic reappropriation of Tartu was a gesture of conscious resistance to Soviet metropolitan politics. The street demonstrations with the public display of the Estonian national flag in April 1988 were dubbed the “Tartu Spring,” with ironic reference to the aborted Prague Spring twenty years earlier, which virtually all Estonian university students watched at the time with awe and dread. Hint’s text participates in this reappropriation of Tartu, adding a crucial piece of political martyrology: Tartu was home to the martyred Soviet-era dissident Jüri Kukk. This reference positions Hint’s Tartu rhetoric in more than an intellectual-cultural register. He does not mention the overtly political demonstrations in Tallinn’s Hirvepark (Deer Park). Considering his own political affiliation with the more moderate People’s Front, his evocation of Tartu-centeredness and his erasure of the Tallinn pole of this historic dialectic is perhaps in responsive alignment with Prime Minister Mart Laar’s more explicit Tartu-centered politics, drawing on the historical legacy of the Estonian Students’ Union. Hint’s text points to the continued significance of a Tartu-Tallinn paradigm in Estonian letters and politics, which could more overtly enter public discourse in the glasnost era. In conclusion, the Tartu-Tallinn opposition may indeed have signified — and may continue to signify — a real struggle for the location of symbolic capital and cultural institutions as loci of power in Estonia. In contemporary terms, however, I would suggest that the rhetorical struggle between the two topographic nodes, visible in everyday speech, journalism, and the site choices and lifestyles of intellectuals, politicians, entrepreneurs, and upwardly mobile young people, has another palpable function. The evocation of the Tartu-Tallinn axis as a dialectic of options and values obscures other regional centers of energy where the current is more unpredictable and where the “others” are more threatening. This fear concerns primarily the complex problematics of the linguistic and civic integration of ethnic Russians into the Republic. The east-west route across

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the northern coast of Estonia (from Tallinn through the industrial towns of Kohtla-Järve, Sillamäe, and Kiviõli, to the border town of Narva) is the region where this problem most urgently demands attention, due to the demographic concentration there of ethnic Russians. There are, of course, other issues of “otherness,” including a brain drain to Western Europe and America and the fear of “decadent” and “unnecessary” Western ideologies, such as feminism. Deflecting attention from other centers, and from the borders to the center gives the illusion of insulating the culture from “outside influences” or “internal others” that it cannot assimilate. The Tallinn-Tartu vector is a historically familiar and well-traveled terrain; from the forging of the Tapa-Tartu railroad connection in 1878 to proposed improvements and widening of the Tartu-Tallinn highway, this is safe ground, far from borders, real or imagined. Ideologically and historically, the Tartu-Tallinn dialectic is another instance of järjepidevus, the cultural continuity with the conflicted, at times ugly but still gilded 1930s, to which politicians in the first Parliament of the new Republic returned in the early 1990s as precursor and prototype. Narva in the northeast and Võru in the southeast might thus be the most threatening “topographical nodes” in contemporary Estonia; the border town Narva, with a 97% Russian population, is a living iconic representation of the problem, how to come to terms with the most feared “other.” Võru, center for a flourishing “renaissance” of instruction and writing in the southern Estonian dialects and the Avant-garde movement of “ethnofuturism,” raises questions about “national unity” and the suppression of internal differences. Likewise, looking back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the contributions of St. Petersburg and Riga as cultural centers and communities for Estonian intellectuals in “near exile” fit awkwardly into the nationalist myth-making, since they represent accommodating and symbiotic models of coping with linguistic, ethnic, and cultural foreignness. Finally, as the administrative redrawing of local boundaries between counties (vallad) was discussed in earnest beginning in 2000 as part of the preparations for European Union membership, it is fair to say that there is considerable local anxiety about internal boundaries that continue to carry significant symbolic weight. Perhaps some of this anxiety can be defused, or at least redirected, by projecting it onto a known axis, using the already familiar opposition between two major topographical nodes, Tallinn and Tartu, without necessarily expressing a partisan view about either center. Future manifestations of this particularly vital cultural paradigm await the charting of writers, essayists, and literary historians in Estonia, whatever its future political destiny may be. Postscript on a Marginocentric Experiment: The Frontier School of Tartu (Jüri Talvet) The “Tartu-Moscow,” or just simply “Tartu School,” of structural semiotics, which emerged in the 1960s in the former Soviet Union is listed in several international dictionaries of literary and cultural theory. Its key figure, Yuri M. Lotman, is well known, although the last, “semiospheric” stage of his cultural philosophy (from the mid–1980s until his death) has received relatively little international attention. What has been missing, however, is a recognition that the School was a liminal phenomenon with roots in Tartu, where Yuri M. Lotman lived since 1950, amidst vernacular Estonian culture and language. He died soon after Estonia had regained its independence. It is little known also that Lotman, of Russian-Jewish origin and an admirer of Russian culture,

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defended in 1991 Estonia’s aspirations to become independent in “A Letter to Mistaken Friends,” his public reply to an attack on Estonian nationalism by a group of intellectuals, led, among others, by the venerable academician Dmitrii Likhachev in Moscow. Indeed, Estonia’s geopolitical as well as historical-cultural location constitutes one of Europe’s most obscure frontier zones between East and West. Its Finno-Ugric language had to submit for a long time to the dominant Indo-European cultures of Germans, Swedes, and Russians, and may have provided Lotman with a particularly keen sensibility for understanding borders as “mechanisms of dialogue.” As the main architect and leading philosopher of the Tartu School, Lotman’s main contribution to structural semiotics could well be his interpretation of culture as a continuous inter-dynamics of synchrony and diachrony, syntagmatic and paradigmatic patterns. Lotman became obsessed, especially in his last phase of research, with processes taking place in cultural border zones, which manifest high degrees of ambiguity and polysemantics, capable of creating explosions and subsequent leaps in human knowledge. He conceives of the “semiosphere” itself as an intersectional border area between the biosphere and the anthroposphere dominated by specifically human activity and its consequences. Some of Lotman’s last writings, for instance his article “Kaasaegsus Ida ja Lääne vahel” (Contemporaneity between East and West; 1992), clearly show that he preferred a universality deeply rooted in the ethnic and the individual, to a universality that political and economic power centers propagated. It is also evident that in the ideologically restricted and centralized Soviet system such a School could be conceived and exist only in a relatively liberalized and Western-oriented peripheral area like Estonia. Even so, the activities of the School were closely watched by the authorities. In 1968, at the peak of reprisals against dissidents, Lotman’s house was searched by the KGB. The activities and ideas of the School could be seen as epitomizing the ambivalence of borders; they developed in steady opposition to the dominant official Soviet ideology, defying its dogmatic precepts. With the exception of Lotman himself, none of the leading scholars of the School ever lived in Tartu or Estonia. Valeri Ivanov, Isaak Revzin, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pyatigorsky, Boris Uspenski, and others contributed to its activities from Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). But Lotman himself did have followers and collaborators in Estonia. The Department of Russian Literature at Tartu University, which he led between 1960 and 1980, was the very center and main organ of the School. From 1964 onward, it brought together scholars from other parts of the Soviet Union to Summer Schools at Kääriku, a small town to the South of Tartu, and it launched the series Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign System Studies), the School’s principal publication, with Lotman as its editor-in-chief. “Sign System Studies” was published in Russian, almost annually, along with another series, Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Works on Russian and Slavic Philology), to which Lotman and his collaborators frequently contributed. Among them was his wife Zara Mints, professor in the same department. All Estonian or Estonian-Russian scholars directly linked with the School were initially Lotman’s students in the Department of Russian Literature. Thus, Igor Chernov published in 1976 parts of his doctoral dissertation under the title of Iz lektsii po teoreticheskomu literaturovedeniyu (From Lectures on Theoretical Literary Science), and he compiled in the same year an anthology of texts by the Russian formalists, Hrestomatiya po teoreticheskomu literaturovedeniyu (An Anthology of Theoretical Literary Science). After the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1992, Chernov became the founding Head of the Department of Semiotics at Tartu University.

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Another close disciple of Lotman, Peeter Torop, the current Head of the Department of Semiotics, defended his doctoral degree on the theory of translation in 1995 at Helsinki University, and has since then published books on translation theory — Total’ny perevod (Total Translation; 1995) — text theory, and cultural semiotics — Kultuurimärgid (Signs of Culture; 2000) —, in both Russian and Estonian. Yuri Lotman’s elder son, Mikhail Lotman, has followed in his father’s footsteps studying Russian verse systems and teaching literary theory and semiotics both at Tartu University and the Estonian Institute of Humanities in Tallinn. Although Yuri Lotman never wrote himself in the Estonian language, several of his writings were translated and first published in Estonian. Thus, he wrote a manual on Russian Romanticism for Estonian schools, Vene kirjandus: Õpik IX klassile (Russian Literature: A Manual for the Ninth Grade), and contributed to a manual on Russian nineteenth-century Realism (Lotman et al., Vene kirjandus; 1989), of which his wife was the principal author. Lotman’s monograph on Pushkin’s life and work, Aleksandr Sergejevitš Puškin, also appeared in Estonian in 1986. He wrote introductory essays for the Estonian translations of Voltaire’s short stories and Mikhail Bakhtin’s selected works. Several of Lotman’s shorter articles on Estonian culture were published in Estonian cultural magazines and weeklies. His lecture cycle about the history of Russian culture has enjoyed a great popularity on Estonian television. He was a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union. The Russian publishing house Aleksandra in Tallinn was the first to come out with a threevolume selection of Lotman’s articles on semiotics and culture, Izbrannye trudy (Selected Works; 1992–1993). Estonian translations of Lotman’s semiotic work were, however, slow to come about. Until the 1980s this was because of ideological restrictions and because Estonians interested in semiotics could read his texts in Russian. Kultuurisemiootika (The Semiotics of Culture), a selection of Lotman’s articles in Estonian appeared in 1990; another selection, Semiosfäärist (About the Semiosphere), was published in 1999. Lotman’s last work on cultural philosophy, Kultuur ja plahvatus (Culture and Explosion), was published in Estonian in 2001. Lotman’s Tartu School is still alive, though it has undergone modifications since his death and the new independence of Estonia. Lotman’s heritage is being disseminated by both the Department of Semiotics and the Department of Slavic Literatures. After an interruption, the Department of Semiotics has continued the series “Sign System Studies,” now including in it also research on general semiotics and biosemiotics, in English as well as Russian. The Department of Slavic Literatures continues to publish another series closely connected with Lotman, “Works on Russian and Slavic Literature.” Both departments organize almost annually international conferences, attended by scholars from many parts of the world. In the field of comparative literary studies, the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature has published since 1996, in cooperation with the Chair of Comparative Literature of Tartu University, the annual Interlitteraria with contributions in English, Spanish, French, and German. Here too, Lotman’s spirit and heritage have been continuously present, proving again that liminal borders can stimulate dialogue: the first five issues contain articles on literary and cultural-philosophical topics by scholars from Estonia and twentyseven foreign countries.

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Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga Irina Novikova In ancient times foreign people appeared near the Daugava, with foreign property. The inhabitants of the Daugava did not allow them to leave their property on its banks. Sly aliens asked a local peasant as much land as to cover it with a piece of leather. Aliens cut this piece into ribbons, and thus encircled a bigger piece of land with the ribbons tied up. Within this place, they started building houses, and called the place — Riga. (Ancelāne 390) How poor are West European cities in some way! Paris has been Paris and London has been London for hundreds and hundreds of years. The same people promenade in town, travel, quarrel, trade and walk. The very names of streets are and will remain old. A revolution might happen now and then, and drop some blood and rename some squares or boulevards. Now and then, some small occupation alters a city panorama with foreign uniforms and flags with crosses. Then it is over, and everything returns to old routes. Until a next short-timed necessity. How much richer are cities in the territories bordering on the Slavs and Germans. The same small place is sometimes called Königsberg, sometimes Kaliningrad. At times these territories were appropriated by Poles, sometimes by Germans, sometimes by Russians. Dvinsk, Daugavpils and Dinaburg are three different parts in the book about European history. […] Gdańsk-Danzig and Gdyna-Gothenhafen became transit places in people’s travels that started in Rezekne-RezicaRozitena, Saldu-Frauenburg, Cesis-Venden, Jelgava-Mitava, or Liepaja-Libava. Only ancient, grey-haired Riga stands with its city gates open, proud, letting its citizens out into the world where they still live and call themselves Rigans. (Janovskis 8)

As B. Ravdin put it, “Riga is a wonderful place to be born in, brought up, and afterwards one’s place can be Moscow, Paris, New York” (4). The city could not avoid the fate of a transient center, hosting transient people who created imaginary vistas in a place that had as distant neighbors St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, Helsinki, and Stockholm. Geography at the crossroads between North and South, West and East engendered an atmosphere of transience that has been sedimented in the cultural legacy of Riga. Different versions of a folk tale present Riga as an “unfinished city,” overcoming the eschatology of the Babel Tower in the voices of the Baltic Babylon: “Every New Year’s night a voice from the Daugava asks if Riga is already finished. Every time there has been a reply: ‘No, not finished yet.’ If somebody at some point says that Riga is finished, the city, together with all its inhabitants, will be submerged in the waters of the river” (Ancelāne 396). By the end of the nineteenth century Riga found itself in the late modern positionality of a “capital” city, experiencing the strategies of centering, most visible in its architectural forms. Some of the political interventions of centering changed the structure of Riga’s communities traumatically. But the city also produced polyphonic interfaces and a multicultural “hypertext,” opposing univocality and linearity. The exiled Rigans preserved in photos, rituals, memoirs, and autobiographical novels the image of a multifaceted city in its passage through the turbulent history of the twentieth century. My essay is an attempt to illuminate the city’s “rhizomatic” struggle with hegemonic hierarchies, with centering and linearity.

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One of Riga’s celebrated twentieth-century stories concerns engineer Walter Zapp. Descendent from a family of Baltic Germans, Zapp constructed a subminiature camera Minox Riga, but this legendary device that was supposed to open the optical unconscious of the city was repatriated with Zapp from Riga to Germany in March 1941. With the end of the war, one of the first actions undertaken by the American military in their occupation zone was passing an ordinance forcing Germans to turn in, under penalty of death, any items of value, including cameras. Luckily, a compassionate officer allowed Zapp to retain legal proof of his invention, the original prototype of the “Minox Riga” camera. The wooden prototype has never told the story of Riga and its nomads. The “Baltic Metropolis” before Minox Riga The city of Riga occupies a complex place in the production of the nation’s “own space.” As a German religious and trade citadel, it had to “repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it” (Certeau et al. 154). On the other hand, the multicultural world of Riga traced a complex network of historical dominations over the autochthonous people of the sea border. As early as 1595, Basilius Plinius, a doctor, teacher, and poet, chose Riga as the center of his theocratic idealized world in his poem “Slavenas Rigas pilsetas metropoles cildinajums” (Glory to the Famous City of Riga, the Metropolis of Livonija; Buceniece et al. 51). In the eighteenth century, A. W. Hupel wrote that one could meet people of all nations in Riga (215). However, the downtown area was strictly hierarchical and divided by the Baltic German administration and traders. Germans constituted the majority of Riga’s inhabitants (43.6%) by mid-nineteenth century; Latvians, by contrast, only 18.85%. They and other ethnic groups were allowed to set up their communities outside the rigidly regulated territory of the center. A city of discipline, of divided and controlled ethnosocial areas, Riga experienced the metropolitan enchantments from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s. Beginning in the 1870s, the city was assimilated into the Russian imperial administration of the Baltic region. As part of the Russian centralization policies, Riga was converted from a Baltic German power-center into the capital of newly formed ethnic territories on the Baltic littoral. The capital of the Latvian nation in the making had to deal with its compromised origin and symbiotic legacy, with architectural and literary eclecticism. The city’s reinvention as part of a national awakening had to accommodate the multifaceted relations of Latvians with former metropolitan cultures (Baltic German, Russian, and Polish). Riga can hardly be imagined without its blend of Latvian, Russian, German, Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian, Estonian, or Roma voices. In keeping with its Hanseatic legacy, Riga had also its own Greeks, Italians, Swedes, and Danes. Under Imperial Russia, the city also opened its gates to Old Believers and Jews. Riga’s constitution as a modern merchant city is indebted to Old Believer and Jewish communities, permeated with exilic consciousness and identification. Old Believers came to Riga to defend their traditional faith against the newly reformed Russian Orthodox Church. Jews moved to Riga because of the Pale of Settlement and formed a small “nation” across the Baltic region beyond the Pale. Ukrainians came by the end of the nineteenth century, during their service in the Imperial Army, and later, as post-revolutionary emigrants in the interwar period.

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The invigoration of Latvian cultural and literary life went thus hand in hand with the development of Riga’s minority communities. As a result of modernization and industrialization, newcomers actively expanded the cultural, economic, and religious spheres of Riga, opposing multiculturalism to the city’s political mobilization as the capital of an emerging nation-state. After 1918, the newly born Latvian state had to deal with the question of how to turn the city into a political center when its cultural topography remained decentered and multivocal. The nationalist ideologies of the 1930s appropriated centering/marginalizing strategies from the former power holders. On the other hand, Riga’s literature continued to explore the city’s discontinuous spaces during the periods when Riga was reconceived as the center of a colonized territory (until 1918), mappable nation (1918–1940), annexing political regime (1940–1991), or transitional pan-European space (since 1991). Riga’s sociocultural map also remained heterogeneous, reflecting the interests and interactions of different cultural communities. For example, the Russian Old Believers constituted a different subcultural world from the secular Russian educated stratum. As offspring of the religious refugees after the Nikonian church reforms during the rule of Peter the Great, the Old Believers established an urban merchant subculture in Moskau Forstadt (Moscow borough). They had their own magazine, schools, and cultural figures. The Old Believer Monastery bell-tower still marks the symbolical entry into this part of the city. A Russian urban and secular population streamed into Riga as a result of the cultural migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which brought Russian intelligentsia and professionals into the peripheries of the Empire. Russian, Polish, and Baltic German cultural figures proposed eccentric and hybrid visions of the Baltic region. As such, they remained marginal in the Latvian cultural production. The Latvian literati and the leaders of the national movement were more closely connected with the democratic forces in inland Russia than with Russians in Riga. This condition, which could be called one of double marginalization and internal dissociation, would become painfully evident in the 1990s, after the restoration of political independence. Rīga … Riga … Рига … Rīga (1907), the psychological novel of Jānis Poruks, a central figure in Latvian romantic literature, opposed the mainstream ideology of Latvian literature at the time, which represented rural life and its values as central to Latvian national identity. Avgusts Deglavs, a democratic writer, began to write a cultural-historical trilogy of his “Babylon,” Rīga, in 1909 but could not finish it. The novel is about the construction of a Latvian national urban identity and its rhizomatic conditions, spaces, and times. The important question for Deglavs was how to represent a small nation through its inclusion in a modern urban space, historically alienated from its collective consciousness. The novel focuses on multiculturalism as the central condition for this ambiguous, multi-differential production of identity and language. Deglavs tried to capture the melting space and time of the city, representing characters from a rich ethnic, social, and cultural spectrum — German traders and Latvian ideological leaders, artisans and Russian workers, emancipated women and students. The novel documents the process of forming a collective national identity and a modern sensibility of belonging in an urban ethnosocial geography. As a character comments, “Look, how Livs

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keep together, they never let each other down[…] And we, Latvians, feel good when something is bad with our neighbors[…]. And Livs would never leave their compatriot behind […]” (Deglavs 40). The road to Riga points to a similar ethnosocial hierarchy of roles, in which Latvians resist Germans and learn from ancient Livs how to keep and survive together: The road between Riga and Jelgava was full of life, full of travelers. The inns were so full that travelers could not find a bed for the night. It was a profitable time for pub-owners as separate rooms were occupied by masters and Germans, and a big pub-room was occupied by common people. Pubs were divided in two parts — one for Germans and one for Latvians. (Deglavs 7)

The Latvian language itself has assimilated and responded to heteroglossia. Latvians settling in Riga changed their lexicon, style, and speaking manners either by Germanizing them or by including Russian, Polish, and Yiddish words as the character Mikumu Maris does. The public sphere, which was literally translating itself from German into Latvian, reflected this appropriation in lexical mergers. In the following example, German words stand next to the Latvianized Russian word “guy”: “Ko nu no mužika izdabūsi? Bauer bleibt Bauer, kannst ihm kochen sūss oder sauer!” (A peasant is a peasant whether you do him bad or good [literally: whether you cook for him sweet or sour]; Deglavs 96). Deglavs also represents the broken Latvian spoken by Riga Germans. Both Germanisms and Russian words saturate Latvian colloquial speech. If Germanisms point to the status of a character in the urban hierarchy, or mark professional attachments, the Russian colloquial lexicon reflects more varied areas of interest, incorporating terms that have to do with land, bureaucracy, trade, or everyday life: bezzemes kalpi-batraki (landhands), izvosčiks (cabman), uzkupči (merchants), magaričas (payment for a perk), machorka (colloquial Russian for tobacco), prikazs (order), razbainieks (robber), samovars (samovar), staroveri (Old Believers), and so on. For Deglavs, the city was central to the rites of passage into modern nationhood and the molding of the modern Latvian language. He represents Riga as a quilt of multiple plots and interests wherein the fragmented local identity of Lettische (Latvian) peasant is melted into a national self. This conversion to “nationhood” contains a necessary interaction with the Other, so that the performance of national identity — literary, cultural, political — is “contaminated” with it. Deglavs foregrounds the hybridity of the long-term process through which Latvians appropriated Riga economically, socially, and culturally. He also reflects on how the “Self-Other” relationship could become hierarchical, anticipating the ethnosocial stratification of post-colonial Riga. Riga stands out as a central “character” that undergoes dramatic changes and the intrusion of new forms of social, economic, and political life after centuries spent under the power of Baltic Germans. Reimagining the genre of the Bildungsroman, Deglavs places the city itself in Bildung, undergoing rites of passage into modern nationhood. The emphasis on the multiculturalism of Riga as an inseparable part of national identity and on Latvian urban nationalism, were important elements in the writer’s polemic against the agrarian nationalists. The latter considered modernization to be detrimental to the authenticity of a nation rooted in an agrarian economy. These ideas have been revived in the present-day arguments about the national capital. The view of Riga as alien to the authentic spirit of a nation rooted in rural localities is based on the awareness of a non-Latvian population in the city. Not only Riga but also other cities in which non-Latvian

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populations constitute a considerable segment are viewed as covert anti-Latvian bastions. They have to be Latvianized in order to be absorbed into a unified nation. In this context, Deglavs’s novel reminds present-day nationalists of the historical complexity of Latvian citizenship, which is inseparable from Riga’s defining feature — its multiculturalism. Baltic German literary culture is another strand in Riga’s multiculturalism. Alongside Theodore Hermann Pantenius, Leonhard Marholm (Laura Moor), and Moritz von Stern, Viktor von Andreyanov was an important figure in the production of a “marginocentric” vision of Riga. Rūdolfs Blaumanis, a famous Latvian poet, was his inspiring and supporting friend. Both were well acquainted with Vsevolod Cheshikhin, a Russian writer, historian, and essayist well known in the cultural circles of Riga. Andreyanov descended from the Russian gentry. His grandfather moved to Livland in the 1820s and married the daughter of a German baron. Andreyanov studied at Dorpat/Tartu and Jena universities and traveled across Europe. Since 1885, he lived in Riga “as a poet and free scholar.” As he put it, “Circumstances, not me, should be blamed for the fact that I became a German, and not a Russian, poet […] a man with a German education in 1865–78 could not choose a new direction in politics, justified by the demands of our practical life and historical development of the fatherland” (Zhuravlev 221). Andreyanov’s support for Latvian emancipation and his hybrid self-identification as Baltic-German-Russian was a challenge to Riga’s mainstream German culture. Together with Vsevolod Cheshikhin, Andreyanov supported the development of Latvian urban life and Latvian literary traditions in Riga. He translated a collection of Latvian folk songs into German and produced a German version of Vsevolod Cheshikhin’s romantic Russian poem, “Beethoven” (1894). Baltic cultural identity as a melting pot was central to his literary and cultural views, which accorded with those of Cheshikhin. Andreyanov published his works in the Baltic German newspaper Rigasche Rundschau, subtitled Zeitung für Stadt und Land (Newspaper for City and Land). However, his hybrid identity that inspired his romantic poetry was not appreciated in the philistine German atmosphere of Riga, so he moved in 1894 to Berlin. The first newspapers for the Russian community of Riga, launched only in the second half of the nineteenth century, represented a spectrum of political positions. The Russian press of Riga encouraged ethnocultural solidarity, helping the construction of a Russian-Baltic identity. The influential Russian newspaper Rigas Vestnesis (Riga Herald) became the promoter of Russian Imperial policies, counteracting the German domination in Riga in the late nineteenth century. Developing a Russian literary tradition was one of the themes emphasized. In 1880, the literary critic Ivan Zheltov published the essay “Ne pristalo li vremya dlya russko-pribaltiiskogo romana?” (“Isn’t It Time for a Russian-Baltic Novel?”). As he explained, “We happened to witness the beginnings of the Baltic-German novel and I knew personally those whose efforts made this possible. […] Why should it be impossible for a Russian writer to emerge in Russian-Baltic life, which is a rich arena of many opposite interests? The central setting must be Riga as the focus of the Russian spirit and Russian public aspirations on this Baltic margin” (Zheltov 12). Russian literary culture claimed a space by the late nineteenth century. Vasilii Kaush was one of the first Russian poets of Riga; his collection, Zvuky proshlogo (The Sounds of the Past), was published in 1899. Vsevolod Cheshikhin was a noteworthy cultural figure in the Riga of the late 1890s and a promoter of the Russian Literary Association (founded 1874). In contrast to other Slavophil writers, Cheshikhin consistently tried to bring together Russian, Latvian, and German

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literature on a democratic basis. His interest in creating a universal language similar to Esperanto reflected his faith in the internationalism of poetic culture. He published poetry and a poetic drama, Napoleon (1892), but he was better known as the author of the novel Blizhnie i dal’nie (Farthest and Closest; 1899). His book Bez osnovi (Without Roots; 1901) was translated into Latvian. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cheshikhin published in the newspaper Baltic Region, avoiding the more conservative Riga Herald. In the 1903 essay, “Kak Riga dolzhna chestvovat’ Herdera” (How Does Riga Have to Honor Herder? — Herder had taught in Riga for several years), he argued for a Herderian integration of the various ethnic literary traditions: In our marginal region, there is a Russian, a German, and a Latvian press, and we have our own Russian, German, Latvian public life; but do we have something common, a Russian-GermanLatvian one? […] It seems that the touching of the two cultures, Russian and German, could enliven the local, at least translated, literature; it would seem that it is exactly Riga that could be the place for different “Russian-German” editions. But the question is if our Russian Rigans translate great foreign Germans, and German Riga dwellers — do they translate great Russian writers? We do not even have a Slavic club in Riga where we Russian could communicate with Polish people (as in Odessa). And there is nothing to be said about cultural and public integration. […] A great international public sphere could develop in Riga if there was an adequate spirit of international affinity, such as Herder would appreciate! Then Riga would give birth to a Russian-German-Latvian public house “Bee-hive” (under the name of Herder!), that would give homage to all local societies and associations, scientific, literary, artistic, and charity organizations; we would have a grandiose triple-nation “people’s house”; Riga’s citizens would have a wonderful first-rate theater and excellent magazines in three languages (like Cosmopolis), etc. This is the way we should celebrate Herder in Riga, rich in spiritual power, but poor as far as the unifying aspirations in the spirit of Herder are concerned!” (Cheshikhin, “Kak Riga” 5)

Cheshikhin expressed similar ideas in his 1905 essay entitled “Natzionalizm progressivnij i progressiruyuchij” (Nationalism Progressive and Progressing), also published in the newspaper Baltic Region under the nom-de-plume “A Russian European.” At a time when Russian imperial centralism was taken for granted, he advocated the autonomy of the Baltic region as a way to create conditions for the self-determination of all ethnic minorities inhabiting the Baltic Sea border. His friend Rūdolfs Blaumanis, a renowned Latvian poet of the period, wrote a short commentary on these ideas in the newspaper Dienas Lapa (Daily Gazette, 1905), symptomatically focusing on the “Russian-German Writer Fedorov,” as the idea of cultural hybridity was close to his aspirations as well. The Jewish literary legacy of Riga reflected the difficulties common to the Jewish culture in the Russian empire and the independent Latvian state. Nineteenth-century Jewish literature developed at the crossroads of German and Russian language traditions. The literary-historical monthly Evreiskije zanuski (Jewish Notes; 1881– ) was published in the Russian language. One of the best-educated Riga Jews, chief rabbi Aaron Pumpianskii, also known as a historian and writer, was its editor. The magazine lasted for one year because it did not find its audience and lacked a charismatic literary figure. German was the language of most educated Jews in Riga, due to the traditional language orientation of the Jewish diaspora in Kurland. Only when Jews started emigrating from the Russian mainland, did Russian start to dominate in Jewish circles.

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In 1907, baron Budberg issued the National-Zeitung (National Newspaper), the first newspaper in Yiddish on the Baltic Sea border. The purpose of this newspaper was to provide national identification for the Jewish intelligentsia, since the Kurland Jews had been pressed into assimilation with the domination of German and Russian cultures. However, because of assimilation policies, Yiddish remained alien to many Jewish intellectuals and the newspaper ran only for eleven issues. As Herman Branover and Ruvin Ferber write: “The paradox was that, in contrast to other ethnic groups of Latvia, Jews needed more than funds and literary forces to create a journalistic tradition. First, they needed to form a circle of readers” (238). In 1910, a new daily newspaper, Die Yiddische Stimme (The Yiddish Voice), was started. It published literature of local as well as world-famous writers. Sholem Aleykhem, who visited Riga several times, submitted texts for publication in it. The competition with other Jewish periodicals sent from St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Warsaw, weakened its position and it closed in the fall of 1910. World War I significantly decreased the Rigan Jewish population, and all literature in Yiddish was banned in the Imperial territories in 1915. Polish culture in Latvia dates back to the sixteenth century, when Poland received Livland as a result of the Livonian war (1558–83). Latvian Polish culture considered itself descended from a formerly powerful national culture, but it constituted an integral part of the developing modern Latvian culture (Kolbuschevskis 10). In Latgallia, the eastern part of Latvia, the strong Polish influence is evident not only in the local language and Catholic religion, but also in the romantic regionalism of the Inflantija (Livland in Polish) literati in the nineteenth century. The herald of PanInflantic culture, Gustav Manteuffel, wanted to strengthen relations between Inflantija and Poland as a challenge to Russian imperial centralization. In his political writings, Manteuffel emphasized the multiethnic composition of Inflantija, arguing that the Latvian nation-state “consist[ed] of different citizens of the land who use different languages but who are interconnected through common roots in the past and present” (Kolbuschevskis 13). Manteuffel’s mid-nineteenth-century vision of a nation-state was socially inclusive, integrating Latvian peasantry and the views of Polish gentry on the necessity of emancipating Latvian peasants. More importantly, Manteuffel, like Cheshikhin, articulated the dream of a multicultural, decentralized Baltic space, whose regional identity depended on different traditions. Both also emphasized the aspiration to overcome cultural fragmentation. Riga in Stone: The Capital of a Nation Riga’s architecture has been as competitive and eclectic a space as that of its literary production. For example, when the German community reconstructed the Dome cathedral, the Russian community immediately presented to the city a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in neo-Byzantine style. The competitive spirit manifested itself in building both German and Russian drama theaters and educational institutions. The Riga Germans financed the construction of the Riga Polytechnic and of a couple of gymnasiums. St. Petersburg allocated money for building five educational institutions, including an Orthodox seminary. These and other famous buildings in Riga’s center are products of a long-standing competition between the two communities representing the rival imperial interests of Germany and Russia.

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Most of Riga’s monuments expressed the need of the Riga diasporas for spiritually unifying symbols. As Oyārs Spārītis points out, the arrangement of the fountain at the center of Riga’s 700th Anniversary Exhibition of 1901 was an allegorical apotheosis: “A female figure embodied Riga as the center of trade, industry and crafts, and the place from where goods were sent out worldwide. The Muse of Science crowned the central arrangement and the Muse held an electric torch, thus, illuminating the way. This arrangement was a manifesto of Riga’s achievements at the turn of the century and proclaimed the right victory of every Riga minority to have its cultural symbols” (128). During the process of nation building in the late nineteenth century, Riga experienced the architectural fantasy of “inclusion” in a universally progressive space and time. The architectural morphology of the city reflected an effort to rationalize street mapping and house building. Jugendstil, better known in Latvia as Art Nouveau, was the architectural style that attracted local architects as a new expressive language for a modern metropolis. Among the architects were Baltic German specialists who, after receiving their diplomas in architecture in Germany, returned to Riga; Latvian architects were also trained at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. Riga’s 700th Anniversary Exhibition of Industry and Crafts (summer of 1901) contained more than 40 pavilions, introducing its citizens to examples of Art Nouveau on a grand scale. Riga was exposed to radical transformations in clothing, literary and visual culture, and building façades under the sweeping influence of the exhibition. Methods and forms of eclecticism translated into a neoromantic movement in Latvian architecture. According to Cesaire Dali, eclecticism was a necessary stage in the development of

Figure 1. The Freedom Monument and the Statue of Liberty

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architecture, “the summary of the whole aesthetic past” (Goriunov and Tubli 49). In this role as summary of the past, allowing the free use of its fragments, eclecticism was readily embraced by the Riga architects. Eclectic ornamentalism and the verticality of Gothic forms were attractive to them for their emotional expressivity in medievalizing Riga as a European metropolis. The Gothic idiom alternated with buildings in the “perpendicular Art Nouveau,” with their ethnographic accessories stylized subsequently into a National Romantic style. Folklore was appropriated as a revived fragment of the universal cultural summary. It functioned as a grand universal source of ornamental language in the architectural and political process of nation building. The political independence of 1918 reorganized the architectural narrative around a central national monument, the Freedom Monument built between 1931–35 by the Latvian architect Kārlis Zāle (Fig. 1). The masks, ornaments, and bas-reliefs of the façades culminated in the figure of a young woman, whose body — as a Gothic vertical pinnacle — soared above the nation’s capital (the work of sculptor R. Mirsmeden). The Statue of Liberty holds three stars — symbols of historical areas in Latvia, Kurzeme, Vidzeme, and Latgale. At her feet, lies a sorrowful Mother figure surrounded with bas-reliefs of soldiers dying for the motherland and pointing to where the center of the nation is embodied in stone. The impurity of the capital was supposed to be eliminated with the erection of this huge statue dominating the city. Baltic Germans had been repatriated before the beginning of World War II, closing the Baltic German page in the history of Riga. The city became an assemblage of “minority” vignettes, making easier its annexation into the topography of Soviet power. Rīga: National Capital // Rīga: Multicultural Babylon Latvian literature underwent an explosion in the Riga of the 1920s. In his utopian poetry, Jānis Sudrabkalns viewed Riga as the site of a “new Parthenon” to be constructed out of clean marble and illuminated by “a new sun.” Drawing on Latvian folklore, the metaphor of the sun suggested a new reality in the making, harmonizing the aspirations of the national culture with those of Europe and the world. Pēteris Ērmanis followed the example of Walt Whitman in his thematics and vers libre approach. His collection of poems, Es sludinu (I sing; 1920), integrated traditional forms with futurist praises of urban objects such as the automobile: “Auto, my brother in the city / […] / I love you, I, a rustic / […] / Everything is music in the city, and this music is in you. You are the concertmaster of the street, mad you are! I sing you, for you have won me over! Glory be!” (“Glory to the Automobile”; Ērmanis 15) For Ērmanis, the city is the place where Jesus embraces everybody, “The lost, the sorrowful, / They are my brothers, they are my sisters,” in a utopian vision of “Power, softness, peace, and love, love, love” (29). The Riga of the 1920s and 30s found two other singers, Aleksandrs Čaks and Kārlis Padegs, whose poems read like snapshots of the city. Čaks, an anarchic “city self-made boy” and Padegs, an extravagant dandy, were nontraditional figures in the Latvian literary typology. Čaks’s collections Sirds uz trotuāra (Heart on the Pavement; 1928), Mana paradīze (My Paradise; 1932), Es un šis laiks (I and This Time; 1928), and Pasaules krogs (The Pub of the World; 1929), turned into poetry the fragments of the city life — streets, cafes, beggars, drunkards, trams, reminding

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one of Walter Rutmann’s movie Berlin, The Symphony of a Great City. Poet and painter Padegs is reported to have said of himself: “I was born as a joke, I live as a joke, and I want to die as a joke” (Kalnačs 7). Riga was first shocked by Padegs’s dandyish apparel, but then it fell in love with him, as it did with his poems and drawings. Both poets took documentary reflection to new artistic heights. Their poems offered a collage of the fragmentary but intense imagery of both the real and imagined Riga. Čaks was more innovative in creating a modernist city code in My Paradise. Nostalgic memories about an Edenic childhood city turned Riga into a personalized chronotope that maps the homology of the human body and the organism of the city. Čaks’s hero is a nomad, a world traveler who turns his Riga into the trope of a universal city — a city without borders in which he lives whenever he is “away, away, away.” The Russian literary culture of Riga could not afford the luxury of a well-established, longterm tradition. Relatively young, it was undermined by the dramatic events of World War I and the October 1917 Revolution. The resulting political independence of Latvia presented a new situation for the minority communities nationwide. Latvian Russians found themselves reduced to the status of an ethnic-cultural minority after 1918, and the dispersal of Russians after the October Revolution brought thousands of emigrants to Riga. The Russian collective legacy was used after 1918 as “a cultural object” to construct, to represent national distinctiveness and cultural universality, to try to ferment a Baltic-Russian cultural identity. Similar efforts to reactivate cultural memory and construct collective and personal identities were pursued in the Jewish, Polish, and the Baltic German communities of the interwar period. The exodus of Russians in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution turned Riga into an important émigré center. A specific feature of the Russian cultural and literary community was that it included people of smaller ethnic groups, such as Belorussians and Ukrainians, who used Russian as their language of communication. The Russian literary culture of Riga functioned as part of a transnational émigré tradition. It was to a great extent identified with a number of short-lived literary magazines and newspapers that reflected the instability not only of funding but also of the literary territory it tried to establish, however marginally, in the Baltic region. In the 1920s, the Russian writers who traveled through Riga or Tallinn to the Meccas of postrevolutionary Russian emigration — Paris, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Helsinki — or who tried to settle on the Baltic, associated Riga with the image of Babylon. This image reflected a sense of fragmentation and dispersal that, paradoxically, provided a bridge between the émigré Russian and the Soviet Russian culture. As Lev Maksim wrote in his essay on Riga, “Malenkij Babilon” (The Little Babylon): A foreigner who can attend a ballet with Karsavina, an opera with Smirnov, Orlov, Kubelik, can conclude that Riga is the most musical, the most educated city in Europe. This is a mistake. Of course, the art contests in Riga could match a real capital; the names are universally known — but they are not characteristic of Riga. […] Riga is only a stop for them en route to bigger places. This is all foreign, fake, and there is nothing of one’s own here. (Abyzov 290)

Riga became another place for the emerging diasporic Russian culture, in which memories of an imperial past were intertwined with emigrant constructions of “Russianness.” This was best illustrated by the literary magazine Perezvoni (Chimes; 1925–28), published in the 1920s by Sergei

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Belotsvetov. Though this magazine focused primarily on literature, avoiding straightforward political issues, the articles published by Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solov’ev, Ivan Ilyin (“O putyakh Rossij” [About Ways of Russia]), or the poems of Konstantin Bal’mont (“Rus’”) testified to the idea of a Russia exiled, dispersed, but universal in its future. The monthly promoted the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Khodasevich, and Konstantin Bal’mont, and the stories of Ivan Bunin and Aleksandr Chernyi. Special issues were devoted to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Kiev and Novgorod, but not to Riga. The magazine reflected a common self-positioning of the Russian emigration in Europe and beyond. Its cultivation of a Russian imperial nationalism took place alongside diasporic anxieties and a sense of alienation from the hosting culture. Through this journal, Riga became part of the general “development of Russian as distinct from Soviet culture” (Pachmuss 14). Russians behaved much like “the Americans in Paris, exiled German and French intellectuals during the Nazi period, and many other émigré groups” (Pachmuss 47). The difference was that the Russian emigration emphasized the creation of a universal Russian tradition and Russian idea. The identification with Russian culture and history served also the political ends of a national renovatio in diasporic cultures. For example Baron Nolde, a talented landscape painter and estate owner, “founded, presumably together with Prince Anatoly Pavlovich Lieven, a Russian patriotic organization called Bratstvo ruskoj pravdij (Brotherhood of Russian Truth)” (Pachmuss 39). As Temira Pachmuss notes, the birth “of a rich Russian émigré literature in Finland and the Baltic countries after October 1917 was not surprising since many Russians owned estates or summer houses in the area or worked in the Baltic region as representatives of the Russian Empire” (13). Apart from historical novels and chronicles, most of the prominent Russian figures in the emigration wrote memoirs of their shattered past. L. Kormchii, editor of the magazine Yunij tchitatel’ (The Young Reader; 1925–26), became a popular writer through such narrative works as Bratstvo tchernij sov (The Brotherhood of Black Owls; 1926) and Genii mira (The Genius of the World; 1930). The magazine Mansarda (The Attic; 1930– ) rallied around itself a circle of poets known as Na strughe slov (In the Boat of Words), which included Georgii Matveev, Igor Chinnov, and Mikhail Klochkov. After its cessation, Matveev and Klochkov began to edit a newspaper Povorot (The Turn; 1930), which featured other local writers. Among the best-known authors of Riga were Petr Boborykin, who reflected the life of Riga’s Old Believer community, Yurii Galich, who published a memoir, a collection of essays, and a book of poetry entitled Orkhideja (Orchid; 1927), and Sergei Mintslov, widely known in the Baltic region as an author of historical novels. In much of this literature, Riga featured as another center of the imaginary exiled world of Russian culture. To quote from “Lira”: The day will come — the Boulevard of Liberty Will see other dwellers, We’ll vanish After all our lives and deeds, And we will be absent in Riga […] But I know that our offspring Will write Thorough memoirs about us. […]

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He’ll reconstruct our everyday life, And our descendants will be ecstatic When — like in a movie — They’ll see us as we were. They will learn That their ancestors lived more joyfully […] That days were fiery and fast In Old Riga, as everywhere, That ministers were afraid Of social-democratic challenges. That the Soviet representative lived in Riga, That even a German colonist fled Riga to escape GPU […] When they will read all these stories About our life in Riga Our descendants will not say “There is nothing left.” — But with gratitude, — “They were here!” (Abyzov 405–406)

The realities of interwar Europe gave rise to different political engagements on the part of the younger Russian-speaking intellectuals for whom Riga became a home (and a cordon sanitaire) at Europe’s crossroads. The past, memory, and tradition were viewed by them mostly as impediments in the development of a truly international literary culture. For example, Riga’s literary magazine Nord-Ost (North-East; 1931) tried to promote both an alliance with the young Soviet literature and translations of young Latvian writers as part of its commitment to the international literarypolitical battles. Interviews with Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and other outstanding figures of European public life were a regular feature of North-East. All literary communities of Riga eventually fell victim, first to dictator Kārlis Ulmanis’s 1934 curtailment of the cultural autonomy of the Latvian minorities and, subsequently, to the Stalinist purges after the Soviet annexation in 1940. The pressures of the 1930s dictatorship and of the totalitarian Soviet system after 1940 disrupted the multicultural literature of Riga. The Polish contribution also ceased after the Soviet takeover. The earlier political independence of Latvia had facilitated the development of Polish literary culture in Riga. Inflantian Poles had played a limited role as transmitters of Polish culture. After 1918, the role of the Polish cultural input changed. As Jacek Kolbuschevskis explains: “The Polish press in Latvia, in particular Nasze Życie (Our Life), used the concept POLONIA in relation to the Latvian Poles, and this was not entirely correct since the term POLONIA was attributed to the emigration, while in Latvia the majority of Poles constituted an autochthonous population. A broad layer of migrant population appeared in the 1920s as war refugees. Seasonal workers were rarely participants in the Polish cultural life. […] Actually, Polish cultural activities were performed by Latvia-born Polish people” (16). This was typically a culture of magazines and newspapers, among which Nasze Życie (1934–40), under the editorship of Jaroslav Vilpishevskii, was the best. Its contributing authors were Edmund Osmanchik, Edmund Slonyskii, and Zofija Ruika. The last issue (No. 30 of August 4, 1940) was published before Latvia was annexed to the USSR; Vilpishevskii was exiled to Siberia (Kolbuschevskis 18).

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The deportations to Siberia destroyed the multicultural dynamics of Riga. Very few ethnic Poles managed to repatriate themselves to Poland. Those who stayed behind tried to find spaces of survival. Julia Ostrovska, for example, taught Polish language and literature illegally. The one Catholic Church in Riga welcomed Polish churchgoers and the Riga Catholic College provided education to aspiring priests (the only formal education in Polish). A Latvian Polish Association could be established only in 1990. The Soviet Production of “Rīga” The dream of a Baltic metropolis faded away under the various dictatorships. Riga was shaken up badly by the purges of 1940, the emigration of 1944, the Nazi occupation of 1941–44 and again, by the Stalinist purges of 1947. The Soviet concept of Rīga as a symbolic center of the liberated Baltic region did not lead to the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. The statue was relocated on a symbolical axis of Soviet power, between the statue of Lenin and the Memorial to the Liberators from Fascism. This symbolical linear organization of monuments included also the Memorial and the Museum of the Red Latvian Riflemen that glorified their deeds after the 1917 Revolution. The Soviet political imagery could not, however, override the fantasy of Rīga as the capital of the Soviet “Western” Republic, and, paradoxically, even contributed to the creation of “a westward city.” The politically unsettling origin of the Baltic region in the Soviet topography showed itself in popular attributions of a “Western” spirit to Riga, including it, alongside Tallinn and Vilnius, in the Soviet mythography of a tangible “West next to us.” Semi-dissident intellectuals from Moscow and St. Petersburg started gravitating towards the Baltic Sea. The Russian-language journal Daugava (1977– ) acquired over time popularity in the entire Soviet Union. During the period of perestroika, this journal and the newly established Rodnik (published also in Latvian as Avots [Waterspring]) were among the most popular cultural-literary monthlies in the collapsing USSR. They represented a rare effort to unite the cultures and democratic aspirations of two ethnic groups, the Latvian and the Russian. Riga accepted to play its special role. Still, the “western” scenario played by Riga had no real political stake, being more of an ethnographic role backed with well-financed souvenir shops and carefully scripted Folk Song Festivals. On the other hand, if official Riga could not accommodate those who imagined it differently, the House of Writers in Yurmala, the sea-resort not far from Riga, welcomed them. It was in Yurmala that Evgeniia Ginzburg wrote Krutoj marshrut (Journey into the Whirlwind; 1967), a book that would be smuggled out and published in the West. Riga also inspired Latvian poetry and fiction. Čaks’s poetic representation of the city was continued in Ojārs Vācietis’s collection of poems Dzeguzlaiks (Cuckoo-Time; 1968). By alluding to Čaks’s images, he created nostalgic texts about Riga, trying to restore the connections with its lost traditions. In Marğeris Zariņš’s Vecrīga (Old Riga; 1978), the old town is a labyrinth of historical “happenings,” stylized as carnivalesque. Four characters in the story “Mysteries and Happenings” take imaginary trips into the past of Riga, and their theatrical stage is an attic in the old town. The ghost of the city emerges also in Zariņš’s postmodernist version of the Faust story: Kapelmeistara Kociņa kalendārs (The Calendar of Kapelmeister Kociņš; 1982), which takes place in a Riga occupied by the Nazis in 1944, deconstructs the imagined continuity of the city’s calendar,

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foregrounding instead individual lives in unrelated textual episodes. Riga becomes a whirlwind of memories of untold exiled lives. Twentieth-century Riga also gave rise to a rich production of women’s literature in Latvian. Aspazija, Zenta Mauriņa, Vizma Belšēvica, Regīna Ezera, Andra Neiburga, Eva Rubene, and Lyudmila Azarova, are some of the writers who found their audience and place in the literary and critical discussions of the time. While the literature in Latvian continued to flourish, literatures in other languages practically ceased to exist in the last decades of the twentieth century. The Russian-language magazine Daugava became the only mainstream publication whose language of literary and everyday expression was Russian. The post-Soviet political borders of the early 1990s produced historically specific cartographies of power as well as complex modalities of subordination and exclusion in the emerging post-socialist self-images. The Soviet ideology had actively submerged the ethnic, national, and political identities of the pre-socialist periods into a totalizing socialist script. However, it perpetuated traditional discourses of nationhood and cultural differentiation for the Soviet “West” (e.g., the Baltic region) and for the Soviet “East” (Central Asia). As Tom Nairn argues: “The ethnic-linguistic factors of national identity were preserved there by an elaborate system of reservation culture: all that was decreed healthy about nationhood, minus the political ‘-ism’” (52). We can thus agree with Katherine Verdery’s view that “socialism did not suppress these identifications but reinforced them in specific ways” (40). Reinforcement was provided, for example, by dividing the people in the territory of a Soviet Republic into those who belonged to the main ethnic group and those who did not. Through such reinforcement, the language, culture, and history of the titular nation was recognized as an important part of the “shared totality” of the Soviet people. The “residues” of ethnosocial division on the center-periphery axis in the Soviet model became crucial in Latvia after 1991. The restoration of political independence and revival of nationhood was constructed as a “return to the past.” Latvia was remapped into pre–1940 ethnic borders by virtue of an “authentic” belonging (based on the rhetoric of a “common destiny” and “common origin”). This project was predicated on the symbolic “death” and exclusion of alien people, or exactly those who had moved to Latvia after 1940 and their descendants. The exclusion process was enforced through the citizenship law and passport system, which divided people into citizens and aliens. The politically excluded became symbolically “dead” and their “death” made their existence in the reclaimed territory and time a deviation, because they could be “buried” or repatriated. The ethnopolitical identity of a titular nation, which had been controversially constructed during the Soviet period, was reconstructed “as a defensive mechanism.” In a “politico-ideological abuse of history” (Hobsbawm 7), the multicultural legacy and memory of Riga, marginalized through the Soviet emphasis on the titular culture, eradicated in the Soviet migration policies, was subsequently “forgotten” in the fervent nationalist argument for the nation’s purity that excluded the former migrants and their families.

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Riga: Post-Minox Floating Riga’s “western” self-image has eroded since the 1990 reintegration of the Baltic region into the geopolitical area of Eastern Europe. Yet ordinary citizens and policymakers have had to develop scenarios for how to become “real Western” again, and return to “normal Europe.” Attempts to recreate an alternative, multicultural Riga remain, however, marginal and unnoticed. A few enthusiasts like Yurii Abyzov and Tatyana Feigmane have tried to retrieve the Russian-language tradition of the pre-Soviet period. Abyzov, for example, has collected data on the Russian literary production of the 1920s and 30s. He is the editor of two significant volumes entitled Ot Liflyandii do Latvii (From Livland to Latvia; 1997–99), which include texts of Russian authors from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. A special issue of the Baltiiskii arhiv (The Baltic Archive) was devoted to the forgotten Russian memoirs. Similar initiatives are undertaken by researchers in Jewish, Polish, and Roma studies. Historians are more fortunate, since the mainstream presses have published a series of historical studies on Russians, Poles, and Baltic Germans in the country and its capital. Literary critics — apart from those associated with the Daugava journal and a few independent scholars — have avoided the concept of a broader Latvian literature, limiting their exploration to the boundaries of Latvian language and ethnicity. One attempt to create a literary-cultural magazine with a Russian-Rigan identity was the founding of Rodnik in 1987, on the wave of perestroika. This magazine possessed the intellectual potential necessary for developing a Baltic Russian literary culture, but it was closed in 1992, under the anti-Russian atmosphere prevalent at that time in Latvia. The collection of stories published by the editor of Rodnik, Andrei Levkin, under the title Starinnaya arifmetika (Ancient Arithmetics; 1986), contained a story in which Riga is represented as a collapsed and rusted tower of Babel (“The Tower”). His essay, “Riga: opyt smerti naiavu (Riga: the Experience of Death in Reality; 1999), published in Daugava, also reflected on the cultural and economic crisis of Riga, caught in transition to a different self-image and the market laws. Significant restructurings have taken place in other artistic productions of Riga, such as its architecture, which has undergone a process of “re-Europeanization.” Riga has changed its architectural venues so quickly that its piecemeal development can be compared with a fast turning over of the pages of a book with multiple authors. The architectural restructuring of Riga has focused on the Metzendorf House and the House of Blackheads, both associated with Riga’s legend as a Hanseatic trade center. The effort to reconstruct Riga as a “Hanseatic” capital was supposed to drag the city out of its provinciality, reemphasizing its westward connections. The restoration of the House of Blackheads was treated as a matter of national and international significance although some wondered whether the legacy of German colonialism should be restored at all. In my view, this restoration is not as controversial as it might appear. As the symbol of the German economic power in Latvian history, it also signifies the “alien” status of Riga versus the multiple local authenticities fused into one nation. Another building restored was the House of the Latvian Association, nicknamed Mamuļa (Mom). This symbol of the National Awakening from the end of the nineteenth century was placed in the new center of Riga, outside the old town, but this created a certain ambiguity about the status of Latvian Riga that was both central and eccentric to the historical one.

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Figure 2. The House of Blackheads, reconstructed in 1999.

Today, a replica of the House of Blackheads, built in 1344 and destroyed by bombing in 1941, has been reconstructed on the square that has special significance in the architectural imaginary of the city (Fig. 2). The building now stands next to the Monument of the Three Red Latvian Riflemen and the Memorial in honor of the Red Latvian Riflemen, renamed Memorial to Occupation. The battalions of red riflemen played a significant role in establishing and maintaining Bolshevik power until most of them were exterminated in the Stalinist purges. Both the Memorial and the Monument stand on a symbolic line drawn from the Memorial to the Soviet Liberators on the other bank of the Daugava to the Statue of Lenin, which has recently been removed. The Statue of Liberty, erected in the early 1930s to symbolize the rise and unity of the nation, found itself between all these monuments and memorials — the only woman, symbol of Latvia, “patronized” by the fraternal threesome of Soviet soldiers on the monument to Soviet liberators, the fraternal threesome of Red Latvian Riflemen, and a paternal Lenin. The House of Blackheads, rebuilt next to the Museum of Occupation, actually deconstructs this symbolic line as the sturdy building sits so solidly and emanates such a reassuring image of the past that it detracts attention from other possible visions of the center. This replica testifies more to the pleasure of the local nouveau riches in re-appropriating the signs of German power than to any German history in Riga. In the nineteenth century, the House of the Latvian Association was built to mark the appropriated present space; by the year 2000, the House of Blackheads was restored to mark the appropriated past space and time. The evocation of Riga’s Hanseatic house, as a landmark of this territory’s belonging to Europe in the past, is meant to facilitate the nation’s

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entry into the European Union. The construction of the Russian merchant Kamarin’s house next to it has caused, therefore, opposition, since it signifies the Russian presence in the city’s past and future, interpreted as its less desirable “eastern” legacy. The House of Blackheads, as former symbol of the oppressor’s power, is restored as a postsocialist “stargate” that can break the barrier of time in Latvia’s political imagination, allowing it — in Paul Virilio’s words — to confront history in the “present day,” to become a “historical event which throws history in disarray and jumbles up the relation of the living being towards the world” (“Speed and Information” # 2). This historical confusion is even more emblematic in the replica of the House of Blackheads, which is made to serve a postsocialist vision that appropriates the cosmopolitan hybridity of the past under a nationalist topography. At the same time, however, the rise of the House of Blackheads from its ashes plays a paradoxical role in the post–1990 Latvian capital city. Its reconstruction brings back the spirit of nomadism and uncertainty of origins; its name promises a subversive blackness at the heart of the old quasi-Hanseatic, quasi-Nordic city. Apart from the fact that proper names are already “local authorities” (Certeau et al. 159), they order semantically the surface of the city (158). In the “dollhouse” downtown area for tourist consumption, a chain of “Rimi” food stores, well known in the Nordic region, has opened appetizing “Hansa Bakeries.” The delicious “Hansa” imagination is accompanied by localized images of “Italy” and “France,” projected from the names of small shops that proudly call themselves boutiques. “China” is present, too, through a couple of Chinese restaurants that have become elite establishments. The historical jumble reflects also in the “Italian” furniture stores, in which pseudo-Baroque furniture pieces and chandeliers mix with futuristic Murano lamps. An eclectic spirit fills again the spaces of the city, but this is different from the turn-of-the-century Jugendstil eclecticism. The Jugendstil architecture, which created a modern living body for Riga’s downtown, was striving to suggest the universalism of humanity and the city’s membership in the glories of architectural forms. What we see today is a production of simulacra that dehumanizes the body of the city, creating a superficial “European” face. As such, it paradoxically emphasizes Riga’s marginality and even non-belonging to a genuine European space. The canal separates the downtown “global” shopping village from the central market where true amalgamation overwhelms any ordering fantasies. Here “Turkey” as the embodiment of cheap “oriental” products meets “Russianness” as cheap labor force, in a space of abjection en route to the “West.” Away? Away? … Again Away? Under its present post-socialist condition, the country has become — in Franz Fanon’s phrase — a territory “of reciprocal exclusivity” (39). The space of “reciprocal exclusivity” is delineated in the service of a reconstructed higher unity. The question for us is how an originally “rhizomatic” culture can make itself available again to multiplicities, restoring its awareness of existential Otherness. Rigans search for their roots — German, Finnish, Ingermanlandian, Jewish, French, Baltic German — to flee the utopia of exclusion. Will Riga become again a city of exiles — on the way to Berlin, Moscow, Tel-Aviv, New York, Helsinki, or Paris? How would Avgusts Deglavs rewrite his Rīga today? Would he finally finish the novel?

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NOTE: I would like to express my appreciation to Irina Tyshko, from the University of Latvia Library, whose expert professional assistance and support has made the writing of this article possible.

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Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Testing Ground for Pluralism Amy Colin, with Peter Rychlo on post-1940 Czernowitz In light of the growing xenophobia, racism, and neofascism of the last decades, pre–World War II Czernowitz gains added significance. For Czernowitz (as the city is known in German), also called Cernăuţi (in Romanian), Chernovtsy (in Russian), Chernivtsi (in Ukrainian), and Czerniowce (in Polish), was a center of intense intercultural exchange in a multiethnic biotope where Romanians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Germans, Austrians, Jews, Poles, Armenians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Turks, Greeks, Hutsuls, Lipovanians, Gypsies, and several different religious denominations coexisted relatively peacefully for centuries. Their homeland was Bukovina (Bucovina), located between the Bessarabian steppe, the northern Carpathian Mountains, and Moldavia (Romania). It was a world of “people and books” (Celan 3: 183), which produced a multifaceted Austro-German, Austro-Jewish, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish literature, with many authors being fluent in several languages. Time and again Bukovinian writers, journalists, historians, and political figures portrayed their pluriethnic homeland as a haven of peace and mutual understanding. Reflecting on Bukovina’s crossroads of languages and cultures, the poets Rose Ausländer and Georg Drozdowski evoked the region’s main characteristics: “Vier Sprachen/ Viersprachenlieder// Menschen/ die sich verstehen” (Four languages/ Fourlanguagesongs/ People/ who understand each other; Ausländer, Gesammelte Werke 4: 130); “Bukowina, liebliches Land,/ Schrein vieler Sprachen/ und mancherlei Art/” (Bukowina, lovely country,/ shrine of many languages/ and various types; Drozdowski 78–9). Some authors regarded Bukovina not only as a European region par excellence, but also as a testing ground for united Europe. A few of them believed in the existence of a homo bucoviniensis whose essence was rooted in respect for ethnic, cultural, and religious otherness. In their view, homo bucoviniensis is a model for homo europaeus: “The European will be a Bukovinian or else Europe will not be” (Prelitsch 9). It is emblematic of Bukovina that this region produced one of the forefathers of the European Union. In 1920, Josef Drach, a wealthy Jewish businessman and art dealer from Czernowitz, developed detailed plans for establishing a European Union with Vienna as its capital. Drach raised funds for a European Peace Bank whose goal was to introduce a single currency in Europe: the European Peace Dollar. One side of the coin displayed the image of Bertha von Suttner, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel peace prize in 1905, the other side the slogan:

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“Nieder mit den Waffen!” (Down with the Weapons!). It is also emblematic of this region’s history that a visionary mind such as Drach was murdered in Auschwitz. Paradoxically, history both nourished and endangered Bukovina’s plurality. One after the other, the neighboring powers had conquered the region, enhancing its multiethnicity but also destabilizing the precarious balance between the inhabitants’ receptivity and animosity towards cultural difference. The Bukovina belonged first (from the tenth to the twelfth century) to the Kievan Rus, then (from the twelfth to the thirteenth century) to the Principality of Halich; in the fourteenth century, it became the nucleus of the Moldavian principality. In 1514, Bukovina, as part of Moldavia, became tributary to the Turkish sultans. Ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Austria in 1774, it was at first a district of Galicia but in 1848 was made, as a titular duchy, a separate Austrian crownland. The region won limited autonomy from Austria, and in 1861 Czernovitz became the seat of a provincial diet. With the dissolution of the Austrian empire in 1918, the Ukrainian national council at Chernivtsi voted the incorporation of Northern Bukovina into the West Ukrainian Democratic Republic. The Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919) returned only the southern part of Bukovina to Romania, but the subsequent Treaty of Sèvres awarded Romania the entire region. During World War II, Bukovina turned into a battleground. The Soviets occupied northern Bukovina in 1940, incorporating it into the Ukrainian SSR; a year later, Romania, supported by Nazi Germany, reconquered Bukovina. Within the first weeks, thousands of Jews were murdered; the survivors were forced into ghettoes and later deported in cattle wagons to death camps in Transnistria. In 1944, Soviet troops reoccupied northern Bukovina, including its capital, Czernowitz. Large numbers of Romanians were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other areas of the Soviet Union. Northern Bukovina now forms part of the Chernivtsi oblast in the Ukraine. Southern Bucovina is part of the administrative county of Suceava in Romania. After 1945, Czernowitz was a “closed town” for decades. Foreigners from capitalist countries were not allowed to visit it. In 1985, Ruth Beckermann, an Austrian Jewish journalist and filmmaker, braved the dangers of traveling to her forefathers’ homeland. In spite of receiving a special permit to spend three days in Czernowitz, she was arrested and escorted out of the country. Today, travel to Czernowitz is still difficult and often exhausting, but foreigners are welcome. What they find is no longer a center of intense intercultural exchange, but a predominantly Ukrainian town in process of rediscovering its suppressed past. Paul Celan’s increasing fame as a writer has helped introduce Bukovina as a literary topos into the consciousness of the present. But for a long time, just a few representatives of Bukovina’s multifaceted literature were known to the public. Among them were several other Jewish authors writing in German, from Karl Emil Franzos to Rose Ausländer and Edgar Hilsenrath; the Yiddish poets Itzik Manger and Elieser Steinbarg; the Austro-German authors Joseph Gregor, Georg Drozdowski, and Gregor von Rezzori; the Ukrainian writer Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka; and the Romanian Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu. The recently awakened interest in Bukovina has generated numerous publications, including critical studies, reprints, and anthologies, as well as several documentary films. The steadily growing secondary literature on Bukovina (see Beck’s bibliography) is not merely a trendy cultural and literary manifestation. Rather, it is rooted in the realization that Bukovina and Czernowitz are paradigms of plural societies that give insights into crucial questions of our time — questions concerning the preconditions for the fruitful interaction of peoples

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from different ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds as well as questions concerning the causes of violence and war in communities that had enjoyed peace for centuries. As paradigms of plural societies, Bukovina and Czernowitz undo several epistemological premises of the contemporary debates on multiculturalism. Among them are concepts often used to describe multiethnic states, regions, and cities, in particular concepts based on binary oppositions: multi- vs. monocultural, homogeneous vs. heterogeneous, colonial vs. non-colonial, immigration vs. non-immigration. Bukovina and Czernowitz reveal that societies are far too complex to be divided according to such clear-cut categories. Although binary oppositions make a complex sociopolitical and cultural reality imaginatively and linguistically available, they also lead to simplifications and misconceptions. The latter are inherent in the discourse of both the opponents and supporters of multiculturalism. The monocultural epistemological tradition rejects ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity within a society; similarly, the theory and practice of multiculturalism, in and of itself an epistemological knot tying together divergent philosophical, linguistic, and cultural strands, attains inner coherence precisely by excluding and homogenizing the other: the monocultural epistemology. Yet is the discourse about/for/against multicultural societies possible without binary oppositions? Could binary oppositions be used as a kind of Wittgensteinian ladder to be climbed in order to discard it? Could they be used as a means of illustrating the ways in which they operate, which includes both an explanation and a disfigurement of a signified — a disfigurement that uncovers precisely through a process of subversion yet another signified? Czernowitz sheds light on these questions. In 1909, the Ukrainian political figure and nobleman Nikolai Vassiliko, the Romanian Aurel Onciul, founder of the Romanian Democratic Party, and the Austro-Jewish parliamentary delegate Dr. Benno Straucher developed — with support from other political figures — a Nationalitätenausgleich (Nationality Reconciliation), considered then and now as one of the most progressive accords between ethnic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Growing ethnic tensions necessitated such a treaty to protect peace in Bukovina by insuring ethnic autonomy in political decisions, elections in particular. The fruitful cooperation between the above-mentioned representatives proved that peaceful ethnic interaction was still possible in this crown-land five years before the outbreak of World War I. Several decades later, in December 1933, Dr. Abraham Jacob Mark, chief rabbi of Czernowitz, considered that it was a sacred mission to protect the peaceful coexistence of the heterogeneous people of Bukovina, which he compared to the Holy Land (25). But Rabbi Mark became in 1941 one of the first victims of Nazi terror in his homeland. Although ethnic tensions had been present in Bukovina since the late nineteenth century, Rose Ausländer believed that it was primarily the Nazi occupation and World War II that destroyed this oasis of peace: “Vier Sprachen/ verständigten sich// Viele Dichter blühten dort auf/ deutsche jiddische Verse/ verwöhnten die Luft// Bis Bomben fielen/ atmete glücklich die Stadt” (Four languages/ in mutual understanding // Many poets flourished there / German Yiddish verses caressed the air// Until bombs fell/ the city breathed happily; Gesammelte Werke 6: 348). Nostalgic modern historians like Emanuel Turczynski insist that in pre–World War II Bukovina the “cohesion of ethnic groups, religious communities, and multiethnic marriages was so strong that no hostile images (Feindbilder) of other nationalities and religious denominations could emerge” (Turczynski 18). By contrast, the poet Alfred Gong acknowledged the existence of ethnic tensions

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in his homeland (13–14), while the writers Gregor von Rezzori and Edgar Hilsenrath regarded Czernowitz as an intermixture of tolerance and intolerance, mutual recognition and hatred. In Der Meridian (The Meridian), Paul Celan invoked a journey back to his homeland — a journey he described as a “typological research” undertaken “in the light of u-topia” (Gesammelte Werke 3: 201–2). Celan’s polysemantic neologism suggests that in a world stigmatized by World War II, the Shoah, and the Cold War, a relatively peaceful world of “people and books” is a distant dream. But Celan’s hometown had another face as well, being one of the centers that attracted a steady flow of immigrants. In Bukovina and Czernowitz, some social, political, and economic structures facilitated the interaction of various ethnic groups, while certain policies undermined it. The dissemination of positive versus negative images of immigrants reinforced the dynamics between inclusion and exclusion. In the eighteenth century, Austrian imperial officials promoted the settlement of German-speaking Christians from other areas of the Empire and southwest Germany but forced Bukovinian Jews out of their own homeland (Ziegelauer 1–91). While Austrian officials portrayed Christian settlers as industrious and reliable, they labeled Jews as parasites. According to a widespread prejudice of the time, representatives of the Austrian military regime believed that Jewish migration was the result of a “sickness of the Jews” rather than the consequence of persecution and expulsion. In an effort to implement “enlightened cures” for the alleged “Jewish illness,” Austrian officials returned Jews to “mother nature,” settling them in villages and forcing them to work the land. Bukovinian Jews who were not merchants, craftsmen, or land workers were obliged to either become farmers or leave the country within forty-eight hours (Ziegelauer 64–65; Gold 1: 22). All petitions of Bukovinian Jews to the Emperor asking him for help were in vain; the only concession obtained was an extension of the deadline to six weeks. While Bukovinian Jews were driven out of their homeland, the immigration of Jews from Galicia was severely restricted. Yet Emperor Joseph II later initiated a change in the relationship between Austrian officials and Jews, awarding more rights to the Jewish population in a 1782 patent of tolerance. In the course of time, Austrian officials came to regard Bukovinian Jews as the most loyal defendants of the Empire at its easternmost boarder. By contrast, some Romanian intellectuals continued to disseminate antiSemitic prejudices (Iorga, “Czernowitz” 124; Budai-Deleanu, “Kurzgefaßte” 178). Bukovina’s other ethnic groups were not spared. For Budai-Deleanu, Greeks were “hungry, money-thirsty insular people,” Bukovinian Hungarians “cattle thieves,” and Armenians “profit oriented” (BudaiDeleanu 178). The German historian Raimund Freidrich Kaindl described the Hutsuls, a Slavic minority, as promiscuous and sexually perverse (9). But these were not the only types of Feindbilder, for Czernowitz had yet another face, which connects it with cities that, at one time or another, became multicultural through colonization. Bukovina never had the official status of a colony but still displayed aspects of colonial and post-colonial domination, manifested in the imposition of a culture, language, and political ideology (Germanization, Romanization, Sovietization, Ukrainization) as well as in the economic exploitation of the region (e.g., the tribute paid to the Ottoman Empire while this area was its vassal). Colonialism and postcolonialism dominated the discourse in certain Bukovinian writings. Romanian politicians, historians, and writers often condemned the Austrian occupation of the Bukovina as rape and robbery (Guillaumin 1875; Nistor 1918–19; Gherman 1993). Romanians and Ukrainians accused not only imperial officials, but also each other of trying to establish colonial

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control over the region. Since increase in population was used as a means of justifying territorial claims, both sides tried to prove that the official census was wrong: Romanians complained that Romanians speaking Ukrainian were counted as Ukrainians, and Ukrainians, in turn, claimed that Ukrainians speaking Romanian were categorized as Romanians. However, Bukovina’s intermingling of cultural traditions can also be thought of in terms of a “melting pot,” though not one that could prevent ethnic frictions. In contrast to Switzerland, Canada, or the United States, Bukovina was never a democracy. In the course of its history, it belonged to duchies, empires, monarchies, kingdoms, communist as well as fascist dictatorships, and finally to two republics on their way to becoming democracies. Perhaps it was precisely the lack of full civil rights that prompted some ethnic groups to resist absorption into the dominant culture, while more liberal tendencies resulted in the possibility of their easier integration. During the Habsburg period, for example, Ukrainians and Jews were more inclined to adapt to the dominant Austro-German culture, while during Romanian rule, they tended to resist assimilation to Romanian culture. Czernowitz and Bukovina illustrate the coexistence and collision of heterogeneous cultural communities. Literary and historical writings have often emphasized the tensional interplay of the constitutive cultures and the tropes that define them. By questioning ethnic, religious, and cultural differences, they often reinscribed them in a different way. In order to understand the implications of this phenomenon, it is important to examine it in its historical and cultural context, including its actual setting: Czernowitz as a nodal multicultural city. Czernowitz was first a crossroads of trade routes before it became a center of intense intercultural exchange. In a trade agreement dated 1408 (the earliest documentary mention of Czernowitz), the Moldavian (Romanian) prince Alexandru cel Bun, assured Lemberg merchants (Ruthenians, Armenians, Tartars, and Jews) free passage on a trade route that ran from Prague via Cracow, Lemberg, Vladimir Volynsk, through his lands to a custom point called Czernowitz, continuing south via Iaşi to the main centers of commerce on the Crimean peninsula. A second route linked Czernowitz to the towns of Siret, Suceava, and the inner regions of Moldavia, a third one connected it to Transylvania. In the sixteenth century, when the Principality of Moldavia became a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, Czernowitz had already grown from a custom point and resting place for merchants to a small settlement, which was in the process of establishing additional commercial ties with Constantinople. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, another trading route was built which ran from the Polish Kingdom via Czernowitz to Akkermann. By the mid–eighteenth century, the settlement previously consisting of a single street with two churches had become a market town and a trading node. Natural disasters, violence, and wars overshadowed the town’s early history. According to a 1782 report by an Austrian Commission — a report based on the testimonies of inhabitants — Czernowitz dated back to a twelfth-century settlement on the left bank of the river Prut, a settlement so often endangered by floods that the Romanian princes ruling Moldavia had it moved to the hills on the right river banks, at the foot of the Cecina mountain. Czernowitz was built anew on the former site of the Cecina town and castle destroyed during the Mongolian invasion. In the sixteenth century, Tartars invaded Czernowitz, laying it in ruins, but the Moldavian Prince Vasile Lupu had it rebuilt. In the mid–seventeenth century, Chmielnitzki’s gangs plundered the region,

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murdering the Jewish population. In 1716 and 1769, Russian soldiers occupied Bukovina, robbing and killing the inhabitants. 1774 is a nodal date in the region’s history. It is the year when Sultan Abdul Hamid I ceded Bukovina to the Habsburg Monarchy as a result of negotiations following the Russian-Turkish War of 1768–74. The response to this event in historical and literary accounts varies considerably depending on the writers’ perspective. For supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as the Austro-Jewish writer Karl Emil Franzos, the date marks a peaceful liberation from barbaric Ottoman rule. Similarly, the Ukrainian-Romanian professor Constantin Tomaszczuk, founding rector of Czernowitz University, praised the integration of the region into the Habsburg Empire because Austrians, in his view, later introduced German Bildung und Wissenschaft (Education and Science) into Bukovina. Romanian historians and writers proved, however, that political intrigues and bribery had led to the Sultan’s donation, prompting him to condemn to death the Moldavian prince Grigore Ghica III, who had protested the Austrian occupation of the Bukovina that was part of Moldavia. On October 1, 1774, when General Gabriel Freiherr von Spleny and his troops marched into Bukovina, Czernowitz was still a relatively small market town with several suburbs (Klokusczka, Rosch, Horecea). In 1762, the British Ambassador to Constantinople, who passed through Czernowitz, described the town as a conglomerate of about 200 houses built along one street. He mentioned seeing the Turkish fountain, a Jewish neighborhood, and the Romanian church of St. Nikolaus. In the subsequent decades, the town further expanded. In 1787, when properties were measured, houses were numbered, and their owners were registered for the very first time, the imperial officials documented 153 Romanians, 84 Germans, 76 Jews, and a group of Armenians, Czechs, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, and Albanians. By 1848, the multiethnic population of the town increased to 20,000 inhabitants who lived through times of prosperity, but also of severe hardship. In 1819–20, 1829, and 1848 cholera decimated Bukovina’s population; in 1864–65, there was famine and a typhoid fever epidemic; in 1859, the Jewish section of Czernowitz burned down. In spite of such disasters, the Bukovinian population gradually increased. The 1857 Austrian census numbered 455,800 inhabitants: 44.6% were Romanians, 38% Ukrainians, 6.4% Germans, 6.4% Jews, 3% Poles, 1.6% Magyars, 0.57% Russians, etc. By 1880, the Austrian census showed an increase in the number of Ukrainian inhabitants: 239,690 Ukrainians versus 190,005 Romanians in a total population of 568,453. Thirty-three years later, the statistics showed the following ethnic and cultural distribution in Czernowitz: a) religious denominations — Roman Catholics: 23,474; Greek Catholics: 9,588; Armenian Catholics: 311; old Catholics: 14; Greek Orthodox: 20,615; Armenian Orthodox: 31; evangelical Protestants: 4,369; Anglican: 1; Mennonite: 1; Lipovanian: 84; Jews: 28,613; Moslems: 2; without any religious denomination: 25; and b) mother tongue — German: 41,360; Ruthenian: 15,254; Polish: 14,893; Romanian: 13,440; Czech/Slovak: 411; Hungarian: 57; Slovenian: 29; Italian: 13; Serbian: 1. In 1910, 32% of the town’s population was Jewish; by 1919, this figure increased to 47.4% (see Die Ergebnisse der Volks; Heppner). Under Austrian rule, the town received a new constitution on August 2, 1786, which established a radically different form of government. During the times of the Ottoman Empire, the market-town Czernowitz had been governed by a starost (the eldest in charge of collecting taxes and reporting to the Prince) as well as by his immediate subalterns: an army major, six citizens,

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and a scribe. The new Austrian constitution granted Christian inhabitants the opportunity to obtain citizenship by taking an oath of allegiance, as well as the right to elect the town council that until 1864 had depended on the district council. The Habsburg officials promoted the acculturation of Romanians and Ukrainians, the two largest ethnic groups, by admitting them into civil service and the town’s administration. Jews were excluded, although they had to pay high taxes. In the late nineteenth and twentieth century, Habsburg officials gradually changed their policy. As a result, the town’s plurality was also mirrored in its administration, which included representatives of different ethnic and religious groups. Jacob Ritter von Petrowicz (mayor, 1864–66) was Armenian, Anton Freiherr Kochanowski von Stawczan (mayor, 1866–74, 1887–1905) was Polish, Wilhelm von Klimesh (mayor, 1881–87) was Austro-German, and Dr. Eduard Reiß (mayor, 1905–07) and Dr. Salo Weisselberger (mayor, 1912–14) were Jews. 1848–1849 marked the beginning of a new era for Czernowitz and Bukovina. As in other regions of the Habsburg monarchy, relative political independence fostered economic and cultural prosperity. Czernowitz expanded and became the capital of the new crown-land. The town’s ethnic, religious, and cultural plurality shaped city planning and architecture. New places of worship for different religious denominations were established in addition to the seventeenth-century Romanian Orthodox wooden church, the Roman Catholic Church (1814), and the Greek Catholic Ruthenian church (1820–21). These were a Protestant church (1849), a Greek Orthodox cathedral (1864), an Armenian church (1875), a Jesuit church (1891), and a Greek Orthodox Metropolitan residence (1864–82). In 1853, the first synagogue was built, and in 1877, a beautiful Reform Tempel was inaugurated in the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph. By the end of the nineteenth century,

Figure 1. The Israel Temple, built 1873–78

there were about twelve different Jewish houses of prayer in Czernowitz. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, Czernowitz had schools for different ethnic groups, hospitals, a major library (Landesbücherei, 1851), theaters such as the Schauspielhaus (1850–55), the Old City Theater (1877–1904), and the impressive, still existing City Theater (1905), a Landesmuseum (1883–88), a Musikverein (1877), as well as printing and publishing houses. In 1875, the University of Czernowitz (Czernowitzer Franz-Josephs-Universität) was inaugurated (see Fig. 2). By 1900, the prosperous and cosmopolitan Czernowitz had electric streetlights (introduced in

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Figure 2. Czernowitz University

1895), a canalization system with water pipes and drainage (begun in 1890), several well-kept parks, a Kursalon with a bath house in the Volkspark, elegant shopping streets such as the Herrengasse, and residential areas with multilevel buildings in Biedermeier (historicist) and Art Nouveau style. Last but not least, Czernowitz had the Café Europe, described in the ads of the time as the “rendezvous place” of the haute volée, high state officials, university professors, representatives of the arts, music, and the press, members of the state theater, physicians, lawyers, and so on. Its reading room displayed dozens of different national and international newspapers. The first city planners and architects designed some of the civic buildings in Vienna’s Ringstraße style. Particularly remarkable is the Greek Orthodox Episcopal residence built between 1864 and 1882 by Joseph Hlavka from Prague and decorated by historicist painters from Vienna. The façade ornaments, as well as the interior design combine classicist Western European motifs with Moldavian (Romanian), Oriental, and Jewish ornaments (the star of David). The new century introduced a new artistic movement, which left its imprint on Czernowitz architecture: the Savingsbank built on the Ringplatz, the Medical Building, the German House, and the train station (1866–1909) are all examples of Art Nouveau. After 1918, Czernowitz architects continued to use different modernist traditions, including Bauhaus elements. The development of Czernowitz as a city was inextricably linked to its cultural flowering after 1848. The liberalization of the Habsburg monarchy in the mid–nineteenth century and the relative political independence of Bukovina enhanced the cultural activities of all ethnic groups and stimulated the developments of a Romanian, a Ukrainian, and a German literature. Writers and artists gathered in literary societies such as the Aeropag über Schönheit, Kunst und Wissen (Aeropag about Beauty, Art, and Knowledge), the Ukrainian Ruska Besida (Ukrainian Tongue),

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Figure 3. The Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka Theater, built in 1904–05 by the Viennese Architects Hermann Helmer and Ferdinand Felmer

and a Romanian reading circle founded by the brothers George and Alexandru Hurmuzachi. In 1842, the popular Viennese humorist and literary critic Moritz Gottlieb Saphir gave lectures in Aeropag; in 1847, Franz Liszt visited Czernowitz. The first newspaper, Bucovina (1848–50), published by the brothers Hurmuzachi in Romanian and German, featured articles on politics, religion, and literature. A few years later, the Austro-German writer Rudolf Neubauer started a German newspaper with a similar title — Bukowina: Landes- und Amtszeitung (Bukovina: Official State Newspaper; 1862–67). It printed not only news, but also literary, ethnographic, and historical texts by Bukovinian writers, including the Romanian Janko (Iancu) Lupul, the RuthenoRomanian Ludwig Adolf Simiginowicz-Staufe, the Ruthenian Osip Yurii Fed’kovych, as well as the Austrian-Jewish authors Moritz Amster and Karl Emil Franzos. Bukovinian writers could publish also in the newspapers Czernowitzer Zeitung (The Czernowicz Newspaper; 1868–1918), Bukowiner Rundschau (The Bukovinian Review; 1882–1919), Bukowiner Nachrichten (Bukovinian News; 1888–1914), as well as in Bukovina’s first anthologies. The Eckhardt publishing house printed the Babylonian Talmud (1839–48), a Bible with standard commentaries (1839–42), the Mishnah with commentaries (1840–46), and other rabbinical as well as kabalistic-Hasidic works. Alongside the works of secularized Jewish authors, such publications testified to the impact of Orthodox Judaism, the Haskala movement, and Hasidism on cultural developments in Bukovina. After 1848, the Haskala movement gained increasing significance in Czernowitz. Among its leaders were scholars such as Abraham Goldfaden and Eliezer Elijah Igel, who became the rabbi of the Czernowitz Reform community in 1872. In contrast to the capital’s middle class, the rural Jewish community of Bukovina felt particularly attracted to Hasidism, whose last major Eastern European centers were the market-towns Sadagora and Vizhnitsa, located near Czernowitz. In Bukovina’s Hasidic community, Yiddish played a major part. In 1908, Czernowitz was selected as the site of the first international Yiddish Language Congress, initiated by the scholar Nathan Birnbaum and organized by a New York Committee. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries three important women intellectuals from Bukovina made their debut on the cultural stage: Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka, an early feminist Ukrainian

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writer and founder of Bukovina’s first society of Ukrainian women, who later came to be considered one of the most prominent representatives of Ukrainian literature; the Austro-Jewish psychologist Susanna Rubinstein, who earned her Ph.D. in psychology and German literature in 1874 with a dissertation entitled Über die sensoriellen und sensitiven Sinne (About the Sensory and Sensitive Senses; 1874) — her later Psychologisch-Ästhetische Essays (Psychological-Aesthetic Essays; 1878) made a major contribution to the study of human emotions; and Eugenie Schwarzwald, who completed a Ph.D. at the University of Zurich in 1900 and made a name for herself as a leading pedagogue as well as director of a Viennese women’s High School. Her Viennese home became a gathering point for Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Arnold Schönberg, Oskar Kokoschka, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, and other writers and artists. World War I put an end to all cultural endeavors in Bukovina, for the region was turned into a battleground; three times did Russian soldiers occupy Czernowitz. At the October 4, 1918 session of the Viennese parliament, the Bukovinian Jewish delegate Dr. Benno Straucher voted for the joining of his homeland to Austria. Ukrainians and their political representatives sought the union of Bukovina with the Ukraine; Romanians demanded union with the Romanian Kingdom. As the tensions between different ethnic groups turned into riots, the Romanian 8th Division entered Bukovina and incorporated it into the Romanian kingdom. On September 10, 1919, the Treaty of Saint-Germain sanctioned this incorporation. Under Romanian rule, Bukovina and its capital Czernowitz underwent major transformations. Romanian officials occupied all key positions in the administration, and Romanian was declared the official language of Bukovina. Czernowitz was now called again Cernăuţi, and its streets received either Romanian translations of their German names or new Romanian names. All emblems recalling the Habsburg era were destroyed. In spite of this process of Romanianization, the officials remained somewhat receptive to the needs of the various ethnic groups and tolerated existing German and Ukrainian schools, as well as the private Hebrew institution Ssafa Iwrija, attended by Celan. In the twenties and early thirties, Bukovina and Cernăuţi reestablished their reputation as centers of intense cultural activity. The stars of the Viennese and Berlin theaters came on tour to Cernăuţi. Famous Romanian actors such as Constantin Nottara and Ronald Bulfinski, the tragedians Paul Baratov and Rudolf Schildkraut, as well as the Vilna troupe, all performed in the capital of Bukovina. The eminent Jewish actors Hertz Grosbard, Jehuda Ehrenkranz, and Leibu Levin gave readings of Yiddish literature. The sculptor Bernard Reder and the painters Oskar Laske and Arthur Kolnik created and exhibited their works in Bukovina. The University of Czernowitz played a crucial part in the city’s cultural flowering, being the first in the region to offer a program in Eastern and Southeastern European history. Prominent professors from Graz, Vienna, and Berlin taught there. Both Carl Siegel, who championed traditional idealistic philosophy, and the agnostic Richard Wahle, who was opposed to metaphysics, had many followers in Bukovina. The Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner had an even deeper impact on the Bukovinian intellectuals who gathered in the Ethisches Seminar Platonica (the Platonica Seminar on Ethics) for discussions. After World War I, the German-speaking intellectuals from Bukovina had a forum of discussion and an organ for criticizing the political, economic, and social failures in Bukovina in the Expressionist literary and political journal Der Nerv (1919–1921), founded by the social

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democrat Albert Maurüber, a friend of Martin Buber. Like Karl Kraus’s Fackel, it demanded moral integrity in politics, economics, and culture.

Figure 4. The St. Nicholas Church, built in 1939 on the site of a 17th century Romanian wooden church

Romanian literature also developed more freely after 1919. The anthology published in 1938 by Mircea Streinul, Poeţii tineri bucovineni (Young Bukovinian Poets), introduced to the public a new generation of writers who tried to reconcile an interest in local history and traditions with an imitation of new poetic forms. Several of these writers, Traian Chelariu, Iulian Vesper, and Mircea Streinul, published collections of poetry and novels that illustrated a particular archaic-modern style, mixing folk and high culture, Eastern and classical motifs. At the beginning of the century and during World War I some Bukovinian writers, artists, and scholars, who had left Bukovina, became well known to a broader public: Joseph Gregor, the last librettist of Richard Strauß, held many key positions in Vienna, including the directorship of the National Library and a professorship at the University of Vienna. His works included Weltgeschichte des Theaters (World History of Theater; 1933) and Kulturgeschichte des Balletts (Cultural History of Ballet). Rudolf Kommer, who lived in Vienna, London, and later New York, made a name for himself as author of Stories from the Vienna Café (1915) and Der österreichische Staatsgedanke (The Austrian Conception of State; 1917). Manfred Stern was the famous General Emilio Kléber, who played a crucial part in the defense of Madrid against fascist troops during the Spanish civil war. Victor Wittner made a name for himself as editor of the leading Viennese literary journal Die Bühne and of the Berlin Der Querschnitt; his collections of poems — Klüfte,

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Klagen, Klärungen (Fissures, Lamentations, Clarifications; 1914) and Der Sprung auf die Straße (Leap onto the Street; 1924) — anticipated the literary and artistic movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Alfred Margul-Sperber, one of the most important cultural mediators of his country, had also moved to Vienna during World War I, and to Paris and New York in the early 1920s; after his return to Czernowitz in 1924 he built intellectual bridges between Eastern and Western Europe by publishing the European Avant-garde as well as young poets from his homeland in the Czernowitzer Morgenblatt (The Morning Czernowitz Paper). He promoted Alfred Kittner, Rose Ausländer, and Moses Rosenkranz, as well as a much younger generation that included Immanuel Weißglas and Paul Celan. He was later criticized, however, for his subservience to the Communists. In the late twenties and thirties, the political situation in Bukovina gradually changed. High school teachers had to offer all courses in Romanian, which had become the only official language of instruction. In the late thirties, the government tried to force the population to speak only Romanian but could not implement this policy and, therefore, had to change it within a few weeks. Leftist newspapers published by German-speaking Jews were censored and required to print the front page in Romanian. The change in political climate found support with the nationalist Romanian and German intellectuals, but triggered opposition among the liberal Bukovinians. In reaction to the rise of fascism, Jewish intellectuals became increasingly oriented towards Zionism, Bundism, or Communism. On June 26, 1940, a Soviet ultimatum forced Romanians to vacate Bukovina within fortyeight hours. After the retreat of the Romanian officials and army, the Soviets occupied the northern part of Bukovina and, in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin agreement, also the Bessarabian provinces of Hotin, Akkerman, and Ismail. Cernăuţi officially became Chernovtsy, and the Soviets soon controlled every aspect of life, implementing Russification in a harsh, iron-fisted manner and deporting so-called capitalists — that is, shopkeepers, landowners, and wealthy farmers — to Siberia in cattle wagons. When the Soviets realized that the advancing Nazi and Romanian armies would force them to withdraw from the area, they deported all alleged enemies to Siberia. Among them were not only shopkeepers, wealthy citizens, and representatives of the former civil service but also liberal and socialist intellectuals. Jews with Austrian citizenship were deported along with Austrians and Germans as potential enemies. On July 5, 1941, the German and Romanian armies, together with the Einsatzkommando 10b, occupied Bukovina and its capital. Within 48 hours, thousands of Bukovinian Jews were murdered (Gong 1–48). On July 8–9, 500 people were murdered in Cernăuţi. Rabbi Mark, the cantor, and other Jewish leaders were arrested and locked up in the elevator shaft of hotel Schwarzer Adler for 48 hours without water and food. Since the elevator was operational, the prisoners could have been killed at any time; after enduring such torture, they were driven to the banks of the river Prut, where they had to dig their own mass grave before being killed (Gold 2: 55). By August 29, 1941, the number of Jewish victims had increased to 3,106. On October 11, all Jews living in the capital were forced into a ghetto and their property was confiscated. Within the next weeks, thirty thousand Jews were deported from the ghetto to death camps in Transnistria, a region granted to Romania by Nazi Germany as a reward for its help against the Soviet Union, with the understanding that the Bukovinian and Bessarabian Jews would be deported and killed. Jews were exterminated by being forced to march for days without food and water and by being placed in deserted quarries or

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ghettos where most of them died of typhus, cold, or hunger. German troops often transported the victims to labor camps beyond the river Bug, where they had no chance of survival. The deportees included the writers and artists Edgar Hilsenrath, Alfred Gong, Alfred Kittner, Else Keren, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Salomea Mischel-Grünspan, Immanuel Weißglas, and Arnold Daghani. While the deportations were going on, the city’s mayor, Traian Popovici, a Romanian in the Habsburg tradition, used his influence to halt the extermination of the Jewish population. After negotiations with officials in Bucharest, he obtained permission to classify Jews according to their profession and exempt certain “economically useful” professionals, labeled as from deportation. The Romanian officials extorted huge ransoms from Jewish families in exchange for such permits, but often deported them regardless. During the harsh winter of 1941–42, when the trains could no longer run, the deportations were temporarily suspended. The Jews who had been living in an improvised ghetto were allowed to return to their homes; they believed themselves adequately protected by the mayor, who had issued them his own exemption permits. But in the late spring and summer of 1942 by order of the Germans, all Jews in possession of Popovici permits were deported to Transnistria. Of the thousands of deportees only a few survived, among them Gong, Hilsenrath, Keren, Kittner, Mischel-Grünspan, Weißglas, and Daghani. Heinrich Schaffer and Arthur Kraft, two poets who had left Bukovina, were murdered in other extermination camps. In 1944, the Soviets reconquered Bukovina and integrated it into the Soviet Union. Under Soviet rule, Bukovina’s population had to face the hardships of communist life and Stalin’s purges and an intense process of Russification. Already in 1940, after the Soviet occupation of Bukovina, the first circles for the learning of the Russian language were set up (Heppner 37). The process of Russification (later Ukranization) was intensified after 1945, Russian replacing German as Bukovina’s main means of inter-ethnic communication. The areas where Bukovina’s initial ethnic languages were preserved became increasingly small. Cernăuţi/Czernowitz, now called Chernovtsy, also underwent drastic political and cultural changes. The city’s historical monuments lost their original function: the Episcopal Orthodox residence was turned into a University, its church serving later as a computer room. The Greek Orthodox cathedral became an exhibition hall for agricultural machines and products. The Jesuit church is an archive. The Reform Temple (whatever was left of it after the Nazis set fire to it and the Soviets tried unsuccessfully to blow it up) became a cinema. The new synagogue was turned into a furniture factory. Most of the smaller synagogues were closed down. Only the Ringplatz, Theaterplatz (Elisabethplatz), the Catholic cathedral, and the main streets such as the Herrengasse remind the visitor of former elegance. In spite of the decay of the historical sections and its suburbs disfigured by identical-looking high-rises, Czernowitz remains a beautiful city. On the façade of a building in the old city, the contrast between a fading and a stronger yellow discloses an unusual image: it is the contour of the double-headed imperial eagle. The sign must have been removed in 1918, but the wall coloring carries the memory of the former Habsburg presence in Czernowitz. It is characteristic of modern Chernivtsi that Ukrainians living across from the respective building never noticed or identified the meaning of that contour on the wall. Typically, Chernivtsi’s sundial, a forgotten emblem of the Habsburg era, still runs according to Viennese rather than Buko-Viennese time. Running an hour earlier, it symbolizes, perhaps unintentionally, a hope for a better future. Peaceful coexistence among heterogenous people has come to be regarded as a constitutive feature of Bukovinian political, social, and cultural identity. In light of the xenophobia and ethnic

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tensions, which also existed in Bukovina, coexistence appears to have been as much a myth as a reality. It is for this reason that writers such as Rezzori have considered the precarious balance between tolerance and intolerance, respect and hatred, as the decisive factor shaping the historical development in the region: “A dozen different nationalities and half a dozen fiercely fighting religious denominations coexisted there in the cynical harmony of mutual animosity and business deals. Nowhere were the fanatics more tolerant and the tolerant people more dangerous” (Rezzori, Ein Hermelin 14). How could the precarious balance between tolerance and intolerance survive for such a long time in spite of growing nationalism and the rise of fascism? It was not only the special geographical situation and historical development of Bukovina, but also the effort of writers, artists, journalists, representatives of different religions, and a few political figures that helped engrave receptiveness into people’s minds, strengthening the bonds between them, teaching them respect for one another and the acceptance of cultural plurality as a benefit rather than a disadvantage. Open-minded Bukovinian authors, who understood the crucial role that mentalities play in the life of a society, disseminated positive images of the “Other” in order to convince the public that tolerance and mutual respect were preconditions for peaceful coexistence. Liberal newspapers such as the Bukowiner Zeitung (The Bukovinian Newspaper) contributed significantly to the battle against prejudice, printing articles about the consequences of intolerance, as well as open letters advocating mutual respect even among opponents representing the political interests of different ethnic groups (see, for example, Bukowiner Zeitung, October 7, 1892). Bukovinian nationalists were also aware of the symbolic force of words, and they misused the power of language and the press, disseminating in the Bukowiner Volksblatt (The Bukovinian Folk Paper) prejudice against different ethnic groups, especially Jews. However, until the late 1920s, tolerance defeated intolerance in Bukovina, mutual recognition outweighed contempt for the Other. Each generation of Bukovinian authors had to cope with old and new challenges. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they had to face nationalism and widespread ignorance about Eastern Europe. The latter manifested itself in adverse policies implemented by misinformed imperial officials — policies affecting people’s lives, the economy of the region, and the relationship between different ethnic groups. The consequences of ignorance deepened ethnic tensions, nourishing nationalism. Bukovinian authors addressed these problems by awakening the interest of the Western European public in the multifaceted traditions of Eastern Europe and Bukovina. They tried to mediate between cultures, especially between the dominant Austro-German and Bukovinian traditions. Such cultural mediation included translation of important historical, political, and literary texts from one language into another as a means of building bridges between heterogeneous peoples. Among Austro-German writers from Bukovina, Franz Adolf Wickenhauser and Ernst Rudolf Neubauer were the most prolific translators from the region. In addition, they integrated Romanian and Ruthenian motifs into their work, lending their otherwise epigonic texts an aura of the exotic. The Ukrainian writers Felix Niemchevski, Osip Yurii Fed’kovych, Aleksander Popovich, Isidor Vorobkevich, and later Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka wrote their first literary texts in German, but included themes from Ukrainian literature into them. Popovich even adopted the German name “Waldburg” and Niemchevski the name “Schwarz.” Fed’kovych translated poetry from Ruthenian into German and wrote a volume of poems in German under the title Am Tscheremusch! Gedichte Uzulen (On the Tcheremos! Poems of the Hutzuls; 1882). Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka wrote her diary, poems, and novellas in German; her first major Ukrainian novel Lyudyna (The

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Human Being; 1894) was based on a novella initially written in German. In both her German and Ukrainian texts, Kobylyans’ka raised public awareness for the situation of oppressed Ukrainian and Hutsul women. It was a general national awakening that prompted Ukrainian as well as Romanian authors from Bukovina to turn to their native tongue, but they continued to cherish Austro-German cultural traditions and integrate them into their works. Even nationalist Romanian poets such as Janko Lupul wrote all their literary works in German. But there were also Romanian writers who wrote only in their native tongue; they followed the lead of poet Vasile Alecsandri, and some were actively involved in the Moldavian cultural association Junimea (Youth). Ludwig Adolf Simiginovich-Staufe wrote poems in German, Romanian, and Ukrainian; he translated Romanian and Ukrainian texts into German. His Die Völkergruppen der Bukowina: Ethnographisch-kulturhistorische Skizzen (The Ethnic People of the Bukovina: Sketches in Ethnography and Cultural History; 1884) was one of first comprehensive studies about different ethnic groups living in Bukovina. The most popular introduction to the world of Eastern Europe was Karl Emil Franzos’s controversial series of essays Kulturbilder aus Halb-Asien (Cultural Images from HalfAsia; 1876–88), which gave a vivid picture of life in Eastern Europe and Bukovina, where Franzos went to school, making it imaginatively available to Western European readers. His novels Die Juden von Barnow: Geschichten (The Jews of Barnov: Stories; 1877) and Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten (The Clown: A Story from the East; 1893) drew attention to the problematic situation of Jews in Eastern Europe. Julie Thenen, a Jewish novelist from Galicia, sharply criticized orthodox and Hasidic Judaism in Galicia and Bukovina. Her novel Der Wunder-Rabbi (The Miracle Rabbi; 1880) and her novellas Der Sohn der Schrift (The Son of the Bible; 1883) and Die Wunderthäter von Kotzh und Plotzk (The Magicians from Kotzh und Plotzk; 1883) revealed the oppressive treatment of women in religious communities. It was characteristic of Czernowitz that the nineteenth-century Austro-German writer Neubauer, who was Eminescu’s history teacher, encouraged the literary activities of a younger generation of poets, including the Austro-Jewish Franzos and the Ukrainian Fed’kovych. Franzos and Eminescu were classmates; they had the same mentor, the prominent Romanian teacher Aron Pumnul, whose death Franzos commemorated in a German poem and Eminescu in a Romanian one. The subsequent relationship of these poets was marked sometimes by mutual esteem, sometimes by controversy. Eminescu adopted the anti-Semitic bias of some of his mentors, demanding that Jews either fully assimilate to Romanian culture or leave the country. Although he himself had learned a great deal from German romantic philosophy during his student years in Vienna and Berlin, he rejected foreign influences upon Romanian culture and mounted fierce attacks against Habsburg policies in Bukovina. By contrast, Franzos defended the importance of Austro-German culture as a catalyst of all other traditions in the Bukovina. Although Franzos was aware of the rising anti-Semitism, he believed in assimilation and wanted Austrian Jews to become Austrians of the Jewish faith. By contrast, the prominent Bukovinian Jewish lawyer and professor of jurisprudence Eugen Ehrlich warned his contemporaries of the devastating economic and political consequences of nationalism and anti-Semitism. In spite of rising anti-Semitism in the AustroGerman culture, Jewish authors from Bukovina continued to make substantial contributions to the flowering of the Austro-German literature of their homeland. In the early twentieth century and in the interwar period the most salient feature of Bukovinian literary works written in German remained their disposition to mediate between different

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cultures. This disposition manifested itself in the author’s use of Romanian and Ruthenian motifs as well as in an intense activity of translation. Josef Kalmer translated poetry from 33 languages into German. Margul-Sperber produced German translations of poems by American poets, including American Indian ones, as well as Apollinaire and Nerval. Weißglas’s translation of Eminescu’s Luceafărul (The Morning Star), made while he was still in high school, appeared in all leading Romanian journals. His later translations of Grillparzer, Stifter, and Goethe’s Faust into Romanian are particularly remarkable because German was his native tongue and Romanian a foreign language for him. Celan, who later taught courses on translation at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), and who produced a considerable number of German versions of Romanian, Hebrew, French, Russian, English, Portuguese, and Italian poems, continued this tradition. In the interwar period many women writers made their appearance on the literary stage. Among them were Rose Ausländer, Lotte Berg, Clara Blum, Regine Goldschläger, Else Keren, Ariadne Löwendal, Salomea Mischel-Grünspan, Stephanie Nußbaum, and Marianne Vincent. Some of them specifically addressed gender issues, criticizing a society that oppressed women, preventing them from realizing their creativity. Their writings thematized the difficulties of overcoming social and political barriers, frustration and internalized prejudices. Since many of these women were Jewish, they also addressed other key problems: the animosity against professionally active women in traditional Jewish communities, misogyny, as well as anti-Semitism. In the late twenties and thirties, violent forms of nationalism and fascism became the major challenge for Bukovinian writers. The rift between writers of different ethnic groups grew wider. Some propagated nationalist and later fascist ideas, but others still preserved a certain receptivity towards other cultural traditions. Romanian poets and writers such as Mircea Străinu, Iulian Vesper, and their followers modeled their thoughts after the traditionalist movement Gândirea (Thought), striving for a strong nationalist Romanian state and discriminating against the Jewish population. By contrast, Traian Chelaru maintained an attitude of tolerance and respect for the Other. Similarly, Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka continued to write stories and novels about the situation of Ukrainians, in particular women, without propagating either radical nationalism or fascism. Some German authors such as Heinrich Kipper, best known for his poems in the Swabian dialect, spread nationalist ideas, while Alfred Klug turned Nazi and erased Jewish poets from his anthology of Bukovinian poetry. By contrast, Drozdowski and Rezzori remained philo-Semitic cosmopolitans. In his novel Memoiren eines Antisemiten (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; 1981), Rezzori diagnosed the causes and consequences of prejudice against Jews. In reaction to Nazism and anti-Semitism, some Jewish authors turned away from their native German tongue. Among them was Itzik Manger, who wrote his entire later work in Yiddish, a language he came to regard as his only true home. Elieser Steinbarg was also fluent in German but wrote his fables in Yiddish because he regarded it as the language of the Diaspora Jewry. A target of his witty criticism was the Jewish attempt to evade anti-Semitism through emigration and adoption of foreign cultures. Among Bukovina’s last Yiddish poets were Jona Gruber and Joseph Burg. Aharon Appelfeld and Dan Pagis, two Israeli writers born in the Bukovina, responded to the Holocaust by choosing Hebrew as their linguistic home. By contrast, the Bukovinian poet Manfred Winkler, who left Romania for Israel in 1959, writes poems in both German and Hebrew. When Bukovina became part of the Romanian Kingdom, German-speaking authors were deterritorialized in the literal sense of the term. Paradoxically, it was precisely in the interwar period

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that Bukovina’s German literature, in particular its Austro-Jewish component, reached a pinnacle. So strong was the attachment of Jewish poets to the Austro-German culture that they continued to write in German in spite of their growing isolation in a Romanian-speaking environment. Even those who later settled in English- or French-speaking countries remained faithful to the German language and culture. When Hitler came to power, the poet Siegfried Laufer committed suicide, for he saw no future for a Jewish poet writing in German. Still, Margul-Sperber, Rosenkranz, Kittner, Ausländer, and Kamillo Lauer, as well as the much younger generation of Weißglas, Gong, and Celan refused to give up their mother tongue. Most of them (but not Celan) continued to cherish defiantly a German classicist style. Such traditionalism was not due to a lack of innovative power, but rather the result of their unusual situation as German poets in a multilingual surrounding. Their growing isolation produced insecurity about their native language, which manifested itself in a strong attachment to established poetic values and an even deeper concern with language. Unlike most Bukovinians, who spoke a German mixed with Ukrainian, Romanian, and Yiddish expressions, these poets and writers were particularly proud of their “High” German. Like Bukovinian writers living under the Habsburg monarchy, they followed fin-de-siècle Austrian and German literary movements, in particular the critique of language prevalent in the arts, literature, and philosophy of that time. Among their literary models were Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Franz Werfel, Stefan George, and especially Karl Kraus, who provided Bukovinian poets with linguistic theories that justified and reinforced their attachment to tradition. Like Kraus, most Bukovinian authors believed in the power of language. Margul-Sperber, Rosenkranz, Weißglas, Kittner, and Ausländer even assumed the existence of a pure, holy linguistic realm that neither history nor political events could affect. In light of the Shoah, the traditionalism of Bukovinian Jewish poets acquired a new dimension. Already in the 1920s and 30s, classicist forms had become particularly fashionable in literature, art, and architecture. These forms were embedded in new artistic contexts, attaining different functions and meanings. Both historicist and avant-garde artists were playing with such residues of tradition, lending them a postmodern dimension. As a reaction to these avant-garde experiments, Nazi poets and artists laid claim to the classicist tradition, perverting it to propagate their own ideology and to demonstrate that Nazism was the only true heir of German culture. Set against this background, the attempt of Shoah poets from Bukovina to write sonnets in spite of their experience of the ghetto, the war, and the death camps, was a political act, a conscious endeavor to rescue from total destruction a tradition misused by the Nazis. Their German poems written within the ghetto and concentration camps testified to their belief in the power of German poetry. The integrity of these poems also gave the deportees strength and purpose. For these Shoah survivors writing in a classicist style even after 1945 was a means to assert further their own voice against the memory of barbarism. Jakob Klein-Haparasch, in his mammoth novel …Der vor dem Löwen flieht (He Who Flees the Lion; 1961), offers a detailed portrayal of the condition humaine under different political systems ranging from monarchy to fascist and communist dictatorships. Following Kafka’s lead, Robert Flinker, author of the novels Der Sturz (The Downfall; 1940– 1941) and the posthumous Fegefeuer (Purgatory; 1968), illustrated the impact of dictatorship on the psyche. Hilsenrath represented the Shoah via the novels Nacht (Night; 1965), Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber; 1970), and Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (Jossel Wassermann’s Homecoming; 1993). Daghani captured images of Transnistrian death camps in drawings

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and water colors, collected and published in The Grave Is in the Cherry Orchard (Romanian edition 1947, English edition 1961). The path that Celan followed differed from those of all the other Bukovinian poets and artists. He broke language apart and embedded the residues of his poetic explosions, along with words from different languages, technical terms, and neologisms, into an innovative “language grid” (Sprachgitter), which no longer thematized the Shoah experience, but uncovered the wounds that history had burned into language. Celan pushed the German language to the edge of silence the way history had pushed the Jewish people to the edge of extinction. The fateful events of the 1940s were reflected differently by Bukovinian writers. For Ukrainians, the unification was so crucial that they tended to ignore Stalinist terror. The almost eighty-yearold Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka thus wrote: “Soviet power chased injustice away; with a powerful wing it cleared the dust and all other obstacles which stood in the way of hard-working people. The peasant rose from his knees, the worker straightened his bent back, and those who had no work found employment which assured their existence. […] Like the entire Bukovinian people, I am finally relieved” (Tvory 5: 191–2). By contrast, in her verses written many years after these historical events, Ausländer characterized the political change in an existential-symbolic way by calling it a “red check and flag game”: “the hammer splits the flight in pieces / the sickle mows time to hay” (Die Sichel 16). The same political changes triggered Gong’s ironic lines: “The Soviets came peacefully by tank / and freed northern Bukovina. / Romanians withdrew orderly and without capitulating / into smaller borders. The Germans were drawn back home, into their Reich. / The Jews, much more rooted than others, stayed. / (One half died in Novosibirsk, / the other in Antonescu’s KZ. / The steppe took over and displayed its culture” (14). Bukovina’s ethnic composition underwent drastic changes after the Soviet NKVD deported the “bourgeois” elements (among them Bukovinian Jews and “nationalist” Romanians and Ukrainians) to Siberia in 1940–41, and the Germans sent the Jewish population to Transnistria’s death camps. In 1944–45, most Poles left the city. As a result, by the mid–1940s the multinational character of the city, once the home of sixteen coexisting ethnic groups (Colin and Kittner 9), was severely curtailed. As the Ukrainian historian Andreas Kappeler suggests, this loss of diversity characterized the larger region as well: “After the genocide of Jews, the killing and deportation of the Polish elite, and the emigration of many Ukrainian-Germans (some of their associations had participated, along with German fascists, in the genocide of Jews), the Ukraine lost its age-old multiethnic character. The only large non-Ukrainian group was that of the Russians; to this day, the Russian-Ukrainian relations are a major problem” (225). After the Chernivsti and northern Bukovina were integrated into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, a process of rapid Ukrainization began: “The new rulers nationalized the cultural institutions of Bukovina’s different ethnic groups, forbade their associations, jailed newspaper editors, and arrested journalists, lawyers, business men, and artists” (Heppner 38). The official language of the state, the school system, and press became Ukrainian. On July 3, 1940, the newspaper Radjans’ka Bukowyna (Soviet Bukovina) appeared as the organ of the regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, which published a similar newspaper in Soviet Moldavia. On September 3, 1940, the newspaper Komsomolez Bukowyny (The Communist Youth of Bukovina) was launched. For half a century, these were among the only newspapers in Bukovina. On September 1, 1940, the

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former multicultural University of Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi reopened as a primarily Russian/Ukrainian institution. The literature of the various ethnic groups came under strict party control. The Soviet propaganda machinery developed a massive campaign against “bourgeois culture,” which included most everything created before 1940. The Red Army’s march into Bukovina came to be regarded as the “Zero Hour” of the region’s culture. The Soviets arrested and deported many Bukovinian intellectuals from different ethnic groups, including members of the formerly illegal communist movement in Romania who had endured reprisals under Romanian rule. In the Soviet era, Chernivtsi had no independent publishing house. A Peter Rychlo branch of the Karpaty (Uzgorod) publishing house opened in the 1960s; it published books in the languages of minorities, including books by Bukovinians who wrote in Russian and Romanian. But writers remained under constant ideological control. Out of the manifold literary styles and forms, only “socialist realism” was accepted. In this enforced uniformity, the writer’s ethnic language no longer mattered or played a mere ornamental role. Literature’s homogeneous political message was available in four different linguistic versions, which were supposed to testify to the diversity of flowering cultures in the Soviet Union. In spite of the many constraints, writers of different ethnic groups still managed to contribute to the development of postwar Bukovinian literature. By the end of the 1940s, the Ukrainian dramatist Zinovij Prokopenko founded a literary association that published three almanacs under the title Radjans’ka Bukowyna (Soviet Bukovina; 1945, 1956, and 1960). In 1958, this association became the Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi Ukrainian Writers Union. The twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian poet Mychajlo Tkacz, who was later awarded the Taras Shevchenko prize, became its first president. A number of Ukrainian writers (among them prose writers Iryna Wilde, Volodymyr Babljak, and Mykhajlo Ivassjuk, and poets Vitalij Kolodij, Tamara Severnjuk, Borys Bunczuk, and Maria Matios) managed to break out of the conventions of socialist realism. In her poems and stories that gained wide recognition in the Ukraine, Halyna Tarassjuk discusses ethical problems, while the poet Mykola Raczuk attained an innovative style of writing by combining postmodernist and Baroque elements. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, younger authors such as Myroslav Lazaruk and Vassyl Kozeljanko turned to absurd and surreal writing. Among the Romanian authors who managed to return to the traditions of authentic literature mention deserve Vasile Leviţchi, Ion Chilaru, Grigore Bostan, Mircea Liutyk, Vasile Terizanu, and Simeon Gociu. Bukovina also produced several Russian poets: Vitalij Demczenko, Anatolij Krym, Valerij Fomenko, and Semen Zidelkovskyi. In 1997, an almanac of Russian poetry from Bukovina appeared. It should be noted here that some Bukovinian authors writing in Russian and Ukrainian resided in the diaspora: Ivan Negriuk in Romania, Mojsej Fischbejn in Germany, Igor Pomeranzev in England, and Leonid Finkel in Israel. Almost all the surviving poets writing in German (Margul-Sperber, Ausländer, Rosenkranz, Kittner, Celan, Weißglas, Gong, and Gruber), most of them Jewish, had left Bukovina before, during, or after World War II. Stephanie Nußbaum and Friedrich Tabak were the only German-speaking writers who remained in Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi. Nußbaum could publish her poetry only in the Moscow newspaper Neues Leben (New Life); Tabak’s scholarly essays and articles appeared in the Bucharest newspaper Neue Literatur (New Literature).

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Amy Colin, with Peter Rychlo

Pre–World War II Czernowitz became a crossroads of memories, ideas, and dreams after 1945. Set against the background of World War II, the Shoah, and Stalin’s purges, Bukovina regained its aura of a peaceful, multi-ethnic oasis in tormented times. Whether myth, memory, or literary paradigm, Bukovina and its capital convey yet another key message: the idea that pluralism is a condition humaine. Twentieth-century Bukovinian authors illustrate the gist of this message. Those who experienced World Wars I and II in their native region had to change their citizenship, political, social, linguistic, and sometimes even religious identity several times and often within a year. Those who left their homeland were forced to change their identity many more times and in a much more radical way than all those they left behind. Leo Katz, author of several novels including Totenjäger (Death Hunter; 1944) and the posthumous Brennende Dörfer (Burning Villages; 1993), moved back and forth from his seventeenth year onward between New York, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and Mexico. After World War II, he returned to Vienna. Rose Ausländer went to Vienna during World War I, came back to Czernowitz in 1919, but emigrated to the United States in 1921, returning to Czernowitz in 1930. After the War, she lived in Bucharest (1945–1946) and then reemigrated to the United States, but moved to Vienna in 1962; finally she settled in Düsseldorf, Germany. The most fascinating example is that of the Jewish writer Clara Blum, who wrote in German, Russian, and Chinese. Born in 1904 into a wealthy Jewish family from Czernowitz, Blum moved in 1915 with her mother to Vienna, where she studied Individual Psychology with Alfred Adler and became actively involved first in the social democratic and then in the communist movement. Winner of a Soviet award for the best anti-fascist poem, she went on a two-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1934, but she remained there for eleven years, working for literary journals and writing poetry. During Stalin’s purges, Blum fell in love with a Chinese Maoist theater director. One day her friend disappeared. Believing that he was on a secret mission to China, she wanted to join him. In search of a Chinese Embassy that could enable her emigration to China, she left the Soviet Union in 1945 and traveled for two years, ending up in France, from where she moved to Shanghai. She changed her name to Dshu Bail-lan and became a professor of German at the Universities of Fundan and Nanking, writing poems and a remarkable novel, Der Hirte und die Weberin (The Shepherd and the Weaver; 1951), detailing her search for the beloved man she never saw again. (He had been deported to Siberia and killed). Blum, along with many other Bukovinian authors, regarded her turbulent life as a source of strength. Plural identity was not just a construct and a trope for them, but a reality that gave meaning and direction to their lives. The ideas of multiculturism and linguistic plurality have become again more acceptable after 1999, when the Ukrainian Republic was established. Writers belonging to various ethnic groups have been allowed to develop their own cultural associations such as the Ukrainian “Prosvita” Society, the Romanian “Mihai Eminescu” Cultural Society, the Jewish Elieser Steinbarg Association, the Polish Adam Mickiewicz Society, the Russian Andrej Sacharov Society, and the Austrian-German association “Wiedergeburt.” Many formerly Russian schools have returned to their original languages of instruction, Romanian or Ukrainian. In 1992, a general Jewish school was opened; its curriculum includes Hebrew, Jewish history, and religion. Today, there is also a Polish Sunday school in Chernivtsi. The political and cultural relaxation brought about also a renewal of religious life in Bukovina. Most religious denominations received back their places of worship, which had been taken away during the Soviet period. Chernivtsi now has several Eastern orthodox

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churches, Greek-catholic churches, Roman-catholic churches, a synagogue, and places of worship belonging to different protestant denominations. The University’s department of philosophy and theology trains Greek-orthodox priests. The Chernivtsi press is much more colorful and diverse nowadays, including several newspapers and journals in Ukrainian, Romanian, and Yiddish. The publishing houses are also multilingual/multicultural: Prut, Molodyj Bukowynez, Zoloti Lytavry, Zelena Bukowyna, Ruta, Bukrek, Alexandru cel Bun. The forty members of the Chernivtsi branch of the Writers Union write in Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish. In 1990, a literary prize was established in the name of Dmytro Zahul, the murdered Ukrainian poet from Bukovina. A number of cultural and scientific institutions are concerned today with the fading multicultural history of Bukovina. The Bukovina Research Center investigates aspects of the region’s cultural history; the Diaspora Museum documents all the voluntary and forced emigrations from Bukovina, while trying to remain in contact with Bukovinian émigrés from around the world. Chernivtsi has gradually rediscovered its multicultural past and is trying to imprint it onto the consciousness of a present that is culturally less diverse but willing to recognize a richer tradition. Commemorative signs on buildings remind passers-by of Kaindl (the Austro-German historian born in Czernowitz), Steinbarg and Altman (the Yiddish poets), Joseph Schmidt (the legendary Jewish Caruso), Sidi Tal (the Jewish actress), Volodymyr Ivassjuk (the Ukrainian composer), Constantin Tomaszczuk (the Ukrainian-Romanian professor and first Rector of the University of Czernowitz), as well as of Celan and Ausländer (Jewish poets writing in German). After visiting Chernivtsi several times, Karl Schlögel wrote: “Czernowitz is a Ukrainian city. Still, ethnic and religious diversity is more predominant here than elsewhere. Here there is Europe, which vanished elsewhere. In Chernivtsi, people still speak different languages: Ukrainian, Moldavian, Russian, Romanian, and German with a pre-World War II accent. […] People talk once again about Czernowitz tolerance; and the contact with the rest of the world was reestablished” (50).

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‘The City That Is No More, the City That Will Stand Forever’: Danzig/Gdańsk as Homeland in the Writings of Günter Grass, Paweł Huelle, and Stefan Chwin Katarzyna Jerzak Part I: Loss In a conversation dating back many years Salman Rushdie and I concurred that my lost Danzig was for me — like his lost Bombay for him — both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and navel of the world. This arrogance, this overkill lies at the very heart of literature. (Günter Grass, “Nobel Lecture”)

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If non-existent cities can breed fiction, real cities should be easily made into literature. In addition to a particular genius loci, a city needs its mythopoetic author. St. Petersburg needed Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, and Nabokov; Ruschuk/Ruse needed Elias Canetti; Sibiu/ Hermannstadt needed E. M. Cioran; Alexandria, Cavafy and Aciman; and Dublin, Joyce. Danzig/ Gdańsk needed Günter Grass to come into existence as a city-text; now it also has Paweł Huelle and Stefan Chwin. Gdańsk’s real and imaginary topography, its cosmopolitan history, and its role as a “small homeland” in Günter Grass’s writings have given it a discrete status. The Free City of Danzig is no more; and yet Grass’s literature has bestowed upon it a permanent kind of autonomy. Rather than being a reactionary claim by one of the disinherited, Grass’s fiction has worked as an antidote against the fumes of both Nazi and communist propaganda. Intensely political and historical, his work has recreated a city and provided an unexpected common ground for a German-Polish reconciliation. As a powerful Hanseatic city, starting point of World War II, and the birthplace of “Solidarność,” where, arguably, twentieth-century Europe took a turn away from Communism, Gdańsk has had more than its share of being in the spotlight. The city’s known history begins in 997, when Archbishop Adalbert tried to baptize a crowd of non-Christians in a place situated in the estuary of the Vistula River called Gyddanzyc. That there was a crowd to be baptized allows us to surmise that Gdańsk was then more than a village. And the fact that the crowd was somewhat free-spirited and unwilling to be imposed on in this manner — Adalbert achieved sainthood after being killed by the local population — gave Gdańsk the first chronicled instance of its genius loci that helped transform it much later into Wolne Miasto Gdańsk or Freie Stadt Danzig (Free City of Gdansk). Granted municipal autonomy in 1260, Gdańsk continued to grow as a trade center under the Teutonic rule (1308–1466). The Teutonic Knights built the three landmarks of the city that survive to this day: the Big Mill, Żuraw (the Crane), and St. Mary’s Basilica. After the Polish king Casimir IV reunited Gdansk with Poland in 1466, at the end of the Thirteen-year War, the city flourished, eventually becoming the most prosperous port on the Baltic. For over three hundred years, Gdańsk’s economic success was based on the city’s loyalty to the Polish crown, a loyalty that had much more to do with the trade privileges extended to Gdańsk by the Polish kings than with patriotism. The economic profit was huge: during the Renaissance, Gdańsk serviced three-quarters of Poland’s foreign trade. The city was big — in 1754 it boasted the largest population of any city in Eastern Europe — and autonomous, minting its own currency and, until 1841, supporting its own military fleet. While it never became a cultural center of the magnitude of, say, Florence, to the provincial Polish nobleman, whose yearly voyage down the Vistula to Gdańsk was a peregrinatio mirabilis, the city with its Flemish architecture and cosmopolitan population was a cultural mecca (Kurski 9–10). The names that have given Gdańsk its claim to fame were not necessarily honored in communist Poland. Renaissance poet Johannes Dantiscus, who wrote in Latin, city councilor and astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who compiled an atlas of the Moon but is now mostly remembered as a brewer, and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born in Gdańsk in 1788 — all had to survive a period of neglect because they could not readily be claimed as Polish. Linguistically, the city was always diverse, thanks to the prominent Polish, Kashubian, Jewish, Dutch, Scottish, and English presence. However, beginning with the Teutonic takeover in the fourteenth century and until the end of World War II, German was the language most commonly

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spoken in the streets of Gdańsk. While in the sixteenth century Latin would have been the language in which the visiting Polish gentleman would communicate with the local clockmaker, in 1954, when my mother arrived in Gdańsk, she could not find at first anyone who would speak Polish. The Kashubian fisherman who showed her the way to Morska Street used a mixture of German, Kashubian, and Polish to give her directions. Twenty years later, we heard Kashubian spoken by our nanny, Toniusia, who had a resonant Polish last name but whose Polishness ended there. She often compared us to the children of Herr Schichau, the owner of the Danzig shipyard in whose household she had worked before the war. Thanks to Toniusia I learned that our street, called with Pan Slavic patriotism Chrobrego Street (after Bolesław Chrobry, the first crowned king of Poland) used to be called Lindenstrasse because of its lovely old linden-trees. Thus, even the Gdańsk of my childhood was not completely Polish and that truth, unlearned during all the years of my formal Polish education, was brought home again through literature. Gdańsk celebrated its second Nobel Prize in 1999 (the Nobel Prize for Peace had been awarded to Lech Wałęsa in 1983). Günter Grass’s remark about his hometown, “When I think to what extent Flemish builders, settlers from Holland and Scotland, Mennonites and Huguenots, English and Jewish merchants — to what extent all of them shaped my Gdańsk, I become aware that all nationalist claims become empty” (Kurski 8), can now be applied to his Nobel Prize. In 1996, Wisława Szymborska accepted the Nobel in the name of universal poetry — poetry written in Polish that speaks to readers of many traditions and nationalities. But Grass could accept the prize for a different reason: his novels have naturalized Polish inhabitants in Danzig and German Danzigers in the Polish Gdańsk. In his Nobel lecture, Grass claims the status of an exile not only by virtue of his family’s forced displacement in 1945, but also because of his isolation in Germany upon the publication of his Danziger Trilogie (The Danzig Trilogy; 1980): “Which means that like writers banished to Siberia or suchlike places I am in good company” (“Nobel Lecture”). In fact, he makes his original exile the spiritus movens of his writing: Besides, I come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to everything that drives a writer from book to book — common ambition, the fear of boredom, the mechanisms of egocentricity — I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated. (“Nobel Lecture”)

The driving motif of loss, which Grass ascribes to himself and to Salman Rushdie, has also been recognized by André Aciman in Out of Egypt and False Papers, two books prompted by the loss of his native Alexandria. But while it is clear that Grass, Rushdie, and Aciman lost their “small homelands,” what have the other two authors considered in this chapter, Paweł Huelle and Stefan Chwin, lost? Because of the geopolitical and historical reality of the postwar years, what they lost is the Danzig Grass knew. Grass’s literature made them simultaneously aware of that loss and able to compensate for it, generating a writing imperative similar in kind to the one Grass describes in Rushdie’s case and in his own.

Katarzyna Jerzak

80 Part II: Literature 1.

Inne historie I dreamt of it all my childhood. Not of the big, colorful one with oceans and mountain ranges. That one I encountered at school and in the atlas. I dreamt of a map of my immediate surroundings, a map that would capture Oliwa hills, wooded valleys, and narrow paths between ducts in a magical network of signs and topographical contour lines. The times during which I grew up were not auspicious to maps. In those days, maps were general — like a vague hypothesis — and falsified by a special department, in case they should fall into enemy hands. (Huelle, Inne historie 201)

Paweł Huelle’s Inne historie (Other Stories; 1999) is a collection of short essays written for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza and other publications. As the collection’s title — which can be translated as “Other Stories” or “Other Histories” — suggests, the writings here are of another genre than the novel and the volumes of short stories Huelle had published previously: Weiser Dawidek (Who Was David Weiser?; 1987), Opowiadania na czas przeprowadzki (Moving House: Stories; 1991), and Pierwsza miłość i inne opowiadania (First Love and Other Stories; 1996). While they border on fiction, most of the “stories” in Inne historie could be classified loosely as reviews or opinion pieces. They differ from Huelle’s literary works as to genre, but not in another aspect: they all deal with history, and their overt or implied referent is almost without exception Huelle’s native city and region. The collection opens, however, not with Gdańsk but with the city that Lawrence Durrell and André Aciman call the capital of memory: Alexandria. Even the piece concerned with something seemingly as distant from Gdańsk as Caius Plinius Maior’s Naturalis Historiae contains a mention of the Baltic Sea and its legendary city of amber, while the essay on the Amish in Colona, Iowa has as its tacit context the much older Mennonite presence in the Żuławy region near Gdańsk. In a tribute to Joyce’s Ulysses, Huelle confesses that in Dublin he felt “as if at home, in the streets of Gdańsk, Wrzeszcz, and Oliwa, known to me from my childhood and from numerous scenes in Günter Grass’s novels” (Inne 45). Feeling at home, which is ordinarily the opposite of the sense of exile one might experience in a foreign city, is here attributed to the powers of literature (Joyce’s Dublin) and to a felicitous convergence of life and literature (Grass’s Danzig and Huelle’s Gdańsk). The actual topography of Gdańsk acquires in Huelle’s mind an additional dimension, one that, instead of dividing the real from the literary, joins the two: “A certain courtyard in Wrzeszcz would be an insignificant, ugly and shamefully hidden part of that neighborhood, had not the incredible and uncanny Tulla Pokriefke played there one day” (45). This “intensification of meaning,” which occurs when a physical location is given further connotations by literary means, brings into existence a space of its own, one that cannot be simply mapped but has to be experienced. In a miraculous tour de force, the exile Grass and the self-exiled Joyce recreate and domesticate their lost hometowns in a way that allows their readers to perceive in the real city the additional content and depth that are the writers’ own. Danzig/Gdańsk’s illustrious historical figures are subtly addressed in several of Huelle’s Inne historie. Three are dedicated to Schopenhauer’s connection to Gdańsk, the city where he spent only five years. “Frankfurt, September 21st, 1860” is an evocation of Schopenhauer’s last hours

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in the Danzig where he was born. “Gdańsk, April 1773” takes us back to the morbid experiment of inflicting a smallpox vaccine on Heinrich Trosiner’s daughters. One of the girls, Joanna Henrietta, who later married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, became the mother of the philosopher and wrote works that Goethe read with some appreciation. In her youth, Joanna was attracted to the artist Daniel Chodowiecki, the other world-renowned native of the coastal city, whom she wished to follow to Berlin. That Gdańsk and Frankfurt should alternate in the titles of Huelle’s essays, while Berlin and Hamburg appear frequently in them, is a reminder that Gdańsk’s connection to Germany used to be vital. Since this simple fact was not commonly acknowledged between World War II and 1989, an entire Gdańsk generation grew up looking at German scripts on their bathtub faucets (Kalt/Warm) or on their mailbox (Briefe) without the slightest notion why they were there. “Gdańsk, March 1793” is a lyrical farewell to the Schopenhauer family in the form of an imaginary account of their last hours in the city they loved. All that remains of the Schopenhauers in Gdańsk is their summer mansion, which was turned after World War II into an institution for young delinquents. The generation that grew up in post-war Gdańsk was equally ignorant of those who had sacrificed their lives for the city. Huelle’s “Count Louis de Plelo” is the story of the 1733 siege of Gdańsk, within whose walls the Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński chose to hide from the Russian army, and of the heroic death of the French count who tried to liberate the city and free the king. “Luneville, February 23rd, 1766,” another elegiac piece, commemorates a place at first glance geographically removed from Gdańsk and the death of the exiled Stanisław Leszczyński. Huelle fills the king’s last eighteen nights with scenes of his humiliating escape from the besieged Gdańsk in 1734. This distressing and perhaps entirely fictitious account gave the Poles of the 1940s–1950s generation a clearer idea than the fabricated history books of the communist era of what it meant for the city of Gdańsk to be on the side of the Polish crown, as well as a foretaste of the imminent dissolution of Poland as a political entity. “Sycowa Huta, Summer 1962” is one of several personal, almost intimate pieces in the collection. Its point of departure is a photograph, taken in the Kashubian Lake District, of the author as a child on vacation with his parents. Writing in 1997, Huelle retraces his steps to Kashubia, the country of his childhood excursions. And a separate country it was, even down to its language. As a young boy, Huelle did not grasp why the local speech was incomprehensible to him: “[I]f they do not speak Polish here, then where are we?” (Inne 180). The conviction, forceful as it was, that the postwar generation was growing into a homogeneous nation, breaks down in this confession. Grass stated in an interview of the same year that the fact that his mother was part Kashubian gave him a life-long identification with minorities. Inne historie’s last elegy, or rather epitaph, is for Bohumil Hrabal. Even in this text, with many specific topographic references to Prague, we find Gdańsk. When he heard the news of the Czech writer’s death, Huelle was in an Irish pub in the Wrzeszcz quarter of Gdańsk, “with a view of Grunwaldzka Street, which used to be called Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, and earlier Hindenburg Avenue, only to be renamed after Marshall Rokossowski, while originally it was called Main Avenue” (Inne 182). This sentence echoes a similar one in Grass’s Call of the Toad: “Grunwaldzka, once Grosse Allee then Hindenburgalleee then Stalinallee” (224). The wake for Hrabal takes place in East-Central Europe, because where else could one street have borne all these different names in a matter of half a century?

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Huelle’s collection was bound to include texts on cartography. Indeed, we find two essays on maps. One, entitled simply “The Map,” opens with Huelle’s childhood dream of having “a map of [his] immediate surroundings, a map that would capture Oliwa hills, wooded valleys, and narrow paths between ducts in a magical network of signs and topographical contour lines” (Inne 201). That dream, however, had to wait because the times were not “auspicious to maps.” Huelle’s own essay offers four maps, each of a distinct order and provenance. The one he just describes is the impossible map that the young Huelle attempted to accomplish every spring, when equipped with paper, pencil, ruler, and compass he would walk through the territory that years later became the site of his novel Weiser Dawidek, tracing forest paths and outlines of hills. This exercise invariably ended in a fiasco: the terrain was too complex and the levels of altitude too difficult for the child to render. So instead, he studied his grandfather’s maps — “large sheets lined with canvas that smelled of war, hunt, and adventure” (201). These detailed maps (at a scale of 1:75000) showed the Poland that ceased to be in 1939: the areas near Lvov and Drohobycz that lingered on in geographic and literary reality (Drohobycz was Bruno Schulz’s hometown) but for political reasons were beyond the reach of the Polish exiles from those parts. To young Huelle, Lvov was a mythical city, as distant from his everyday reality as any city in Homer’s Odyssey (Inne 206). Years later when, instead of trying to cartographically represent his surroundings, Huelle wrote short stories, he found in a used bookstore a reprint of a German map — the 1936 “Waldkarte von Oliva und Zoppot” — on which, tripping over the German names of places he knew by their Polish appellations, he retraced some of the paths familiar to him from his walks. The irony is that he found a faithful rendering of his most familiar surroundings on a “foreign” map — foreign at least to the sensibility of someone born and raised in Gdańsk, the city touted in post-war propaganda as perennially Polish. The fourth and last map is the one Huelle bought in a post-communist bookstore in the 1990s. As he suggests, the ultimate freedom returned to the inhabitants of Gdańsk and its environs is to be able to take a walk in the Oliwa Hills, carrying the 1936 “Waldkarte” and the 1996 “Oliwa Forests,” savoring the pleasures of a veteran reader of maps and places. Much like Aciman’s essays about Alexandria in False Papers, Huelle’s essayistic prose never lets go of Gdańsk, unveiling one by one its various incarnations. If Aciman’s collection is a lyrical compendium of exilic wisdom, a tribute to the importance of place in the personal and writerly self, Huelle’s writings pay homage to the role played by the loss of place in literature, even if that place is lost only in time. Just as Aciman speaks of the real Alexandria but also of the Alexandria he himself had conjured in Out of Egypt, Huelle’s pieces resonate more deeply for the reader who knows the city from the novels of Grass, Chwin, and Huelle himself. Unlike Grass, Chwin and Huelle belong to a generation that did not live during World War II but took it upon themselves to give expression to the muted voices of the traumatic war period, particularly of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Their work is part of a transnational trend that includes W. G. Sebald’s novel Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants; 1992) and Erri De Luca’s Tu, mio (Sea of Memory; 1998). What links Grass’s, Huelle’s, and Chwin’s writings is a depiction of Gdańsk as a center of the world, a center of emotional gravity. Grass’s portrayal of the city is the most cosmopolitan as well as chronologically and culturally complete, especially if we consider the diachronic aspect of his early epic novels as well as the global character of his later works. Huelle’s work, on the other hand, is the most approachable for post-war Polish readers. The Gdańsk of the 1950s and 60s was, for a maritime harbor, almost uncannily closed off to the world, and Huelle portrays it as

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such. At the same time, nothing undermines the universality of the experience of childhood Huelle narrates. Finally, Stefan Chwin’s Hanemann opens up a lyrical space that had hitherto remained inaccessible to the post-war Polish generations, if only for geopolitical reasons. Chwin’s masterful reintegration of the German elements of both pre– and post–World War II Danzig/Gdańsk reality, suffused with the melancholy of German Romanticism, has significant political implications. Like Stendhal’s La vie de Henry Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard; 1835–36), which anchors the text in the writer’s hometown of Grenoble with its many sketches, maps, and plans, Grass, Huelle, and Chwin obsessively return to their own native place, knowing full well, as Stendhal did, that one’s strong feeling — be it nostalgia or abhorrence — towards one’s origins sets a most powerful artistic expression into motion. 2.

Weiser Dawidek During our nature classes, M-ski often stressed the fact that no European city would be ashamed to have a zoo like the one in Oliwa. I don’t know what he meant. Did he mean that we didn’t live in Europe, or that, apart from the zoo, we had something to be ashamed of ? (Huelle, Weiser Dawidek 42)

“Where am I?” is the perennial question of exiles. Exiles are acutely aware of where they are not, but need to negotiate both the distance from home and the otherness of the new space. Huelle’s novel, Weiser Dawidek (1987), contains a minute rendering of Huelle’s native city of Gdańsk and its environs: Wrzeszcz, Oliwa, Jelitkowo, and Sopot. The novel’s plot, which recounts the official investigation of the disappearance in 1957 of a twelve-year-old boy, is realistically anchored in the streets, parks, beaches, and hills of Gdańsk, with an occasional excursion abroad to Mannheim and Stockholm. Readers experience a triple pleasure if they know Gdańsk and Grass’s novels, for they can retrace, with the narrator, the steps of Grass’s characters, as well as those of their own. And yet the narrator and the novel’s characters all exhibit some metaphysical discomfort or malaise known to all exiles. Paradoxically, the one who is most at ease in the city is the true exile, Dawid Weiser. An orphan and an outsider, this Gdańszczanin without a birth certificate has many a literary kin. Weiser’s seemingly first-hand knowledge of Gdańsk’s German past may be a literary inheritance of sorts: at times he appears to be a continuation, if not an avatar, of Grass’s Oskar Matzerath, as when he recounts with great detail the last days of the Polish Post Office in Danzig. Weiser’s magical powers, as well as his troubling status as a Christ and Satan figure at once, also make him a literary descendant of Oskar. Dawid Weiser seems to be even more closely related to Joachim Mahlke, the protagonist of Grass’s Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse; 1961), who is also the odd one out among his Danzig peers. Weiser, too, is a powerful outcast who transforms himself from a scapegoat into a semi-military, semi-religious leader. Just as Mahlke is flamboyantly Catholic and vaguely Polish, so Weiser is blatantly non-sectarian and vaguely Jewish. Even the faintest aura of Jewishness suffices to make him the object of harassment at the hands of his Catholic peers. It is, therefore, a matter of poetic justice that the estranged boy — supposedly born in “Brody, USSR” — is the one most at home in the city of Gdańsk. It is he who guides his followers in the footsteps of Frederick the Great in the Valley of Joy, shows them the Schopenhauer house and the house of Schichau, the prewar owner of the Danzig shipyard.

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The thorny question of nationality does not cease to reverberate in postwar Gdańsk, partly because the city becomes a melting pot of sorts for the few remaining Danzig Germans, for the Kashubians, Poles, and the numerous refugees from the once Polish east. Abraham Weiser, Dawid’s alleged grandfather, “who had lived a whole era somewhere in the south-east among Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Poles, Jews, and Armenians” (Weiser 49), is portrayed in the novel as one of Poland’s last Jews, not only displaced but also orphaned by the annihilation of his entire nation. The mysterious occultation of his grandson is both a reflection of that horrendous loss and a narrative challenge. Like in Da Vinci’s Last Supper, in which the figure of Christ is both the focal and the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, the central figure of Weiser Dawidek focuses the novel’s energies only in order to prepare for his eventual disappearance. It is this disappearance, however, that is the imperative behind the entire story. The narrator emphatically assures us that he can, at will, see the bank of the river Strzyża where Weiser and his girlfriend Elka are sitting with their feet in the water; he can see them “as clearly as on a map drawn from memory” (Weiser 190). But memory is not always faithful. Just like Grass, Huelle questions both history and memory. He makes it clear that what one sees is a matter of perspective, while at the same time refusing a facile utopian vision: Whenever we stood there, up on the hill, our city seemed to us completely different from the one in which we lived every day. At that time I did not know why, but today, when neither Bukowa Hill nor Weiser exist any more, nor the Jelitkowo of those days, today I think that from up there one simply didn’t see the dirty, litter-strewn yards, the overflowing garbage cans and all the ugliness of the midtown, which could be symbolized by Cyrson’s grey and dusty shop, where we used to buy bottled orangeade. (Weiser 21)

The backward glance may be nostalgic, but it does not idealize. Gdańsk of those years is just another Polish town trying to shake off the nightmare of the war as well as a peculiar sense of shame. The shame is never explicitly defined and yet it is detectable throughout the novel, sometimes within the context of the “Polish complex,” at others as a case of bad conscience. An example of the former is offered by M-ski’s claim in the motto of this subsection that “no European city would be ashamed to have a zoo like the one in Oliwa” (Weiser 42), which prompts the narrator’s question: “Did he mean by that that we didn’t live in Europe, or that, apart from the zoo, we had something to be ashamed of?” (42) In the 1992 version of the novel, Huelle allows himself a more explicit remark: “Today, when I no longer visit zoological gardens, M-ski’s sentence about the most beautiful zoo in Europe sounds ridiculous and stupid. As if in a foreign city a guide told us ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the most beautiful prison ever built in our city, or perhaps in all of Europe’” (Weiser 42). And when the inspired madman Yellowwings curses the “bloody city” in which “everything is deceit” and in which “there is no end to looting” (111), one cannot help but think of Gdańsk in 1945 — as depicted in Chwin’s Hanemann — when the Eastern Polish and Lithuanian resettlers walked into the still-warm mansions, houses, and shops deserted by the war’s victims. Yet it is not only the city’s past that is bloody. Weiser Dawidek repeatedly portrays Gdańsk as the city of the Apocalypse — not a distant, unimaginable Armageddon but rather an imminent catastrophe whose ecological ill-tidings are becoming visible everywhere. Like Grass, Huelle is preoccupied with the impending threat posed by the thoughtless development of technology.

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Huelle’s novel can be seen as a Polish sequel to Grass’s Danziger Trilogie, as a symmetrical filling of the gap on the Polish side of postwar history. 3.

Unkenrufe Since in my school days I ran myself ragged in the routes that Reschke claims to have covered, for which reason the city faithfully rebuilt from the ruins remains a city where I can find my way in my sleep, and since his detour via Beutlergasse to St. Mary’s could have been my detour, I follow him to the Orbis-Hotel Hevelius, adapt to his shuffling gait, make myself his night shadow and echo. (Grass, The Call of the Toad 34)

Grass appears to have been favored by fate in that he was able and willing to return to the city of his childhood — if not to move back to it. When asked why he did not go back to St. Petersburg, the late Russian exile Joseph Brodsky answered that he preferred to remember than to qualify. At the turn of the millennium in Rome, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewki, responding to a wellmeaning reader who asked whether he had considered a return to his native Lvov, asked in return: “And what would I do over there, in the Ukraine?” (2). Grass, on the other hand, has accepted the renewed Polishness of his hometown. As Zagajewski suggests in his essay on Grass, Grass has a different brand of Germanness than Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, or Thomas Mann. His peculiar Germanness “does not border on Ancient Greece or France, neither does it share a border with Slovenia or Switzerland, but rather with Polishness” (2). According to Zagajewski, the great resonance of Grass’s oeuvre in Polish readers is that, instead of being “a jealous or snobbish border guard who bans entry” (2), Grass beckons them to cross the border. It is tempting to extend Zagajewski’s metaphor and say that Grass has shown the Germans and the Poles that the real borders are not necessarily what we see on today’s real maps. Just as Grass compares his loss of Danzig to Salman Rushdie’s loss of Bombay, so Zagajewski finds perhaps an even more fitting parallel between his own exilic fate and that of the author of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum; 1959): [Grass’s Germanness] was almost analogical to my own experience; my experience consisted of a constant mixing of and confrontation between my Polishness — the Polishness brought by my parents and by myself, still an infant (and thus rather in my genes and in the tradition I inherited than in my mind) from our beautiful Lvov, lost forever — and the German character of my school building, my neo-Gothic church, the bits of conversations in German that I would overhear in the streets, and the German spoken by my nanny. (2)

This is surely the key to Grass’s importance in Poland: his writing has not only reopened an almost untouchable, rich past so organically connected to Poland’s own as to be inseparable from it, but it has also given the postwar Poles, if not a reconciliation with, then at least a much needed access to, things German. Whereas Grass’s Danziger Trilogie — which contains next to Blechtrommer and Katz und Maus, also Hundejahre (Dog Years; 1963) — deals with Danzig’s troubling and violent recent times, his Der Butt (The Flounder; 1977) retells Gdańsk’s history since the dawn of time. In Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad; 1992), he propels the city into a capitalistic, albeit ecologically

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sound future — because, according to Grass, Gdańsk’s future and past are simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian. The two protagonists of The Call of the Toad embody the corresponding halves of Danzig/ Gdańsk’s past: Alexander Reschke is the mixed German-Polish autochthon, whose family name evolved from Rebeschke through Reszkowski to Reschke and back to Reszkowski again, while Alexandra Piórkowska is the transplant from the Eastern parts of Poland, her family having lived in Wilno/Vilnius. Alexander’s attachment to the city of his childhood, which his family was forced to leave, is devoid of any nationalist sympathies. Early on, in his speech on “The Century of Expulsions” that he delivers to Alexandra, inspired by their idea of a cemetery association, Alexander makes an important distinction between home and nation: “What we call home means more to us than such concepts as fatherland or nation” (Toad 27). The corresponding German word, translated by Ralph Manheim as “home” is, of course, “Heimat,” which is perhaps less nationalistic in tone than “Vaterland,” despite its abuse during the Nazi era. Home, then, is the physical space in which one grows up, the landscape and the cityscape, the arrangement of the streets one walks along, the species of trees and other plants that grow there — one’s habitat. Significantly, the question of the native tongue does not seem important here: Erna Brakup, a Danziger German who remains in Gdańsk after the war, obeys her own motto — “Speak well of what’s foreign, but don’t go where you’re foreign” (Toad 121) — and learns Polish. She continues to speak it even on her deathbed, so that the Polish Alexandra has to translate the stubborn woman’s words into broken German for Alexander’s sake. Alexander himself seems comfortable in the Polish Gdańsk. His duality is less a split and more a layered reality: The fact that after the Second World War millions of Germans were driven from their homeland — Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and (like his parents and mine) the city of Danzig — also divided his mind, though without tearing it apart; for if Reschke suffered from the feeling that he had “two souls in one breast,” it also would have left him soulless had one of them been surgically removed. (Toad 85–86)

This doubling as a symptom of the exile’s fate is aptly diagnosed by André Aciman: “With their memories perpetually on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place they are also seeing — or looking for — another behind it. Everything bears two faces” (Letters of Transit 13). In The Call of the Toad, the issue of duplicity pursues both the narrator and the main character. In the second chapter, framed as an excerpt from Alexander Reschke’s diary, we find the account of a most bizarre occurrence. In Gdańsk’s landmark church of St. Mary, Reschke encounters his own tomb: I saw my name freshly chiseled in cuneiform though spelled in the old way, expanded by the first names of my brothers. Thus I read my name as Alexander Eugen Maximilian Rebeschke. I read it over and over again, in the end aloud though under my breath. Without a date, of course. Nor was I favored with an epitaph, let alone an escutcheon. Unable to bear the thought of lying under granite, I fled as if I had gone mad, my steps echoing on the flagstones. […] I ran, ran away from myself and out the southern side door, ran as I hadn’t run for a long time. (Toad 49)

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In this puzzling scene, not unlike an encounter with a Doppelgänger, Reschke confronts the lethal potential contained in the return to the place of one’s childhood. But Alexander Reschke’s cycle is closed only in appearance: for at this point the reader does not yet know of Reschke’s supposed link to Catharina Hevelius, neé Rebeschke, the first wife of the seventeenth-century Gdańsk astronomer, Johannes Hevelius (in whose honor the hotel where Alexander stays is named), so the extra syllable in his name makes little sense as yet. In a similar way, when the narrator in Huelle’s Weiser Dawidek explains why the interrogating militiaman addresses him as “Heller” — “because that was my name in those days” (22) — the reader is equally perplexed and no further explanation is forthcoming. Gdańsk is a city of changing names — its street toponyms change, its inhabitants change names, and its very name changes. Huelle’s Weiser Dawidek, Chwin’s novel Hanemann, as well as his most recent novel Esther, all announce the otherness of the main characters in their titles. While the names of the eponymous characters in these three novels may sound vaguely German to the contemporary Polish reader, two are also Biblical. In addition, Dawidek’s first name in postwar Poland could only be Jewish, while Esther’s name takes us back to a legendary Jewish lover of Kazimierz the Great, Esterka. It is telling that the English translation of Huelle’s novel is phrased as a question — Who Was David Weiser? — suggesting that something in the protagonist’s identity is questionable. I read Die Blechtrommel not in Poland, where it was banned for many years, but in Missouri in 1986. In fact Grass’s book is responsible for my having become what Aciman calls a “permanent transient,” because I remained in the United States against the will of my country’s government in order to audit a course on Literature and Authority at Washington University, a course which included works by Orwell, Grass, Solzhenitsyn, and Koestler. Living in St. Louis in the house of the Honorary Consul of a small Western European country, I dreamt of returning home with a false passport. Die Blechtrommel was my first non-oneiric return. Unkenrufe proved to be another. Grass’s books transported me to Gdańsk in a more tangible and satisfying manner than my physical returns home. Each actual return was a shock because in those years Poland was shedding its skin. Grass’s literature was like an inoculation — the changes that seemed raw and formless when I witnessed them in the living city became digestible through his novels. If Die Blechtrommel gave me the Danzig I never knew, Unkenrufe was an even more astonishing gift: the Gdańsk I knew offered itself to me not distilled and bottled like the Gdańsk Goldwasser vodka, but rather smelling of boletus mushrooms and herring, a city I had lost forever and yet yearned to inhabit. The obsessive focus on death, the moribund, and the morbid in Unkenrufe is oddly digestible as well. Gdańsk is no less attractive as a city for all the cemeteries that Alexander, Alexandra, and their business partners place in and around it. Grass does not miss the opportunity to mention those who are present in the city only in the form of decaying graveyards — the Jews and Mennonites. The city needs a thoroughly cosmopolitan, mixed population to be itself and prosper. That is why “Asia’s silent invasion” (Toad 37) is seen as a healthful injection of new energy into the dormant, because too homogeneous, community. In Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900), Sigmund Freud offers the city of Rome, with its Baroque buildings constructed in part from ancient ruins, as the archetypal image of the past’s presence in our dreams (Dreams 530). Likewise, in Unkenrufe Grass proposes Danzig/Gdańsk as the site whose reality mimics its memory in the narrator’s mind. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Rome is the other, however unlikely, double of Danzig. The

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final call of the toad resounds inside the Roman Pantheon, with Reschke himself lending his voice to the “toad deep within” (Toad 245). The choice of setting is as always significant in Grass. From the Gdańsk Bazylika Mariacka, “whose newly raised dome will be supported by twenty-six octagonal pillars until the next destruction” (48), the main couple travels to the other St. Mary’s, the Pantheon dedicated in AD 609 as the Church of Santa Maria Rotonda but preserved in its original form from the times of Emperor Hadrian. The site’s immutable quality, its resistance to time and, above all, its authenticity, serve as an ironic contrast to the reconstructed panorama of Gdańsk. The reader is made aware of the fact that the northern culture, as we know it, is much younger, because the Pantheon stood for almost a millennium before Gdańsk was founded. Echoing Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie (Barbarian in the Garden; 1988), the implied contrast between the barbaric north and the civilized south shows again Grass’s sensibility to be closer to Poland than to Ancient Greece. When in the fall of 1999 my Father called from Poland to tell me that Günter Grass received the Nobel Prize, I was standing under the Pantheon’s oculus, watching the solution of light and dust in which Alexander and Alexandra heard the call of the toad in the fictitious 1999. In December of that year, when I found myself back in Gdańsk, Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert (My Century; 1999) was in the bookstores. I read it on the return journey. The century, the millennium, and the book, all end with Gdańsk evoked in the words of Grass’s long dead mother. 4.

Hanemann Exile, like love, is not just a condition of pain, it’s a condition of deceit. (Aciman, Letters of Transit 13)

Hanemann (1995) is a meditation on the perseverance and fragility of memory in a city that itself embodies the tension between permanence and vulnerability. Chwin’s Danzig/Gdańsk is simultaneously “the city that is no more” (Hanemann 21, 54) and “the city that will stand forever” (29). The narrative voice mixes elegiac elements with a lyrical eulogy or panegyric. The novel’s title character, a surgeon specialized in dissection, takes upon himself the task of metaphysical pathology and investigation, probing the mysteries not only of the body, but also of the bruised soul — the human soul as well as the soul of the city. An exploration of both personal and collective trauma, Hanemann is a work in the tradition of Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love; 1960). Hanemann, just like Duras’s heroine, survives the death of his beloved not only to live the ordeal of forgetting but also to witness, with bewilderment, a resuscitation of feeling. The novel’s initial mood of criminal quandary recalls the opening of Weiser Dawidek, except that the historical cataclysm whose aftermath we observe in Huelle’s novel is only about to erupt in that of Chwin’s. A diffident narratorial voice takes us to a prewar August afternoon, several days before Hanemann is to leave Danzig for Königsberg, accompanied by his fiancée, Luiza Berger. Just as in Huelle’s novel, the reader does not know the precise nature of the investigation in which Hanemann takes part. The last postmortem Hanemann undertakes is the only one he will be unable to perform, for the corpse he unveils on the dissecting table is that of his beloved. Luiza’s sudden death by drowning leaves Hanemann in a state of acute numbness. The refusal to represent the unrepresentable links Hanemann with Weiser Dawidek: both novels exercise a remarkable degree

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of restraint in depicting the main characters and their trials. As readers, we remain as dissatisfied as the series of well-intentioned but far from omniscient narrators and informants who try to penetrate the mystery surrounding the central figure of each work. The question of vision is significant throughout the novel. Whether one sees the world in “the convulsive red and the cadaver purple” of Hanemann’s early fascination with Nolde, Kokoschka, and Kollwitz (Hanemann 81), or with kitsch’s “warm impudence that ignores the powers that be” (81), makes all the difference. Chwin’s novel has its kitschy and sentimental side, which the author had developed in his first work of fiction set in Gdańsk, Krótka historia pewnego żartu (A Short History of a Joke; 1991) and which continues, indeed overwhelmingly so, in his most recent novel, Esther (1999). In Hanemann, the sunset is the protagonist’s moment of “proximity to the world” — perhaps because a sunset can stand for both tragedy and kitsch: Dark silhouettes — the black profile of a man and the black profile of a woman — against the silver background of a sparkling sea. That picture, which, she could swear, she had seen that June night in the Glettkau gasthaus, had a sweet power about it, a power that made not only her heart, but anybody’s heart, melt. And when Mrs. Stein’s thoughts returned to that night, the past of the dead city began to resemble the young fiancée, who at dusk, blushing with shame, in the sheets fragrant with roses, for the first time unveils her body to the eyes of her longing lover. (24)

This peculiar analogy between the now dead young woman and the city points to Gdańsk’s exceptional hold on the imagination of its former residents. From the young narrator’s perspective, however, the city has joined its departed inhabitants: “Mrs. Stein was no longer, just as the City was no longer. And only the dark photographs that were hanging above the glass table […] released the soft darkness of the streets running towards the Motława, the shimmer of the fine cobblestones on Mariacka Street, and the milky glow of the streetlights on Szeroka Street” (21). The nostalgic, uncanny light in which Danzig appears in these photographs permeates the entire novel, whose aesthetic perspective combines a fascination with Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic vistas (Hanemann always comes home to a color lithograph of “The Cross in the Mountains” and the novel’s cover reproduces a fragment of the “Moonrise over the Sea”) with Hans Memling’s “Last Judgement” and kitschy paintings of sunsets. But even kitsch can acquire a meaning as ominous as Memling’s eschatological visions. One of the first things that the narrator’s mother sees, when she enters the apartment abandoned in a hurry by Hanemann’s neighbors, the Walmanns, is a painting of a sunset on the beach in Glettkau, the very setting of Luiza’s tragic death. In the novel’s punctilious perspective, people, their city, and even their ordinary things are granted a comparable status. The scene at the improvised market where the Germans remaining in the city sell their salvaged belongings to the newly arrived Poles has its ironic counterpart in the opening market scene in Grass’s novel, in which the German tourist, his wallet stuffed with Deutschmarks, buys the modest wares offered for sale by an old Polish woman. Though Hanemann is also obliged to sell some of his silverware, his recollection brings other long-departed objects back to life. He gently reproaches Luiza’s sister, Stella — who dies in the bombing of the ship that was supposed to carry her from Danzig to Hamburg — for her inattention to the ordinary objects at Frauengasse 16. The martyrology of cracking tiles, the agony of nickel, the suffering of glaze, the yellowing of the bathtubs, are all sung in this chapter. The chapter ends, however, with

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the poignant image of Stella’s hand resting in the form of scattered little bones on the bottom of the Baltic. Once again, the fragility of the human body, of objects, and of the city itself is counterbalanced by the power of resurgent memory and dedicated imagination. The question of national language, seemingly loaded with historical significance, is transcended by a surreptitious return to the more universal language of the body. Hanemann’s semilethargic life is gradually invested with a renewed sense of purpose and pleasure when he begins to feel he is a part of the Polish world around him. He gives German lessons to several young Poles, among whom is Andrzej Ch., Piotr’s friend. Andrzej and Hanemann read together Hermann Rauschning’s Geschichte der Musik und Musikpflege in Danzig (History of Music in the Old Danzig; 1931). To the sixteen-year-old student, German is an obscure language that demands an arduous effort; until an epiphany comes to him: Hanemann’s Polish translation of the text reveals “the secret of strangeness” (Hanemann 96), the alterity that separates Andrzej bodily from the “foreign beauty” (97). This revelation allows the boy to understand that difference in tone is even more important than difference in meaning, because the former is “painfully close, each of us tests it in the depth of one’s own body which always, despite the best of intentions, jealously guards that which is its own” (96). This realization is a foreshadowing of the narrator’s fascination with the body’s communicative power, expressed in the art of pantomime. The only truly invulnerable objects and most genuine people are those the mute boy Adam — an orphan taken in by the narrator’s family — evokes with his powerful hands. Adam’s masterful gestures recall that other genius of pantomime, Rameau’s Nephew in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew; 1761–74). While the young Piotr only dreams of “being somebody else” (Hanemann 169) — indeed, he desires “to speak a hundred languages, to have a hundred souls, a hundred voices, bird, human, young, old, ancient, new, male, female voices!” (183) — Adam, just like the Nephew, can “be anyone” at will. However, this empowering sense of becoming somebody you are not carries with it a mark of transgression, a “dark, evil joy” (184). Adam reminds us of Dawid Weiser. Adopted like Weiser and, like Weiser, ostracized, even though nobody can pinpoint his origins — is he possibly Jewish as well? — Adam, too, disappears at the end of the novel. In Hanemann there are layers of partly overlapping images, figures, and stories. The appearance of Hanka — who the narrator finds one morning in the kitchen, preparing his breakfast — is as sudden and mysterious as the disappearance of Luiza. Hanka is perceived as a bearer of an ethnic identity that is other, definitely non-Polish, and yet rather vague. She has a dark complexion and people call her “the Ukrainian.” Hanemann notes her resemblance to “figures in old German paintings” (134), but nobody, not even Piotr’s parents, for whom she works as a maid, knows where she comes from. Piotr’s direct question, “Hanka, where are you really from?” meets with an enigmatic answer: “From the world” (131). Hanka’s suicide attempt allows her to enter into Hanemann’s life, thus closing the gap left by Luiza’s death. In his daydreams, he lives the tragic events at the Glettkau pier with Hanka in Luiza’s role. A peculiar sense of solidarity awakens in Hanemann, along with the abandonment of speech in favor of the language of signs, as he becomes Adam’s teacher. In Chwin’s novel, verbal language is repeatedly put into question as a means of true communication; discredited by their use as propaganda, tainted with blood, words are no longer adequate. Only the language of literature seems to be able to overcome the usury of language as such.

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The novel’s layered structure mirrors Gdańsk’s own onomastic layering. The physical body of the city is covered with various appellations. For a reader born, like the narrator, after World War II, and familiar with the Trójmiasto (Tricity) Gdańsk, Sopot, and Gdynia, Chwin’s novel offers a veritable exercise in the archeology of place-names. While Zoppot and Marienburg are close enough to Sopot and Malbork, their Polish counterparts, to be obvious at once, others names present a definite barrier. Where and what, for instance, is Dirschau? In Unkenrufe, Grass uses the Polish and the German names interchangeably, so that the astute reader in the end matches the two linguistic halves of the city’s reality. In Weiser Dawidek, Huelle uses mostly the Polish names. Chwin is by far the most concerned with providing the reader with more than a clue: his novel comes with a highly satisfying, albeit incomplete, glossary of place-names that establishes a reassuring correspondence between Dirschau and Tczew, Frauengasse and Mariacka, Neufahrwasser and Nowy Port, Jelitkowo and Glettkau. Hanemann, like Weiser, does not die; he exits the narrator’s world the way Weiser and Elka walk out of Heller’s life. Hanemann leaves escorting Hanka, the “Ukrainian” maidservant and their adoptive son, the pantomime master Adam. Piotr accompanies them to the Gdańsk train station and remains, like Heller, staring at the “entrance to the tunnel.” But in recollection, he sees another scene in which the woman, the man, and the child “come out on the other side of the Oliwa Forest, into the bright space of the fields and ahead of them, over the distant horizon, there glows with soft redness a huge, gentle sun” (194). This soft sunset glow would make for a good Hollywood ending, but it is followed by a last chapter titled “Szron” or “Hoarfrost,” which considers posthumous exile, depicting the death of Gdańsk’s Jewish and German cemeteries. Hanemann thus ends where Unkenrufe begins. The sense of loss is mitigated by expectation, as Piotr daily checks the box marked “Briefe,” in the hope of finding a word from those who are gone. In this novel, in which words are to be doubted, the reader does not share his hope for he knows that the end is not a happy but rather a silent one. The plot of Chwin’s third novel, Esther, takes place mainly in Warsaw. Gdańsk is intended as Warsaw’s utopian other, nothing short of the promised land, a sunny Jerusalem: A strange city, […] and a very beautiful one. And refugees from all over the Earth are drawn to it, all those who are not happy. On the meadows near the city walls you’ll see Hassidim and Mennonites, praising our Lord with their dances. Various churches stand one next to the other in peace. […] And in orchards, planted on the seashore, apples are aplenty, as if one were in the Hesperidian Garden. And even though different tongues and languages mix in the streets, no one hurts anyone else. (Esther 279)

Unfortunately, this Gdańsk portrayed as paradise in Esther remains a mere literary conceit, inaccessible to the reader. One cannot live in Esther, nor go anywhere from the station named Estherhof after her.

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92 Part III: Life and if the City falls but a single man escapes he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile he will be the City (Herbert, Report from a Besieged City 77)

The present moment focused upon in Weiser Dawidek, Unkenrufe, and Hanemann is the moment of recuperation — through recollection, research, and ordering — of the place and its inhabitants, well anchored in the physical reality of Ogarna Street, Grottgera Street, and the anonymous apartment building overcrowded with the families of shipyard workers. But Hundegasse, Lessingstrasse, and the ghosts of their German residents are also palpably present. These three Gdańsk novels make ample use of the city’s linguistic, especially onomastic variety. The metamorphoses of the place-names and the transformations of characters’ family names make of Danzig/Gdańsk a concrete multifaceted place, but also a space of ever-exchanged energies and currents. Gdańsk emerges not as a claustrophobic, oppressive modern metropolis in the manner of Paris, London, and even Leningrad/St. Petersburg, but rather as a city built on a human scale, imbued with the cultures that have constituted it over the centuries. In the brief sketch on Cavafy, “Alexandria, the Year 1886,” which opens Inne historie, Huelle emphasizes the role of the poet’s words in the existence of the city: “Cavafy’s poems create an astonishing world […] where that which had happened thousands of years ago in the same Alexandria and Mediterranean world continues to exist in parallel to our time: not as in a museum, archeologically, but precisely as a living face of the present” (9). Gdańsk, Alexandria’s northern echo, has a long and complex history, but, above all, it is itself a living story. A place not traditionally or emblematically Polish in the way Warsaw or Cracow are, Gdańsk has been placed triply on the border. Situated on the Baltic, for many years placed next to or in Prussia, and since World War II also in the immediate proximity of the Soviet Union and now of Russia, it was always on the edge of the continent, and, as an important harbor, it often changed hands. Influenced by the German and the Polish tradition, Gdańsk nonetheless preserves something essentially its own, an amorphous but persistent character. Its identity may be multilayered and fluid, but it is recognizable despite the Teutonic, Nazi, and Communist waves that engulfed it in the past. It is the merit of Huelle, Grass, and Chwin to have engaged Gdańsk’s complex singularity. Their narratives participate in the continuing figuration of the city’s being.

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On the Borders of Mighty Empires: Bucharest, City of Merging Paradigms Monica Spiridon Liminality as a Cultural Issue In the chapter dedicated to Romanian literature, published in a contemporary cultural encyclopedia, Eugen Ionescu (Eugène Ionesco) wrote: the Romanians mistrust, their fear, justified or not, of not being able to become a politically autonomous nation because of the greedy neighboring empires (my emphasis), and at the same time of not being able to create a specific culture, an authentic expression of the ethnic soul. This excessive mistrust, understandable if we think of past historical circumstances, will remain one of the weaknesses, or rather an obsessive neurosis of any literature that at the same time offers and refuses the dialogue with the major civilizations, lustful for knowledge and for cultural exchange but also rejecting it: too extensive a contact, too strong an influence from the European literatures might hinder the originality of the Romanian origins. After Slavonism came Neo-Byzantinism, after the too artificial Latinisms came the primacy of the French and the German spirit. Aren’t all these dangerous for the Romanian spirit? Don’t they force it to adopt an improper way of thinking and a non-specific style? Even when the aesthetic interest was predominant, the national and the political obsessions did not disappear completely: they can still be identified in the twentieth century. (Ionesco, “La Littérature roumaine” 5)

Ionesco diagnoses here a malady of the Romanian cultural spirit: its chronic crisis of identity and its obsessive interest in legitimating referential models. Due to a whole series of historical and geopolitical factors, the Romanian social imaginary became the stage of an intense traffic of paradigms in the last two centuries, responsible for tensions, deviations and gaps, catalysts of collective attitudes, and rich sources of stereotypes. A nation which was contiguous on all sides with expansionist empires, strategically organized its identity-related history and ideology in the framework of secure stereotypes (see Durandin) that would legitimate its right to existence and recognition. The Romanian self-exiled writer Emil Cioran articulated the key issue regarding the debatable — and highly debated — condition of Romanian identity in a paradoxical interrogation. Paraphrasing Montesquieu, his question is: “Comment peut-on être Roumain?” (How can one be Romanian? La Tentation 54; see also Antohi, “Cioran” 211). As latecomers to the club of the European nations, the Romanians have been oversensitive to the complexities of the question: How can one be what one is? (see Calinescu, “How”). In Romania, national identity emerged mostly by way of compensation: as a response to the unhappy consciousness of being a Romanian, epitomized by Cioran’s question. The deep reason for this collective insecurity — at the same time desire and doubt — was the mixed cultural heredity of Romanianness: Western Roman linguistic legacy and Eastern Orthodox Christianity (Iorga, Byzantium; Meyendorff; Tachiaos), have constituted the thorny halves of the Romanian cultural identity. From a purely geopolitical standpoint, this rather confusing condition

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is the byproduct of both the marginal position of Romania with respect to the European West, and its interstitial placement (Bhabha, The Location 38–39) between dominant imperial powers, either non-Latin, or non-orthodox (the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, imperial Russia). As an outcome of this borderland position, the main arena of the Romanian critical debates around national landmarks has been dominated by two antipodes, generically identified as the Orient and the Occident. In Romanian culture, the paradigmatic anxiety brought about by the obsession with identity can be traced in various areas of reference. The collective perceptions of the national idea have fostered conflicting ideologies, rhetorical devices, and topoi of the social imaginary. They have fashioned literary histories and literary programs and forged symbolic topographies and sites of memory. As Benedict Anderson argues, a “nation’s biography can not be written evangelically, down time, through a long procreative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it up time — towards Peking Man or King Arthur” (204). Unfortunately, in Romanian culture there are no Peking Men, King Arthurs, or Round Tables. No legitimating narrative would arrive at a constituting forefather, though that role has from time to time been assigned to figures from Romanian prehistory (Dacian or Roman). This is why in Romanian literature prestigious places, worshipped by popular memory — to use the concepts of Pierre Nora (18–20), and of Keith and Pike (34–38) — have been regarded as constitutive national molds. The result of these compensating projections might be pertinently characterized with Michel Foucault’s category of heterotopia. In his lecture notes, released just before his death, Foucault grappled with the double illusion of our spatial representations (“Questions on Geography” and “Of Other Spaces”). We see spatiality either as purely mental (a conceived space) or, on the contrary, as empirical definable (a perceived space). Foucault’s alternative is to emphasize the cultural ability of building simultaneously conceived, perceived, and lived spaces, the so-called heterotopias: “Heterotopias are something like countersites; effectively enacted utopias in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found in a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (“Of Other Spaces” 24). In Romania, the master tropes of the national literature were heterotopic spaces like Rome, the Western cradle of national Latinity, or Byzantium, the Eastern mold of orthodox Christianity (Mango 29–43; Meyendorff 131–34). In the wake of a growing anxiety about national identity, literature has persistently built crisis heterotopias: prestigious models such as a Post-Byzantine Byzantium, a Fourth Rome, or a Little Paris that were designed to meet the requirements of legitimacy and to compensate for the discomfort of being a Romanian. It is also noteworthy that this topographical leaning has been closely intertwined with the persistent public concern over the Orient and Occident as alternative geopolitical and cultural horizons of Romanian identity. In the Romanian cultural space, literary representations of the metropolitan city emerged as privileged expressions of these eclectic identity models. As Alexander Gelley has shown, the “city-texts” provide answers to a series of questions, convergently pointing to the process of textual representation and to its levels: “Who writes the city? How are we to define and classify the city-texts? What kind of disciplinary and thematic criteria are in play — formalist, historical, political, aesthetic, impressionist?” (240)

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The City-Text and Its Alternative Paradigms 1.

The Western Model

The ambiguity of the category of city-text plays an important part in the projection of cultural identities. Even if a real city provides the substance of a city-text, its referent is a mere axiomatic starting point of an endless semiotic process, which ends up in a series of different phantasmagoric architectures. As an image, the city always has a double reference, to the artifact in the outside world and to the spectrum of refractions it calls into being in the mind (Pike ix). Real cities have their unique and highly distinctive histories. Repeatedly bombed or burned to the ground, destroyed by terrible earthquakes, victims of fateful epidemics like cholera or the plague, real cities can be systematically restored or rebuilt, replaced or refounded. They can get larger or smaller, sharing the destiny of every humble object in the world. This was the case of Bucharest, seen as a tangible historical community. It has always been de facto a cosmopolitan town, host to writers of very diverse ethnic origins, Romanian citizens as well as foreign residents (see Giurescu; Ionescu-Gion). The beginnings of several modern Balkan literatures can be traced to Bucharest: Bulgarian Romanticism, for instance, since Khristo [Hristo] Botev lived and published in Bucharest; or the so-called Albanian Renaissance (see Robert Elsie’s article in this volume). Since the nineteenth century, Bucharest has been host to a large south-Danubian (Greek, Albanian, and Bulgarian) diaspora, which led to intercommunal knowledge, multilingualism, and cosmopolitanism (see Papacostea-Danielopolu; Siupur). Replacing the usual Slavic network, the intellectual community of Bucharest facilitated the penetration of Western European models into the Balkans. By the nineteenth century, the interliterary communication was direct, unmediated by translations, since the foreign resident writers knew Romanian well. Thus, Bucharest gradually assumed a catalytic role in the molding of Southeast European exchanges. At first, the cultural exchanges developed at the institutional level, mainly connected to the printing and distribution of books. Later, they got more personal, giving birth to some distinct multicultural typologies (see Intelectualii din Balcani în România). This was the case of the immigrant Bulgarian intellectuals, of the professors teaching in the Greek Academies of Bucharest, as well as of the Albanian Renaissance writers. The situation led to sharpened perceptions of self and other and to an unusual responsiveness of Romanian intellectuals towards models of the most diverse origins (see Karnoouh; Zub). In sharp contrast to real cities, imaginary topographies can be forged with the most sophisticated symbolic materials (Bruns 70–71; Lehan 265–69). In some particular contexts, the mental resonances assigned to real cities by particular individuals or groups of individuals may be relatively stable. Consequently, the referent of an imaginary topography is by no means a historical city but the mental model made possible by it. In fact, the production of literary topographies can be seen as an ideal illustration of the so-called denaturalization of mimesis, a notion that came about long after Aristotle. The hard version of verisimilitude (the Greek eikos or the possible) slid towards the soft version of cultural verisimilitude (relying on the Greek doxa or common opinion). This latter version can account for some fundamental mechanisms of literary representation disregarded by Aristotle (Compagnon 108–15).

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Deprived of their real topographical meaning, Rome, Paris, Byzantium, Athens, Vienna, or Berlin have often been superposed over cities like Bucharest or St. Petersburg to compensate for their less lustrous identity (Dageron 43–47; Pitsakis). Each time a city like Bucharest, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Riga, or Plovdiv proclaimed Paris, Rome, or another city as its signifier to legitimize itself symbolically, a secondary cultural sign was born. The verisimilitude of such symbolic modeling has been rhetorically validated either by education or by the reports of occasional travelers — in the specific case of Romania, by Raymond Poincaré, Lucien Romier (Le carrefour des empires morts [The Crossroad of Dead Empires; 1931]), Paul Morand (Bucarest; 1935), Wolf Lepenies (“Complaints”) and many others. Nowadays this process of legitimation is furthered by the mass media. As an imaginary city, according to its subtextual system of aesthetic, social, and political values, Bucharest changed faces and names like a chameleon, from The Fourth Rome, to Little Paris, from a Balkan town to a cosmopolitan city and a space of synthesis and centrality. The imaginary Bucharest was in fact a generic homonymy, covering the most diverse representations, fostered by the dialogue, the fusion, and even the confusion of strong alternative models, such as those of the Occident and the Orient. The most prestigious and most relevant Western landmark of the fictional Bucharest was Paris. The so-called Petit Paris (Little Paris) — the quasi-official denomination of the Romanian capital-city during the first half of the twentieth century — was the result of a fascinating blend of ideological clichés, common sense stereotypes, and fictional projections. There are, of course, some particular corners of the real city, identified by incurable cultural wanderers, which seem to justify such a persistent symbolical equation. In Sfidarea memoriei (The Defiance of Memory; 1996), a book of peripatetic dialogues with Stelian Tănase, Alexandru Paleologu manages or simply pretends to recognize the Little Paris engulfed under the depressing wreckage of the communist era: You can still discover everywhere the melancholic residues of the so called Parisian style of former Bucharest, where the rhythms of the streets, the coffee shops, the tradition of cooking, the haute couture and also the prêt-à-porter, the high art and the discourse of colloquial or frivolous chat had all found their models on the two banks of the Seine. (84)

There is something that the two wanderers never assert explicitly, although it can be found between the lines: the intertwining of Bucharest and Paris has been based on a purely cultural-literary relation. The Parisian model, which epitomized for a very long time the Western calling of Romanian culture, was rooted in the soil of French literature. Selected, preserved, molded by collective memory, the cultural signifier called Little Paris displays the unique fingerprint of Baudelaire and of symbolist flâneurs like Nerval or Barbey d’Aurevilly; but also of Balzac, of Proust, and of Gide. Preparing to enact its scenarios in everyday life and to transplant its models into Romanian fiction, the educated elite of Bucharest had, of course, access to the original texts of French literature. Meanwhile, in the suburbs of the city, the lower middle class — in a vigorous social and economic rise by the end of the nineteenth century — was eagerly devouring Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, in translated installments, published mostly in ladies’ magazines.

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The adoption of Occidentalism à la parisienne in Romanian daily life, civilization, and culture was extremely strong and in certain respects without competition. If we go deeper into the fictional worlds of Romanian writers, Paris loses its absolute monopoly to the benefit of some other models, seen either as alternative or at least as complementary. But in the universe of the hairdresser, the restaurant owner, the fashion shopkeeper, the pastry maker, and the café goers and amblers on Victory Avenue, the identification of the Western with the Parisian went undisputed. A number of prose writers of the interwar years situated their fiction in a cosmopolitan and Western-looking Bucharest. Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu wrote several analytic and psychological novels about the Baldovin and the Hallipa clans. The favorite milieu of this prose writer was the high life of Bucharest between the two world wars. The fashionable buildings of the city, in which life styles continuously mix, seem to be somehow connected both with the rural aristocratic manors (Prundenii, Gîrlelele) and with the Swiss resorts, or with the luxury sanatoriums of the West. The novelist’s interest in environments, groups, families, and social classes endows her characters with lives guided by models that practically institutionalize in Romanian culture the Western urban behavior and its code of manners. This highly cosmopolitan Bucharest is populated by artificial hybrid creatures: devoured either by obsessions of the kind that consume some of Thomas Mann’s characters, or by Proustian nostalgias of a waning nobility. An interesting counterpoint is set up by two other creators of Bucharest topographies who portray opposed social, political, and moral choices. Camil Petrescu is the author of two novels loosely related to Bucharest, Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război (Last Night of Love, First Night of War; 1930) and Patul lui Procust (Procrustes’ Bed; 1933). Both offer insightful chronicles of the architectural, social, intellectual, and cultural life of the city in the wake of the first and second World Wars. The world of the theater, fashionable cafés, the sporting life and the spas, the democratic press, the life of the political institutions and of literature — nothing is overlooked. Both the masculine and the feminine psychologies belong to “Little Paris.” For Cezar Petrescu, by contrast, Bucharest is an environment of disorientation and desolation that betrays traditional values. Cezar Petrescu established in Romanian literature the theme of the devouring city and the motif of Bucharest as a metropolis of doom, a biblical Moloch. In Calea Victoriei (Victory Avenue; 1930), the topos named in the title — a sort of local Fifth Avenue — takes on the attributes of Sodom and Gomorrah. The mediocre but quite prolific Cezar Petrescu embodies a literary age, its mentality, and its thematic obsessions. Although there is little that can be called unusual about them, Anton Holban’s characters — Sandu with novelistic ambitions and the women he successively loves: Dania, Irina, and Ioana — do not live in reality but rather in literature. These couples of lovers dwelling in 1930 Bucharest, with a discrete but unmistakable Western appearance, build their lives in response to French literature (mostly Racine, Proust, or Gide). In Jocurile Daniei (Dania’s Games; 1926/1971), for example, the female protagonist’s eager trips to Paris, London, and Vienna are less consistent than the bookish imaginary voyages into which Sandu (character as well as “author” of Holban’s novel) lures her. However, fiction was not the only genre contributing to the literary topography of the city. An important mapping of Bucharest can be found in the Jurnal 1935–1944 of the Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian (pen name of Iosif Hechter) published in 1996, fifty years after his death. Novelist, playwright, and journalist, Sebastian reveals himself in his Jurnal as a well-informed analyst

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of the Romanian metropolis’s contradictory spectacle from the mid-thirties through the war years. The author probes expertly the political dynamics and the collective psychology, obsessed with an identity crisis that generated resentments and frustrations during a period that can be considered a historical turning point. Everything is narrated from the paradoxical viewpoint of a Jew who functions as a bridge between the fickle coteries that fragment the cultural life of the city: from the aristocratic Bibescu family to the banking bourgeoisie, and from the world of the press to the backstage theater world. Sebastian had an exceptionally lucid, self-reflexive conscience, accompanied by a matching creativity. George Călinescu, author of a monumental Romanian literary history, the Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent (History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present;1941), also published a number of novels in the classical narrative mode. In Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Riddle; 1938) the Bucharest environment fosters a Père Goriot, a Rastignac, and a Lucien de Rubempré on the banks of the Dâmboviţa; in Cartea nunţii (The Wedding Book; 1933) a young couple evokes Daphnis and Chloe. In Călinescu’s Bietul Ioanide (Poor Ioanide; 1953) the protagonist is an architect steeped in classical values, and the narrative perspective follows his eyes. Step by step the narrator scrutinizes the stylistic chaos of the entire town, starting with its chronic indecision about models. The motley human world of Bucharest, frequented by the relay-character Ioanide, includes ruined Phanariots of a more or less aristocratic origin; philo-Germans, imitators of the new Reich (the members of the Iron Guard and their occasional admirers); and the snobbish high-life of no particular political or cultural color, which includes Oriental merchants with old roots in Damascus, Smyrna, Athens, or Cairo. In this human zoo, Ioanide’s ordering eye identifies clear-cut areas. He locates at one extreme the members of the Iron Guard, perfect embodiments of a medieval model, seen by the classicist Ioanide as fanatic, cruel, and anti-humanist. In the diary of his son, who has secretly joined the Movement, the architect comes across a eulogy dedicated to the healthy and sound man, immune to cultural shaping and therefore unperverted. At the opposite pole, Ioanide literally and symbolically embodies the ideal of a neoclassical Bucharest. He publicly displays his fantasies by building for a model show a Victory Avenue lined with classic equestrian statues. In a sequel to the novel, written for communist tastes and expectations, Scrinul negru (The Black Chest; 1960), Ioanide designs communist temples of culture in a neo-Hellenistic style. Only a fine line separates honest projects from farce. By contrast to Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu and to Camil and Cezar Petrescu as well, Călinescu identifies in his Western Bucharest some marginal islands of oriental and exotic appearance. Fascinated by the transitions between these cultural enclaves, the novelist scrutinizes the identity conflicts created by the generation gap. The best example is perhaps Sultana Manigomian, representative of young Armenians who abandon the old commercial skills and traditional community in order to adopt Western ways of thought and life. Ion Marin Sadoveanu’s novel Sfârşit de veac în Bucureşti (End of Century in Bucharest; 1944) explicitly revives the nineteenth-century popular novel. His Bucharest is a battlefield of two worlds. On one side is the Western-educated aristocracy that experiences utter economic chaos; on the other, the bourgeois careerists that part with visible effort with the traditionalist, rural, and suburban world. For this rising community, the borderland between Occidental and Oriental mentalities, behaviors, and values is identical with the border between public and private. Their homes,

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family lives, manners, beliefs, and intimate events belong to the oriental Bucharest of the good old Phanariot times. Their garments — abandoned by the embarrassed younger generation — cuisine, social conventions, and discursive registers recall a former Bucharest that simmers underneath the publicly visible level. By contrast, their social and artistic lives, their official relationships, the rhythm of the streets, the institutions — everything under the public eye — comply with the new patterns. The education of the young generation, the elegant manners, the public entertainment, the shows, the luxurious promenades, all imitate the Western models that they progressively internalize. The author reveals his narrative skill in the colorful accounts of weddings, burials, trials, sentimental affairs, bankruptcies, and financial crashes that follow the Western journalistic clichés of the fait divers. Ion Marin Sadoveanu’s archeological eye for behavior and for historical documentation is quite remarkable. However, in sharp contrast to Călinescu’s self-aware narrative performance, which constitutes the modernity of his novels, almost everything in Ion Marin Sadoveanu looks like an imitation of the French realist paradigm of the nineteenth century. The most complex topographic ambiguity can be found in Mircea Eliade’s fictions. The realistic novels of his youth are set in a cosmopolitan, almost unidentifiable town that lives on the same wavelength as Paris, Berlin, and London. By contrast, the Bucharest of Eliade’s fantastic prose is a multilevel imaginary space (Spiridon “Introducere”). On one of these levels, a secret Bucharest can be discovered: archaic and atemporal, a sacred space hidden under the guise of the transient. The image of this secret Bucharest is informed by Eliade’s scholarly work: his reflections on the relationship sacred-profane, his praise of the archaic man in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), and his studies of the Zalmoxis myth and the topoi of Balkan folklore. One can find also a second, intertextual level rooted in Eliade’s representations of Bucharest, echoing such illustrious forerunners as Ion Luca Caragiale. For example, Eliade’s short story “La ţigănci” (With the Gypsy Girls; 1945) can be read as a fantastic replica of Caragiale’s story “Căldură mare” (In the Dogdays; 1901). Finally, a third level emphasizes genuine social observation, focused on the modern interwar Bucharest. This city still preserves patches of patriarchal green, especially in its suburbs, or in some neighborhoods bearing the mark of a Balkan suburb. In Ion Marin Sadoveanu’s novels, the oriental city finds appropriate refuge, especially in private areas. In Eliade’s prose, on the contrary, the archaic and picturesque Bucharest — almost lost in the turmoil of a restless modern city — takes advantage of the colloquiality of the public space in order to express itself. We might even conclude that the last harbor of this dying Bucharest is the public discourse of some nostalgic characters and their flooding memories. During his Western exile, Eliade tried to superimpose on these manifold representations the image of a Bucharest fallen under Soviet influence and mutilated by Communism, a city that he never actually saw. As a consequence, Pe strada Mântuleasa (The Old Man and the Bureaucrats; 1968) and În curte la Dionis (At Dionysus’ Court; 1968) obsessively return to the site of his childhood, described in his Autobiography (1981–88), using it as support for his fictional topographies. The novel Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest; 1971) offers the most eloquent blend of this kind: the extensive chronicle of a city caught in the whirlwind of history. A history that, for Eliade, brutally destroys all paradigms that turn out to be the main source of identity confusions.

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The Eastern Model

Despite the wide variety of models, the topographical representations of Romanian Western identity seem strongly focused and even unidirectionally oriented. To be more specific, they follow the mainline of a great legitimating narrative about the remote and dignified origins of the Nation. Compared to its cultural counterpart, the oriental model of Bucharest produced in the interwar years only one outstanding fictional topography: Craii de Curtea-Veche (The Old Court Libertines; 1929) by Mateiu I. Caragiale. The novel’s motto reproduces the famous dictum uttered by the would-be French president Raymond Poincaré upon his visit to Bucharest: “Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l’Orient, où tout est pris à la légère” (What do you expect, we are here at the gates of the Orient where everything is easy-going), which introduced an image of Bucharest from the perspective of the foreigner. From a certain point of view, the novel is a comment on or an extension of this motto. Mateiu Caragiale’s Bucharest reveals both an aesthetic and an existential option. Aesthetic, insofar as the narrative model of the novel, the Arabian Nights, contradicts the canon of psychological urbanism, programmatically defended by modern Romanian criticism; existential, because the city, dominated by the symbol of the Old Court is a dream that originated in the writer’s idea about his own genealogy and destiny. On the cultural stage of the time, Mateiu Caragiale played the carefully composed role of a character with a problematic identity. In the novel, the fictional representation of Bucharest is framed by a succession of hesitations about the writer’s identity: hesitations between his real bourgeois condition and a presumed ideal aristocratic descent; between Berlin, where the novelist spent his childhood with his exiled father, the prominent Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, and Bucharest, where he felt nevertheless at home; between an ancient local aristocratic model and a contemporary Western one, namely the dandyism of a Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly or Villiers de l’Isle Adam. The roguish protagonists of Mateiu Caragiale’s novel perform several symbolic voyages in paradigmatic times and spaces. In the chapter entitled “The Three Pilgrimages” the first one moves back into the bucolic past of humankind, the space of the mythic models that have engendered today’s civilization, a Golden age, placed under the sign of Pan. The second one takes us into a world that vanished in the French Revolution: an anticlassicist and hyperrefined eighteenth century. Mateiu Caragiale’s characters nostalgically call it the century of good will and of good taste. Both these imaginary adventures give birth to unmistakably utopian representations of nature. The third pilgrimage, this time both in deed and in mind, is a descent into a Bucharest that has turned its back on the West, a Sodom disguised in Balkan clothes in which the characters deliberately stage a depraved and cynical existence. The identitarian frame of the book seems reduced to a simplistic antithesis between the horizon of utopia — bygone times, distant spaces — and that of dystopia, a world of hic et nunc. But the characters and the fictive narrator belong through their real and ideal options to all these worlds, and they display their identities in all of them at once. Utopia and dystopia are condensed to simple axiomatic horizons. Between them, the novelist builds a tangible and delirious city. The blend and the confusion of the two paradigms in the social and the human world of the 1910–11 Bucharest is actually the basic theme and the only memorable event of the novel. Mateiu Caragiale’s novel points to the problematic status of the oriental model in Romanian culture. Rather inconsistent and ill articulated, this model is highly dependent on its Western

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counterpart. Despite its exotic and picturesque appearance, the Oriental paradigm played in Romanian culture the role of counter-Occident, fostered by sophisticated intellectuals harboring antiWestern sentiments. Upon closer scrutiny, the Oriental model (theoretically, morally, ideologically, religiously often overrated in Romania) is only the functional antidote of an Occidentalism that is perceived occasionally as excessive or frustrating. Edward Said’s well-known remark applies to Romania as well: for Orientalism “to make sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, there in discourse about it. All these representations rely on institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed upon codes of understanding for their effects” (22). The status of the two paradigms is obviously not equal: the Western model is an ab quo term, a landmark for the other paradigm that expresses itself only as a retort or counter-reaction. Beyond the Iron Curtain 1.

The Test of Parody

After the Soviet occupation of Romania in 1945, the balance between the ideological and the literary discourses dramatically changed. The literary emerged gradually, after painful detours, as the leading intellectual discourse, refusing to follow obediently the ideological paths and political demands. Taking advantage of the slow de-Stalinization of Romania in the early 1960s, authors engaged in a narrative criticism of all preexisting literary paradigms, questioning their ideological and aesthetic premises, as well as their rhetorical devices. The Romanian fiction of the 1960s and 70s managed to forge relatively sophisticated instruments of counter-reaction to the communist ideology and its legitimizing rhetoric. Authors undertook the task of reevaluating the inherited literary models, often through parody. The nationalist literary topoi was an especially productive paradigm in this sense. Rewriting, whether in parody, pastiche, or irony, restates a formula, a theme, or a narrative option, and validates its vitality. Through parody, the nationalist topographies are irreversibly set up as products of the collective imaginary. As a reading contract with a well-advised reader, parody is the route by means of which the critical spirit and literary self-reflection enter fabulation. The novelist Ştefan Bănulescu is one of the post–1945 authors who have questioned Romanian culture’s constant aspirations towards paradigms. All his writings are set in an emblematic space, whose name is revealed in the title of Bănulescu’s volume of essays, Scrisori din provincia de Sud-Est. Sau: O bătălie cu povestiri (Letters from the South-Eastern Province. Or: A Battle with Tales; 1994). Bănulescu parodically contends here with Romanian culture’s stubborn aspiration to glorious genealogical patterns. His fictional world is structured according to the principle of endless repetition and conversion of haughty prototypes. In a novel entitled Cartea de la Metopolis (The Book of Metopolis; 1977), imitation itself becomes the central theme of the story. The events and characters of the novel illustrate a peculiar type of existence, in quest of highly distinctive models. In the Danubian city of Metopolis, a transparent fictional guise for Bucharest, the main source of all patterns, the model of all models is imperial Byzantium, upgraded to the status of a genealogical myth. The play “O feerie bizantină” (A Byzantine Masquerade), performed with

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big fuss in the city of Metopolis, functions in the novel as an ironic reminder of the conversion of Byzantine archetypes into picturesque clichés and commonplaces. The spirit of Byzantium has survived mostly as its own comic copy. In Bănulescu’s embedded play, we find a Procopius of Cesarea who exalts, and another one who slanders Emperor Justinian and Theodora; a merry herald and a pessimistic one; a poet, Theodore Prodromul, full of lofty ideas and another one with base and venomous ones. We also find three Theodoctes, two Rhodomneas, and a series of groups built on the rule of reverse symmetry: a Byzantine prelate who does not want the union with the Western church and a Catholic priest who wants the union with Constantinople; a hundred iconoclast monks passing by a hundred iconodule nuns; etc. The industrious concocting of copies and forgeries in Bănulescu’s city downgrades the idea of cultural genealogy to a mere metaphor, if not to a straightforward lie. The very principle of modeling is thus put into question, the relationship between arch-reality and its copies becoming virtually reversible. By means of their imaginary projections, the writers of the 1960s and 1970s foregrounded the inescapable fate of the quest for identity: the frustrations of liminality, as well as the melancholy of prestigious origins, end up either in tragedy or in farce. 2.

Identity without Models

In the early 1980s, the cultural isolationism of Romania became paroxistic. By that time, the quasihegemonic power of national ideology managed to materialize in an officially displayed complex of superiority, self-titled as Protochronism. Its main cultural expression was a boastful refusal of any sources, models, or forerunners, based on a paradoxical theory of local priorities that wanted to retrieve what had been allegedly ignored due to Romania’s marginal status. The same nagging question, How can one be a Romanian? seems to have generated Protochronism. In Ceauşescu’s Romania, the pride of being born Romanian was the obsessive hallmark of all official discourse. The literature of the 1980s offered a sort of requiem for a metropolitan city where identity cannot be regained. Both prose and poetry emphasized an imaginary mix of communist daily life and rural nostalgia for the past, of cosmopolitan chimeras and of utopian fantasies. A significant example is Mircea Cărtărescu the writer in the “generation of the 1980s” most intimately connected to Bucharest through destiny, vocation, and aspiration (see Cărtărescu “Bucureştiul meu”). His urban childhood, spent on asphalt sidewalks, surrounded by huge ugly buildings as well as the quiet lanes of the old town, provide a system of obsessive landmarks in his poetry. Even the most spectacular leaps into surreality start from the space of Bucharest: its great avenues and shops, the socialist match-box-like apartment blocks, or the melancholic suburbs. With Cărtărescu, the daily existence, the commonplace, and the contingent become acceptable in poetry. Cărtărescu, who has in the meantime switched to prose, has inaugurated a trilogy of novels with Orbitor. Partea I: Aripa stângă (Dazzling Light, Part One: The Left Wing; 1996). The cycle begins as an epic quest for the narrator’s past, practicing a type of ironic Proustianism. The narrative agent, who has lost his capacity to build cathedrals, doubts his own identity. The cityscape of Bucharest provides a fascinating backdrop for the mixture of memories, fantasies, historical scenes from the times of Ceauşescu’s reign, and dream-like digressions.

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Novelist, historian, journalist (and, after 1989, political analyst and senator), Stelian Tănase is also a keen chronicler of a Bucharest that communism has cast out of history and thrown into daily banality: a place where any model degenerates and where even deliberate imitations fail lamentably. Corpuri de iluminat (Lighting Fixtures; 1990) is an antiromance that methodically undermines the prestige of famous couples of lovers from Western literature. The main character of the novel, a Bucharest Juliet, lives in the socialist ghetto of standardized apartment blocks. The author makes an inventory of the malformations, anomalies, and leftovers of both the people and the city. The various feminine figures from Corpuri de iluminat, Playback (1995), and Luxul melancoliei (The Luxury of Melancholia; 1982) are mutations of Emma Bovary, crossed with a Carpatho-Danubian Marilyn Monroe. A chapter in Corpuri de iluminat is called “Gadget Bovary.” The metaphor that gives the title of one of his novels, “playback,” is extrapolated to real life, suggesting that the urban world the book focuses on is inauthentic, a surrogate created through technologies of manipulation. The Bucharest described by Tănase is a city whose history is fake and whose face is disfigured by the neo-Stalinistic reconstruction projects of the Ceauşescu era. It resembles the Moscow of the 1930s, in which a transcendent revolution is about to take place, as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s fiction. If the parodies of the 1960s and 70s emphasized the ridiculousness of every particular existence (to borrow Valéry’s phrase), the generation of the 1980s seemed mostly concerned with the futility of cultural modeling. Overcoming all identity complexes and frustrations, this generation has given up demonizing or idealizing; it does not comply or self gratify any more, ignoring the euphoria and anxiety of legitimating genealogies, in favor of an exquisite cultural melancholy. It is this type of melancholy that Lepenies, one of the most sophisticated visitors of Bucharest, has pointed to after the fall of Communism: I was in a similar mood after I had visited Romania, i. e., Bucharest for the first time. I had expected nothing but misery and I was prepared to deplore a city that the imperial madness of a dictator must have destroyed once and for all. I found misery, all right, but I also found pride and promises. I had found a city that was not beautiful — but Berlin isn’t beautiful either and we certainly don’t have as many areas as Bucharest that look like Neuilly-sur-Seine around 1900. (171)

This particular kind of cultural melancholy is also present in the dialogues revolving around postcommunist Bucharest, published by Alexandru Paleologu and Stelian Tănase — two writers representing very different generations and identitarian options. Every time cultural identity is at stake in their conversation, Paleologu insists on evoking some prestigious model. For him, defining Romanian identity necessarily implies a clash of models — either Western (first of all French, but also German, Italian, and Austrian) — or Oriental (Levantine, Phanariot, or plain Turkish). “We Romanians — Paleologu argues — have been blessed with the outstanding skill of following the patterns of the most diverse universal civilizations” (Paleologu and Tănase 29). Tănase has a different bias. Since Romania is located at the meeting point of several empires, for him Romanian identity, and obviously the identity of Bucharest, is to be found in the interstitial spaces between different “ends.” Over the past few years, Tănase has been working on a massive novel set in Bucharest. As the writer has confessed, the starting point of his book is 1683, the year of the first printing of the

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Bible in Romanian (the Bible of Bucharest). The story ends three hundred years later. The dates are highly significant, for they represent simultaneously a beginning and an end. In Bucharest, Tănase explains, “the end of several great empires is to be found. The histories of the Byzantine empire, of the Ottoman empire, and of the Russian empire practically ended in Bucharest” (Paleologu and Tănase 430). Reimagined as the locus of several collapsing civilizations, Tănase’s Bucharest is primarily a literary topos and a myth. The nineteenth-century French traveler Paul Morand used to say that Bucharest was a meeting point more than a city. Brutally demolished, destroyed by spectacular fires, erased to the ground and rebuilt several times, this paradoxical city has from now on only one chance: to make a fresh start, against all models, all regional identities and all cultural stereotypes, such as the opposition Occident vs. Orient. The metaideological Romanian fiction of the 1980s (Cornis-Pope 116–21) still contends with this traditional bipolar logic of Romanian culture, relying on a long series of alternative models, fostered by the collective imaginary. The young writers have grasped an essential process that takes place in contemporary Romanian literature: the gradual retreat of paradigmatic modeling into discourse. In fact, they redefine the paradigms as scenarios of cultural memory, as stereotypes to be preserved, reread, and, especially, rewritten. At the same time, they capture the passage of models and of their products into literary assets. Thus, Romanian literature enters an age that we could call post-paradigmatic. The Ethical Vantage Point In the early stages of nation building, Romanian culture operated mostly with essentialist assumptions. First came the genealogical tracing of remote and dignifying origins; then came the sophisticated processes of a genuine cultural translation: Rome or Paris meaning Bucharest, Orthodox and imperial Byzantium meaning Greater Romania, and so on. Furthermore, like all small and peripheral nations interested in tightly structuring their symbolic spaces, Romanian culture largely favored binaries like Occident vs. Orient. On the discursive level, this attitude led to an aggressive conceptual and rhetorical reductionism. However, on a strictly literary level, the paradigmatic representations, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes conflicting, were more flexible, less clear, and more likely to engender a brand of hybridity than the historical, political, and ideological ones. What was, in conclusion, the relationship between the paradigms that have interplayed in the Romanian cultural space? Theoretical disputes have usually pointed out the reductionist character of the models, pleaded for their synthesis, or simply left the matter in a calculated ambiguity. Among those who saw Bucharest as an ideal space for a fertile confluence was Nicolae Iorga. Claiming for Bucharest the spiritual status of a Fourth Rome (the second one being Byzantium, and the third, the pan-orthodox Moscow), the Romanian historian assigned to the city the position of a liminal place between the Western Latin heritage and the Eastern Byzantine one. He even insisted on a Romanian Byzantinism without Byzantium. For Iorga, this post-Byzantine Byzantinism (described by Iorga in Byzance après Byzance [Byzantium after Byzantium; 1935]) was a rich and productive synthesis of two genuine kinds of Europeanism. As we can see, Iorga highly valued the idea of cultural confluence and hybridity.

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Nae Ionescu assigned the synthesis a radically opposite valuation, for he refuted polemically the allegedly cultural centrality of Bucharest as an expression of a “Walachian spirit” of confluence: “The unifying function of Walachia? Let us admit it existed. However, this springs straight from the lack of national roots of the Walachian mentality and from its loss of contact with any tradition. This has been fostered by a new class, trying by all means to copy the abstract mentality of Western liberal democracies and to compensate for its incapacity to think organically. I would call it an exchange mentality as opposed to a production mentality” (146–48). This memorable expression, “the exchange mentality,” captures the cosmopolitan spirit of Bucharest. In his negation, Nae Ionescu gave a more suggestive description of Bucharest than Iorga. Ionescu’s false axiological and ideological opposition between an exchange mentality and a production mentality actually accounts for the rich cultural reality of Bucharest, its fusion of models in the process of creation. The common denominator of the evolution of paradigms in the cultural text of Bucharest is to be found in the tension between ideological reductionism and the city’s knack for creative amalgamation with symbolical instruments. From a slightly different perspective, this tension acquires an ethical aspect. It can be seen as a restless flip-flop between anxiety and enthusiasm, between the fear of being forever stuck in a certain model and the will to overcome all models, melting them in a (con)fusion of paradigms. As a general rule, literary creation helps produce imaginary amalgams. The literature of Bucharest has translated the concrete historical dimensions of the city into mixtures and impurities, revealing a genius loci oriented towards skillfully articulated syntheses.

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Literary Production in a Marginocentric Cultural Node: The Case of Timişoara Marcel Cornis-Pope, with John Neubauer and Nicolae Harsanyi Timişoara, almost the furthermost bastion of contemporary civilization towards the Orient, a few hours away from the Ottoman border, is the last carrier of the culture that emanates from European civilization. Out of its noble impulse, the city looks across the border of Mahomet’s people where the big waves of the ancient Danube carry the diligent commerce of Germany’s and Austria’s flourishing cities, but where the brilliant spirit of modern civilization is still struggling to take root. But the city also likes today to glance nostalgically in the opposite direction, towards happier cities, where […] the interests of greater countries and empires come together, and the spiritual formations of an entire section of the world are reflected in a converging mirror. Johann N. Preyer, Monographie der Königlichen Freistadt Temesvár (256)

As the introduction to this volume argues, the multiethnic cities of East-Central Europe have often played the role of “marginocentric” nodes, facilitating the interaction of various ethnic and cultural influences. It is their very marginality as well as their multiethnic composition that has allowed

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these cities to glance simultaneously East and West (as our Preyer epigraph suggests), establishing a fertile nexus between cultural traditions. They often represented centers of modernization and pluralization in the area, opposing to various nationalist and imperialist projects a more genuinely polycentric concept of culture — what Claudio Magris, echoing Urzidil, has described as the “hinternational” zone lying behind and across East-Central European nations (Danube, chap I). We will exemplify the paradoxical dynamics of a marginocentric node with the city of Timişoara/Temesvár/Temesburg. Located in the multicultural Banat — a border region connecting Central Europe with the Balkans — this city with its mix of ethnicities (Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Jewish, Romany, Slovak, Ruthenian, Greek) was placed back on the world map by the 1989 events. Disdainfully dubbed Romania’s “Wild West” by Ceauşescu’s xenophobic regime, Timişoara was predestined to become the igniting point of Romania’s 1989 revolution and its “first free town” with a democratically elected administration. To an uninformed observer, Timişoara’s prominence during the 1989 revolution and through the difficult transition period to the first noncommunist government may appear paradoxical given the city’s marginal position in Romania’s political geography dominated by Bucharest. In our view, however, Timişoara illustrates the impact that a marginocentric node can have on an otherwise hypercentralized culture. As recent analysts of the Eastern European upheavals have suggested, this paradox can be explained through communism’s tendency to create dispersed states rather than monolithic power systems, as previously thought. This systemic ambiguity facilitated the emergence of liminal zones that exerted centrifugal pressures on the dominant ideology. With its western-most position and multicultural traditions that challenged any monolithic national narrative, Timişoara was the system’s “weak spot” by definition, ideal for the manifestation of revolutionary passions. But if politically the anticommunist revolution could only have started in Timişoara, culturally it had other plausible options. In spite of its ostensible concentration in Bucharest, Romanian culture often found fertile ground for innovative or simply regional productions in the provinces. Several other provincial towns functioned as marginocentric nodes at one time or another: the early twentieth-century Bacău inspired Tristan Tzara’s pre-dadaist parodies of pastoral and metaphysical poetry as well as George Bacovia’s post-symbolist poetry; Târgu Jiu provided Constantin Brâncuşi with the stage for his monumental ensemble of works that includes the “Infinite Column”; interwar Craiova encouraged a reconstruction of the surrealistic movement which had all but died out in Bucharest; and two major cities of the Transylvanian plateau, Cluj-Napoca and Sibiu, enabled Lucian Blaga to create a vernacular version of Expressionism and to articulate an ambitious cultural stylistics around the notion of undulated transhumant space. More recently, Târgovişte became associated with the work of the first wave of postmodern fiction writers (Mircea Horia Simionescu, Radu Petrescu, Costache Olăreanu), and the little mountain village of Păltiniş functioned as philosopher Constatin Noica’s “school in retreat” (see our History 1: 42–43, 45, 47). The lingering regionalist-centrifugal impulse of the historical provinces of Banat, Bucovina, Bessarabia, and Transylvania has played a similar role in resisting national and ideological homogenization. As Irina Livezeanu has argued, after the Great Union of 1919 the process of national integration launched from Bucharest had to compete with alternative models of regional self-identification. In Bessarabia, where Romanians had been forcefully denationalized and their language suppressed by Czarist Russia, the post–1918 “Romanian regeneration” (114)

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encountered a number of difficulties, such as a weakened national awareness, a nostalgic clinging to regionalist values, and a distrust of Bucharest’s centralizing tendencies. Even Transylvania and the Banat, which had in 1918 “the most developed and mature […] traditions of struggle” against denationalization (129), presented challenges to the process of cultural integration. The chief resistance came from the Hungarian, German, and Jewish minorities, “all more urban and historically more privileged than the Romanians” (129); but also from parts of the Romanian elite that had a commitment to cultural regionalism. Even though Bucharest emerged as the undisputed political center of the new nation, Timişoara and other marginocentric cities in the Banat, Transylvania, and Bucovina maintained a certain polycentric pull on Romanian culture. Unfortunately, under the homogenizing pressures of right-wing and left-wing dictatorships beginning in the late 1930s, the regionalist impulse was seriously eroded, becoming a negligible counter-force in most areas of Romania after World War II. From this point of view, Timişoara represents a fortunate exception, combining a cosmopolitan-experimental attitude with a lingering regionalistic ethos. Romania’s most multicultural city is also the capital of the historical province of the Banat that already in the eighteenth century boasted “a metallurgical industry, a developed system of mining, river transportation, sewage systems and canals, trade companies, broad dissemination of information through newspapers and books, […] schools in Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Hebrew, […] and even a culture of eating — people in the Banat were frequently called the Gascons of Eastern Europe” (Neumann, Temptation 224, 261). The ethnocultural pluralism stimulated competitive/cooperative modes of development beneficial to most groups. Foreign travelers noted the significant role that multilingual communication and religious interaction played in this region. Instead of being torn apart by its Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Mosaic, and Moslem religious practices, the Banat became a genuine “region of convergences, a territory where the civilizations of Central and South-Eastern Europe interplay[ed] to generate a multiple internal dialogue, on the one hand, and a great European dialogue, on the other” (Neumann, Temptation 223). In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, not only intellectual leaders like Paul Iorgovici, Constantin Diaconovici Loga, and Dositej Obradović, but also craftsmen and farmers shared several languages. Under the impact of the Austrian Enlightenment, newspapers in different languages began to appear in Timişoara and in rural areas as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. Romania’s first important novelist, Ioan Slavici, grew up at the interface between Transylvania and the Banat with the conviction that one needed to relate to each individual’s ethnic culture and language; his fiction wove the three main ethnic groups of the area — Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans — into one dramatic story. Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn, while defending the heritage of the Banat Swabians against Hungarian assimilation, also praised the culture of the Romanian neighbors (Berwanger, Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn 38). Even after Timişoara and the Banat became part of Romania, local intellectuals continued to straddle languages and cultural traditions. In his memoirs, Andrei A. Lillin recalls that he was sent by his father to a German high school to learn science and to a Romanian boarding school to perfect his native language; in addition, he was taught the universal language of music, well represented in the concerts and opera programs of the city (200). The small spiritual capitals of East-Central Europe made an important but often overlooked contribution to the process of cultural dissemination. Due to their geographic position, these centers functioned as “double capitals,” facilitating a dialogue between East and West, or between

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what Neumann calls the “Homo Otomanicus” and the “Homo Europaeus” (Temptation 129). Timişoara, competing, as it did, with other cities in the area for control over the cultural corridors of East-Central Europe, was no exception. The cross-cultural communication was mediated by local libraries, Franciscan and Catholic monasteries, schools and colleges, intellectual and religious organizations, presses and translations. Timişoara’s topographic position presented a further advantage, allowing the city to maintain a relative autonomy at the crossroads of several empires and national interests. As Timişoara’s first modern mayor, Preyer suggested in the work from which we took our motto, the city’s topography had assured its survival since its establishment as the Roman castrum of Zambara (Tibiscum). Set up between rivers and marshes, this fortified town survived the destructive assaults of the Mongols in 1240 and of the Ottomans in 1551 and 1552, the plague of 1738, the earthquake of 1739, the siege of 1849, the bombing campaign of 1944, being repeatedly rebuilt as a strategic gateway between East and West. The marginocentric potential of Timişoara was recognized at various times, for instance when Timişoara became the capital city of Károly Róbert (Charles Robert of Anjou) between 1315 and 1323. The Hungarian king felt that his royal seat was better protected in marginal and well-fortified Timişoara than in the middle of an indefensible Pannonian plain. In 1479, the administrator of Timişoara, Pavel Chinezul, defeated a Turkish incursion into Transylvania, preventing that territory from becoming an Ottoman colony. Later on, when Timişoara and the Banat region came successively under Turkish (1552–1718), Austrian (1718–78), Hungarian (1778–1849), Austrian (1849–67), and Dual Monarchy control (1867–1919), before becoming part of Romania in 1919, they continued to enjoy a special status: first as a multicultural province under the Turks, and later as a “free imperial city” and “Kronland” (Crown Land) of the Habsburg Empire.

Figure 1. The Orthodox Synagogue, built 1895

As a “free imperial city,” Timişoara granted its ethnic groups, including the Jews, the right to settle and to pursue fruitful economic, religious, and cultural activities. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Timişoara had both a Sephardic community (seeking shelter from Belgrade, Ragusa, and Nikopolis, occupied by the Turks), and an Ashkenazic one. Other ethnic groups (for example Germans from Swabia, the Palatine, or the Rhineland) were encouraged to settle in the area after the Turkish withdrawal at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in order to drain the marshes and cultivate the land. The absence of a well-defined class structure — a feature that Virgil Nemoianu finds characteristic of several regions in East-Central Europe — stimulated

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initiative and mobility, all classes manifesting interest for learning and creativity. The Central European “learning ethos […, which] focused not on gainful labor and individual achievement, but rather on the acquisition of information and communitarian recognition of the primacy of learning as a standard of merit and social advancement” (Nemoianu, “Learning over Class” 79), was particularly strong in Timişoara and the Banat region. Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian, German, and Jewish intellectuals cooperated there on projects (dictionaries, newspapers, presses) meant to promote the cultural betterment of their communities. Cultural and religious establishments such as the Piarist High School (which welcomed beginning in 1908 students from all ethnic groups), provided the institutional support for this interaction. This “learning ethos” applied not only to the “middle classes and perhaps most emphatically to the Jewish middle classes in their effort at social integration and cultural acceptance,” but also to the peasantry, aristocracy, the working class, and “the large bureaucratic apparatus of the Double Monarchy and its successor states, shaping […] the civilizational framework and the sustaining values of duty, fair order, honesty and legality, punctuality and responsible behavior” (“Learning over Class” 85). By the end of the nineteenth century, railroads connected Timişoara to Budapest, Karlowitz, and Vienna; electricity, industrial machinery, coupled with a high rate of rural literacy (Maliţa 64) made the Banat one of the better developed regions in Central Europe. This area also functioned as “the last frontier for [some] Balkanic foods” and customs, blending Eastern and Western traditions (Doina and Nicolae Harsanyi 26, 28).

Figure 2. The Catholic Dome (built 1736–1774) and the Trinity Pillar (1739–1740)

Timişoara itself won the nickname of “Little Vienna” for its squares and streets in concentric rings, a navigable canal that links it to the Danube system, baroque mansions, and churches for different denominations. The multicultural traditions of this city come together eloquently in the oldest baroque square in town, flanked by the twin-towered Roman Catholic Cathedral (1774), the neo-roman and baroque buildings of the Serbian Bishopric (1748, 1791), and the Baroque Palace (1735, 1754), which served as the Austrian governors’ residence and today houses the city’s Art Museum. All around this square, one can find further examples of multicultural architecture, moving through Austrian baroque, German Renaissance and neo-Gothic, Hungarian Secessionist, Romanian post-Byzantine, and even a Moorish style in the city’s two main synagogues. Several

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buildings betray their palimpsestic nature: the Old Townhall, erected by architect Pietro del Bonzo in 1735, mixes baroque with later Renaissance ornamentation. Its Latin engraving praising the Prince Eugène of Savoy’s liberation of Timişoara from the Turks (on Oct. 13, 1716) is counterpointed by a Turkish inscription by the main gate that reminds the reader that this palace was built on the site of a former Turkish bath. Preyer’s own description of Timişoara as a town that looked simultaneously to the East and to the West, suggests a hybrid, intercultural node. Unfortunately, like so many other commentators since, Preyer deemphasized the Eastern inheritance of the city, attributing all efforts to civilize Timişoara to Western influences, and deploring the decay of the city under Turkish occupation. For Preyer and later scholars of the region, “Homo Otomanicus” remains Central Europe’s Other, often as “inassimilable” as the Gypsy and occasionally the Jew. The same laws that allowed the settlement and manifestation of these “others” (e.g., Joseph II’s 1783 Systematica gentis Judaicae regulation) also carefully regulated their participation in the dominant culture, pressuring them to assimilate. Fear of an Eastern Other reemerged periodically whenever the multiethnic balance of Timişoara or the Banat area was weakened by nationalist passions. Ironically, every ethnic group seeking hegemony over its neighbors tried to reduce them to a stereotypal Other, describing the Romanian, Hungarian, or German cohabitants as Turkified or Gypsified. As Ioan Haţegan argues in his Afterword to Preyer’s monograph, contemporary historiography needs to emphasize (without counter-idealization) the contribution of the Eastern strand not only to Timişoara’s multiculturality (Preyer, Monographie 295), but also to the entire area between the Danube and the Don that Karl Emil Franzos called Halb-Asien (Half-Asia). The interplay between an archaic-oriental and a middle-class Central European civilization has “maintained the vitality of the cultural dialogue, stimulating pluralism (national, social,

Figure 3. The Serbian Bishopric and Cathedral (1748, 1791)

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linguistic, and religious), and guaranteeing a however fragile equilibrium between contraries” (Corbea, Response 13). It has also helped create a hybrid East-Central European identity, a “homo duplex” mentality (Muthu, Response 24) and a baroque approach to culture. The personalities who contributed to the establishment of Timişoara’s multifaceted culture were themselves eclectic, combining the oral, lyrical, and didactic traditions of the East with the learned and highbrow traditions of the West. This was true not only of the Romanian intellectuals (educator and writer Constantin Diaconovici Loga, grammarian and political thinker Paul Iorgovici, the polyglot diplomat and essayist Moise Nicoară, all thoroughly influenced by the Enlightenment), but also of the managerial elite which came from Vienna and the West. Johann Preyer’s own genealogy included a cobbler, a royal stableman, a confectioner, a Viennese painter, and a trade inspector in the Banat province. Educated at the Piarist Gymnasium that two great writers from the region, the Romanian Ioan Slavici and the German Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn attended later, he himself became administrator, lawyer, and writer of memoirs, plays, and poems in the late classicist style. But there is a subtler Other that Central Europe’s multiethnic cities have confronted periodically: their own idealization as models of cosmopolitan civilization. As a mayor, Preyer tried to turn Timişoara into such a model, introducing gas illumination in 1857, encouraging multilingual education, and founding Timişoara’s first music association and Law Academy. And yet, his description ends with an uncertain “should”: [A]s the new capital city of a royal province equal in size to the Kingdom of Belgium and twice the size of the kingdom of Saxony with an almost equal population, and as the focal point of a region endowed by nature with blessings and riches like few other countries, Timişoara should achieve within a few decades living standards appropriate for its endowments. (Monographie 256)

Figure 4. Old Town Hall (built 1731)

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The contrast between what the city was and what it could or ought to have been underlies much of the political and creative literature on Timişoara. While praising its modern comfort and multiculturality at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Serbian poet and novelist Miloš Crnjanski (also a graduate of the Piarist High School in Timişoara) noted the town’s proletarian periphery and the old Serbian district’s frantic struggle for survival. The second volume of his epic novel Seobe (Migrations), written at the end of the 1920s but published only in 1962, dedicates several sections to 1752 Timişoara that finally experiences a period of calm under its garrison commander, Franz Karl Leopold Baron von Engelshofen, troubled only by the rebellious dreams of the Serbs living on the outskirts of the city (Druga knjiga seoba, ch. 1). A few years earlier, Camil Petrescu summed up Timişoara as a city of exotic contradictions, with fields of corn between modern avenues and cultural institutions, as if its map had been “drawn by a geographer with lapses in memory” (“Itinerar” 166). In other representations, Timişoara appears alternatingly as a regional relay, a resonating chamber for trends created elsewhere, and as an occasional originator of cultural and artistic paradigms. As a regional “knot,” Timişoara facilitated the coexistence of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural trends. The mixture of late baroque, neo-classical, Jugendstil/Art nouveau architecture is a marker of the city’s East-Central European belonging. The multicultural diversity of its population encouraged early theatrical representations in several languages. The first mention of a theater in Timişoara goes back to 1753: modeled on the theatrical institutions from Vienna and Bratislava, it staged plays primarily in German but also in Hungarian. Another performing stage, opened in 1761, welcomed Liszt, Johann Strauss the Younger, and the Romanian poet Eminescu as theater prompter. When the modern theater building in Italian Renaissance style (the work of Viennese architects Hermann Helmer and Ferdinand Felmer) was inaugurated in 1875, a battle over the language of representation ensued; in the end the theater became Hungarian, using actors from Budapest, but the winter season was in German (see Fekete). Romanian representations first took place in schools and public buildings but were moved to the stage of the main theater (subsequently rebuilt by architect Duiliu Marcu) in 1920. The city also attracted a mix of outstanding personalities who played a seminal role in the cultures to which they belonged and in the intercultural dialogue of the city. The presence in Timişoara of Dositej Obradović (founder of modern Serbian literature) at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of Margit Kaffka (a major social and feminist novelist in Hungarian literature), and the German conductor Bruno Walter at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Camil Petrescu, Romania’s premier psychological novelist, who published there a literary-artistic magazine in three languages in the 1920s, enhanced Timişoara’s reputation as a cosmopolitan city. Some of these encounters were fortuitous, called by the troubled times more than by the attractions of the city. World War I brought Margit Kaffka to Temesvár in 1915, following her husband’s hospital postings. While she dedicated no work to the city and continued to shuttle between Temesvár and Budapest, this period proved to be very productive: Kaffka wrote several novellas published in the volume Két nyár (Two Summers; 1916), and rewrote her novel Állomások (Stations) in the spring of 1916, which she serialized in Vasárnapi Ujság (The Sunday Paper). In the fall, she started writing her last important novel, Hangyaboly (The Ant Heap); she also completed and published a volume of poetry, Az élet utján (On the Path of Life; 1918). However, she continued to feel isolated in the city and in 1918 she moved back to Budapest only to die in November of the Spanish flu (see Rolla).

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In 1931, commenting on the cities he had visited on his reading tour, Liviu Rebreanu noted Timişoara’s “European look,” although he found it “still foreign” architecturally to the rest of Romanian culture (qtd. in Maliţa 143). Rebreanu’s evaluation was motivated by the belief, shared with other writers born in the provinces, that cities like Timişoara had the potential to nourish an alternative Romanian culture to that centered in Bucharest. Magazines like Cele trei Crişuri (The Three Criş Rivers) in Oradea, Provincia literară (The Literary Province) in Sibiu, or Banatul (with articles in Romanian, German, Hungarian, and Serbian) in Timişoara were started to realize that untapped potential. Another cultural magazine published in Timişoara, Ion Stoia-Udrea’s Vrerea (The Will; 1932–1937, 1945–1948), reflected in its arguments, structure, and roster of contributors (Zoltán Franyó, József Méliusz, Virgil Birou, Rodion Markovits, Andrei A. Lillin) a crosscultural collaboration. For these writers, editors, and translators on the Left, the world was divided into rich and poor, not into ethnic groups. Arguably, it was the multiethnic, cosmopolitan temper of Timişoara that allowed it to play an innovative role in art (see also Ilieşu 191–205, 225–255). Between the two world wars, it became the converging point of a multicultural-multimedia experiment which included the paintings of Oskar Suchanek, the sculptures of Nándor Gallasz, the poetry of Zoltán Franyó, and the prose of Anişoara Odeanu. Franyó, in particular, was the embodiment of this experimental convergence, not only in poetry but also in politics (in 1919 he served as Georg Lukács’s deputy in the Red Hungarian Republic). A friend of Endre Ady, Lucian Blaga, and Octavian Goga, Franyó offered through his own work an innovative synthesis of the best poetic traditions in a dozen languages. As a poet, he contributed significantly to Hungarian Modernism; as a translator, he found inspired equivalences for Goethe’s Faust and Eminescu’s poems in Hungarian, for ancient Chinese and Persian poetry in German, and for contemporary Romanian poetry in both Hungarian and German. In 1968–69 alone, he published in Vienna an anthology of Romanian poets translated into German, in Berlin four volumes of Greek Poetry in German translation, and in Bucharest a volume of essays in Hungarian. The Herder Prize that crowned Franyó’s literary activities in 1977 recognized in him the epitome of the polyglot, multifaceted Central European writer. This model was imitated by younger writers like Mariana Şora (b. Klein), who wrote philosophy, memoirs, and fiction, and translated Romanian literature into German and French. Other writers of the mid-century, Rodion Markovits and Andrei Lillin, who wrote fiction and criticism in Romanian, German, Hungarian, and Serbian, also deserve attention as representatives of an alternative multicultural literature, but we need to separate their concessions to Soviet ideological pressures from their efforts to articulate a new space of intercultural contact. The ethnic dialogues of Timişoara were not stifled completely during the communist dictatorship. In spite of the massive deportations of Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, and Serbians from this area to Russia and the Baragan labor camps (the deportation of the German ethnics remained a taboo subject until Arnold Hauser’s novel Der fragwürdige Bericht Jakob Bühlmanns [Jakob Bühlmann’s Questionable Report], published abroad in 1972, and Johann Lippet’s Biographie, ein Muster [Biography, a Model; 1978]), and Ceauşescu’s later program of ideological/national homogenization, Timişoara continued to enjoy relatively autonomous forms of cultural production, from sophisticated ones (a circle of literary semiotics, a wave of postmodern poetry, an innovative film studio, a club of modern jazz) to subdialectal poetry and folk music in several languages. The difficulty of controlling this eclectic cultural production, which combined Eastern and Western

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Figure 5. The Metropolitan Cathedral of Banat, built by architect Ioan Trăienescu (1936–46) in traditional Byzantine and Romanian styles

traditions, explains the continued challenge that Timişoara posed not only to Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime, but also to Ion Iliescu’s post–1989 transition government, which was displeased with Timişoara’s alleged regionalist and separatist attitudes. The “city lost in mist” — to borrow the title of József Méliusz’s 1969 novel dedicated to Timişoara — functioned for many writers as an epitome of marginality, both in a negative sense (suggesting withdrawal from history and provincial stagnation) and in a positive sense, offering alternatives to the centralized urban culture pursued by the communist regime. Born in Timişoara/Temesvár in 1909 to a Hungarian father and a Serbian mother, Méliusz studied in his hometown, as well as in Budapest, Switzerland, and Germany. He wrote his poetry, fiction, and essays in Hungarian, founded the Hungarian literary magazine Utunk (Our Road; 1946–), translated French, German, and Romanian literature, and animated cross-cultural exchanges. Written in 1939–40 but published only in 1969, Város a ködben (City in Mist) is a complex work, mixing memoir, social chronicle, political analysis, and straightforward narrative. Focused on the period before and during World War I, Méliusz’s book depicts a provincial multiethnic Timişoara caught between a decadent imperial past and the rude awakening brought by the War. The writer treats unsparingly even members of his immediate family, emphasizing the corrupting effects of the old bureaucratic regime, as well as the polarizing repercussions of the Great War that dismantled the imperial order only to give rise to new ethnic tensions. Forced back into

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history, Méliusz’s Timişoara undergoes both a “Passion Friday” and a “Resurrection” (Marino, Preface to the Romanian translation 12), exchanging its bureaucratic imperial past for a present in which liberalizing tendencies coexist with new polarizations. Elements of this conflicting paradigm can be recognized in other recent literary works. At once provincial and cosmopolitan, Timişoara and the Banat region have inspired Petre Stoica’s nostalgic-expressionist poetry, Nicolae Breban’s and Gheorghe Schwartz’s Kafkaesque political fiction, and Sorin Titel’s polyphonic tetralogy “Tִara îndepărtată.” In Titel’s novels, “Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Poles, Germans, [Jews], navigate towards the Vienna of the 1900s, experiencing a deep human solidarity under the sign of mythic-imperial values” (Ungureanu, “Cutia Pandorei” 61). They also try to save the respect for cultural differences, learned in the interstices of the Habsburg Empire, in a maternal and provincial Banat, in the sharply polarized world of the mid–twentieth century. During the late 1970s the multifaceted identity of Timişoara was translated into a broad metaphor of resistance against ideological oppression in the experimental poetry of Traian Pop Traian, Ion Monoran, and Duşan Petrovici, the innovative fiction of Sorin Titel, Livius Ciocârlie, and Daniel Vighi, and, more indirectly, in the political literature of the ethnic German writers rallied in the “Aktionsgruppe Banat” (Herta Müller, Richard Wagner, William Totok, Rolf Bossert, and others). In the work of all these writers, Timişoara functions as a “city-text,” as one of “those nodes or points of confluence” where both the sociocultural and the textual identity of the city are continually “articulated and tested” (Gelley 240). By retrieving the contradictory facets of a historical and imaginary urban space, the Timişoara “city text” challenged the leveling of differences in Ceauşescu’s pursuit of uniform “communist cities.” The conversion of the city into a space of memory and imagination was essential to its redefinition as a locus of ideological resistance. The ritual recall of an earlier time in the history of Timişoara and the region (as in the fiction of Alexandra Indrieş, Sorin Titel, and Livius Ciocârlie) functioned as a historical corrective, opposing an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century notion of decentered, multiethnic culture to Ceauşescu’s hypercentralized neo-Stalinism. Other writers accentuated the contradictions of contemporary Timişoara, denouncing the fake nature of communist “reality” as in the fiction-reportage of Daniel Vighi. Using a combination of cine-verité and fictionalizing techniques, Vighi’s Povestiri cu strada depozitului (Stories on the Warehouse Street; 1985) and Însemnări despre anii din urmă (Notes on the Latter Years; 1989), foreground a Timişoara that is at once mediocre and mythic, caught in drab present and capable of subtle transfigurations. The same realistic-transfigurative approach can be found in the fiction of the two most versatile postwar writers associated with Timişoara, Sorin Titel and Livius Ciocârlie. In their work, the most “anonymous” and yet potentially innovative of Romania’s “great cities” (Titel interview, in Sasu and Vartic 266), functions as a form of “critical regionalism” against Ceauşescu’s monstrous conceit of the totalitarian megalopolis, which he partially achieved through the demolition/reconstruction of old Bucharest. Titel’s early work, written during the time he lived in Timişoara, moved rapidly from a rural Banat environment to a Kafkian representation of the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life in Noaptea inocenţilor (The Night of Innocents; 1970) and Lunga călătorie a prizonierului (The Prisoner’s Long Journey; 1971). The city is presented here as a tentacular ideological space which encroaches upon intimate life, sacrificing individual candor

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and naturalness. Written in Ceauşescu’s redesigned megalopolis, Bucharest, Titel’s later novels, culminating with Femeie, iată fiul tău (Woman, Behold Your Son; 1983), hark back to the historical province of the Banat and its capital city, Timişoara, trying to reconstruct a nineteenth-century model of cultural interaction. While Ştefan Bănulescu attributed in Cartea de la Metopolis the collapse of Romania’s urban civilization to the “cutting and submerging” performed by a lunatic reformer (17), Titel viewed this collapse as a simultaneous failure of the technocratic megalopolis of Western and Stalinistic inspiration and of its provincial, marginocentric alternative promoted in Habsburg times. Titel’s fiction interprets the breakdown of the provincial capital as a political failure caused by the weakness of the model itself (the Habsburg federalism being gradually eroded by internal nationalisms and emerging totalitarian ideologies) and as a failure of imagination. It further suggests that the recovery of the provincial city as a viable cultural alternative would have to involve an imaginative reinvention/rethinking of the model. Titel’s title metaphors, “remote country” (Ţara îndepărtată), “bird and shadow” (Pasărea şi umbra), and “fleeting moment” (Clipa cea repede), bear witness to this difficult process, focusing on the author’s effort to bring to light the buried continent of memory and unravel traces of a historical palimpsest in his favorite provincial city. Narrative reconstruction in Titel’s later novels is almost always dialogic, the reader gaining access to a repertoire of recovered stories by moving, as in Ţara îndepărtată, from the memory of one individual to a layered dialogue of voices and stories traded by a family or community. Some narrative structure does emerge, but it is a rather polycentric one that organizes stories around interests only indirectly related to the main family. Whatever the speaker or the event recalled, stories overlap, “falling surprisingly, comfortably […] upon ‘the same problem.’ [Titel’s] world communicates in all its points […] in the space of a unique memory, organized like a network whose trajectories intersect in luminous nodes” (Vasile Popovici, “Postfaţă” 461). What Titel reconstructs in his later novels is the polysystemic oral space of a quasi-mythic province on the Western border of Romania. The role of this recreated provincial space, which mixes Romanian, Hungarian, and German cultural traditions, is to reclaim a dialogic model of narrative and cultural exchange against the communicational crisis instituted by the Second World War and the communist dictatorship. By listening to the simple stories traded in the family kitchen, the young protagonist of Ţara îndepărtată is allowed to move from the “brutal masculine world” of war and revolution to a richer intersubjective “womb-like world” of motherly tales (Brînzeu, Armura de sticlă 115, 116). In Pasărea şi umbra, the death of one character triggers a process of narrative retelling that enhances the lives of the two surviving characters, old and young Iulişca. And in Femeie, iată fiul tău, two characters who bear the same name, Marcu, force their erratic stories that include memories of war and endless wanderings, to converge on more stable subjects, such as prewar provincial life and maternity. Understanding the city of Timişoara as repertoire of images, names, and customs buried in memory, Livius Ciocârlie’s fiction also attempts the difficult recovery of a communitarian and multicultural notion of provincial town (embodied in prewar Timişoara) against the culturally homogenized and ideologically sterile totalitarian city. The unusual form of Un burgtheater provincial (A Provincial Burgtheater; 1985), described by its author as “a sort of chronicle, a sort of novel,” of the autobiographical novel-diary Clopotul scufundat (The Sunken Bell; 1988), and of the other novelistic memoirs published by Ciocârlie since 1989, suggests that the reconstruction

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of an East-Central European city text involves a rethinking of literary genre and rules of representation. The first work presents a collagist view of Timişoara and the Banat region, pieced together from fragments of historical chronicles (Turkish, Romanian, and German), newspaper clips, letters and personal reminiscences. Both the status of the author (reduced to an assembler and rereader of texts) and that of his narrative subject (the cultural spectacle of a multiform provincial city, summed up in the metaphor of a “burgtheater”) are redefined in this intertextual construction. In Clopotul scufundat the recuperation of historical Timişoara is even more difficult, involving a range of conflicting genres (personal diary, memoir, essay, document, fiction). Much of this work records relentlessly the degradation of the traditional city-text in Ceauşescu’s Romania. Ciocârlie’s semi-autobiographical protagonist responds to this degradation with a philosophic indifference. The exchanges of this self-described “adventurer in apathy” (166) with the outside world are dominated by negative symmetries: “The coldness inside me attracts the surrounding coldness.[…] My indifference is echoed by the world’s indifference” (202). The narrator’s attempts to find his mooring in the urban present end in litanies of insignificance and loss. As Pia Brînzeu summarizes, the narrator’s “friends only represent long lists of insignificant people, his school mates have vanished scattered around the country, relatives, habits and destinies follow, no less than love itself, a perpetual ‘fall into nothingness.’ Even the books in his father’s library, the recipes in his mother’s notebook, or the house furniture […] add to the inflationary production of insignificance in a closed universe like a ‘parenthesis inside a parenthesis’ (61)” (Armura de sticlă 149). The narrator’s other solution, writing, also fails as long as the character remains trapped in a listless third-person monologue that alienates him further from life. But in time the “slow and vulnerable gelatin” of writing (69) begins to gel, filling the existential void with vivid notations of former times and places. Drawing on a memory he did not know he had, the character-narrator recovers images of a historical Timişoara: “Out-field,” was the name of a not too large plot of grassland, at the margin of the “Bucharest Street.” The street branched out from the boulevard. It began, much like it does today, with a villa hidden behind a high iron fence. Then came the more modest house inhabited by the “Strumpfs.” Two Bauhaus-style homes, with a second level. In one, bluish-grey, lived a family of Italians. Their name ended in “atti.” Vignatti, perhaps. Across from them, on the other side of the street, a single house which belonged to some Germans. The old man used to sell soccer tickets. I had a lot of respect for him. His wife, big, bony and always frowning. They have vanished a long time ago. Further up, the street ended in the field that stretched on the other side of the fence. (162)

Such passages have a surprising germinative force, reconstructing in detail the “ghost” of a prewar city (Brînzeu 153). They also have important political implications, opposing a description of the city as a multiethnic periphery, only marginally removed from nature, to Ceauşescu’s flattened and hypercentralized urban ideal. Belying the narrator’s initial distrust of memory (“If after a cataclysm, it would fall upon me to reconstruct the world from memory, the result would be pitiful — 146), his text performs that very task, “unburying” a palimpsest of more authentic city images from the debris of an ideological cataclysm. Whether he retraces neighborhoods in the city or recalls foods and pastimes of his youth, Ciocârlie’s inventories of names emphasize the multilingual and multicultural nature of Timişoara.

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Ciocârlie’s intertextual reconstruction of a city-text finds its ingenious parallel in Femeia în roşu (The Woman in Red; 1990), a multilayered narrative written by Mircea Nedelciu, Adriana Babeţi, and Mircea Mihăieş, which reconstructs and parodies several genres of fiction: the mystery novel, the documentary historical novel, and the novel of intercultural relations. The character at the center of the novel is the historical figure of Ana Cumpănaş, whose trajectory moves across two continents, from the small town of Comloş, in the Banat region, where she was born in 1892, to East Chicago in 1909, where under the name of Anna Sage she runs a brothel and becomes briefly involved with the infamous gangster John Dillinger, and back to her native Banat after she facilitates the latter’s murder. As Ana’s Romanian last name suggests, her life was precariously “balanced” between provincial town and big metropolis, East and West, Old World and New World, the topoi that framed the lives of many Eastern Europeans who, like Ana, sought a better life in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though she helped the police ambush and kill Dillinger, she was deported back to her native country in 1934 because of her “low” moral character. The authors of the Woman in Red reconstruct her story in a way that emphasizes her paradoxical cultural trajectory as well as the paradoxes of historicalsensational fiction. If Titel and Ciocârlie tried to salvage a historical palimpsest from under the ideological debris of the contemporary city, poets Traian Pop Traian, Ion Monoran, and Duşan Petrovici focused more insistently on contemporary material, refiguring it imaginatively but often at great costs. Most of Traian’s poetry could appear only in 1998, in the retrospective volume Săptămâna 53 (The Fifty-Third Week). The darkening, abandoned cityscapes of Timişoara, with “parked streetcars/ from which nobody sheds light” and highways swept by the worthless “wet coins of rain” (14, 43), provide the background for a number of anxious reflections on the fate of the individual and a culture under totalitarianism. Small acts of revolt are consumed at street corners: Being a pedestrian comes in handy when I tread over the bored yellow of the street markings — joining a sidewalk that has accepted my footprints to one that refuses to acknowledge the temperature of my presence — well-aware that the pleasure of my walking will not hinder the driver from popping his exhaust wasting his presumptive capital of innocence — je me revolte, donc nous sommes he blurts through his teeth whizzing by me like the explosion of a thought that upsets the traffic (De faptul că sunt pieton mă folosesc/Being a Pedestrian Comes in Handy, Săptămâna 53 90)

Though minute, these acts of revolt can restore individual and collective identity (“I rise in revolt, therefore we are”). The events of 1989 have accelerated this process of change but, as a 1995 poem dedicated to Timişoara from the poet’s self-exile in Germany suggests, both the political and the literary revolution have a long way to go. In a post–1989 Timişoara where people desperately try to make ends meet conning and being conned by others, “everything is for change and exchange/ more so than stamps old clothes customs words political administrative geographic sexual religious and moral affiliation” (“Timişoară, Timişoară,” Putere absolută 37).

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A revolutionary pathos was present also in Ion Monoran’s poetry and in his meteoric public life, ended in 1993, four years after he had made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the anti-Ceauşescu uprising in Timişoara. The little poetry that this furnace technician and underground poet managed to publish in magazines (though he won an important first-book competition in 1980, the Party censorship prevented the publication of his manuscript) anticipated the poetic revival of the 1980s. His posthumously published collection Locus Periucundus (Spirited Place; 1994) offers two successive attitudes towards the city. The older poems, written between 1976 and 1979, map an oppressive, disarticulated cultural environment that squanders human potential. But the city also infuses the poems with a raucous, spinning energy that upsets the “mendacious avantposts / of ganged-up reality” (“Veto,” Periucundus 5). The speaker roams the “streets locked into night” like a “stormy youth” (14) or a self-appointed garbage man (26), trying to free the city from under the weight of lies promoted by the official “ideologues” (27). On rare occasions, the reader is treated to a “Rimbauldian” flare of poetry in the middle of an otherwise uninspiring vista at “Dawn”: Under the electric wires along 6 Martie Street night is retiring in its white and dewy dress scattering sparrows strung like beads on the wires and even the wind is sprawled cold on the sidewalks so that you almost feel good on this straight and useful street like many other streets beyond all the stirring you vainly try to prevent a pod from bursting (“Zori,” Periucundus 9)

Monoran’s poems composed after 1980 attempt a bolder metaphoric redefinition of the urban space, moving from minimalism to tragicomic Postmodernism. The poet’s position at the “periphery of this plain city / […] pounded by invisible languages and idols” (Periucundus 35) allows him to understand not only its complex existential drives, but also its contradictory roots, at once rustic and urban, spiritual and material. Though sickened by the “misery of becoming/ in the labyrinth through which you must pass/ in order to grow and remain/ true to yourself” (54), the poet takes the challenge and explores the topography of an East-Central European city, identifying its “loci periucundi, as Plinius would say, / dominated by the mysterious presence / of certain [disturbing] spirits” (38). At its worst, the city is a “false orthography of images” (68) that buries the ruined temples of tradition under the “banal intimacy of the present” (42); at its best, a “disorder conceived by a frivolous gardener” (39), capable of stirring images that link the “disorder of past and language” to the “magic of verbal infinites” (75).

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The latter proposition is emphasized more clearly in the poetry of the Serbian-Romanian Duşan Petrovici. Echoing Allen Ginsberg’s search for “beat(ific)” moments in trivial cityscapes, Petrovici’s pre–1989 poetry — from Lebede ale puterii (Swans of Power; 1972) to Neînceputa mireasmă (Untouched Perfume; 1975) — built a metaphysics of urban experience around nodes of erotic and metaphoric energy. In his more recent 1994 collection, written since his immigration to Germany, Petrovici still presents himself as “a gnostic athlete” who discerns/invents patches of utopian candor in the “totemic city” (Erotica hermetică/Die hermetische Erotik 32, 34, 40). The poet “undertakes subterranean works” (44), trying to improve the imaginative infrastructure of the city, but his approach remains minimalist, content to gather what “spring and angels […] have dropped on the street/ from their small suitcases” (48). Closer to the existential-political anxieties of Traian and Monoran than to the erotic-metaphysical fabulation of Petrovici is the political poetry and fiction of the ethnic German writers that formed the “Aktionsgruppe Banat” in the early 1970s. German ethnic literature had survived the pressures of assimilation coming from both the Hungarian authorities after the establishment of the Double Monarchy in 1867, and from the Romanian authorities after 1918, but not without paradoxical detours and significant compromises. Compare the examples of Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn and Ferenc Herczeg, two writers of Swabian origin, who were once highly popular writers but for very different reasons. Herczeg, the son of the German mayor of Versec/Vršac, became Magyarized during his school years in Szeged and Temesvár and wrote only in Hungarian, whereas Müller, born in Guttenbrunn, hated his compulsory Hungarian education in Temesvár so much that he dropped out and retained a strong dislike for it throughout his life. Like the Temesvár-born art historian Arnold Hauser, the two writers quit the city early; they went to Budapest and Vienna respectively, although Herczeg later became the parliamentary representative of the city in 1896. Müller-Guttenbrunn worked as a critic and director of theater in Vienna before he turned fully to fiction writing and became known as the Erzschwabe (Archswabian) for taking up the cause of the Banat Swabians, mostly against the Hungarians. After a tearjerker about a tragic love affair between a heroic Austrian soldier and a Hungarian girl that sacrifices herself to save the Austrian troops from the Hungarian outlaws (Die Madjarin/The Hungarian Girl), Müller-Guttenbrunn wrote a scathing condemnation of Hungarian culture in Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols; 1908), and defended Lenau against his Hungarian appropriation in a Lenau trilogy (1919–21). Herczeg, in turn, published during World War I his novel Hét Sváb (Seven Swabians; 1916), which glorifies the Swabian solidarity with the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848–49 — at the cost of the Serbs, who are portrayed as beastly marauders. Even more paradoxical was the career of Reiter Róbert (see under Liebhard) who started his career as a Hungarian Avant-garde writer (publishing in Lajos Kassák’s journal Ma) under his Magyarized name. After editing the Hungarian paper Munkáslap (Workers’ Paper; 1919–), he re-Germanized his name to Robert Reiter and became in 1925 the editor of the Banater deutsche Zeitung (Banat German Newspaper) and during World War II of the pro-Nazi Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung (Southeast German Daily). He returned from Soviet captivity in 1948 under the name of Franz Liebhard (assumed from a deceased campmate), and became a loyal communist. In 1968, he opened Timişoara’s Müller-Guttenbrunn Literary Circle, trying to turn MüllerGuttenbrunn from a Swabian nationalist into a transnational socialist (see Berwanger, Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn 29ff). Still, for those who remembered the real biography of Müller-Guttenbrunn, this literary circle suggested, however covertly, an effort to resist cultural assimilation.

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The members of the Aktionsgruppe Banat continued this tradition of cultural resistance in stronger but also more complex forms. Like the group of Romanian-German writers rallied around the magazine Echinox in Cluj, the “Aktionsgruppe Banat” had to confront continually the issue of what it means to write German language literature in “the cities of the East” (Bossert, neuntöter 60; trans. Fritz H. König). Culturally, Romanian-German literature exhibits the characteristics of a marginal enclave: as König notes, the German speakers form “a cultural and linguistic island inside Romania in an agricultural setting concentrated around the Romanian cities Timişoara and Cluj. Ties to the German-speaking countries were never very close. Consequently, the language is often slightly archaic, permeated with ‘Romanianisms,’ and geared mainly toward their own surroundings” (35). But aesthetically it is a true hybrid, bridging the Western and East-European practices of poetry. These writers read the unofficially circulated German, Austrian, and American literature, as well as dissident East-European products. Their literature achieved a “Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt — an effect of distancing and estrangement — through all means available to them. They want[ed] to disconnect themselves from official literature, from the literature of their predecessors, from the poetry that ‘serves.’ They [were] antilyrical, antisentimental, antitraditionalist” (Ungureanu, “Richard Wagner” 5). But in addition to trying to define their own voice, these writers had to struggle to maintain a rudimentary identity in Romania: the Aktionsgruppe Banat was officially banned in 1975, and almost all of the Banat poets subsequently emigrated to Germany in the early 1980s, where they were faced with the task of creating another problematic identity (many in the powerful and conservative refugee organizations looked with suspicion upon their iconoclasm). The suicide of Rolf Bossert in 1986, eight weeks after arriving in Frankfurt, called attention to the dramatic fate of Romanian-German writers whom “no one calls/ no one expels/ yet their community continually collapses” (Berwanger, “Schwabenausverkauf” 436). Bossert’s poetry defines eloquently the cultural obstacles associated with writing in the marginal cities of the east, where censorship and provincial self-indulgence turn pens to “rust.” As he wrote in “Open Air Restaurant”: We sit in the cities in the East Poetry is being made. And while the pens rust The mug claims to be genius […] My eyes roll in the wind. The lash falls down. For the deaf and blind I talk round the issues. (“Gartenlokal”; Neuntöter 60, trans. König)

At the same time, this poetry defines the responsibilities incurred by the poet in this environment: “Writing I give myself life, / writing I give my life away” (“Selbtsporträt”/“Self-Portrait; Neuntöter 8, trans. König). In order to survive in Ceauşescu’s Romania, the poet must become “Dracula’s grandnephew” or a “Neuntöter” bird (a red-backed shrike), impaling his words with sarcasm and rebellion. His position remains uncomfortable, suspended between mastery and victimhood, at-homeness and homelessness. Hence the laconic-ironic nature of much pre–1989 German-language poetry, whose minimalist techniques suggested a precarious existence in a city that

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is both “native” and alien to them. As König remarks, “the tragedy for all Romanian-German writers is that in order to survive and become free [in their native cities] they have to emigrate to Germany where, on the other hand, they are doomed to lose their culture and their accustomed milieu as writers” (42). Those German writers who managed to survive both Ceauşescu’s dictatorship and their subsequent uprooting from their native Banat are still obsessed with the trauma of totalitarianism experienced and resisted over several decades. William Totok, who suffered repeated persecutions and imprisonment for his activities, sees his entire “Autobiography” as an initiation into risk: “I’ve grown up/ with that anxious enthusiasm/ that has knocked my teeth out” (“Percepţie”/ Perception, in anthology Scriitori germani 45). The city itself is a threatening proposition that “grows far away over our/ eyes, so that we believe/ that in the cement lies/ a hidden allusion, the big castle/ guards our lips” (46). Writing under these conditions is a perpetual confrontation with a state of crisis: “At the burning table/ I sat/and wrote./ What I wrote/ did not extinguish/ the flames. What was burning/ did not hinder/ my writing” (“La masa în flăcări”/At the Burning Table, Scriitori 50). In Herta Müller’s first collection of stories, Niederungen (Nadirs; 1980), and her subsequent poetic prose volumes, such as Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango; 1983), language accurately records the details of a disagreeable world, disagreeable both because of the totalitarian regime that oppresses it and the sordid circumstances of her people, the Banat Swabians. The same dark atmosphere haunts Müller’s prose after her emigration to Germany in 1987, for instance in the novel In der Falle (Trapped; 1996), though now dissociated from the particularities of her former or present home. Political denunciation is accompanied also by narrative recuperation of a richer, multicultural past, as in Richard Wagner’s work published after his emigration to Germany in 1987. His essay Popoare în derivă (Drifting Peoples; 1994) describes an East-Central Europe of peripheral centers and lingering regionalisms, but also of continuous relocation and expulsion of minorities. His recent novel, Die Muren von Wien (The Torrentail Mudslides of Vienna; 1990), is focused on one of these regions, the Banat, emptied of its former German population, to illustrate through engineer Benda both an identity crisis in contemporary East-Central Europe and a search for an earlier, ethnically richer Banat. While not an autobiographical persona strictly speaking, the protagonist confronts similar issues of identity as he defects from his native Banat to Germany, helped by his lover Eve. But their relationship soon collapses because of the protagonist’s sense of alienation both from the culture of his childhood and his adopted one. In communist Romania, Benda was a marginalized German ethnic, imprisoned for six months for attempting to escape to the West. In Germany, he is at best a “Swabian from the Banat” (Viena, Banat 19), that is a member of a vanishing breed who speaks German “like a foreigner” (34). In Vienna, where the protagonist takes refuge after he is deserted by Eve, he feels equally disconnected, unable to establish a successful relationship with his new girl friend Iris. The structure of this short novel, composed of discrete vignettes that mix several temporal levels, emphasizes even further this sense of disconnectedness. The discourse itself becomes circular, repeating without any gain: “The time spent with Eva is the time spent with Eva. The remembrance is remembrance. The Banat is the Banat.[…] Vienna is Vienna. The past is past” (135). And yet, while in Vienna, closer to his native Banat, the protagonist manages to “dream back his past as if he could have changed it still, as if it were not finished” (24). The availability of Iris

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as a sympathetic narratee stimulates recollections about his childhood village, now depopulated of Germans, and his youth in Timişoara. The rereading of Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn’s Der kleine Schwab (The Little Swabian; 1910), though unsatisfactory as a narrative, awakes further childhood memories in him. He recalls the old German names of streets and squares in Timişoara and reconstructs — through the memories of older family members — a prewar Banat with its German customs, but also a more recent Banat with the friends he left behind. His family memories preserve the image of a proud Swabian Banat, but its patriotic manifestations continued in Bavaria by the Swabian émigrés do not interest him. Trying to find his place in this fractured universe, the protagonist consults maps of the area that do not satisfy him. Realizing that his topographic distinctions have been to a great extent artificial — his “West was an illusion, created against the crushing banality of life in the Banat” (113) — he wants to draw his own map that would reconcile the two halves of his life. He contemplates a “map of the Banat [that] would include the names of the localities in several languages”; this type of map would have more cultural “reality” than the real maps he had seen (119). The remembering map that his own novel draws manages to save his world from the “feeling of ultimate loss” (122); it also gives the protagonist and those throngs of East-Central European immigrants that in 1989 converged on the opened Hungarian-Austrian border some sense of belonging. Not only poets and fiction writers, but also scholars have envisioned Timişoara and the Banat area as viable alternatives to the centralized cultural production of the interwar nation-states and the postwar communist states. Even though Timişoara has not produced a coherent “school” and body of work, some of the most important contributions to rethinking Romanian culture around broader European/multicultural paradigms have come from intellectuals associated with Timişoara and the Banat area. Born and schooled in Timişoara, Mihai Spariosu’s theoretical work has undertaken a consistent critique of the “power principle” that has informed models of ethnocultural identification, proposing instead an interactive model of cultural production based on mediation rather than on contest. His recent book, The Wreath of Wild Olive (1997), attributes the post–1989 resurgence of interethnic tensions to our polarized definitions of cultural identity, and argues instead for a cooperative cultural paradigm that interplays ethnic differences in a nonconflictive way. Also born and educated in Timişoara, Neumann — whose work we have quoted in this article — has studied the cultural “convergences” between national and ethnic traditions, foregrounding the “intercultural dimension” of Central and South-Eastern Europe (see esp. Convergenţe spirituale /Spiritual Convergences; 1986). His more recent books, The Temptation of Homo Europaeus (1993) and Identităţi multiple în Europa regiunilor (Multiple Identities in Regional Europe; 1997), emphasize the idea of a “transethnic” East-European civilization that developed beginning in the eighteenth century in response to parochial ethnic interests and the continued threat of Ottoman imperialism. Conceived for the most part during the 1980s but published (with one exception) after 1989, these studies can be read also as a meditation on the present dangers of ethnic/nationalistic divisions and the need for a new cross-cultural integration. Finally, Virgil Nemoianu (born from an old Romanian family on the south-eastern Banat border, but with Serbian and GermanItalian roots on his grandmother’s side) has been interested in the reactions of cultural peripheries to influential centers. The case of Eastern European Romanticism, studied by Nemoianu in The Taming of Romanticism (1984), is an instructive example of how “peripheral areas” dissipate and restructure Western literary and cultural trends, fitting them to specific regional needs. The

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periphery functions not only a “supplement” but also, as Nemoianu has argued more recently in A Theory of the Secondary (1989), as a corrective, recovering “the potential losses, all the ‘secondary’ matters that in its powerful sweep history is bound to overlook and discard” (22). To the extent a marginocentric city like Timişoara rewrites “core” identities, it strengthens progress by widening the range of choices. It should not come as a surprise that some of the recent attempts to recover the idea of a multicultural “Third Europe” have also been associated with Timişoara. The volumes published by the homonymous interdisciplinary research foundation based in Timişoara have mapped this “Third Europe” both as a cultural reality and as a utopia. One of their first volumes, Europa Centrală: Memorie, paradis, apocalipsă (Central Europe: Memory, Paradise, Apocalypse; 1998), focused on a specific form of East-Central European literature, the memoir/diary/autobiographical novel that, as Ungureanu wrote in the Afterword, reflects both the agony and the hope embedded in the dream of a third space of multicultural identity (Babeţi and Ungureanu, Europa Centrală 514, 519). Adriana Babeţi has analyzed some of the features of East-Central European literature in her book, Dilemele Europei centrale (The Dilemmas of Central Europe; 1998). The fiction of Livius Ciocârlie, Danilo Kiš, and Ivan Klima embodies for her a characteristic perception of Central European space. Their subjectively filtered prose reconstructs a baroque universe “that includes its own contradictions, that asserts, in order to subsequently undermine, its values, placing them in a continuous crisis, submitting them to continuous metamorphosis” (92). In reconstructing the “memory of the Banat,” the Third Europe” research group and other cultural historians rely not only on sophisticated writings but also on oral narratives and personal memoirs that represent both the “averse of history,” with its major events and revolutions, and its “reverse,” its shadows and moments of stagnation (Leu and Albert 3–4).

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Plovdid: The Text of the City vs. the Texts of Literature Alexander Kiossev Studies of the relationship between modes of living and space have focused in recent decades primarily on two fields: the theory and history of territorialization and urban studies. These two forms of inquiry define “space” differently: they consider it at different scales, focusing on why they usually remain isolated from each other. They are motivated by different theoretical premises and solve different problems. The study of territory uses two major approaches. The first, which extends from the early work of Jeremy Bentham to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, is concerned with processes of territorialization, modern homogenizations, and spatial forms of social control. The second, associated with the names of Edward Said (Orientalism), Larry Wolff (Inventing Eastern Europe), Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans), Milica Bakić-Hayden (“Nesting Orientalism”), Vesna Goldsworthy (Inventing Ruritania), Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Balkan

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as Metaphor) and others, is concerned with “spaces of identity” and imaginary geographies. It emphasizes the participation of the images of a certain territory in games of the geopolitical and cultural imagination. In the tradition of urban studies, the city requires another frame of thought. Alongside the practical study of various functional structures of city life (from architectural and planning aspects through infrastructure to educational and health programs), we have witnessed the emergence of new postmodern urban studies, whose theoretical and practical analyses, like those of imaginary geographies, pay significant attention to spatial representations. The new urban studies draw on the “spatial turn” in modern humanities and social sciences, a trend that started with Walter Benjamin’s Illuminationen (Illuminations) and his comments on the figure of the flâneur, continued with Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Writings on Cities, Michel Foucault’s “Space, Knowledge and Power,” and Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone, and culminated in the studies of the new critical-postmodern geographers, Edward W. Soja’s Postmodern Geographies, David Harvey’s The Urban Experience, and other works (see Miles, Hall, and Borden). Recent cultural urban studies represent the city (conceived usually as a multicultural megalopolis) as a high-tech urban and cultural ensemble, a self-sufficient universe incorporating spatial elements, temporal elements, multiplicity, and disorder. At the same time, they find in the city a dynamic agglomeration of social and cultural clashes, in which the power hierarchies, the cultural and economic intergroup relations, have turned into spatial cultural codes. Thus, the city is seen as a spatial and hybrid image of groups that coexist tensely — in conflicts, crises, and renegotiations of boundaries. To the postmodern gaze, urban issues are more interesting than territorial ones because, unlike the homogenized territories and imaginary geographies, the city is a real space of incompatibility and heterogeneity. The city is multiple, incorporating many cultural systems that are hard to unify and represent from one viewpoint only. I will use the example of nineteenth-century Plovdiv to argue that the two major approaches to city culture are not mutually exclusive, but imply each other and may interact productively. From the viewpoint of the classical territorial approach, the city is only a small dot on a large-scale map. From the viewpoint of the contemporary Babylonian megalopolis, the territorial horizon is a leftover from past, nationalist times. There are, however, other viewpoints. From their perspective, the city encompasses, especially its historical nineteenth-century form that has continued to influence the forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the imaginary geographies and symbols of faraway spaces. The latter may not only be present in the real urban space of a city but may also intervene in it and alter it. That is to say, they may influence the city’s heterogeneous “spaces of identity.” In the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, Plovdiv was a complex multicultural space, a sort of miniature Balkans. At the start of the nineteenth century, Plovdiv’s inhabitants included Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Muslims, as well as Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Pavlikyans (Bulgarian Catholics), Roma, and even merchants from Ragusa/Dubrovnik (Genchev; Nemski; Mutafchieva; Solun i Plovdiv). However, the Ottoman city was multicultural in a medieval rather than a modern sense. It was far from the ideal of modern multiculturalism, from being a hybrid place for contacts, conflicts, and re-negotiations of boundaries. The fact that communities met face-to-face did not mean that they were in a state of democratic cohabitation, with their cultural identities equally represented in the public space. Before the

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1820s, every ethnic, cultural, and religious community had its own localized and strictly defined mode of living, and the contacts between these communities, limited to the practical needs of economic exchange, were well regulated and hierarchically structured, in spatial terms as well. These communities inhabited different neighborhoods; some of them, like those of the Pavlikyans, Jews, and Armenians, were quite closed and endogamous. They had distinct secular and religious cultures, dress, emblematic everyday food; they practiced their religions in separate temples, celebrated their own holidays, and performed their religious rituals in different holy languages (Turkish, Greek, Ladino, even Italian). Thus, in the early nineteenth century the city experienced a premodern coexistence of small religious and cultural communities that perpetuated their own distinct modes of living. Most typical of this policy of self-isolation were the taboos that each community had regarding specific eating, drinking, or sexual practices of the other communities, stigmatized as repulsive and unclean (Yancheva 165–93). As a rule, an individual’s identity in this urban environment was determined by his/her small, enclosed premodern group, and defined mostly by language or religion. This identity seemed stable, “natural,” non-negotiable. The only place of official contacts was the high street, but this was ruled again by a hierarchy of ethnic groups as well as by ethnic or denominational monopolies over specific trades. The control of communities was perhaps not quite so inevitable, since hybrid cultural phenomena continued to exist under the surface of this map of premodern self-segregated groups; however, we have little information about them, due to the nationalist character of most history, ethnography, and literature. Lyuben Karavelov, for example, describes the architectural traditions of both Bulgarians and Greeks (Săbrani săchineniya, 1984 edition, 3: 104); there were hybrids in city architecture and cuisine. Overall, however, the most important condition for contact, competition, and cooperation was missing before the 1820s and 30s. At the time, Plovdiv had no public spaces because it had no modern public sphere, no modern “high” culture with its attendant institutions — an educational system, a modern church, press, book publishing, libraries, museums, etc. These hybrids show, nevertheless, that the static picture of a premodern oriental city with separate and stable ethnic groups was in this case only an abstraction. Under the surface of a seeming feudal immobility, the slow historical process of multidimensional exchange between spaces and cultures was going on. Because of the changing economic and political situation of the Ottoman Empire, the city experienced a series of voluntary and enforced migrations, an exodus of certain ethnic and denominational groups and an influx of others. After the initial arrival of Anatolian settlers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who expelled the existing Christian population, the reverse process occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (Genchev 5–70; Solun i Plovdiv 139–65). For economic reasons or in search of security from violent robber gangs, many Christian (Greek and Bulgarian) families settled in the city, followed by Ragusa merchants, later pushed out by Greek and Jewish traders (Genchev 31–50). As part of the early modernization, the demographic processes intertwined with economic and cultural ones: Plovdiv’s importance as a commercial center increased in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It supplied Istanbul with rice, wheat, sesame, timber, mutton, wool, cloth, and horses. It traded with cities further afield in the Balkans or in the Near East. Research has identified even a Plovdiv colony in Calcutta, India. In the eighteenth century, due to its location

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Figure 1. The Dzhumaya Mosque, 14th century

on the postal route from Constantinople to Vienna, Plovdiv became an important transport hub of the Empire. This suggests that a static mapping of the territorial location of the religious and ethno-cultural groups in the city is inadequate. The mapping should be “animated” in order to take account of the social and historical dynamism, within which a city’s boundaries of “native” and “foreign” are constantly rewritten. This new, dynamic map should encompass not only the visible ethnic and religious realities of the city, but also the “long-distance” relations with phenomena away from the city, which make these city realities possible. Never in the city’s existence did communities live in perfect local isolation. Both the city as a whole, and each of its districts dominated by an ethnic or cultural element, was in continuous processes of communication and exchange with various closer and more distant, material and symbolic “other worlds.” The inflows and outflows of people, capital, and goods, as well as of cultural products — names, symbols, models, and interpretations — constantly introduced nonlocal elements into the city’s space and way of life, from coffee and pepper to political ideas and literary genres. This communication with distant worlds did not leave the city unaffected. The “other worlds” did not simply communicate, they sent agents and symbols that changed the city’s cultural map. The forms of intervention varied from economic and material causality to symbolic techniques capturing the collective imagination and changing the sense of group belonging. The alien symbols transcended the closed, premodern sites of identities in the city, supporting or changing balances, stabilizing or reinscribing the internal boundaries of its cultural topography.

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As a result of the modernization processes within the Ottoman Empire and the intensification of trade with Western Europe, Plovdiv “opened up” in the nineteenth century to trade with cities like Marseilles and Vienna, and with countries that were “distant” to the medieval imagination — Italy, Germany, and England. As noticed by many travelers, in 1840 this city was a commercial crossroads between Istanbul, Belgrade, Bucharest, Thessalonica, and Seres. After 1846, by decree of the Sultan, the Maritza River was declared officially navigable to steamships, and internal duties were abolished. From the 1830s and 40s land trade and transport links grew as well: in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the opening of the Istanbul-Belovo railway, the regional and eastward-oriented trade was complemented by trade with Western Europe. Astonished by the diverse trading styles of the local multiethnic population, the English traveler Edmund Spencer advised London merchants in 1850 to study the techniques of the articulate citizens of Plovdiv (Vazvazova-Karateodorova 292). Together with the new rail- and waterways, Plovdiv gradually acquired “symbolic highways,” the new cultural institutions of modernity: book publishing, a new educational network, national churches, press and public opinion, libraries and cultural centers, clubs and charities. The Greek and Bulgarian cultural institutions in Plovdiv were in conflict from the very beginning: one can call this conflict destructive for the premodern urban mosaic and constitutive for Plovdiv’s modern public space and its centrifugal geographic imagination. While the other ethnic groups — Muslims, Jews, Pavlikyans, Walachians, and Roma — entered late the struggle for public space, the Greek-Bulgarian competition had already started in the late 1840s.

Figure 2. The Old Roman Amphitheater, built AD 343

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This Greek-Bulgarian competition to create modern cultural institutions deserves more attention. As noted by the Greek historian Xantipi Kodzageorgi-Zimari, the Hellenic ideology of the New Greeks required in the early nineteenth century a rejection of the purely religious schools, replacing them with good classical education and their own educational network (Solun i Plovdiv 321–41). In 1820, the central Greek school was founded, soon to be followed by three private ones. In 1834, the city saw the founding of the first Greek school of mutual education (The Holy Trinity), where all Christian ethnicities were able to educate their children in Greek. Greek education in Plovdiv was so advanced that the first Greek girls’ school was opened quite early, in 1851, while in 1876 the Greek women’s society “Eurydice” founded the first secondary school for girls. Most of these schools were built and financed with the money of Plovdiv’s Greek notables and they attracted good teachers — even teachers from the University of Athens, established in 1837. Churches were also being built and renovated in Plovdiv, and newspapers from the Kingdom of Greece were being distributed, including the authoritative Neologos. The cultural initiatives of later Bulgarian settlers, living mainly in the Karashiaka and Marash districts, came about thirty years after the Greek ones. The first Bulgarian school was built in 1850 with the money of the Plovdiv notable Stoyan Chalukov, and in a few years it attracted important Bulgarian creators like Naiden Gerov, Konstantin Gerov and Ioakim Gruev (Gruev, Moite spomeni 25–30). Soon after that, other rich Bulgarian merchants and tax collectors from Plovdiv took part in the financing of this school. Several years later another Plovdiv notable, Little Vluko Kourtovich, founded the Trinity School. Bulgarian periodicals published in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, as well as outside of it, came to be distributed in the city: newspapers and magazines from Tsarigrad (Tsarigrad News, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Windpipe, Chitalishte, A Guide to Basic Education, and Turkey), from Belgrade (Danube Swan), and in the 1870s from Bucharest and Brăila (Freedom, Independence, The Flag, and the magazines Knowledge and Bulgarian Bee). The main conflict between the two self-modernizing communities concerned the language of liturgy: the Greeks perceived their language to be traditional and canonical, while Bulgarians wanted Old Slavonic to be introduced in the divine service and later claimed ownership of certain churches in Plovdiv. After a series of libels, pleas to higher instances, physical clashes between Greek and Bulgarian youths, and the replacement of two metropolitan bishops, the Bulgarian religious community managed to differentiate itself as part of the decades-long struggle for religious independence that led in 1870 to the creation of the autocephalous Bulgarian church. In 1872, the Bulgarian metropolitan bishop entered Plovdiv and received a glorious welcome. The church struggles and the circulation of newspapers suggest that the cultural institutions were from the very beginning unthinkable without an effort to transcend the purely local needs and issues. They created communication and solidarity over hundreds of miles: Plovdiv issues were discussed by newspapers in Istanbul and Bucharest, Athens, Brăila, and Crete. Yet, on a rhetorical level, these passionate polemics carried in their lexicons of tropes the image of a pure and homogeneous communicative space, encompassing and transcending all localities. This double function applied to other cultural institutions as well. The schools in the different cities of the Ottoman Empire exchanged staff, textbooks, and ideas, functioning as effective supralocal networks. Furthermore, books, papers, pictures, and maps came from outside into the city, and cultural pilgrims — teachers who had traveled half the Empire — would reside and work in Plovdiv for several years. This fact alone introduced arguments and ideas from outside Plovdiv

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into the local cafés. The networks of cultural institutions had an indirect impact as well. In their auto-representation, they transformed fragmentariness, hybridity, and poverty into ideological images of homogeneous spaces, describing pure and dense national territories. To give an example, a number of bookshops opened in Plovdiv in the 1850s; in a few years, these bookshops would establish branches in Rousse, Veles, Thessaloniki, and Svishtov. In the multiethnic market of Plovdiv, it was quite natural to sell Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, French, and English books, in addition to Bulgarian ones (Yancheva 127, 134). Likewise, Bulgarian newspapers believed they were covering “the whole of Bulgaria” and educating the “entire people,” though they were distributed only in a few cities. A similar ideological substitution occurred in the public representation of cultural institutions in the Ottoman Empire — schools, libraries and cultural centers, and book publishing. In lieu of the actual networks of economic and cultural links, humble in scope and often ethnically diverse, public rhetoric posited the grand monolithic image of “our entire country,” which was “purely” Bulgarian or “purely” Greek and made all hybrid phenomena (e.g., some Bulgarian papers were also published in Greek) either invisible or portrayed them as a hostile irritant. With regard to Plovdiv, these processes had special consequences. The powerful public images of the competing homelands threatened the town’s fragile ethnic and religious balance. They required a new type of identification whereby Plovdiv citizens felt themselves not as the inhabitants of a real city, but as “brothers” or “sisters” of invisible millions within an imaginary native collective. Under this perspective, the representation of the city itself became problematic: it shrank from the self-sufficient world of different groups and cultures to a dot on the map, pulled in various directions by the grand communities. Only a few decades of this type of social fantasy, enhanced through journalistic and literary representations, changed Plovdiv: former neighbors began perceiving themselves as combatants on opposite sides of ancient conflicts and large-scale territorial claims. Life in the narratively reinforced national territories led to quarrels in the common churches, to street fights, and to an asymmetry in the formation of collective identities. While the Jews, Paulicians, Roma, and even the imperial ethnic group, the Turks, still lived in premodern closed communities, the Bulgarians and Greeks, who used to share their churches and schools and had accepted mixed marriages until recently, turned into irreconcilable visionaries. Each group seemed to live less in a specific neighborhood of multiethnic Plovdiv and more in its own ideal territory. This changed the city’s own topography, forcing it to accommodate different identities and disputes. The Greek ideological position preferred a historicized geography. As Kōnstantinos Chatzopoulos has argued, at the end of the eighteenth century about fifteen Greek geographies describe the lands of “European Turkey” (85–106). These mappings were pulled in two different directions by the desire, on the one hand, to present the Ottoman provinces precisely and objectively with the available means of cartography, and by the ideological tendency, on the other hand, to project a new Hellenic geography on the peninsula. The latter emphasis prevailed after Adamantios Korais translated Strabon’s ancient geography and reintroduced Hellenic toponyms for modern geographical and administrative areas. The province of “Thracia” raised particular controversies. Chatzopoulos claims that the name was archaic even in Byzantine times, so the province was named “Romania” or “Roumeli” from the eighteenth century onward. Even when “Roumeli”

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Figure 3. Plovdiv: Thracian Tomb, 5th–4th century BC

was accompanied by “Thracia,” mention was made that the latter was an old name whose territorial reference had shrunk considerably — it bordered on Hemus and Bulgaria and encompassed a modern Ottoman province much smaller than Ancient Thrace, which had extended as far as the Danube. Korais, however, was the first to revive the Hellenic notion of Thrace as a veiled argument for the inclusion of vast lands and provinces into a visionary Greek homeland that was expected to breathe new life into its ancient history and territory. In this sense, Thracia became part of the wider space of “Hellas or Grecia,” which in some texts encompassed the whole of the Balkan Peninsula. While debating whom Plovdiv belonged to, the local Greek intellectuals and political leaders associated it with Philippopolis, the venerable city of Emperor Philip II. They fitted Philippopolis into the center of the “glorious and fertile” Thrace, a legendary ancient state inherited by Ancient Greece, the Hellenic world, and Byzantium. The rightful modern heir of this ancient country was Greece, which included Plovdiv in this vision. According to Georgios Tsoukalas, a prominent Greek teacher who wrote the first modern book on Plovdiv’s history and geography, this affiliation was proven by the continuity of the Greek language from times immemorial through the history of Plovdiv, the city of Philip (51–70). Moreover, according to an 1851 contributor of Neologos, Amalia Smirian, the new claimants to this territory — the Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, and Bulgarians — were nomads who brought nothing but ruin (Yancheva 21). The Bulgarians were allegedly the worst of these “savage tribes”: they did not accept the divine gift of the Greek language, preferring to speak an incredible TurkoSlavonic mixture. The Hellenic-Byzantine tradition, the argument went on, had given Bulgarians

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more than one chance to civilize themselves — the Byzantine emperor endowed them with lands that were later christened by Byzantine missionaries — but the Bulgarians broke the peace agreements and performed treacheries. Despite all this, Smirian offers Bulgarians another chance to become civilized, i.e., to become assimilated. The Bulgarian community in Plovdiv had its counterarguments. To begin with, the Bulgarian journalists were well acquainted with, and happy to reiterate, the doubts of the Austrian historian Jacob Fallmerayer that modern Greeks were the heirs apparent of the Ancient Hellenes (Clogg 21). For these journalists the alleged continuity of language and civilization was merely an illusion of the new Greeks who sought to plume themselves with ancient glory. As Petko Slaveikov wrote: “They do not seek to be Greeks but aspire to be Romans, because when any of them is asked who he is, he replies in Greek: Ego imi Romeos (I am Roman). Thus those who take the citizens of Plovdiv for Greeks delude themselves” (“Prodălzhenie na otgovora …,” no pagination). Second, the Bulgarians regarded themselves not as plunderers and barbarians but as a new civilizing force, ready to Slavicize Byzantium (Lilova 27–62). Here the argument divides along heroic and nonviolent lines. The former emphasizes the preservation of identity and continuous opposition: though a young and small tribe, Bulgarians had managed to conquer their lands and preserve their independence against a powerful empire. In the second scenario, the stress falls on assimilation: after the arrival of the Slavs on the Balkan Peninsula, the lands of Hellas and Byzantium were peacefully Slavicized. The Bulgarians outnumbered and assimilated all other tribes, infusing their own culture everywhere. The third argument, found even in Bulgarian textbooks in Greek, was more brutal and direct: Thracia, and with it, Plovdiv, are purely Bulgarian. In spite of the revelations about the many ethnicities, languages, and religions in the area, Thracia was still claimed as purely Bulgarian. The rhetorical leap from “the majority is Bulgarian” to “therefore Thracia (Plovdiv) is purely Bulgarian” bothered few people. The claim sounded even stranger when accompanied by the acknowledgement that this area was home to a great number of representatives of the ruling nation, the Turks. Overall, the Bulgarian press of the nineteenth century argued that “there are some Greeks in Thracia, but they are quite sparse compared to the large population of Bulgarians and Turks. The concentration of Greeks in European Turkey is the Halkidiki Peninsula (south of Thessaloniki), where they are not mixed with other tribes” (Anonymous, Letostrui). This is only one rhetorical step away from Petko Slaveikov’s claim that “all can see and know that the population of Thracia and Macedonia is purely Bulgarian, and yet they still make every effort to assure the world that these lands are Greek” (“Prodălzhenie na otgovora,” no pagination). There was yet another, fourth collision point between the leading ethnic groups: the name of the city, Philibe/Philippopolis/Plovdiv/Pulpudeva, which brought improbable historical-etymological arguments from both parties. More interesting than the direct arguments are the subtle suggestions incorporated in the images of the imaginary homeland and the location of the disputed city within it. The Bulgarian journalists dehistoricized the name Thracia and transformed it into a toponym of physical geography (Bogorov, “Kratka” 123–30). While the Greeks called it “glorious Thrace,” a land with a formidable historical heritage, the Bulgarians took it to be merely a rich land, associated with agriculture (a traditional Bulgarian occupation), fertility, and abundance. Here are a couple of examples: “This eparchy lies in Northern Thracia and borders on the Balkan to the north, on Rila mountain

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to the northwest, and to the southeast on a vast meadow reaching all the way to the Black Sea, a meadow strewn with cities, towns, and villages”; “This city is stuck on a longish hillock rising over it […]. It stands in European Turkey as some high poplar in a big garden: equally removed from Edrene, Eski Zaara, Sliven, Kazanlak and Turnovo […], coastal towns like Takirdaa at the White Sea and Bourgas at the Black Sea” (Anonymous, Letostrui). The “naturalization” of the area is clearly suggested in the metaphors employed by Bulgarian geographers and journalists. This has two consequences: once the valley of Thracia has been purged of foreign cultural and historical signs, its fertile and yielding nature is easier to relate to the organic metaphors Bulgarians use to describe their “natural” presence in it. Even economic supremacy can be presented through garden metaphors: Plovdiv’s “citizens have come from the surrounding Bulgarian villages, planted here by the blossoming trade” (Bogorov, “Kratka” 125). Interestingly, this image of natural prevalence is selectively directed against the Greeks only: no mention is made, for example, of whether the Bulgarian population had prevailed over the Turks. The second consequence of Thracia’s dehistorization is its conversion into a tabula rasa awaiting the writing of another historical Grand Narrative. This narrative was usually rather humble, focusing on Plovdiv’s settlers, who came from the surrounding Bulgarian villages on the initiative of Bulgarian tax collectors and traders who built churches and schools and “awakened” the suppressed Bulgarian ethnos. Out of this humble story of past and present the utopian narrative of the future “Euro-Bulgarian Plovdiv” was woven. As Bogorov wrote: [Plovdiv] is situated in the middle of the long postal route from Vienna to Tsarigrad, traveled by two posts every week: the Turkish and the German ones. Every day its central location invites guests from all surrounding cities, guests who fill the inns and stay for a couple of days to sell and buy goods. After the last war, Plovdiv became known to the five great powers that were kind enough to send their representatives to it, so that now their flags are waving magnificently over Plovdiv’s houses. And if one day the fertile fields of European Turkey are traversed by railways, Plovdiv will be in the center of this pale nodular star […]. In no other city has the element of Bulgarian nationality been so suppressed, so cramped, so forgotten, as it is in Plovdiv; and yet, thanks to the noble hearts of its citizens, it is more developed today than in other Bulgarian cities […]. And we are not deluding ourselves if we say that in matters of enlightenment, Plovdiv is for Bulgarians what Paris is for the French, and in matters of the book trade, what Lipska [Leipzig] is for the Germans. (Bogorov, I se zapochna 149, 150)

The discussion of specific practical matters concerning the transformation of Plovdiv into a European city, including Bogorov’s technocratic dreams about a railroad from Plovdiv to Bourgas that would turn Plovdiv into a “second Manchester” (I se zapochna 213–14), all connect the city’s history to a progressive narrative that can only be nationalistic. Bogorov imperceptibly transforms the presentation of the city into a synecdoche for the heroic narrative of the rise and fall of the Bulgarian nation, for its effort to revive its suppressed spirit and to raise its cities to the level of the prestigious centers of European civilization. The larger-than-local teleology of this story already contains a hidden designation of the city as “Bulgarian.” The traditional temporal coordinates of Plovdiv (as the city of Philip II, Eumolp, etc., in the glorious Hellenic Thrace) have been replaced by the features of the future city, a blossoming Bulgarian trade center in Bulgarian times and on Bulgarian territory. The projected Bulgarian (rather than Balkan and hybrid) character of Plovdiv

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Figure 4. Hisar Kapiya (Fortress Gate), built under Trajanus and Marcus Aurelius, incorporated in houses from the Revival Period (18th–19th century)

leads to a rather different exchange between native and alien, the close and the distant. Bogorov no longer mentions Plovdiv’s relationship to other cities of the Ottoman Empire (although, on a practical level, he realizes the trade advantages of being located at a Balkan crossroad). With its modern symbolic capital — book printing, churches, education, technological progress — the city seems to leave the Balkans and realign itself with the supraspatial, ideal community of great European cities, Paris, Leipzig, Manchester. In both the civilizational utopias and the poetical visions about the “garden on the plains,” Plovdiv has a peculiar spatial localization. The Bulgarian journalists were obsessed with its central position, for which they coined a multitude of names: the city is “a poplar in the garden,” “on the crossroad of the future railways,” “the focal point of Roumelia,” and “the center of Bulgaria.” Although the city walls had been destroyed back in the sixteenth century, Bulgarian journalists and self-proclaimed geographers saw the city “as a fortress rising on three hills, from where the gaze wanders over a picturesque plain intersected by the river Maritza and strewn with villages” (Anonymous, Letostrui). In this sense, the Bulgarian writers of Plovdiv repeat a venerable trope of imaginary and real geography: “centering.” This trope suggests unification of and domination over the imaginary territory, and the symbolic condensation and emblematization of the space. Yet, their strategy also involves the modern, practical motivation of stressing the central location of the city as a commercial, political, and military hub. The visibility of the center can also serve as a category of aesthetics, as a beauty visible from every point, as a poplar city in a garden, the

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center of a star in a picturesque plain. Yet there is something else at work here. The excessive rhetoric of centrality hints at a problem at the core of the argument: the “central” Plovdiv is a scandal to the Bulgarian nationalist-territorial imagination, for it is a “motley” city in the midst of “purely Bulgarian” Thracia. Here is, for example, how Petko Slaveikov tried to deal with the problem: “Those who do not want the citizens of Plovdiv to be Bulgarian but wish them to be Greek, will have a hard time explaining historically how those Greeks came to be in the middle of the city only, while the periphery is all populated with Bulgarians; the villages all the way to Edrine, the people near the sea, if we leave aside the ruling Turks, are all Bulgarian and have never heard the Greek language” (“Prodălzhenie na otgovora,” no pagination). Petko Slaveikov directed his question at his Greek opponents, but he was probably vexed by the same dilemma: how did those Greeks come to be in the middle of the Slavonic sea? Of course, this question could receive a detailed empirical answer with elaborate historical, economic, and geographic explanations. However, Slaveikov was more concerned with the paradox of the city’s hybrid “centrality.” The city torments the coherence of the imaginary homeland because every attempt at its representation leads to this unbearable paradox, foregrounding the impurity of the pure, the heteronomy of the integral. To complicate the paradox, under the ideologized Greek-Bulgarian opposition, there were other Plovdiv cultures that were overloaded: not only “the ruling nation” (the Turks) but also other non-ruling ethnicities. The representations of Plovdiv thus described an obsessive parabola, from a more or less objective description of hybridities to a flight through a pure imaginary city/ homeland, followed by a fall back on the multinational realities of the area, a new torment. Here we must consider the general limits of urban representation in the genres of journalism and political essay. Different forms of discourse have different strategies and different potentialities in their ideological representations of space. Some genres are more objective and rationalistic: geography textbooks and ethnographic descriptions fall within this category. Journalism has an ideological potential that is more pronounced and manipulative: it reduces the number of minorities inhabiting an area; it changes the images of compactness and localization concerning the different ethnic groups, etc. (Lilova 43). There are, however, genres that are even more ideological than journalism in the way they construct sublime imaginary territories completely removed from the administrative, economic, linguistic, and cultural realities. I am referring, of course, to the genres of fiction and poetry. The Bulgarian literature from the National Revival period did not see any city as a universe in itself: the city was always a function of the territory, necessarily part of the homeland’s landscapes, which in turn were part of an ideological vision of “the whole of Bulgaria.” This politics of urban representation had two main versions in Bulgarian prose. The first reproduced the semiotic paradox that Julia Kristeva calls the “abject” — the transgressive clash of the system of national signs with the unbearable, repulsive hybridity of whatever scandalizes its boundaries, both inside and outside this system (Powers of Horror). As Inna Peleva has demonstrated in “Plovdiv v prozata na Lyuben Karavelov,” the early nationalistic prose of Karavelov was scandalized precisely by the linguistic, ethnic, and religious “motley” space of Plovdiv. Through a vocabulary of unusual metaphors and comparisons, Karavelov’s prose projected on Plovdiv danger, impurity, and perverse sexuality; he saw the hybrid city as a negative and ambivalent space, close to the archetype of the female and chthonic element of water (at the time Plovdiv was surrounded by swamps and rice fields). In the duplicity of its ideological (Plovdiv is ours/Plovdiv is not ours) and metaphoric

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definitions (“a poplar in the midst of the garden of Thracia” vs. “a swamp of vice and impurity”), the city is a semiotic scandal, the Balkan “abject” of the nationalist literary imagination, breeding insecurity, intolerance, and disgust. As Peleva points out, in Karavelov this profound opposition reaches down to the level of colors: the nauseously gaudy Plovdiv is opposed to the homogenously perfect color that is perceived to be the Bulgarian essence, the white associated with both moral and physical purity (67–75). At the time of the National Revival, this type of treatment of big cities became a tradition in Bulgarian literature. Outraged by the unbearable hybridity of these cities, literature turned them into shameful oriental Babylons, imperial Sodom and Gomorrahs, loci of sin and forbidden pleasures. The same image of a scandalously-heterogeneous place of nonidentity and moral failure was imposed in other works on the cities of Constantinople, Sofia, Rousse, Paris, and Bucharest (see Penchev’s article on Tsarigrad/Istanbul in this volume). As I will argue further, these cities were perceived as being opposed to the ideal Bulgarian territory. This tradition was fairly stable, as a novel published thirty years after Karavelov’s memoirs, Ivan Vazov’s Nova zemya (New Land; 1896), shows. Despite the altered context — the city became the new capital of Eastern Roumelia, and Vazov resided there with an important national mission as a member of the Regional Parliament and one of the most important agents of Bulgarization in the city — the novel verbatim repeats Karavelov’s metaphoric paradigm. Plovdiv is once again the alien, big, and inhuman, а version of archaic urban evil. The depiction of urban scenery in Nova zemya follows a predictable pattern: “They drifted down across narrow curved streets, surreptitious harbors of garbage, stench, and lust, turned off along a deserted street, then went into another muted and blind alley” (276). Beyond the realistic motivation (the characters visit a poor police officer’s house in a shabby neighborhood), the connotations of the narrative are appropriate for a journey into an inferno where physical and spiritual filth come together. This chthonic character of the city is once again opposed to the wholesome countryside, as in the following passage: “The mud of the capital had gobbled up this youth into its depth, destroyed this vigor snatched away from the bread-yielding fields and the gracious labor” (274). One of the characters is instructed to avoid taking a wife from the city: “You don’t make a church in a devil’s village! Why didn’t you take a bride from Karlovo?” (274). As in Karavelov, the city appears too multifarious and hence not “purely Bulgarian.” There are a number of paradoxical exchanges of connotations between the chthonic (archaic evil), the alien (impure), and the corrupt political nature of the city. The novelty is that, unlike Karavelov, Vazov superimposes a Rousseauistic layer over the image of the city. The clash of European and oriental civilizations has turned the capital of the autonomous province into a topos of inauthenticity, where European civility and newfangled French manners hide old oriental passions: frauds, intrigues, and brutal political murders are all possible in this town. This new vainglorious European-Roumelian Babel is opposed to the Rousseauistic principle of fidelity to one’s authentic self (this time sung to a nationalist tune). The man of letters must find a way out of Plovdiv to get into contact with the nature of his homeland, represented not just as a quintessence of beauty, purity, and patriotic passion, but also as the authentic source of all identity. That is why the motif of the “nature-bound escape from Plovdiv” is most common in Vazov’s poetry and prose from this period. The poem “V tzarstvotoo na samodivite” (In the Realm of Fairies; Săbrani săchineniya 5: 115–78), for example, centers on the motif of the escape from Plovdiv into the

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unadulterated Bulgarian landscape, amid the fairy world of national legends: a world that merges together national history, poetry, and natural authenticity. The second approach to the representation of Plovdiv (closely related to the “escape from Plovdiv” theme) privileges the panoramic perspective of the city, one that dissolves the city into or pits it against the national visionary landscape. As early as 1874, Karavelov wrote in “Zapiski za Bălgariya i za bălgarite” (Notes on Bulgaria and Bulgarians): The city is too picturesque, but you ought to see it just as you would see all other Asiatic cities (even Constantinople) — from afar. When you look at Turkish cities from afar, they all seem magnificent and picturesque, but as soon as you enter them, you are confronted with decaying houses, muddy streets, stinking swamps, hopeless filth, lazy and measly dogs, and sleepy faces. And indeed, on entering Plovdiv I was enthralled by the location and peculiarity of the buildings, by the magnificence of the river Maritza. The houses were painted in every color imaginable, mosques and minarets were shining white, graveyard trees were green, and the wide and clear beauty of Maritza reflected the city buildings, like in the replica of another city. But as we entered the city everything changed, everything looked different, everything disappeared. (Sǎbrani sǎchineniya, 1984 edition, 4: 401)

Here the narrator describes the city “in stages”: his movement to the city motivates the use of both perspectives (the distant external and the close internal one) and allows him to juxtapose and grade them. This operation generates the ideological claim that the external, distant perspective is the norm of “Asiatic cities.” Thus the normative point of view, which pursues beauty, truth, and authenticity, becomes basically ex-urban, fleeing the abject reality of hybrid cities. Unable to relate to any being in the city, it keeps reproducing massive natural-territorial locations, “picturesque landscapes,” and “magnificent views” that are larger than the city. In other words, this point of view imposes an aesthetics of the (national) territory (“the land,” “the country,” “the dear motherland”) that transcends urban space. This could be the reason why Bulgarian literature of the National Revival period could not develop a genuine aesthetics of the urban that was different from the Sodom and Gomorrah stereotype. In this respect, too, Vazov preserves and reproduces Karavelov’s “norm of the eye” approach to Plovdiv. For him, the value of Plovdiv lies not within the city itself, but in its overall position as a geographic, administrative, and symbolic representation of Southern Bulgaria, especially during its unification drive in the 1880s. This holds true even when the poet is not outside but inside Plovdiv. Inside the city his eyes see (on the rare occasions they bother to look) nothing but narrow streets, stench, and filth. The churches, mosques, and all other historical sites hold no interest for Vazov’s narrator. Typically, the urban topography is merely mentioned, without a genuine curiosity toward its details, and with no accompanying aesthetic or historical comment. Sometimes the narrator marks the itinerary of his hero with casual references: “He went under the age-old arch of Hissarkapi and stepped out onto the Dzumaia square […] walking along Station Street” (Nova zemya 276). Interestingly, Vazov was not at all tempted to use the play of historical layers unfolding between those Thracian and Hellenic ruins, or between the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern European architectural symbols, as other Bulgarian novels — for example, Dimitar Kirkov’s Khălmăt (The Hill; 1986) — will do a century later. The multicultural and historical

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mosaic of the city does not move him. The town itself is usually all but excluded from the gaze of the narrator, who is physically in it but prefers views oriented towards the horizons of the majestic landscape where natural beauty and national-territorial emblems can be discerned: “To the North — the endless plains; in the distance — the Balkan Mountains with their squatting giants: Yumroukchal, Ostrets, Amabaritsa; a row of white woolly clouds, resembling a marble mountain raised high in the sky. To the South rose the dark green Rhodope Mountain. A gorgeous sight” (Nova zemya 358). Even the gaudy nature of the city can be tolerated — but solely from this distant perspective that almost melts it into the aesthetics of the nationalist vision. Vazov can thus paint a passionate canvass of the city, as “a panorama great and rare in the world” (316), without turning a blind eye to the white minarets, Byzantine houses, and all the “eastern variety.” The gaze of the insider (Benjamin’s flâneur) gives way to the visionary geography, which can only see Plovdiv as valuable for being halfway between the Balkan range and the Rhodope (“a gorgeous sight”). This grand lyricism glosses over the potential conflicts of the “eastern variety.” Here is another Vazovian-Rousseauist landscape from “Kandidat za hamama” (A Candidate for the Turkish Baths), wherein Plovdiv is included only to be forgotten: Nature revealed herself to them in all its beauty and youth. The wide fields, sprawling to the tufty skirts of the Rhodope, shone green and charmed the eye with their lustrous hue. A feeling of peace and comfort was drifting through the clear space, and the two friends, visibly intoxicated with the gentle breath of spring, soon had to forget the wild and dusty Plovdiv with its profits and disturbances, with its squares full of noise and politics, with its labyrinth of streets even smellier and filthier than the schlock written by Mr. K. (Sǎbrani sǎchineniya 7: 70)

As I have suggested, this politics of representation was valid not only for Plovdiv; the burgeoning Bulgarian literature of the period was typically restrained in including the larger centers of the Empire in its imaginary geographies, and when it did so, their images were thwarted in a specific way. A good example from Nova zemya is the description of Rousse (yet another large multicultural town on the Danube) in the letter of the Russian Count M. to a girlfriend in Russia: How could I describe Rousse? Take Kiev off its hills and splash the Crimean Bahtchisarai onto them, not forgetting to add a few European-style houses. Narrow alleys, slumfulls of lepers, cafés where the hookah gurgles, filth — an eastern world. As couleur locale, pour a measure of shoddy houses, pocked roofs, minarets truncated by our shells, […] and dust, dust — the horror![…] Dust and wind […]. The Danube, however, flowing down the high banks, the Danube redeems it all. A magnificent river! (43)

The alienating view of the foreigner hyperbolizes the Oriental eclecticism and the European pretensions of the city, focusing on the clichés of the repulsive and privileging the natural sights at the expense of the intrinsic urban qualities. To better understand the principles that govern the reduction of the urban to the national-territorial in this type of poetics, we must consider how territory is constructed by Bulgarian literature. It is worth noting that between the prose and the poetic images of the ideal territory of Bulgaria there are many similarities, but the differences are no less telling.

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The picture created by the prose is somewhat more rational and articulated than the one depicted in the poetry. During the period 1840–1900, urban images penetrate Bulgarian ethnographic descriptions, travel writing, memoirs, short stories, and novels more easily and frequently. As Desislava Lilova has pointed out (48–51), the 1846–1876 period saw the rise of the peculiar ethnographic/journalistic genre of “settlement description”: various contributors to the Bulgarian press wrote about 130 detailed descriptions of different Bulgarian cities, towns, and villages. In 1869, an obscure teacher, Mosko Dobrinov, urged all patriots to write such descriptions. His invitation was endorsed by Karavelov and Slaveikov and followed by a number of Bulgarian revivalists. These descriptions, Lilova claims, display standardized and positivistic genre patterns, registering coordinates, climate, waters, natural resources, population, etc. That is, despite their patriotic motivation, they make an effort to give comparatively objective and detailed information about the settlement, including cases of “overlapping” tongues, religions, and ethnicities. Yet, contrary to expectations, the objectivist pressure of those ethnographic descriptions had almost no effect on Bulgarian prose and its lukewarm interest in cities. If we try to construe what Alexander Gelley calls “the representative protocol” (238ff), i.e., the technique of city presentation, in the 1860s novels of Vasil Drumev and Iliya Blaskov, we notice that the settlements are “absorbed” by the visionary realm of the nation. They are not social universes in themselves: the motif of adventurous travel and the imagery of roads are repetitive procedures that interlink towns and villages against the background of the sacred national expanse. For example, in Blaskov’s novel Izgubena Stanka (Lost Stanka; 1865), the adventurous narrative encompasses a network of crossroads, towns, and villages in the northeast of the country (the regions Deli Orman and Dobroudja). However, these cities are not “worlds in themselves,” but rather springboards orienting the reader’s view towards the national horizon. They are situated explicitly and recurrently in the “vast Dobroudja planes,” “among other big and small villages”; the action always takes place at their borders (near the town, at the gates, at the city walls, on the road …) rather than at their center. These are places to arrive at or to leave from; the characters are refugees, traders, caravan travelers, highwaymen, i.e., dynamic agents of the “large-scale” geography. In addition, this network of towns and villages exemplifying national space proves to be highly selective: the settlements of other ethnic groups are very rarely mentioned, the action never takes place in “foreign towns,” foreigners are usually enemies rather than neighbors or townsfolk. Yet the multiethnic locality of the narrative (Dobroudja, the Deli Orman) is often designated as open to the national universe by means of geographical markers (the rivers Danube and Louda Kamchia), of historical events (the Russo-Turkish War), of prestigious Bulgarian cultural signs (the Rila Monastery, the Sacred Wood, etc.). Focusing on these, Blaskov’s narrator does not shy away from rapturous interjections: “Ah, what a splendid place, what an attractive sight you are, my dear beloved country!” (Izgubena Stanka 34). These patriotic representations of space, with their emphasis on the negative features of big heteronomic towns, had other counterpoints in the Bulgarian prose of the 1860s, 70s, and 80s besides the visionary territory of the homeland. One of them was the idyllic image of the small town seen as a stronghold of Bulgarian authenticity and national awakening. This locus of authenticity and emancipation was contrasted in various ways with Plovdiv’s unclean hybridity. Even the small town’s provinciality was regarded with a tolerant eye. As a parallel strategy, in much poetry and prose, Plovdiv, the networks of idealized small towns, and even the national territory, were incorporated

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into much larger literary geographies. In a nutshell, there are three concentric circles around the represented cities: the ideal homeland, the ironically portrayed Balkan and Oriental environs, and finally the ideal horizons of civilized Europe. Thus, the notion of the “distant world” functioned both as a parodic term and as an ideal norm. The literature of this period managed a successful ideological exchange between provincial, national, and universal perspectives by using geographic symbols in three manners: as ironic, ecstatic, and normative. Usually it was precisely the image of the city that communicated with other similar Balkan Babylons: Bucharest, Brăila, Ploieşti, cities in Bessarabia and Moldova, Thessaloniki, and, of course, Istanbul. These were the images of the mobile premodern Balkan merchants, taken to the point of parody: the distant world looked in fact nondistant and Oriental, an ironically perceived substitute for the wide world. Yet the national visionary territory also sought contact with its desired, exemplary other: Paris, London, Geneva, Berlin, Bern, or Europe in general as a cradle of civilization. The tensions between these two symbolic economies produced a variety of ironic-parodic effects between premodern and modern spaces. They were destined to transcend the boundaries of literature and influence the city’s actual fate. Individual and more complex city images seldom appeared in lyrical texts. The city was cast into a handful of simple variants in the poetry of the 1850s and 60s. First, as in Pericli Todorovich’s “Grad Tulcha” (The City of Tulcha; 1851), it was a “glorious” place craving for Bulgarian enlightenment. Second, it was reduced to historic remains, a mournful mark of past glory, as in Raiko Zhinzifov’s 1862 “Ohrid” (Topalov 356). On the negative side, the Sodom and Gomorrah image appears again. The biblical stereotype voids the image of the city of any urban specificity; even the city’s name can sometimes disappear in order to evoke its generalized baleful image, as in Zhinzifov’s “Grad” (City; 1868): City sinful, city faithless And deprived of Christian grace Black and wicked, city hopeless Bloody scourge and heavy mace Will you, city full of flurry, Ever suffer the Lord’s wrath? Will God’s ire ever hurry, Ever wash your sins away? (Topalov 351)

Only at the end of this poem from 1868 does it become clear that the city in question is the imperial capital Tsarigrad-Istanbul-Constantinople. In Gerov’s “Na Ch…” (Dedicated to Ch…), the reader is advised directly: “I am calling upon you, let us travel / not to the noisy city but to the village / where we’ll be able to see / what’s good in the world” (Topalov 193–95). A fascinating exception can be found in an early multicultural poem, “Văzrozdeniya na Tulcha” (The Resurrection of Tulcha; 1849) by Stefan Izvorski, in which the city is the venue of fair competition and peaceful co-existence among different ethnic groups and religions: Tulcha, glorious town across where all people live in freedom — Turks, Walachians and Bulgarians, Greeks, Germans and Russians […] each with its church and sermon in its own language (Topalov 161)

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But this exception proves the overall norm: literature was most often than not an agent of homogeneity. Its representational policy sought to dissolve the urban heteroglossia into a national melting pot. Some poems reproduced the “territorial networks” of towns and villages specific for prose. In poetic texts, however, this took the form of a “dialogue of towns,” as in Jordan HadzikonsatntinovJinot’s school poems for various towns (Topalov 186–89), Stefan Vasilev’s “Liceto na Zeavna” (Zheravna’s Face; 1849; in Topalov 169–70), and Minko Nikolov’s “Selo Sopot i grad Vratsa se razgovaryat pomezhdu si kato brat i sestra” (The Village of Sopot and the Town of Vratsa Talk as Brother and Sister; 1851; in Topalov 183). Similar to prose, poetry saw the city located within the national territory. In this respect, the introductory lines are very indicative, localizing the action and, at the same time, overriding the local viewpoint in order to attach a broader national belonging to the city. Consider the beginning of Zhinzifov’s poem Kărvava koshulya (Blood-Stained Shirt; 1870): “In my wretched land / there is a little town / lying amidst a meadow, / its name is Prilep” (Topalov 357). These lines smoothly merge the town with the local landscape, and the latter with the ideological national-territorial perspective. Still, the main ideological function of poetry was different. Bulgarian poetry from the second half of the nineteenth century (Dobri Chintulov, Dobri Voinikov, Teodosii Ikonomov, Stefan Bobchev, Atanas Shopov, Ivan Vazov, and Khristo Botev) reproduced a mental geography that was to a certain extent opposed to the objective, ethnically articulated maps in the geography textbooks. They were different even from the poor yet relatively realistic city images offered by prose fiction. Poetry offered a map of the imaginary homeland, purged of alien presence, ideal and homogeneous. The big landmarks of physical geography — mountains, plains, and rivers — are the privileged signs/boundaries of that space, represented in poetry as “Bulgarian by nature.” In contrast to the urban multiethnic “Sodom and Gomorrah,” this native space is related to another biblical archetype, that of the earthly paradise. The name (culture) and the land (nature) appear in Petko Slaveikov’s “Tatkovina” (Fatherland; 1883) in a happy ontological concurrence: Beautiful you are, my homeland, sweet name and Edenic land, The heart, young and innocent, for you trembles and flutters. Dear to me are the mountains to the north and the south Cherished are the plains tilled by the Bulgarian plough. (Săchineniya 1: 257–58)

The typical metaphor of Eden “shrinks” space, combining the natural and geographical facts with the intimately experienced private space. The mountains and plains are transformed into a deeply personal, ecstatic experience; the traditional metonymic vocabulary of love poetry (“heart,” “beauty,” “youth,” “innocence,” “sweetness,” “tremor”) binds the protagonist and his homeland in a quasi-erotic relationship. Bulgaria/the land/nature (in Bulgarian “land” is a synonym of “soil”)

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infuses the flesh and blood of the lyrical protagonist in Shopov’s “De sam sya rodil” (Where I Was Born; 1874): “Do you know where lovely nature / has born and nourished me? / Do you know where my homeland is / where my mother has breastfed me? (Topalov 447–48). Despite the air of intimate, loving closeness, the contours of this lyrical map are delineated by emblematic sites: the Danube, the Balkans, the Black Sea, Maritza, Pirin, Rila, and the Rhodope as marks of “the motherland.” Furthermore, this imaginary realm is not simply the national territory delineated by its “natural” borders: rather, it is a communicative cultural-and-natural space permeated by vision and a unified supranatural voice. Within these sacred borders, outlined by emblematic national sites, the voices of ethnic, social, and denominational others are muted by a fictional national voice. This universe is filled with the “Bulgarian sacred tongue of my predecessors” (Vazov, “Bălgarskiyat ezik” [The Bulgarian Language], Săbrani săchineniya 2: 155–56), the call to national liberation, the Bulgarian “mourning and weeping,” and the Bulgarian song hyperbolized into a cosmic chant. As early as the mid–nineteenth century, Naiden Gerov articulated this motif of the Voice hovering supernaturally across the national territory to unite the local and ethnic communities: “A cry rose from the Balkan / to be heard across the world / the Bulgarian stood up / to demand his liberty. / Take heed people of Sofia, Zagorans / Macedonians and Romans” (Topalov 125). During the period 1870–1925, the lyrical production of the foremost national poets — Botev, Vazov, Peyo Yavorov, and Nikola Furnadzhiev — offered variants of this booming native voice blended in with the elements of wind, storm, forest, mountains, and echoed by “beast and nature” (Kiossev, “Rechev zest”). Borne on the wings of its own hypnotic power, the voice negotiated the distances from Strandja to Pirin (mountains on the opposite sides of the country), from the Danube to the Aegean Sea, and from the Albanian desert-land to the Black Sea waters. The nationalist ideology in its literary form tried to achieve that “authentic” overlapping of territory, communication, and society that Benedict Anderson talks about (9–47; 163–87). We can already draw a conclusion regarding the ideological function of this “poetic Bulgaria.” The main rhetorical ploy of lyrical poetry was to create an “obviously-native” Bulgarian space, a visionary counterpart to the hybrid Ottoman Empire with its multiethnic territories and towns. The lyrical territory of “Bulgaria” was presented neither in the motley of its various languages, cultures, and ethnicities, nor in the factual hybridity and dispersion of its populations, creeds, and settlements. With a cavalier disregard for such facts, lyrical poetry molded Bulgaria into a pure presence, as a land traversed by the Bulgarian Spirit/Word/Blood. This self-revealing unity, complete in its natural boundaries, was reduced to an ecstatic “here”’ (replaced by the emigrant Botev with “there’). This “here” (conjugated with the other deictics of nationalism, “us” and “now”) in its paradoxical extension left no space for cities. The powerful lyrical-ideological figure constructed by poetry excluded what was typical of other genres — elaboration, polemics, questions of “what is and what isn’t ours.” Thus, on the scale of genres of public discourse, lyrical poetry occupied the last position: it was national ideology in its purest form, as described by Slavoj Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology — the lyrical homeland as a sublime, irrational, and territorial object. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Plovdiv belonged to three successive state formations: the Ottoman Empire (until 1878), the newly constituted province of Eastern Roumelia (until 1885), and subsequently the newly united principality of Bulgaria. After the Russian-Turkish war of 1878, a considerable number of foreigners (Russians, Czechs, Frenchmen,

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a few Englishmen and Germans) arrived in Plovdiv to take up political posts or to work in the new industries of the modernizing city (Stoyanov 3–55). They formed an alternative elite to the earlier Ottoman and Greek elites (the former military and administrative, the latter economic and cultural). At the same time, while a considerable number of Turks abandoned Plovdiv, provincial brotherhoods of Bulgarian intellectuals and revolutionaries from Sopot, Karlovo, Kalofer, Koprivshtitsa, and Panagyurishte moved into the city that needed to be “claimed” for Bulgaria. In short, the elites of small, “purely Bulgarian” towns intruded into the “motley” Plovdiv, nationalistic representatives of the “pure” homeland entered the urban mosaic. Most of those young and mobile Bulgarians had traveled and studied in coveted Western Europe, so they naturally intermingled with the foreigners and formed the city’s new high society. The newcomers ousted the old local elites and created their own public life; this led to a gradual withdrawal of the Greek elites, and ever-weaker contacts between them and the Bulgarian and international circles. The Bulgarian press was in full swing: in addition to the many Bulgarian newspapers coming from the principality, Plovdiv was home to Maritza, Nezavisimost (Independence), later Yăzhna Bălgaria (South Bulgaria), Naroden Glas (People’s Voice), Borba (Struggle), and literary magazines like Zora (Dawn). Academic societies were founded; the high schools for both girls and boys got new impressive buildings. The Greek elite did not give up entirely. Greek still functioned as one of the three official languages in the area. In 1880, eight Greek schools were active in Plovdiv: one for boys, three coeducational ones, two for girls, and two pedagogical schools (see Solun i Plovdiv 321–41). The Zariphios High School, established in 1875, was a great educational institution for Greek communities inside and outside Roumelia. To increase its authority, contacts with Greek and European centers were intensified: university professors in philology, mathematics, and theology were attracted from Athens; the teachers of French and music were of French and German origin. Beginning in 1881, the instructional program of the Greek schools in Plovdiv was synchronized with that in Greece and, from 1885 on, the high school issued certificates identical to those of high schools in Greece. The most important newspaper of the period, Philipoupoulis (bilingual until 1882, Greek since 1886), was published by A. Nikolaidis and D. Komarianos, who had previously published the paper Constantinople in Tsarigrad. The newspaper’s scope was not limited to Plovdiv; with the support of the Greek state and Greek nationalistic foundations (sylogos), it sought to be the forum of the Greeks from all Eastern Roumelia. Although the Bulgarian political and cultural dominance in Eastern Roumelia was already a fact, the Bulgarian cultural imagination was not yet satisfied. For Bulgarian identifications, Eastern Roumelia was part of the ideal homeland and, as such, it could not be an independent sublime object of the imagination, could not be codified into “organic” territorial categories. Its advantageous localization (centered on a big river in the middle of a plain well fortified by mountains) did not matter at all: in all respects, Eastern Roumelia was still something absurd, something the Bulgarian imagination could not acknowledge (Stoyanov 5–6). There is ample evidence for that: from the protests of the Plovdiv Bulgarians in front of foreign consulates in the city, and the arrogant naming of the central newspapers of Plovdiv and Eastern Roumelia, South Bulgaria, to the fact that during the years 1878–85 Roumelia published several Bulgarian maps but not a single one of Eastern Roumelia itself. Here lyrical poetry is once again the most extreme and indicative example of the problem: it projected on Eastern Roumelia the repulsive image of the dismembered

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whole, another variant of the archetypal abject: “Is this a state or a nightmare? What is this thing without middle or end / That cannot even be drawn? / What is this body with no head, no shoulders, / No legs, no arms, just a stinking maw?” (qtd. in Stoyanov 6). In 1885, a unification of the provinces was enacted against the stipulations of the Berlin Congress, and the “nightmare country” disappeared in order to join the Principality of Bulgaria. Unified Bulgaria just barely managed to keep its integrity after an international crisis ended in the Serbo-Bulgarian war, from which Bulgaria emerged as the winner. This evolution had concrete consequences in Plovdiv: although the Bulgarian elite moved to the capital Sofia, Plovdiv’s Greek intellectual and commercial minority was slowly driven out of the public space; its institutions were either marginalized or closed. This process culminated in 1906, when, in response to the massacre perpetrated by Greeks in the Bulgarian villages of Macedonia, Bulgarians raided the Greek settlements in Bulgarian cities (the city of Anchialo, on the Black Sea, was burnt to the ground, with over 300 people killed). In Plovdiv, Bulgarian mobs went around to Greek houses and shops, smashing them and beating their owners while the summoned army stood watching. The anti-Greek riot led to the closing of most Greek schools; a considerable number of Greeks emigrated from the city, Greek newspapers and magazines were discontinued, and their editors forced to flee the country. A veritable “ethnic cleansing” took place in the name of a distant cause, the territory of Macedonia — another area coveted by the Greek and Bulgarian cultural imaginary. The imaginary homeland, already inscribed in powerful national identifications and historical narratives, once again interfered in the life of Plovdiv — this time rather brutally. The conflict between the two cultural elites, leading to a comparatively swift Bulgarian victory in political representation and the development of the Bulgarian state and its institutions created conditions for the intervention of these imaginary geographies in the city — an intervention that slowly transformed the city, turning the nationalist project into a Plovdiv reality. We can easily trace this process through the symbols inscribed straight onto the body of the city: the names of streets, buildings, squares, and public spaces. As early as the 1870s, the emblems of the “homeland” and its imaginary geographies started to take over Plovdiv’s neighborhoods. The conversion to Bulgarianness was accompanied by the gradual expulsion of the old Greek and Turkish names. The preferred new names either came from the Bulgarian national hall of fame or had a European aura. After 1885, they simply flooded the city, though they occasionally created a bizarre hybrid: for instance, the Oriental-Occidental name of the Kyuchuk Paris neighborhood (“Little Paris” in Turkish). When the city’s master plan was approved (first version 1891, the second one 1900), the renaming of streets continued with the consistency of a state policy: heroic royal streets, such as Tsar Kroum, appeared, and a garden was named Tsar Simeon. Next to the hotels called Independence (later renamed Paris), Rhodope, and Sofia, one could find the French-Bulgarian Hotel du Bulgarie and the universal Metropole. The International Theatre Luxembourg was opened in 1881, and the Plovdiv cinema Pathé Fèeres in 1909. Some of these names clearly indicate that new institutions had been imported, with the intellectuals or clerks required to run them (see Abadzhiev 105, 150; Gyaurov 46, 48). The changes had architectural and urban consequences as well, although these came more slowly. Especially after 1885, the nineteenth-century “text” of the urban interior and exterior changed. For a long time houses had followed the Oriental tradition of facing inward, towards their gardens, offering shelter behind their high walls, away from the narrow crooked streets.

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However, from the 1850s onward, the rickety walls were replaced gradually by solid Europeanstyle brick buildings. The façades of houses slowly turned to face the emerging public spaces, where the Bulgarian nation state enacted and watched its own self (see Kojuharov). The Bulgarianization and Europeanization of the city went hand in hand with the attempt to delete the “Oriental,” Turkish, and Greek element from its image. Public buildings were erected to represent the Bulgarianness by default. As early as the 1880s, the Turkish cemetery of Ortamezar, located in the city center, was removed and turned into a park for social promenade, while the former Konak was turned into a French Catholic school. Due to the lack of maintenance, the mosques crumbled and collapsed (Amer Gaazi Dzami was demolished by the city authorities in 1912; Yeshnolou Dzami and Choukour Dzami fell in the 1928 earthquake). The other minorities were slowly and systematically denied access and symbolic representation, their schools closed down one by one, their newspapers discontinued, the names of their neighborhoods rewritten in a Bulgarian-European style. This process lasted for more than fifty years, finally turning Plovdiv, according to a tourist guide, into “the most Bulgarian of cities.” To return to my chief point: in the era of nationalism, the city is not and cannot be a selfsufficient cultural universe, a “heteroglossia” of different cultural voices that negotiate with one another. The reason is simple: the imaginary geographies of nationalism are not just imaginary, they are institutions that control life in the nation state, and change the face of its cities. The fate of Plovdiv over the past century and a half is a good illustration of this.

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The Torn Soul of a City: Trieste as a Center of Polyphonic Culture and Literature Anna Campanile Wind whines and whines the shingle, the crazy pierstakes groan; A senile sea numbers each single Slimesilvered stone. James Joyce: “On the beach at Fontana” (Trieste 1914; Joyce 651)

1.

City at the Border

The geographical and historical conditions of Trieste between Italy and East-Central Europe make it an exceptional case in twentieth-century (literary) history and culture. Naturally, there are many other culturally relevant border regions in Italy — such as the “invented” region of South Tyrol or the Aosta Valley. Nevertheless, Trieste appears to be a phenomenon in itself, insofar as it had

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already brought forth a peculiar, diverse, hybrid, and hence multilingual culture and literature in the nineteenth century. That Italy was and is comprised of numerous regional cultural realities, which all oppose homogeneity, does nothing to diminish the significance of this polyphonic culture and still leaves unanswered the following questions: what were the reasons for the rise of this culture? How could literature attain such originality in Trieste? How did the city become a myth? In the eighteenth century, Trieste grew within a few decades from practically nothing to a medium-sized port, out of conflicts between mercantile thinking and aspirations for an autonomous cultural development, between economic interests and national issues. Further, a dramatic gulf also opened up between the city and the countryside — one that was foremost a question of cultural identity: the city area was more directed towards Italy, the countryside was mainly populated by Slovenes; this tension, reinforced by the political inclusion into the Habsburg Empire since 1382, essentially formed the basis of the city’s polycultural character. After 1918, as Trieste was given to Italy and the political dreams of the Irredentists came true, the flourishing trading city changed into a normal Italian border city. Trieste now experienced the crisis of a city without a hinterland, and its culture increasingly found its compelling expression in literature (Hösle, “Triest. Annährungen” 7–9). Trieste was to become a seismograph and mirror of the modern world and its existential discontent, at least that of European history: between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries the city generated a culture shaped by the contradictions, the traumas, the breaks and dualisms characteristic of modern humanity, which are essentially tied to its position at the margin, its border existence. Claudio Magris has characterized this existential condition of the Triestiner as “unhappy nomadism” (qtd. in Pellegrini, Le città 129). In Giuliana Morandini’s Caffé Specchi (The Café of Mirrors; 1983) a woman, Katharina Pollaczek, awaits in Trieste the judicial decision on whether she is to be awarded the custody of her child. She walks through the streets swept empty by the bora, observes the people in the numerous cafés, reminders of the East-Central European past, and strangely her fate is like that of this city. Suddenly, with the murder of a Serbian girl, both the city and Katharina are hauled back into the present of a border city at the edge of the Balkan conflict. The differing journeys through life taken by the city’s inhabitants include the entire history of the city itself and, as in a game with mirrors, Katharina sees the outlines of their existence that intersect with her own. One of them explains to her his “difference”: No, I didn’t know… I just amused myself building roads which would cross one another. With different stones, I marked the borders. Maybe you know that up on the bohemian hills there are many varicolored stones of a rare diversity… Confounding languages for me is an everlasting game… I recovered new and strange words, changed their meanings, invented accents and sounds… […] but this is not reality, Katharina, this is an illusion of mine. (Caffé 52)

Some of the dialogues in the novel are conducted in several languages, from the English of the opening pages, the German of the Berlin conductor, the Trieste dialect of the household staff, and the Slovenian of the saleswoman in the wine store, to the Serbo-Croatian of the doctor in her memory. This lends the Trieste of the novel the atmosphere that the city must have had in the two centuries between 1719 and 1919. Nevertheless, understanding between the novel’s figures, as

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well as simple self-analysis, are both impossible: “[B]ut maybe it’s this city I don’t understand, it was always so difficult to follow its streets, the races that intermingle there, the languages” (Caffé 32). The mixing of idioms and the intersection of paths, which lead to varying European countries, are renewed metaphors for the torn soul of this city, whose inhabitants have learned to refuse the straightforward path to identity. The experience of a problematic border has always been represented in the literature of Trieste as a sense of multiple belonging or nonbelonging, one that becomes relevant as a condition for writing itself. The “antinomy of the border” (to use Magris’s phrase) exposes the same impossibilities that Franz Kafka also discovered in his Prague and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe as a characteristic of “minor literature,” namely, “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise” (27). Like Prague, Trieste is a “Dichterschicksal,” a “writer’s fate” (Paul Eisner qtd. in Magris, “Prag” 33), and the border is an integral component of its existence, one that has been part of the literature of the city up to the present day (Spirito, “Trieste” 10). Earlier, the border was seen as an overestimation of the political-patriotic function of this literature, later it became more of a literary motif, as for example in Fulvio Tomizza’s Materada from 1960. The Dalmatian sergeant Emidio Olrich in Franco Vegliani’s novel, La frontiera (The Border; 1964), represents emblematically the paths of a historical fate between proximity and distance. The narrator is an Italian officer, who in the summer of 1941 spends a month vacation on an island in Dalmatia from where his forefathers came and who themselves were forced to leave as the island was handed over to Yugoslavia at the end of World War I. As we can infer from a report by an uncle of Emidio, who at the same time is also a distant relative of the narrator, the fate of the narrator is closely entwined with that of the young Emidio. By showing the intermeshing of biographies, Vegliani’s novel (33) allows us to understand, that the political border is not a natural boundary. At the intersection between the historical and the fictionalized border, Hermann Bahr wrote already in 1909, nine years before the demise of the Habsburg Empire: Trieste is strange. The most beautiful landscape. Even more beautiful than Naples. But not a city at all. One has the feeling of being nowhere here. It seems as if one moves in the unreal. Here the state has posed itself the problem of withholding from the city its character. Of course, this cannot work, it is an Italian city. But it is not allowed to be so. Hence, the unwillingness one perceives everywhere. It is a city, which leads an unwilling existence. What it is, it shall not be, and it defends itself against the illusion it is forced into. (Dalmatinische Reise 8)

One has the feeling of being nowhere at all. Without naming the notion, Bahr speaks of Trieste as a no-man’s land, as a border between states. The border is the line, which belongs to nobody and is therefore nothing. The border is an abstraction, an immaterial line of unification and separation, something that “is no longer and not yet.” The border is negation, vacuum, the intellectual state of not-belonging, so the border literature is always a contaminatio. According to Magris, the cities belonging to the Danube monarchy have a border literature, since the monarchy stood, as Robert Musil also recognized, at the edge of an emptiness; inside this emptiness, the border becomes not just political-social, but also psychological (“Prag” 8).

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Historical Contingencies

There are many stereotypes about Trieste: shoved to the margins by a whim of history; provincial city where polite society chews away at the hard crusts of memory; city of the old; Trieste in eternal indebtedness to the sea-port of the Habsburgs, nourished and fattened on the calculated generosity of the dynasties in Vienna. The rise of the city began in 1719, when it was declared a free port, furnished with numerous custom, tax, and even criminal justice privileges, and when religious tolerance reigned. And they all came: the gamblers, the crooks of stature, the merchants, Greeks, Serbs, Slovenes, GermanAustrians, and Jews (Katsiardi-Hering 20). The city grew. The port and the stock exchange opened, and the Borgo Teresiano (the neo-Classical City center named after Maria Theresia) was erected on drained salt-work fields: a quarter that bowed to the Kaiserin in Vienna with its name, a quarter in which nothing was left to accident, where the clear geometry betrayed something about the mercantile spirit of the city. And where every street, beginning in the northwest, still led to the open sea. In 1719, the city had only 5,600 inhabitants. From then on its population exploded continually, except for a brief reduction during the Napoleonic Wars. From 39,000 inhabitants in 1818 the population of the port city of the Danube Monarchy leapt to 123,000 in 1875. Fifty years later it had already reached 220,000 (Mayer 9). Merchants and entrepreneurs streamed from all parts of Europe into Trieste, people speaking a variety of languages, with differing ethnic backgrounds and religions. And they joined together under the sign of common economic interests. A stratum of cosmopolitan bourgeoisie arose, singular in form, whose intellectual climate was shaped by the tension-ridden heterogeneity and the European orientation of a port city, all of which helped the city, not only commercially but also culturally, to achieve an extraordinary blossoming (Dubin 4). The port was so determining for the identity of this city that Johann Gottfried Seume, who stopped in Trieste on his journey to Sicily in 1802, remarked: “As I am no merchant and have no mercantile soul, according to my friends; you won’t hear me say much about Trieste, where everything is mercantile” (77). Modern Trieste was, therefore, a creation of Austrian trade policy and was granted many privileges for the promotion of trade and commercial shipping in the course of the eighteenth century. In 1769, these measures were extended even further, so that the entire city was declared a free city. A broad freedom of religion allowed the settlement of many non-Catholics, mainly Jews and Orthodox, but also Protestants from northern and southern Germany (Cataruzza 58). After World War I, Trieste was separated from its Danube-Balkan hinterland and cut off from Central Europe, which had been decisive for its identity and history, not just politically but also culturally. Trieste lost the qualities that had made it so unique, and writers tried to regain them through literary representations. The will of its intellectuals was decisive in this reflection upon their cosmopolitan roots, conscious as they were of their own historical role between the Italian and the mainly German-speaking world. In 1918, Silvio Benco founded the journal Umana (Human), which gained its inspiration from a unified literary ideal and announced an “irresistible inclination” to the past. The Italian journals sought to emphasize the special features of literature from Trieste so as to contribute to the deprovincialization and the Europeanization of literature. In 1928 and 1929, two monograph issues of Solaria (a journal that appeared in Florence between 1926 and 1934) were both devoted to the Triestine writers of Jewish descent, Italo Svevo (Aron Hector Schmitz) and Umberto Saba (Umberto Poli).

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The Cold War moved the demarcation line of a divided world into the city. In order to clarify, finally, the competing claims between Yugoslavia and Italy, the politicians in distant London decided in 1954 that henceforth the city should be an Italian sovereign territory, while Istria should stay Yugoslavian. Now completely cut off from the hinterland, Trieste experienced its economic demise. Rome supported and maintained the city while being suspected of sabotaging its recovery. The situation facing Trieste was awkward: the city, in which a Venetian dialect is spoken, was surrounded by a countryside speaking only a Slavic language; the more intellectual sections of the urban bourgeoisie were cut off from the country to which they believed to belong through language and culture. Trieste’s separation from its hinterland, its enforced Italianization and its new marginal position in the post-war era shifted its identity. From then on, its inhabitants lived on the myth of the past, on the faded glory of the great age of its cosmopolitanism, economic power, and literature. Claudio Magris, echoing a notion introduced by Johannes Urzidil, named the literature of Trieste “hinternational” (Danubio 27). 3.

Trieste as a Literary Center

As Fulvio Tomizza suggested in a 1969 essay, to be born a writer in Trieste was a difficult vocation. In Trieste, everything would be more complicated, everything would have exaggerated effects. Far away from the lively, spoken language, the writer would have to make himself understood in a rough dialect that tolerates no rhetorical subtlety. Writing is therefore a distinctive self-fashioning in front of others, a way of balancing out this failing in verbal communication, a proclamation of legitimation (“Nascere” 11). Hence, the admiration, even the cult, of many late nineteenth-century Triestine authors for the Romantic style, for the poetry of a Giosuè Carducci and later Gabriele D’Annunzio. The gulf between poetic language and the local dialect was a constant for writing in many Italian cities and regions. In Trieste, the use of the local dialect was also widespread and almost natural. There were many authors, among them the poets Virgilio Giotti and Biagio Marin from Grado, who took advantage of the expressive power of this “lingua franca” used by the merchants in the port city. Many others provide examples for a naturalistic use of the dialect in novels and short stories written in Italian, in order to make reality more believable. One can cite, for example, Saba’s novel Ernesto (published posthumously in 1975), where the insertions of the dialect are meant to make the realistic coloration of the setting seem more authentic (see Ernesto 19). The linguistic opposition between “Triestino” and Italian was directly tied to the identity of the Triestine writers. The journalists and literati, as is often the case in multilingual regions, were forced to find their own steadfast linguistic identity. With great effort, they had to acquire first their own identity in language. This is the case with Svevo: his work is saturated with the smallest details of the atmosphere and language of Trieste. Literary critics have frequently emphasized Svevo’s difficulties with the Italian language (Maier, Svevo 175–80). This is how Saba summarizes the issue: “Svevo could have written well in German; he preferred to write badly in Italian. It was the last homage to the assimilating fascination of the ‘past’ Italian culture. It is the love story of Trieste for Italy before the ‘redemption’” (Saba, Scorciatoie 80).

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Even the split in the personality of Zeno Cosini, the protagonist of Svevo’s last novel La coscienza di Zeno (The Confessions of Zeno; 1923), can be read as the result of linguistic distress and a hybrid identity. As the alter ego of the writer, Zeno’s repressions and neuroses serve no other purpose than “to gain clarity about oneself in the standard language” (Hösle, “Sendung” 289). It is a way of writing that is in obvious contrast to the Italian literature at the turn of the century, less playful or formalistic, oriented instead towards the existential, much like the northern literatures. This feature is also recognizable in the works of the philosopher and writer Carlo Michelstaedter, also of Jewish descent, who took as his main theme the inconsistencies of and the chasms opened up by rhetoric. One could only respond to these with the boldest gesture of existential autonomy, suicide (Michelstaedter, La persuasione). In this sense, to echo Magris, we could speak of a specific Triestine self-understanding, and of its idioms as being the result of a deprivation. The Triestiners, like other inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire, were not in a position to formulate a positive definition of their identity. It is much easier to define what one is not, to state one’s difference from every other identity, than to have to name the unambiguous characteristics of what is one’s own (Ara and Magris 799). The significance of Trieste as an international literary center began, however, with the arrival in 1905 of James Joyce, who found a position as an English teacher at the local Berlitz School, and who lived in the city on the Adriatic, with the exception of short intervals, until the beginning of World War I. The family stayed until 1915, when Joyce’s brother Stanislaus was arrested by the Austrian police for publicly representing Irredentist positions (Pierce 221). For Joyce, Trieste offered at that time something of his Dublin, insofar as it also stood under alien rule; but it also allowed him the advantage of viewing it with some composure, as Svevo suggested looking back at the same period (Saggi 202). The two writers, whose work can be compared with each other in more than one respect, and whose mutual inspiration is impossible to quantify, met by coincidence. Ettore Schmitz worked at that time in the textile mill of his father-in-law and had to travel frequently to London on business. From 1908 on, he took English lessons from Joyce. The acquaintance with Joyce provided Ettore Schmitz, and with him Trieste, access to the world literary stage: it was the Irish writer who, through Paul Valéry, Valéry Larbaud, and Benjamin Crémieux, introduced Svevo to a French public a few years after the publication of La coscienza di Zeno. This new fame was even more remarkable if we consider the previous literary failures of the thirty-one-year-old Schmitz. Under the pseudonym Italo Svevo — chosen to stress his double sense of belonging — he had published an autobiographically tinged novel, Una vita (A Life; 1892), which was completely ignored by critics just as his second work Senilità (Senility; 1898), which appeared six years later. At the time he met Joyce, Svevo had consequently decided to turn away from literature and to give himself over entirely to a life in business, as was the tradition, long fallen into cliché, in his home city. Trieste had also attracted Joyce’s curiosity. As a friend from Joyce’s time in Zurich reported, the writer had a profound interest in cities, in their architecture and history. Cities were for him like individuals, wherein history had become form and space (Carola Giedion-Welcker, qtd. in Hartshorn 21). The busy cosmopolitan atmosphere of Trieste pleased him greatly, so much so that he soon felt at home there. Joyce lived close to the Greek Orthodox Church San Nicolò dei Greci and a Serbian church in the Via San Spiridone, where he watched the rituals and masses at close quarters (Hartshorn 21–22). Joyce’s other favorite activity at the time was to visit the Teatro

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Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, which was only one block away from his apartment. The operatic performances there and the general cultural atmosphere of the time testified to Trieste’s uniqueness: one breathed in the paradoxical mixture of Irredentism and German culture that was only possible there. The opera house had been called “Il Teatro Grande” until 1843, when the first performance of Verdi’s Nabucco was given there. The political events, which were closely tied with theater life, as the theater was often a forum for Irredentist protest, also greatly interested Joyce. He saw himself as a “socialist artist” (Hartshorn 26) and spent many evenings in discussion rounds with workers, mostly at the inn Antica casa rossa, located in the old quarter. The common interest in literature was the basis for Joyce’s relationship with Svevo. Closer analysis reveals several interdependent links between the two writers: both shared an interest in modernist narrative techniques, including the literary integration of psychoanalytical procedures, and their novels Una vita (1892) and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1914) had an autobiographical orientation (Debenedetti 563). A few brochures on early psychoanalysis in Joyce’s library, whose prices are noted in Austrian crowns, show his engagement with this theme during his stay in Trieste (Bremer 36). Themes and materials they discussed, which found expression in their works of this period, were another source of common inspiration. That the Jewish elements in the portrayal of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses can be traced back to details provided by Svevo on the Triestine Jewish community has, for instance, been well documented (Benussi 334). Here it must be recalled that nine of the stories from Dubliners, as well as Stephen Hero and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man were written in Trieste and, as Joyce confessed to his brother Stanislaus, who was at the time still living in Dublin, “the Triestine heat had probably influenced the mercilessness of some of the stories, such as The Boarding House, a harshness that [ … I] regretted (but did not modify)” (qtd. in McMinn ix). 4.

“Triestinità”: Is there a Triestine Literature?

Despite all the interconnecting lines and exchanges between the literatures of different languages in Trieste, the question still remains whether the Italian, German, Slovene, Jewish, and in Joyce’s case even the Anglo-Saxon strain, did not exist completely independent and alongside of each other in the city. Was there something common to these literatures? Was there ever a Triestine literature? Claudio Magris disputed its existence in a 1996 interview. The culture and the literature of this city display a certain particularity, but to make of it something distinctively typical is not possible. The question of this particularity is nothing new: in 1930, in an article denounced by the Fascist rulers, the Tuscan Pietro Pancrazi had already pointed out the specific characteristics of literature in Trieste. He spoke of a “moral urge,” a strong interest in psychology and a certain difficulty with language, which meant for this literature more than just “the joy of expression,” a wish to have a mission (“Triestino” 103). The 1930s witnessed repeated polemical debates regarding Trieste’s “Italian soul.” Pancrazi, for example, located the roots of Triestine writing in a group of authors composed of Giani and Carlo Stuparich, Scipio Slataper, Ettore Cantoni, Michelstaedter, Saba, and Svevo, who harmonized with one another and shared marked psychological and psychoanalytic interests. In an

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earlier version of the same article, Pancrazi had spoken of the cross-cultural readings of these writers who were by nature bilingual. They were the first to assimilate northern influences and read authors such as Hebbel, Weininger, Strindberg, and Ibsen, and they were later the first to read Freud. Furthermore, Pancrazi underlined their proximity to Russian authors (Maier, Svevo 104). Belying any national inclination and self-censorship, Pancrazi defined the “triestinità” as a modern category, one we would today characterize as hybridity and value as an extremely fruitful aspect of literature. Looking at the replies that this definition of “Triestine literature” evoked, it is interesting to note that precisely those authors who appeared less frequently in the discussion made it world famous: Saba and Svevo. One cannot hence speak of a literary tradition from Trieste in the true sense of the term. If it is the job of literary historians to construct unified conceptions and create parallels, to what tradition should they relate their construct of Triestine literature? To the Italian, to a regional literature, or to one of its local branches? Pancrazi’s already mentioned reflections had drawn attention to this border region in a polemical way and provided some suitable interpretive approaches for these authors, all of whom otherwise appear to be difficult to grasp. In the process, some familiar patterns emerged that could be described as characteristics of the literature from Trieste: the autobiographical, an inclination towards exaggerated introspection, hostility towards rhetoric, and a moral impulse. Today these classifying categories have become common points in approaching the literary production from Trieste (Pellegrini, La Trieste di carta 33). It was the historian, philologist, and patriot Domenico Rossetti who first spoke of “Triestine literature” as that which was written in Italian there. In January 1819 he wrote in one of the seven letters devoted to the city that he wanted the arts and sciences to “find a home here, where they are still strangers” (Rossetti 91). The political notions of this noble antiquarian, and his interest in culture and art were alienated, however, from the development of education in the city. Rossetti remained in spirit attached to the old city center, showing aversion towards the new mixed and mobile city, born out of the economic success of the free port. It is in this spirit that the irredentists came to sing: “Ne la patria de Rossetti non se parla che italiàn” (In Rossetti’s fatherland, only Italian is spoken; Magris, Microcosmi 229). Rossetti remained a symbol for the struggle to establish Italian cultural hegemony. By contrast, a hundred years later the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper adopted an exemplary critical attitude towards the culture of his home city. His programmatic Lettere triestine (Triestine Letters), which appeared in the journal La Voce (The Voice; 1909), railed against the citizens who corrupted Trieste with their commercial profit-seeking and rendered Trieste blind to higher spiritual aspirations: Trieste would have been capable of contributing in some way to the magnificent Italian literary production. But its soul was too base, exhausted by the economic motive, so that it could not conceive of higher ambitions, and too obtuse to understand that material development cannot move beyond a certain point without the contribution of an intellectual force. (Lettere triestine 11–12)

This letter, which appeared in 1909 and carried the unambiguous title “Trieste non ha tradizioni di cultura” (Trieste Has no Cultural Tradition), also indicated that Slataper himself suffered from the inferiority complex of the Triestiners towards the linguistic and stylistic elegance of the Tuscans

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and other Italians in the kingdom, from which the city on the Adriatic coast was still excluded. But a month later, in the fourth letter entitled “La vita dello spirito” (Spiritual Life), Slataper wrote about the uniqueness of this city with two souls, its unusual way of being Italian, and the necessity of creating a new cultural identity from it, one capable of producing an original Triestine art: Even if our dialect is no longer different from the Italian dialects, we have to remember that it has been Ladin. Our mind is different, even now. For all of its struggle it can’t enclose itself in the formulas of thought that come from simple conditions. Trieste has got a specific Triestine mark: it must long for a Triestine art. (Lettere triestine 36–37)

Unlike his artist friends who published their articles in city newspapers such as Il Piccolo, Slataper left Trieste for Florence where he sought contact with the literati engaged with La Voce: Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Ardengo Soffici. There he published his autobiographical work Il mio Carso (My Karst) in 1912, which has been called “the first literary work of a Triestine writer” (Hösle, “Sendung” 293). Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris have used the example of Slataper to comment on the problem of literary identity in Trieste. Slataper writes at the very beginning of Il mio Carso about his split soul, about the difficulty of giving readers in Italy some understanding of what it means to be born in Trieste. He tries to recall his more distant origins, thinking about his adventurous ancestors who had come to Trieste at the time of the free port (Carso 4). His childhood is marked by the history-making events that determine the existence of a border city (7). In these he also recognizes his own “anima tormentata” (tormented soul), which is like that of his city. These few examples confirm that Ara and Magris are accurate in claiming that “Triestinità” exists only in literature, its only home. Trieste is, more than any other city, its literature: Svevo, Saba and Slataper are not so much writers who are born in it [Trieste] and out of it, but writers who generate and create it, who give it a face, which otherwise, by itself, would not exist. The anti-literariness of the Triestine [writers] translates the attitude of men who demand from writing not beauty but truth, because in their eyes writing means acquiring an identity, not only as individuals, but also as a group. (Ara and Magris 15–16)

Another position is taken by Elvio Guagnini who, in his introduction to the cultural history of twentieth-century literature in Trieste, describes the Triestine as an “undifferentiated and inadmissible” category, because it annuls all historical and cultural categories necessary for differentiation (Introduzione 12). He sees Slataper as the only advocate of a Triestine art: starting with Il mio Carso, his declaration of faith in the mountainous Karst landscape, his work represents a search for the original word that will enable what does not appear to be possible, namely, to give one’s own multicultural identity a name. The novel begins with the narrator’s confession of his own failings: he would like to describe the particularities of his own being to his friends in Florence, but at the same time he would be forced to express too much, to surrender his own border identity. What comes to light is not the self-consciousness about one’s own difference, as articulated by the authors of the so-called “minor literature,” but rather the first step in becoming conscious of what Jacques Derrida calls a “disturbed identity” (Guagnini, Introduzione 17). This observation can be

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applied also to the Istrian writer Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, who asserted in an interview that, had he ever tried to write an autobiography, he would have entitled it “Un italiano sbagliato” (an Italian turned upside down; qtd. in Ara and Magris 139). The literature of the Italians in Trieste was for the most part a literature between worlds, even before it could nourish itself on the Triestine myth. It would be extremely difficult to reconstruct individual influences. What is important to stress here is the role that various artists and intellectuals, among them Robert (Bobi) Bazlen, played in the process of convergence between cultures. Bazlen is typical insofar as he left behind very little written work and yet played an extraordinary mediating role between the Italian and German-Austrian culture. He translated Freud and Jung, introduced Kafka and Musil to an Italian readership, and spread Triestine literature in the rest of Italy. For example, Eugenio Montale, with whom Bazlen enjoyed friendly ties, received the novels of Italo Svevo to read, and he recognized early their originality within the panorama of Italian literature. Montale dedicated to Bazlen — whose father was a Swabian Protestant and mother came from Palestine — a few touching verses that accentuated his cultural peculiarities through the use of German expressions: “With this letter, which you will never be able to read, I tell to you adio and not auf wiedersehen, and this in a language you loved not, being without Stimmung” (Tutte 464). The extent to which the writers were preoccupied with Trieste becomes evident from the many works that use it as a backdrop or as a protagonist, and even declare it to be the motivating factor for writing. In the literary geography of Trieste, the interplay among all these possibilities bears witness to the vitality of the city’s image. This is best evidenced in the work of Giani Stuparich, who was deeply marked by World War I, for both his brother Carlo and his friend Slapater lost their lives in the Karst (see Arosi). In all of Stuparich’s autobiographically tinted work, for example his Colloqui con mio fratello (Conversations with My Brother; 1925), the city appears unreachable. Trieste remains as it were the city of heroes, of Irredentists — La nazione czeca (The Czech Nation; 1915) — the city of the patriot Gugliemo Oberdan, an illusion that lacks solidity, as if it were only “respiro di mondi lontani” (a breath from distant worlds; Poesie 101). A long list of writers who had similar concerns and interests can be found in the anthologies of Giuliana Morandini (Da te lontano) and Pietro Spirito (Trieste. Paesaggi della nuova narrativa), as well as the studies of Ara and Magris, De Lugnani, Guagnini, and Pellegrini. 5.

Trieste’s German-Speaking Culture

The settlement of German speakers in Trieste began with the city’s proclamation as a free port in 1719 and increased during its economic and political upswing under Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Administrative civil servants came from the motherland to deal with the city’s growth bureaucratically, but so too did military personnel and entrepreneurs, as well as craftsmen and merchants with their families. German became the lingua franca in the public arena and administration; the first German normal schools were already established by 1772. Hence knowledge of the German culture became part of the curriculum, and from 1770 onwards, it started to penetrate the educated sections of Trieste’s population (De Lugnani 14–15). The institutionalization of the German language, and with it of German-language culture and literature, was of decisive significance

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precisely for those provinces that had not been previously German. Wherever the family cultural background remained Italian and the school provided a quasi-bicultural education, a “hybrid” culture, a signal for a culture’s inner dynamic and modernity came about. A German intellectual life also unfolded after 1719: cultural and sport associations and newspapers were founded. A German bookshop and reading circle also existed in the late eighteenth century, where books on the Vienna Court and Jewish assimilation were the center of attention. The most important focus in German cultural life was, however, the theatre: German-speaking performances are documented as early as 1784, when Felix Berner and his company came to Trieste for the first time. The actor companies were invited to the city upon the initiative of the German-speaking Triestine bourgeoisie, which could best express its own self-understanding in the performative medium of the theater. Works by Lessing, Schiller, Klinger, Brandes, Iffland, Engel, and others were performed (De Lugnani 18). And yet, the audience was in no way exclusively Austrian; the Italian public also welcomed opportunities to extend its scope of cultural life. Those who did not understand German were helped with impromptu translations by the bilingual audience. This remarkable fact (De Lugnani 19) shows the tolerant atmosphere among the ethnic groups at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. After the Napoleonic interlude, the German-speaking theatre celebrated its return to Trieste in 1827 with a performance given by Arthur Stöger’s company. This friend of the dramatist Ferdinand Jacob Raimund and director of the Josefstädter Theater in Vienna staged mainly comedies by Raimund and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, which ranked amongst the most popular plays in nineteenth-century Trieste. Though tragedies were less often performed, the plays of Schiller, Goethe, and Grillparzer also received attention (De Lugnani 38–40). The “Schiller Vereinigung,” founded in 1835, supported the staging of dramas, especially those of Schiller. The association also endeavored to promote a rapprochement between the members of the various nationalities residing in Trieste and to encourage cosmopolitanism in science and art. Non-Germans were welcome to join the association, so long as they belonged to “the good society of a proper professional class” (qtd in Opela 442). The German-language cultural manifestations of the Triestine middle class became an integral part of the civil urban culture. Since the main language used in schools remained Italian, its use was also permitted in administrative matters and in the press. This continued even later, because plans put forth in 1866 for a Germanization of the Crown Lands (and of the coastal territory) were never implemented (Corsini 870). Important places of cultural exchange were the literary society “Gabinetto di Minerva,” founded in 1810, and the circle “Casino Tedesco,” praised in 1842 for its wealth of culture and information by an English traveler called Joyce. In the wood-paneled reading room, over 140 newspapers lay ready for readers interested in economics and culture. Lively literary exchanges existed in these circles; multilingual reading evenings, music performances, and book translations, illustrated the unprejudiced openness of the Triestine bourgeoisie. The most significant literary journal of that time was the bilingual Adria. Süddeutsches Centralblatt für Kunst, Literatur, und Leben (Adria: Southern German Main Paper for Art, Literature, and Life). Founded by Jakob Löwenthal in 1838, it understood itself as a bridge between Italian and German culture, and printed texts on the theater and music life in the city, as well as critical reviews and reports from the important cultural centers in northern Italy and Austria. The literary texts, mostly short stories and poems, were written by German-speaking authors in Italian, while

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the rubric “Italienische Schattenrisse” (Italian Outlines) introduced protagonists from contemporary Italian culture. The Triestiners Johann Nepomuk Vogl, Johann Gabriel Seidl, and Adolf Ritter von Tschabuschnigg also wrote for Löwenthal’s journal, as did authors known beyond the region, such as Willibald Alexis and Franz Dingelstedt. On the Italian side, the Triestine literary journals La Favilla (The Spark) and La Rivista Viennese (The Viennese Review) printed translations of German texts, including the classics, but also authors from the Junges Deutchland (Young Germany) movement like Nikolaus Lenau and Ferdinand Freiligrath. La Favilla even hosted a debate on the Italian translation of Klopstock’s Messias. In September 1850, the first edition of the monthly Illustriertes Familienbuch des österreichischen Lloyds (Illustrated Family Book of the Austrian Lloyd) appeared, featuring such renowned authors as Franz Grillparzer, Paul Heyse, Theodor Fontane, Anastasius Grün, and Betty Paoli, with circulation that extended to Austria and Germany (De Lugnani 48). After 1860, the Familienbuch became the first forum for a debate on the nationality conflict, featuring several articles by the Slovene writer Peter von Radics. The journal held on to its principle of nonpartisanship, promoting the peaceful coexistence of Trieste’s ethnic groups. The Triester Zeitung (The Trieste Newspaper), founded in 1860, also deserves mention as the most important organ for the German-speaking middle class until 1915. Edited by Jakob Löwenthal and the Klagenfurter Franz Pipitz, it was the primary source for the German cultural life of the city. The most important German-speaking Triestine writers of the 1840s were Tschabuschnigg, Heinrich Stieglitz, and Jacob Nikolaus Craigher. While the Carinthian Tschabuschnigg placed himself in the succession of Heine and the Italian classics with his realist novel Die Industriellen (The Industrialists; 1854), the romantic Craigher oriented himself towards Friedrich Schlegel and Zacharias Werner, whom he befriended (De Lugnani, 34). Though these authors were not well known outside the region, they were symptomatic for the blending of Italian and German-Austrian cultures and literatures in Trieste. Historical documents reveal a vibrant cultural exchange amongst the Triestine intellectuals and artists of various cultural extraction, whether coming from the Friaul, Carinthia, Germany, or South Tyrol. This cultural openness may appear at times almost odd. The unpublished memoirs of Paul Hohenberger and Franz Mosser (see Memoiren von Paul Hohenberger und Franz Mosser; 1854–68), for example, vehemently opposed the Germanization of the city because they saw this as responsible for anti-German ideas (Opela 453). Their anxiety suggests the existence of a temporary balance between contending realities during the nineteenth century. As Bazlen puts it, “this peaceable life with equal rights lasted until 1914. […] The Italians had their ‘Società di Ginnastica,’ the Germans their athletic club ‘Eintracht,’ the Slovenes their ‘Sokol’ [organization] and ‘Narodni’ Cathedral” (14). Yet the two or three cultures of Trieste also produced a specific hybrid, recognizable especially in the work of Trieste’s most important German-speaking writer, Theodor Däubler. The bilingual Däubler, who grew up in Trieste, owed his solar, Mediterranean thematics to his excellent knowledge of Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, Carducci, D’Annunzio and others. Slataper’s criticism (Trieste as Karst-city, commercialized literature, the conflict of the torn soul) found no resonance in his work. Aside from Däubler and the Heimat writer Julius Kugy, Trieste produced no German-speaking writers of consequence.

The Torn Soul of a City 6.

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Jewish Culture and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

A perusal of documents makes clear that Jewish merchants already lived in Trieste in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Still, only after the free port proclamation can we speak of a significant immigration that brought Jewish merchants from every region in Italy, the increase in Jewish population running parallel to the general demographic development of the city (Gatti 313–14). Most Jews settled in the “Ghetto di Riborgo,” established in 1697; some better-off Jews were permitted to live outside of it (Bon 32). The gradual emancipation from a ghetto existence in the course of the eighteenth century, after centuries of prohibitions and intolerance, was important not only juridically but also culturally, offering the younger generations new social, professional, and cultural horizons. In comparison with the Jews in the rest of the Habsburg Empire, the Triestine Jews enjoyed broader privileges: unrestricted freedom in exercising their religion, the possibility of independent economic activity, the possession of property, and the unrestricted right to travel within the Empire without paying the degrading “Leibmaut” (head toll). All these privileges need to be viewed in the context of the establishment of a free port. A further step in improving the situation of Jews was Joseph II’s Toleration Edicts of 1781–1782 that, while failing to grant equal status to all religions, did prescribe tolerance (Catalan 17). In the course of the nineteenth century, the emancipation process was decisive for the development of Jewish identity, but it also had its drawbacks. In Trieste, the Jews who wanted to assimilate to the majority encountered hardly any difficulties. The city exerted a strong cohesive effect: the number of marriages between Jews and non-Jews was higher than in Italy. With the new law of 1868, mixed marriages were allowed when one of the partners declared to be nondenominational or converted to the religion of the partner (Catalan 27). This was the case with Italo Svevo, who formally left the Jewish religion in order to marry the Catholic Livia Veneziani in 1886 (Benussi 337). By the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community was split between the German and the Italian side. After the breach between the Slovenes and the Italians and in the face of growing anti-Semitism, it was no longer possible to maintain this precarious balance. The antiSemitic currents sweeping Europe, the Dreyfus Affair, and the founding of the Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl also changed the lives of Jews in Trieste. The singer and actor Moni Ovadia wrote in the script for his performance La porta di Sion (The Gate of Zion; 1999) that it is no secret that Trieste was also called “la porta di Sion.” Between 1933 and 1940 the Zionist movement sent 121,391 persons from Trieste to Palestine. The Committee for Jewish Migration had been active since 1908 in bringing transit refugees from Eastern Europe to Palestine. For this purpose, special ships like the Galilea and the Gerusalemme were fitted with a synagogue and a kitchen for serving kosher meals (Ovadia 40). In the 1930s, the Jewish community in Trieste was the largest in Italy in relation to the overall number of inhabitants. Prior to the race laws, its roughly 6,000 members were largely assimilated culturally, socially, economically, and politically. Nevertheless, from 1941 onwards, their persecution proceeded with extreme brutality, and it included anyone living with Jews. In addition to grave hardships caused to the victims, this led to an unequivocal loss of the traditional Triestine Jewish identity (Bon 33–34).

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On the complexities of that Triestine identity, Saba writes in his autobiographical introduction to the collection of stories Gli ebrei (The Jews; 1910–12): Before sending me to sleep, my nurse made me recite, instead of the Shemah Israel in Hebrew, the “Our father” in Slovenian. […] Even if I repeat myself, I recount those things of ancient times not for the sake of talking about myself — I swear to it, reader — but only in order to complain about those awful minglings which were possible in Europe when there still was a Europe; and in Trieste, when my home town — in spite of everything, today like yesterday, yesterday like today very much Italian — was in full development. Then came Hitler to “put order into things.” (Ricordi 10)

Here Saba describes a typical biography of a Triestine Jew, with a nonbeliever father and a Slovene Catholic foster mother,. The end of such a characteristically Triestine cultural symbiosis was the persecution and deportation of the Jews. The Jewish presence in Trieste has another interesting chapter, introduced in Milo Dor’s essay, “Triest als Stadt zwischen drei Welten” (Trieste as the City between Three Worlds) through Giorgio Voghera, who lived in a Jewish old-peoples’ home but who is in the habit of visiting the Café San Marco in the Via Cesare Battisti every day (Dor 49). This important witness to the city’s modern history was the author of Gli anni della psicoanalisi (The Years of Psychoanalysis; 1980), a book of memoirs that mark a veritable milestone in the cultural history of the city and describe Trieste’s adoption of Sigmund Freud. Trieste played an important role in the early work of Freud. His first scientific publications, prior to his psychoanalytic period, emerged here while he worked at the Marine Biology Institute, the “stazione zoologica.” He had come from Vienna in 1876 to research the sexual behavior of eels and the secrets of their migrations (Morandini, Da te lontano 26). The public interest in psychoanalysis in Trieste can be dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century but its origins are unclear. Edoardo Weiss, the child of an affluent Triestine Jewish family, had read Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900) as a schoolboy and at the age of nineteen sought out Freud directly upon moving to Vienna (Bremer 41). Weiss started to practice in Trieste already during his training, amongst others with Svevo’s family and Nora Joyce, who told him her dreams. After the war, Weiss established himself as a psychoanalyst, something that was unique in an Italian city, as Saba makes clear in a letter to Giacomo Debenedetti: “Trieste is the only Italian city that has a doctor interested in psychoanalytic treatments, one of the best students of Freud and a marvelous person: doctor Edoardo Weiss” (qtd. in Cusin 281). The period of psychoanalysis in Trieste was very intellectual and marked by an emphasis upon culture, but did not last as long as in Vienna. It was obviously a refined version of psychoanalysis, very much tied to the influences exerted by the German-speaking culture in Trieste. The middle class read Freud just as it had previously read Nietzsche, and it was strangely touched by the eccentric theories of Otto Weininger (Cusin 280). Interestingly, while the Triestine Jews were especially attracted to these theories, they did not seem all that inclined to undergo analysis themselves (Voghera 50). The studies of Edoardo Weiss, though written in Rome, had something to do with Trieste; they were concerned with an illness characteristic of border areas. The title of his 1936 study

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was Agorafobia. Isterismo d’angoscia (Agoraphobia. Hysteria of Anxiety). Agoraphobia is symptomatic of the inhabitants of a border city who try to construct something solid out of the loss of their own identity and feel themselves part of a minority. Weiss thus integrated the social and cultural experiences from his home city with his scientific studies. 7.

Karst vs. Trieste: Slovene Literature

The Slovene minority living in Trieste today is one of its constitutive elements. The Slovenes of the city and its surroundings represent the second largest ethnic group, and yet they are often absent from the studies on the local literature. They have lived in Trieste since the sixteenth century; the author of the first book written in Slovene, the Protestant priest Primož Trubar, was a resident of Trieste at a time when the city played an important role as a cultural transfer between north and south. He wrote a Slovene catechism and a primer for articles of faith (Meriggi 26). The Reformation had already penetrated into Slovenia via Trieste in the 1560s, and strong Protestant communities were established in many towns and cities, a sign of the early function played by Trieste as an intersection point between cultures. During the nineteenth century and the French occupation of Trieste the use of Slovene was permitted in schools and other institutions, hence the Slovene population celebrated the French as defenders of their nation and culture. This period marked the birth of Slovene literature. The noble patron Žiga Zois, born in Trieste and himself an aspiring writer, enabled philologists and writers to pursue their work. Through his generosity, his interest in fostering the Slovene language, and his unique library, he helped initiate the final awakening of a nation. These endeavors resulted in the work of Romantic authors such as France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar, who saw in the Slovene culture of Trieste the expression of an oppressed people (Meriggi 58–59). The cultural activities of the Slovene minority began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Around 1874 the Slovenes organized themselves into societies to promote the fostering and teaching of their mother tongue, to set up libraries, and to stage cultural events. A number of periodicals were also founded: Edinost (Unity) in 1876, the literary women’s monthly Slovenka (The Slovene Woman) in 1898, and the socialist Delavski List (Worker’s Paper) in 1890. In 1904, the first Slovene house of culture was opened in Trieste, connecting cultural activities to politics. For Dragotin Kette, who completed his military service in the city, Trieste embodied a city of misery. His “Triestine Venus” stands for borrowed love; she represents the opposite of the woman of his dreams, stylistically modeled after Italian examples of the Middle Ages (Meriggi 245). His corporeal representations of women compare with those of Svevo as to their origin, yet Kette’s images remain bound to a social realism. The experience of the city is directly tied to autobiographical events (Bavčar 228), as evident in his cycles of poems “Adria” and “Na molu San Carlo” (On the Pier San Carlo). Another set of experiences, both personal and authorial, form the basis of Srečko Kosovel’s work. Born in Karst, Kosovel is regarded as the Slovene antithesis to Slataper in his literary appropriation of the Karst Mountains. In his work, the stony landscape became the location for primal human experiences: a place of isolation, where life and death, dream and reality, misery and wealth, can be experienced intensely, conferring a uniqueness and wholeness to human existence (Bavčar 230).

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cultural activities of the Slovenes intensified: the number of periodicals and newspapers expanded, and the Slovene theater experienced a heyday, with performances of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov in translation. Around 1912, Trieste was the largest Slovene city in terms of its inhabitants, larger even than Ljubljana. In 1914, a further wave of Slovene migration occurred. Nationalist historians speculate that this was planned by the government in Vienna so as to cancel out the continuous growth in the Italian population. They see a clear sign of this policy in the introduction of multilingualism into the bureaucratic apparatus, in particular the judiciary (Filippuzzi 261). After World War I, at a time of virulent Italian nationalism, the city came under Italian administration. In 1920, prior to Mussolini’s seizure of power, Fascist groups set on fire the House of Slovene culture, one of the early examples of polyvalent cultural centers in Europe. After the Fascists came to power in 1922, the Slovene language once again disappeared from schools, courts, administrative offices, and even churches. Fifty thousand surnames were submitted to compulsory Italianization (Bavčar 231). The only Slovene writer active in Trieste at that time, Boris Pahor, was forced to publish his work underground. His narratives Moj tržaški naslov (My Triestine Address; 1948), Vila kraj jezera (The Castle on the Lake; 1955), Mesto v zalivu (The City in the Gulf; 1955), and Nekropola (Pilgrim Among the Shadows; 1967), reflect on the experiences of a Slovene in Trieste who loses his culture, his language, and his national identity. Pahor’s literary space is the imagined representation of the concrete space of a Slovene in Trieste; his work is concerned with what it means to be a Slovene, searching for a language and culture of his own, even if this search is embedded in a European dimension and possesses an existential perspective (Ara and Magris 195). Another important representative of twentieth-century Slovene literature in Trieste is Alojz Rebula, born in Šempolaj, a small Slovene village close to Trieste, where he still lives. In his novel V Sibilinem vetru (In the Wind of the Sybilles; 1968), Rebula offers a parable of the conflict between particularity and universalism, between unity and difference, which can be described as exemplary for the post-War era. He transplants the question of the Slovene minority’s historical identity in Trieste into another historical epoch and deterritorializes these conflicts, which hence become a metaphor for the entire world (Ara and Magris 195). Unlike Pahor, Rebula moves from the concrete reality of a city suspended between the Romance and Slovene worlds, extending its cultural contexts and filling them with utopian substance. This is evident at the end of his 1960 novel Senčni ples (Shadows Dance), where mutual respect, illustrated by the love of the two protagonists, serves as the basis for peace between ethnic groups (Kadić 185). The question of identity, experienced by the Italian-speaking authors of Trieste in existential terms, is also significant for their Slovene colleagues. What Ara and Magris regarded as the main characteristic of Triestine authors, namely their “maniacal insistence on one’s own peculiarity and identity” (195), applies equally well to the Slovene writers. An interesting case of intercultural exploration, focused on the fate of the Slovene cultural component in Trieste, can be found in the novel Gli sposi di Via Rossetti. Tragedia di una minoranza (The Bridal Pair from the Via Rossetti. Tragedy of a Minority; 1986) of the Italian-language writer, Fulvio Tomizza. According to Eugen Bavčar, this is the first important example of breaking through the “psychological wall that forms within the inner realm of a multilingual literature” (235). Tomizza relates the story of the Slovenian writer Stanko Vuk, a champion of the Slovene

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cause in Trieste, who, together with his wife Dana, died a cruel death at the hands of the Fascists, after a long imprisonment. This “typical Triestine story” (Gli sposi 7) is hardly known to the Italian majority, whereas it plays an important role in the consciousness of the Slovene minority. 8.

Prospects for the Future

Trieste’s present and future position has also concerned a number of twentieth-century writers. The disappointments suffered and the illusions held on the way to realizing the goal of integrating Trieste into Italy are reflected, for example, in Fausta Cialente’s novel Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (The Four Wieselberger Girls; 1976). This narrative portrays how, during the first years of the Italian Monarchy, the philo-Italian dreams, long kept private by a typical Triestine family belonging to the intellectual middle-class, are shattered (Filippuzzi 15–16). In her story Mirko und Franca (1980), Hilde Spiel (born in Vienna) contrasts the decadence of the present Italian Trieste with the image of a once flourishing city under the Habsburg Empire. The story’s setting is a dying city, caught in self-pity and self-indulging memories of a glorious past. The Trieste of the Cold War years, living in the shadow of the Iron Curtain on the border of the Western world, can do little beyond merely surviving: “Trieste is completely and utterly comprised of tragic occurrences” (Spiel 44). And yet, this unpromising environment becomes the scene of a love story between the Slovene Mirko and the Italian Franca. Mirko is a stonemason who settles in Trieste because he sees a future there as an artist. Franca, a mentally unstable girl recently released from a psychiatric institution through the efforts of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, is taken in by the family of a well-to-do Triestiner. The story thus highlights a number of elements significant for the modern story of Trieste. For example, Franco Basaglia’s effort to democratize psychiatry in the 1970s recalls the revolutionary role that Edoardo Weiss played in modernizing psychiatric treatment at the beginning of the twentieth century. Franca herself appears to be an allegory of the state of the city, abused and intimidated, yet protected by a powerful authority, incapable of giving love or of opening itself. Mirko intuits the full extent of the problem when he tells Franca’s old protector, the Commendatore Bauer-Bonfante (his name is indicative of his double cultural belonging): “Trieste wants to destroy itself. I can’t understand it. This city is in love with its own ruin” (Spiel 44). To which the Commendatore can only reply, “You go with the times. It works for you. Time does not work for us” (Spiel 44). Spiel’s story can offer no happy ending for the lovers, only a common perspective located geographically in Slataper’s Karst and interspersed with quotes from the latter’s work. Mirko himself sees a point of convergence in literary expression. In the last scene he recalls the lines about the Karst nature and its women quoted emphatically by the Commendatore (43) during their first visit to the mountains: “I love those Karst Women, he says slowly, who hold the corner of their head-scarves with their teeth in order to protect themselves from the bora, and descend in groups into the town” (137). Mirko finally is able to understand the message those lines hold: they appear to him not as a literary monument of Italian culture at the time of Irredentism, but rather as the representation of a place of possible reconciliation between Slovenians and Italians in the name of their common love for the Triestine Karst landscape.

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Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest John Neubauer and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák The history of the Hungarian capital goes back to Roman times, when the province of Pannonia had a center called Aquincum in the territory that today is the third district of Budapest. After 1541, Buda (Ofen), Óbuda, and Pest belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and the recapturing of these cities in 1686 all but devastated them. Reconstruction in the eighteenth century started slowly, and necessitated the settlement of many foreigners, first and foremost Austrians and Germans, but also Serbs, Slovaks, Romanians, Czechs, Greeks, and others. Emperor Leopold originally restricted the settlement in Buda to Catholics of German descent, except for Serbs in the castle and in the Tabán district (Sziklay, Pest-Buda 26–27). The University of Buda/Pest After the dissolution of the Jesuit Order, Joseph II moved in 1777 the Jesuit University and printing press of Nagyszombat (Trnava) to Buda, and in 1784 from there to Pest, in order to strengthen Buda/Pest as Hungary’s administrative center with German as its official language. Professorships were given initially to Catholics of German descent, and the first chair in language/literature was, logically, established for German (1784); its first chair holder became the rather undistinguished Leopold Alois Hoffmann, who wrote, among other things, anti-Hungarian booklets on secret commission from the Emperor. Friedrich August Werthes, appointed the same year to a chair of aesthetics, wrote during his tenure a Zrinyi drama that probably served as a source of Theodor Körner’s more popular drama (see pp. 518–22 in vol. 1 of our History). The chair for Hungarian language and literature was established, after extended debates, with the appointment of the geographer András K. Vályi. In 1802, the chair was assumed by a genuine philologist, the distinguished Miklós Révai. Both the national and the religious rule were gradually relaxed: Lajos Schedius, appointed in 1792 to the chair of linguistics and aesthetics, was the second Lutheran professor already. He edited the German language journals Literarischer Anzeiger für Ungarn (Literary Announcements for Hungary; 1797–99) and Zeitschrift von und für Ungern (Journal by and for Hungary; 1802–04), for both foreigners and German-speaking Hungarians, and became a leader in Hungarian civic and church affairs. Germans were in the majority among Buda’s and Pest’s inhabitants in 1800, but the ethnic composition of the two cities was complex. More important perhaps, ethnic identity was a matter of personal decision, and during the early decades of assimilation, many inhabitants, especially writers and intellectuals, had a double or even multiple linguistic and cultural identity (Sziklay, Pest-Buda 35). The classicist mentor for non-German writers was the legendary Benedek Virág, who lived the life of an impoverished recluse in Buda’s Tabán district. There he was frequented not only by Hungarian writers, but also by the Serbian/Hungarian poet Mihály Vitkovics, the Serbian Lukijan Mušicki, the Slovak Bohuslav Tablic, and the Romanians Petru Maior and Samuil Micu-Klein, all of whom lived part or all their lives in Buda/Pest. Virág helped with the Hungarian

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part of Micu-Klein’s multinational dictionary, which remained in manuscript form but was later merged into the dictionary published by Maior in 1825. A great many writers and intellectuals were bilingual. Mihály Vitkovics wrote in Serbian and Hungarian, Jovan Muškatirović (a member of the city council) in Latin as well, and Schedius and many others in German, Hungarian, and Latin. Many of the lawyers were bi- and tri-lingual, with multiple ethnic loyalties. Vitkovics had an important law practice, so did Jakov Ignjatović, and the Romanian Emanuil Gojdu [Gozsdu], who was the first to replace Latin with Hungarian in law proceedings. A moderate Romanian nationalist, Gojdu participated in politics, and used most of his accumulated wealth to establish the Gojdu Foundation, which awarded fellowships to Romanian students of the Eastern Orthodox religion studying at Pest, Vienna, and other universities. The recipients included, for example, the young poet Octavian Goga. The Beginnings of Theater in Buda and Pest German language performances dominated when theater life of the double city slowly recovered in the later eighteenth century (see Pukánszky-Kádár). The “Rondellentheater” of Pest was founded in 1774; Buda’s first permanent German theater opened in a wooden shack near what now is the “Chain Bridge” in 1783. A more ambitious theater in the castle started in 1787 with Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Mozart but gradually turned to more spectacles in the tradition of the Viennese Volksbühne for financial reasons. The 3500-seat German Theater of Pest opened on February 9, 1812. This initiative of Joseph II was carried out by his successors in the hope that it would serve as a cultural bulwark against Hungarian nationalism. However, these hopes did not materialize: the few great successes were overshadowed by chronic financial problems of this oversized theater. Difficulties with Hungarian nationalism manifested themselves on the opening night already. Three plays by August Kotzebue were planned, two with overtures that Beethoven wrote on commission (“The Ruins of Athens” and “King Stephen”). But Kotzebue’s third play, “Bela’s Flight,” was too patriotic for the censors and had to be replaced by an unknown author’s play, “The Raising of Pest to a Royal Free City.” Subsequent programming was largely dependent on financial pressures. The public preferred opera, imported stars, and foreign companies. Only Theodor Körner’s Zriny could fill the house occasionally. By the late 1830s the German theater had to face a severe competition from the Pesti Magyar Színház (Hungarian Theater of Pest — renamed National Theater in 1840), which opened on August 22, 1837 and was allowed to play in Hungarian only (see Zoltán Imre’s article in vol. 3). Staging of opera and the production of new Hungarian ones underwent a rapid development when the composer Ferenc Erkel was appointed as its conductor in 1838. The Academy supported the production of good theater texts in Hungarian by starting in 1830 a series entitled Külföldi játékszín (Foreign Plays) under the editorship of József Bajza, the first director of the Hungarian Theater of Pest, and starting in 1832 it awarded a yearly prize and publication for the best Hungarian drama in the series Eredeti játékszín (Original Plays). The German theater burned down on February 2, 1847 and was not replaced. The Hungarian National Theater played in the 1850s a great many “fake” historical dramas whose real subject was the

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present under foreign suppression. In 1870, a law was passed that forbade permanent German language theaters in the nation’s capital, although German theaters continued to exist in the city until the 1880s. The Royal Printing Press of the University of Buda The university press and publisher was an extraordinary transnational literary institution and, for a while, even an East-Central European Center for the Enlightenment and Classicism (Sziklay, Pest-Buda 85; see also Köpeczy and Király). Its list of authors, a genuine “Who’s Who” among East-Central European writers in the early nineteenth century, included the Hungarians József Bajza, Károly and Sándor Kisfaludy, Miklós Révai, Mihály Táncsics, Ferenc Verseghy, and Benedek Virág, various Bulgarians, the Croat Ljudevit Gaj, the Romanians Petru Maior and Gheorghe Şincai, the Serbs Sima Sarajlija Milutinović, Lukijan Mušicki, Dositej Obradović, Jovan Sterija Popović, Sava Tekelija, and Milovan Vidaković, and the Slovaks Ján Hollý, Ján Kollár, and Bohuslav Tablic. Among the works printed were textbooks like Kollár’s Čítanka anebo kniha k čítaní (Reader or the Book for Reading; 1825) and Miklós Révai’s ABC könyvecske a nemzeti iskoláknak hasznokára (ABC Booklet for use in the Schools of the Nation; 1780), the Slovak almanac Zora, the Serb journal Srbske letopis, Josef Šafařík’s Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten (History of the Slavic Language and Literature in all Dialects; 1826), Romanian translations of Fénélon’s Telemach and Obradović’s autobiography — to name only a few. Overall, the Press published books and periodicals in sixteen languages, including neoGreek, Czech, Slovak, Croat, Serb, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Romanian, Hebrew, and Yiddish — often because the censors were more liberal here. The Romanians Micu-Klein and Maior, together with Gheorghe Şincai, were not only authors of the Press; they also found employment there in the first decades of the century as editors and censors. The metropolitan of Karlovac, Stefan Stratimirović, censor of Serbian books between 1797 and 1827, was an exception. As an ardent defender of Old Slavonic, he prevented the publication of many works, for moral, religious, and linguistic reasons. The Buda Press was an ideology-free commercial enterprise that had no particular scientific or artistic focus, though it earned most of its money when it succeeded in acquiring sole rights for publishing textbooks. The Press was willing to publish (and to distribute through its wide net of agents) anything for which the author or a publishing institution was ready to pay. Thus, it published in 1827 Sava Tekelije’s polemical answer in German to the theory of the Daco-Roman origin of Romanians, and in 1830 Eftimie Murgu’s response to Tekelije (Sziklay, Pest-Buda 85). As a printer, the Press often published works in consignment (e.g., the Srpski letopis for the Matica srpska). The first private printer-publishers in Buda/Pest were of German descent; they included the Trattners, the Landerers, and Adolph Hartleben, who published much cheap German literature in the 1840s.

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The National Museum and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian National Museum, and, within it, the Hungarian National Library (now called Széchényi) was started with Ferenc Széchenyi’s donation of his library, manuscript, and coin collection in 1802. The library opened its doors on December 10, 1803. The Magyar Tudós Társaság (Hungarian Scholarly Society) was founded in 1825 and convened for the first time in 1831, in Pozsony. In 1858, it was renamed the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia) and in 1865 it moved to its imposing present building. The Division of Linguistics, the first of the six original ones, was responsible for publishing in 1832 the first spelling rules, and two years later a Hungarian grammar. A plan for a dictionary was presented in 1839, but its publication in six volumes followed only in 1861–74. The Academy also initiated a publication series for old Hungarian texts. Its scientific and cultural work was complemented by the literary activity of the Kisfaludy Társaság (Kisfaludy Society), named after Károly Kisfaludy, a major romantic poet and editor of the important journal Aurora between 1821 and 1830. Serb Literary Culture in Buda and Pest In the first half of the nineteenth century, Buda/Pest was the center of Serbian literature, culture, and education. The Royal University Press purchased Cyrillic letters in 1796 from a press in Vienna, acquired the printing privileges for them, and published a total of 698 Serb books by 1847. Unfortunately, Vuk Štefanović Karadžić, the great Serbian language reformer and folklore collector, could publish only two works with the press because of objections by the metropolitan Stratimirović. Nevertheless, Pest was where Jovan Hadžić founded in 1826 the Matica Srpska, the first of the Slavic national publishers and cultural centers, which assumed that same year the publication of the Srpski letopis (Serbian Annals) launched just a year earlier in Novi Sad. In addition, Sava Tekelija [Tököli], a rich landowner from Arad, founded here the Tekelijanum (Collegium Tökölyanum) in 1838 for Serb students studying in the city (Tekelija, the president and the patron of the Matica Srpska, opened also a Matica library in the Tekelijanum). While the Serbs had no theater of their own, they did profit from the city’s theatrical life. For example, the legendary Hungarian actress, Déryné, played in a Hungarian drama about Karađorđe (1812), and the following year, the Hungarian theater performed August Kotzebue’s play Der Papagei (The Parrot) in the Serbian language. Many Serb students attended the University of Pest and contributed to the city’s intellectual life. Some of them, like Dimitrije Davidović, became leading intellectuals and politicians in Serbia; others stayed and became integrated into the cultural life of the city. Born in Eger, Mihály Vitkovics [Mihailo Vitković] studied in Pest and became a prominent lawyer and bilingual poet of the city. While his poetry was largely imitative of classical models, he was an important mediator in the city’s literary circles, and he represented, together with Pál Szemere and István Horváth, Kazinczy’s language reform in Pest (see Kazinczy’s poetic epistle to him in vol. 3 of our History). In his mediating function, he carried an extensive correspondence with prominent Hungarian as well as Serb writers and intellectuals.

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Vuk Štefanović Karadžić, the great pioneer of Serbian grammar and folklore, settled in Vienna, but passed repeatedly through Buda when shuttling between his adopted home and Belgrade, where he maintained a tenuous relationship with the unpredictable Serb despot, Miloš Obrenović. During his first brief stay in Buda in 1810, he came to know Davidović, Serbia’s minister of education and culture in 1834–35, and the linguists Luka Milovanov and Sava Mrkalj. Milovanov helped him write in 1814 his first important Serbian grammar, Pismenica serbskoga jezika po govoru prostoga naroda (Orthography of the Serbian Language according to the Usage of the Common People) by providing him with the rules (Wilson 100). “Pedrag and Nenad,” one of the important folk songs in Karadžić’s famous collection, was sent to him by a Serb friend in Buda (Karadžić, Songs 249). Devastation of the vineyards, tensions between Hungarian and Serb nationalists (including violent clashes in 1848–49), and other factors led to the decline of Serb culture in and around Buda/Pest by the mid–nineteenth century. The Matica Srpska moved to Újvidék/Novi Sad in 1864, together with the Srpski letopis. Buda’s Tabán district, also called Rácváros (Serb City) remained heavily populated with Serbs in the nineteenth century, until the charming but unsanitary small houses, narrow streets, and vineyards were condemned by the city in 1909; World War I and the economic depression delayed their demolition until 1933. Gyula Krúdy, the great Hungarian modernist arrived in the capital just in time to savor and describe the decaying charm of Tabán’s lingering pubs and restaurants. His 1930 short story, Zöld Ász (Green Ace), a tragi-comic epitaph to the place as well as to its people, opens with a baroque evocation of a disintegrating world: Home of streets winding up the hill to inscrutable destinies; thresholds merely to stumble over; ailing doors that dropped from their position when unfamiliar hands touched them; furniture that was new in grandmother’s time, and people even older; embittered threadbare sofas; arthritic chairs; […] fleas that forgot how to jump on eternally squatting old women; desperate, limping old roosters;[…] dusty courtyards that surrender to lugubrious decay in the night; exhausted oil lamps; […] women’s blouses swinging on worn clothes lines and yellowed by indifference; […] women shrunk to the size of a letter in a prayer book without ever getting to know the magic of a lovers’ night; men bewitched already in childhood and grown old in nuttiness; virgins sloppy with their garters already in cloister schools; young wives who stayed childless […]. (Delikátesz 606–607)

Three long, untranslatable paragraphs describe a carnival of misery, each of them ending its list of unlived and decaying existences with a decision by somebody to become abstinent. Yet this defiance of dissolution tragically severs the tie between a little bartender and her lover, who goes mad in the end, in spite of all efforts to cure him and bring him back to her. Three years after publishing Zöld Ász, Krúdy succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and to exhaustion from a dissolute life, just when the first pickaxes hit the Tabán. What escaped destruction then (for instance the Serbian Orthodox church), was destroyed in World War II.

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Slovak Literary Culture in Buda and Pest The twin city used to have also a sizable Slovak population, which counted among its members Ján Kollár, perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century Slovak poet, who served as a chaplain and later as a minister in the parish of the Lutheran church in Pest. His struggle to get a secure appointment and to receive full recognition for his Slovak constituents within the church (for details see Matus) offers an insight into the ethnic tension of the Hungarian capital during the reform period of 1810–48. Born in Upper Hungary (Felvidék), Kollár studied at the University of Jena (1817–19), where he had three defining experiences: participation in the Burschenschaftsbewegung (German youth movement); the discovery of old Slavic place names around Jena and northern Germany; and meeting Mina Schmidt, a parson’s daughter, whom he married finally in 1835, after believing for years that she was dead. The subordinate and insecure position he assumed in 1819 in the Lutheran community of Pest was less than what he expected: he was appointed as a chaplain, not as a minister, because he was unable to serve the Hungarian constituency of the Church. His linguistic handicap was and remained his deficient Hungarian, but his greatest conflict was not with this rather small constituency of the church (less than 100 members in those years) but with the largest one, the German constituency (1700–1800 members), one of whose leaders was professor Schedius. Kollár served mainly the Slovak constituency, which had 1300–1500 members. The Slovak demands for a minister of their own led to bitter internal struggles in the Lutheran church, which were finally resolved on the highest governmental level but only in 1834. In the final agreement, Kollár was recognized as the vicar of a semi-independent Slovak constituency, but without a vote of the community as a whole, because he was unacceptable for the other constituencies. The hostility against Kollár was only partly based on his position in the church and his stubborn struggle to get equal rights for the Slovaks. In several of his publications, most notably in his Slávy dcera (Slava’s Daughter), the first version of which was published in Pest in 1824, and in his essay “O literární vzájemnosti mezi kmeny a nářečími slávskými” (On Literary Reciprocity among Slavic Tribes and Dialects; 1836), Kollár advocated a Slavic revival that appeared to some as a dangerous form of pan-Slavism. In 1826, Kollár started with Martin Hamuljak a Slovak Reading Club (Slovenský čitatelský spolok), and, with other Slovaks of Pest, a Society of the Friends of the Slovak Language and Literature (Spolok milovníkov reči a literatúry slovenskej; 1834). Kollár’s disapproval of the separation of the Slovak language from the Czech diminished his popularity among Slovak nationalists but won him the admiration of many other Slavs. For example, the Croat Ljudevit Gaj got to know Kollár while studying in Pest and developed his ideas for an Illyrian nationalist movement under his influence. There is a certain visionary madness in Kollár’s Slávy dcera, a sonnet cycle containing, in the first version, a foreword (Předzpěv) and one-hundred fifty poems divided into three sections on rivers: the Sála (Sale), the Labe (Elbe), and the Dunaj (Danube). Kollár fused here the idea of a submerged Slavic culture in Central Europe with the image of his beloved Mina from Jena, whom he considered at the time to be dead. Yet underlying the originality of the combination is a cluster of romantic topoi about lost glory and present decay. There is, thus, a striking analogy between Kollár’s cycle and the epic poem Zalán futása (Zalán’s Flight; 1825) that the leading Hungarian poet, Mihály Vörösmarty, published just a year later, also in Buda. If Kollár’s bygone ages shroud

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him in the night, opposing their glory to the shame and corruption of the present day, Vörösmarty opens with the famous line: “Old glory of ours, where are you lingering in the darkness of the night?” Vörösmarty’s epic differs from Kollár’s loose narrative, but both poems are clarion calls to awaken their respective nations. Unfortunately, the two calls inevitably came into conflict, though Kollár’s preface placed the blame for the Slovak problems on the Germans, not the Hungarians. In spite of political differences, the Slovak population of the Hungarian capital was continually replenished by immigrants from the north and could thus sustain a Lutheran church and school until a rapid decline set in after World War I. The Hungarian Reform Period in Buda and Pest Pozsony (Pressburg/Bratislava) remained the place of the diet and the administrative center of the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire until 1848. However, the creation of several important cultural institutions in Pest during the early nineteenth century gradually led to a major shift in the cultural life of the Carpathian basin. As mentioned, the National Library, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the National Theater were founded. From January 2, 1841, the Pesti Hírlap (The Pest Newspaper) started to appear twice a week. Edited by Lajos Kossuth until 1844, it paved the way for the 1848 revolution. The paper devoted even more attention to the interests of Pest after Kossuth was succeeded by the historian László Szalay and the publicist Antal Csengery, two members of the group that viewed centralization as one of their goals. The revolution broke out in Pest and Buda on March 15, 1848, and four days later, the Marczius Tizenötödike (March Fifteenth), organ of the radical intellectuals of Pest, appeared. The city played a major role in the development of liberalism, which was supported by a considerable section of the nobility and made it possible for people of diverse ethnic, religious, and social background to rise both economically and socially. A decisive step towards the unification of the cities on the two sides of the Danube was made when the lánchíd (chain bridge), the first permanent connection planned by Széchenyi, was completed in 1849. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, identity often depended on personal decision rather than on ethnic origin. As the reform period progressed and the Hungarian national awakening strengthened, Hungarian became the primary language of literary and cultural life. As is well known, both parents of Sándor Petőfi were of Slavic origin, yet this poet became the most influential figure of the youth of Pest that started the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49. As a high school student in Pest, he may have come into contact with Jan Kollár, but their national orientations went in different directions. One of the consequences of the defeat of the 1848 revolution was that bureaucrats from the Czech lands and Austria settled in Pest-Buda. Pesti Napló (The Pest Daily), the most important of the post-revolutionary dailies, was started in 1850. In 1855, Zsigmond Kemény became its editor. Born into one of the distinguished Transylvanian aristocratic families, he became known as the leading publicist of Erdélyi Híradó (Transylvania Herald) before he settled in Pest and joined the staff of Pesti Hírlap. As a publicist, he argued for a liberal treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. During the revolution, he drafted the law of Jewish emancipation. His most important post-revolutionary pamphlets, A forradalom után (After the Revolution; 1850) and Még egy szó a

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forradalom után (One More Word after the Revolution; 1851), called — like the Czech František Palacký’s open letter of 1848 to the Frankfurt parliament (see p. 273 in vol. 1 of our History) — for a strong Central Europe that could resist German and Russian domination. Élet és irodalom (Life and Literature; 1852–53), a sociological analysis of culture, and Eszmék a regény és a dráma körül (Ideas on the Novel and Drama; 1853), a theoretical investigation of the relations between narrative and dramatic presentation, were addressed to the new bourgeoisie and appeared in installments. As a writer of narrative fiction, he aimed at creating a new public. Gyulai Pál (Pál Gyulai; 1847) was an attempt to subvert form by establishing a dialogue between very different discourses; Férj és nő (Husband and Wife; 1852) was a searching analysis of the incompatibility of feudal and bourgeois mentalities; and Ködképek a kedély láthatárán (Phantom Visions on the Horizon of Mood; 1853) questioned the identity of the self. Özvegy és leánya (A Widow and Her Daughter; 1855–57) and A rajongók (The Fanatics; 1858–59) explored irrationalism in history (see also pp. 471, 475 on his Zord idő). One of the main characteristics of Pest’s literary culture in the second half of the nineteenth century was the growing gap between high and popular culture. Although Lúdas Matyi (1867–73) and Üstökös (Comet; 1858–1919), started by the popular novelist Mór Jókai, were well-established comic weeklies, the landmark year in the history of Hungarian comic papers was 1868, when the first issue of Borsszem Jankó (Johnny Hayseed) appeared. Between 1870 and the early 1890s, it had a readership of at least 15,000–20,000. If Üstökös published anecdotes that inspired novelists and short-story writers, Borsszem Jankó contributed to the development of urban jokes that served as a starting point for the humor of Frigyes Karinthy and other writers. In 1870, Buda and Óbuda had 70,000, Pest 200,476 inhabitants. In the decades following the 1872 unification of the three cities, Budapest was the fastest growing city in Europe. By 1891, it had more than half a million inhabitants, of which 67.1% considered themselves Hungarian. Among the ethnic minorities, Germans represented 23.7% and Slovaks 5.6%. By that time, the Serbian minority was no more than 0.3% of the population, but it still had its own Orthodox churches and publications. Throughout the nineteenth century, the relative proportion of the religious communities seemed to be stable, with the sole exception of Jews. In 1720, no more than 12,000 Jews lived in Hungary. By 1850, their number rose to 366,000, by 1910 to one million, 5% of the population. As a consequence of the emancipation law passed by the revolutionary parliament in 1849, Jews were regarded as a religious and not as an ethnic community. In 1851, they represented no more than 15.1% of the population of Pest-Buda. By 1891, their relative proportion increased to 21%. In other words, they became the largest religious minority; 64.4% of the population of Budapest was Roman Catholic, 7.3% Calvinist, and 6% Lutheran. The Jews were concentrated in the capital and made up only 5% of the country’s population. The Jewish community in Budapest was far from homogeneous in terms of religion and language. In 1880, more than 80% of them regarded German as their first language; by 1900, their number decreased to 20%. The intellectual elite continued to be bilingual: Béla Zalai, an early representative of Husserl’s phenomenology; Béla Balázs, poet, essayist, and one of the early theoreticians of film; the philosopher György Lukács; and the art critic Leo Popper wrote important works in German. One of the consequences of assimilation was that numerous scholars of Jewish parentage were elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, including the Orientalists Ignác Goldziher and Ármin Vámbéry, and the

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linguists Zsigmond Simonyi and Bernát Munkácsi. More and more writers of Jewish origin published, especially in A Hét (The Week), started by József Kiss in 1890. Nevertheless, the Romanian poet and later politician Octavian Goga questioned Kiss’s Hungarianness — and he was not alone. When on December 13, 1912, the Hungarian Minister of Religion and Culture, János Zichy, declared that the minorities have a right to their language but the Hungarian state can allow only a single culture within its borders, namely, the all-powerful and imperishable one inspired by the Hungarian soul (Ady, Összes prózai 198), Goga responded in Românul, the leading Romanian paper in Hungary, with a highly ironic article on January 7, 1913, asserting that Hungarians were a dying race in the so-called Hungarian literature, for they had been replaced by figures called Meyer, Durand and Löwy, or, for that matter, Kiss. The source of all this was Budapest, “this sudden city, with its Americanism, cabarets, Jews, jargon of Dohány utca, obscenities of the night.” Kiss, with all his talent and charm, was part of this: “Hungarian national literature came to an end in poetry with Petőfi and János Arany, in prose with Mikszáth, yielding to a Jewish national literature of Budapest, which rules today” (Ady, Összes prózai 205–207). Endre Ady, a friend of Goga who had attempted earlier to bring him closer to the new Hungarian writers (see Ady Összes prózai 212–13), wrote a reply on May 16, 1913 (17–19). As a “fanatic friend of the Romanians,” he thought that Goga spoke out of envy, for Hungary “had lived its life always a bit with Europe,” and Jewish-Hungarian literature was part of this (18). Writers from the ethnic minorities residing in Budapest became now rapidly assimilated to the Hungarian majority. Among the short-story writers, István Petelei was Armenian, whereas Elek Gozsdu was partly of Romanian partly of Serbian descent, and the novelist and playwright Ferenc Herczeg was born into the German community of southern Hungary. Their example shows that assimilation depended virtually on a single criterion: adoption of the Hungarian language. The writer József Eötvös, who published in 1840 a pamphlet on the emancipation of Jews (A zsidók emancipációja), and in 1851 and 1854 the two volumes of A XIX. század uralkodó eszméinek befolyása az álladalomra (The Influence of the Ruling Ideas of the Nineteenth-Century on the State), drafted a law on national minorities that was passed in 1868. This law made Hungarian the official language of public life but also permitted the use, on request, of a second, third, and even fourth language spoken by minorities. It alienated the nationalists, and not much of the law was subsequently put into practice. In 1907, a Verein zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums in Ungarn (Association for the Preservation of German Nationality in Hungary) was created, with the support of Karl Lueger, the highly popular mayor of Vienna, but it could not stop the assimilation of Budapest’s German-speaking population. While in 1880 18% spoke only Hungarian, by 1910 the percentage rose to 47%. The most important periodicals of the 1850s and 60s were modeled on British journals, but the last decade of the nineteenth century was dominated by Kiss’s A Hét (The Week), which was largely responsible for the development of the Hungarian equivalent of the French “feuilleton,” a genre that brought journalism and narrative fiction into close contact. Even such outstanding bourgeois writers as Dezső Kosztolányi and Sándor Márai relied on this tradition. Alienation as a possible consequence of urban life appeared early in the verse of János Arany. His lyric poem “Kertben” (In a Garden; 1852) presents a world in which people are strangers to each other, and his ballad “Híd-avatás” (The Inauguration of a Bridge; 1877) is a vision of a danse macabre, in which young people jump into the Danube from the new Margit Bridge in Budapest.

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László Arany, János’s son and one of the most gifted poets and essayists of the next generation, provided a powerful contrast between the intimacy of rural life and the cultural estrangement of urban civilization in his verse novel, A délibábok hőse (The Hero of Mirages; 1872). Finally, the hero of Géza Gárdonyi’s short novel, Az öreg tekintetes (The Old Honorable; 1905), is a highly sensitive old man who finds himself isolated among the superficialities of the capital. Still, the cultural criticism articulated by those who viewed the rapid changes in Budapest with skepticism was overshadowed by the optimism that culminated in the millennial celebrations of Hungary’s existence in 1896. A third bridge and the körút, equivalent of the Viennese “Ring,” were completed. The subway, first on the continent, was constructed to connect the inner city with the exhibition site in the Városliget (City Park). In view of such spectacular changes, it is quite understandable that the city was celebrated in verse, plays, and novels. Even the rapid growth of capitalism and the interactions between business and politics were featured, for example, in Ödön Iványi’s A püspök atyafisága (The Bishop’s Relatives; 1889). Other aspects of urbanization were treated in novels ranging from Tamás Kóbor’s Budapest (1901), a naturalistic documentary of a Jewish district, to Cécile Tormay’s A régi ház (The Old House; 1914), a novel about the assimilation of the German bourgeoisie; and from Kálmán Harsányi’s A kristálynézők (Crystal Gazers; 1914), a metafictional interpretation of the life style of Hungarian Art Nouveau artists, to Lajos Kassák’s Angyalföld (1929), a fictionalized presentation of a working-class suburb in Budapest. The best known internationally among these, A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys; 1907) by Ferenc Molnár, can serve as a good illustration of ethnic assimilation. The young hero’s loyalty to his friends brings about his premature death. He lives in a poor district and his surname, Nemecsek, suggests that he may come from a family of Slavic (possible Slovak) origin. His self-sacrifice could suggest that the assimilated would support the Hungarian community — a message the novel’s author may also have supported. The attraction of Budapest increased in the years before World War I; it drew people from outside to the city and fostered the formation of intellectual groups and coteries. Budapest had now become the second largest city of the Habsburg Monarchy, a center of concentration for multilingual culture. While the majority of its middle class spoke Hungarian, German, or Yiddish, the reduced Serbian community preserved its religious traditions, and Slovak workers developed a popular culture of their own. Despite periodic threats of political, social, and ethnic conflicts, the upper- and even the middle classes enjoyed relative freedom and security. With light taxation, hardly any inflation, cheap food and labor, and a plentiful supply of domestic servants, many middle class families had comfortable and sheltered lives. Intellectuals were being urbanized, experiencing those emotions of stability and alienation that accompany city life. At the beginning of the twentieth century, four major trends emerged in the intellectual life of Budapest; each was characterized by a specific attitude towards urbanization. Two of them, the movement around the journal Nyugat (1908– ), and the somewhat later avant-garde led by Lajos Kassák, editor of A Tett (1915–1916) and Ma (1916–1926), could be called artistic in the strict sense. Huszadik Század (1900– ), edited by Oszkár Jászi, was the organ of sociologists and political scientists, whereas the primary interest of A Szellem (1911), the short-lived organ of what was to be known as the “Sunday Circle,” was metaphysics.

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Each of these four trends claimed to represent modernity, but their definitions of it were different. The most important contributors of Nyugat, a journal that developed contacts with the coeval La Nouvelle Revue Française, were creative writers born in the provinces who drew inspiration from their early years spent in the countryside. Their poetry and fiction were dominated by a retrospective glance. The poet Ady made significant returns to his village, both in a physical and in a psychological sense; the novelist Zsigmond Móricz focused on the life of the gentry and the peasantry; the poet and essayist Mihály Babits evoked memories of his native Transdanubia in numerous poems and in his long autobiographical novel Halálfiai (Sons of Death; 1927); the major works of Dezső Kosztolányi, from the verse cycle A szegény kisgyermek panaszai (Complaints of the Poor Little Child; 1910) to the novels Pacsirta (Skylark; 1924) and Aranysárkány (The Golden Kite/Dragon; 1925), were imaginative though unflattering recreations of his childhood in the provincial town, Szabadka (Subotica). The activities of the different groups overlapped, but these areas of commonality were overshadowed by the fundamental clashes among the four movements. While the sociologists and political scientists of Huszadik Század believed that modernity meant value-free rationalism, belief in evolution, and confidence that science could offer complete explanations, the creative writers of Nyugat discarded both scientism and functionalism, and were attracted to Symbolism, Jugendstil, and psychoanalysis. Sándor Ferenczi, a close friend of Freud, and Géza Csáth, a neurologist and short story writer, were regular contributors to this journal. Huszadik Század took a serious interest in nationalism, and Jászi developed good relations with Czech and Romanian intellectuals. His study A nemzeti államok kialakulása és a nemzetiség kérdés (The Rise of Nation States and the Nationality Question; 1912) put forth the idea of reorganizing Central Europe, based on the principle of national self-determination. In contrast, most of the leading contributors of Nyugat published works that were deeply rooted in precapitalist traditions. Among the members of the “Sunday Circle,” Béla Balázs and György Lukács regarded German philosophy and literature as a cultural model for the rest of humankind, and they ignored the ethnic conflicts of the region. With Kassák´s avant-garde, a new internationalism emerged. In his free-verse poem, Mesteremberek (Craftsmen; 1915), he referred to Budapest as a supranational metropolis like Rome, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and London. He replaced Nyugat’s individualism and retrospective attitude with a collective and prophetic voice, and he dismissed ethnicity and rural values as residues of the past. For most of the writers of Nyugat, modernity was a way of escaping from the clutches of German culture. Since Budapest competed with Vienna, the artists of the Hungarian city looked for models outside the German-speaking countries. Ady translated Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Jean Rictus; the highly imaginative fiction of Krúdy drew inspiration from Pushkin and Turgenev; Babits admired Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The reaction against German models was also felt in the other arts: the Gödöllő school of Hungarian Art Nouveau was founded on the principles of Ruskin and William Morris; the painter József Rippl-Rónai joined “Les Nabis” in Paris; and Béla Bartók discovered in the music of Claude Debussy an antidote to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Budapest’s spirited theatrical activity was dominated by Herczeg and Molnár. Both were conservative artists, although they came from the middle class, just as most contributors of Huszadik

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Század and the members of the “Sunday Circle,” in sharp contrast to Ady, Móricz, Babits, or Kosztolányi, who came from the two traditional precapitalist classes: the nobility and the peasantry. Capitalism irrevocably changed the life of Hungary. During the Napoleonic wars, the center of literary life was Ferenc Kazinczy’s country house in Széphalom, a small village in the Northeast of the country. A century later, the writers gathered to discuss politics and culture in the coffeehouses of Budapest. Ironically, institutional changes and transformations in the social context of literature were not always complementary. While the consumers of art may have changed, the most original creative talents continued to come from the traditional classes. In the early twentieth century, art was often sponsored by “nouveau riche” families (sometimes of Jewish origin), but produced by members of what had been the lesser nobility until the abolition of feudalism in 1848. The impact of capitalism may have been strong on literary institutions (theatres, publishing houses, newspapers), but the social background of Ady, Krúdy, Babits, and Kosztolányi was not different from that of Dániel Berzsenyi, Ferenc Kölcsey, Mihály Vörösmarty, János Arany, and Imre Madách — the poets who dominated the nineteenth century (Petőfi was the great exception). In contrast to some of their predecessors, all the members of the first Nyugat generation had to earn their living, but they often felt ill at ease in the new situation. Major novelists and poets were forced to write “feuilletons” and “feuilleton” short stories. These relatively new genres were closely tied to the rise of the press. Ady, Krúdy, and Kosztolányi had to devote several hours per day to journalism. The devastating criticism of the gentry came mostly from artists who themselves belonged to this class. If academic art was represented by Mihály Munkácsy, a painter of German petty bourgeois origin, Impressionism was started by Pál Szinyei Merse, and Expressionism was developed by Baron László Mednyánszky and Tivadar Csontváry Kostka — three painters of noble extraction — literary modernity was established by members of a class that often resisted modernization. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the gap between bourgeois and artist had widened. One is tempted to say that originality and provincialism coexisted in the culture of Budapest. Although Ady´s poetry had been called immoral, obscure, and even cosmopolitan by some of his right-wing contemporaries, the first book about it was written by a conservative literary historian, János Horváth. Like Ady, Horváth came from a Protestant family of the region called “Partium” (today in the north-west of Romania). In retrospect, the main thesis of Ady és a legújabb magyar líra (Ady and Recent Hungarian Poetry; 1910) is absolutely correct: an undeniable continuity exists between earlier national traditions and Ady´s work. The indebtedness of Babits and Kosztolányi to János Arany is even more obvious. Instead of rejecting, they reinterpreted him: while the nineteenth century viewed Arany as an epic poet; for Babits and Kosztolányi, he became the author of elegiac and ironic lyrics, a poet who was forced to move to Budapest and wrote in his later years about uprootedness in a rapidly changing city. Before Kassák made his presence felt, Ady had been the only major poet who sympathized with socialist ideas and published verse and articles in Népszava (The Voice of the People), a daily founded in 1890 by the Party of Hungarian Social-Democrats. Yet even Ady’s work reveals traces of nostalgia for preindustrial values. “Hazamegyek a falumba” (I Shall Return to My Village; 1907) and other of his poems suggest a rejection of urban civilization. Bartók regarded peasant culture as an antidote to the international “kitsch” of city life. In Halálfiai, Babits’s autobiographical novel, the hero moves from the rural and cohesive community to the achievement-oriented society of industrial capitalism. And Kosztolányi confessed in 1913: “What interests me is the

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Hungarian country-side […]. It is the land of miracles. Those who are born there will have a wider horizon than anybody brought up in a highly industrialized capital. […] In a world where nothing happens and life is dominated by drinking wine, playing cards, sadness, and solitude, the soul will have an inner dimension, a strange compression and intensity of emotions. Provincial life is always of purely psychic character” (Irók 2: 333–34). Significantly, almost no writer of great distinction was born in Budapest. One of the exceptions was Cécile Tormay, a middle-class novelist whose ancestors belonged partly to the Hungarian nobility and partly to the German bourgeoisie. Her second novel, A régi ház (An Old House; 1914), suggested that the traditions of the German cities of Ofen and Pesth could make a significant contribution to culture only once they were combined with the rural legacy of the landowning class. Clearly, Kassák´s avant-garde brought a radical change to this view of Budapest. For him, the cosmopolitan metropolis was not a source of cultural estrangement, but the basis for creating a culture stripped of local color. His movement grew out of the immense shock the war produced in the minds, and he pleaded with those “brothers” who felt that a “new man” and a “new society” would emerge after the war. Kassák felt no conflict between the needs of the creative artist and the values of industrial society. He felt at home in a working-class suburb of Budapest and later wrote his most successful novel Angyalföld about it. In 1919, a relatively small group of Communists introduced a totalitarian system in Budapest. Shortly after the fall of this dictatorship, the peace treaties of 1920 confirmed the collapse of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. The status of Budapest changed: from now on, it was the capital of a small nation-state. Ady died in January 1919, Jászi, Balázs, Lukács, and Kassák went into exile. Interwar Budapest was dominated by trends quite different from those of the early twentieth century. The tension between metropolitan cultural pluralism and the cult of national identity intensified. When Hungary lost more than two thirds of its territory in the peace treaty of Trianon, the resettlement of Hungarians uprooted from Transylvania and what used to be called Upper Hungary changed not only the composition of Budapest’s population but also its cultural milieu. On the one hand, urban writers, painters, and architects drew inspiration from the metropolitan innovations and some representatives of avant-garde art were inclined to associate modernity with the capital city; on the other hand, writers either coming from or expressing sympathy for the peasantry had reservations about what they regarded as Budapest’s internationalist life. After the end of World War II, there were attempts to establish a multiparty democracy, but the Soviet army and the Communists soon introduced a most oppressive political system. Cultural continuity was broken for several decades. Privately owned publishing houses were nationalized and replaced by state-owned firms. Writers who failed to make a compromise with the Communists were either silenced or forced into Western exile by György Lukács and other ideological leaders who returned from Moscow after the end of the war. Ujhold (New Moon), a quarterly started in 1946 by non-Communist writers, was banned in 1948, and the same year Márai was forced to leave the country. Writers and visual artists were expected to produce “socialist realist” works about the life of workers and peasants. After the death of Stalin in 1953, more and more authors, painters, and sculptors became alienated from the regime. The meetings of the Hungarian Writers’ Association were instrumental in the preparation of what turned out to be the bloodiest uprising in the postwar history of Communism. Some of the writers who participated in the revolution that

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broke out in Budapest on October 23, 1956, and was crushed by the Soviet troops on November 4, were imprisoned in 1957, including István Bibó, the most important non-Communist political essayist of the period (see pp. 85–90 in vol. 1 of our History). The Hungarian communist system became less rigid after 1956, but restrictions never disappeared. Scholarly institutions were set up with the idea that they could establish contacts with the West. The Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences made the results of Western scholarship available to the Hungarian public and developed good relations with the International Comparative Literature Association. Still, the activities of this institute were strictly limited to research, while the universities were expected to represent more dogmatic forms of Marxism. A monthly with the title Nagyvilág (The Global World) was launched to make foreign literature available in translation, but on the principle that “progressive” literature was to be supported, some other works were to be tolerated, and others again were to be called reactionary and banned. Similar distinctions were made with narrative fiction, verse, and plays written in Hungary. The authorities delayed the publication of such works as Harmadnapon (On the Third Day; 1959), a poetry collection by János Pilinszky containing visionary poems about the Holocaust, A látogató (The Case Worker; 1969), a book based on György Konrád’s experience as a sociologist, and Sorstalanság (Fatelessness; 1975), an autobiographical novel by the Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész, because they were considered to be too pessimistic. Márai’s short novel, Szabadulás (Liberation; 2000), written in 1945 about the siege of Budapest, could appear only after the collapse of Communism in 1990. Literary activity was marked by the influence of censorship, selfcensorship, and samizdat publication (see the sections on 1948 and 1956/1968 in our History). After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the publishing industry underwent quick and radical changes. The huge state-owned publishing houses were replaced by private ownership and small enterprise. Literature in the strict sense lost some of its prestige, and political freedom put an end to reading between the lines. Inflated reputations were downgraded, the curricula and the textbooks used in schools revised. In post-Communist Budapest, the reading public is strongly divided. In many cases, the popularity of publications seems to be governed by political interest rather than by artistic considerations. Javitott kiadás — melléklet a Harmonia caelestishez (Emended edition — a Supplement to Harmonia Caelestis; 2002) by Péter Esterházy, a relatively short book about the author’s discovery of documents indicating his father’s activity as an informant employed by the Communists, seems to have attracted more readers than Esterházy’s long and difficult works of narrative fiction. It remains to be seen what role Budapest can play in a Europe moving towards integration. On May 1, 2004, Hungary and nine other countries joined the European Union. Today, Budapest seems more international than it was in the previous century, and Hungarian literature finds more and more readers in other countries. A novel by Márai, who committed suicide in San Diego one year before the first democratic elections in post-Communist Hungary, became a best-seller at the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1999; Kertész received the Nobel Prize in 2002; Esterházy the Peace Prize in 2004. Yet there is growing concern among some Hungarians that their language may lose its vigor in a world of globalization. An increasing number of books and periodicals are being published in Budapest in English, German, and other languages.

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Prague: Magnetic Fields or the Staging of the Avant-Garde Veronika Ambros You are in an inn-garden near Prague You feel perfectly happy a rose is on the table And you observe instead of writing your story in prose The chafer asleep in the heart of the rose (Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone 17)

The city that the French poet entered in 1902 was provincial, parochial in its outlook on life, yet aware of its historical importance. Referred to as “Paris of Central Europe” (Epstein 140), Prague traditionally served as a meeting point of different cultures. Already in 865 AD, a Jewish trader, Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, described a town built of stone and lime, a city that through trade is the richest of all. From Krakow Russians and Slavs come there with goods, and from the lands of the Turks Mohammedans and Jews come to the people of Prague […]. (Sayer 30n)

Throughout the centuries, the position of the city reflected different political and cultural alliances. One of the high points in its history was the reign of the Emperor Charles IV who chose Prague as the capital of the Roman Empire of the German Nation. Charles, a Renaissance ruler, educated in Italy and France, was equally interested in art and economics. He corresponded with Petrarch, founded in 1348 the university in Prague, introduced wine production, fishponds, and new techniques in agriculture and supported art as well. Although the Hussites, the Czech reformation movement following his rule, destroyed many a monument of this era, the architecture of the city still bears his imprint. During the fifteenth century, Prague was merely the capital of the Bohemian kingdom. Yet, in the sixteenth century, the town became an important center of trade, art, science, and religious unrest again. The Habsburg emperor Rudolf II declared it once more the capital of the German empire, and he gathered acclaimed physicians, astronomers, and artists to Prague. The famous painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a predecessor of the surrealists, was among those summoned to the court. Ripellino draws a parallel between Arcimboldo’s composite images and the “rustic masks of the Czech Baroque theatre” (Ripellino 85). Under the influence of the flourishing mysticism, he surrounded himself with alchemists who were ordered to find the elixir of life or the stone of wisdom. Connected with Rudolf’s time is also the Golem legend. The Golem, a predecessor to the robot (an artificial “human being” conceived by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in 1921), was a man made of lime, created, as the legend goes, by the great Rabbi Loew of Prague in order to protect the Jewish part of town. (There are a variety of different versions of the story in which the rabbi eventually has to destroy his own creation). Golem became fashionable again through the eponymous novel by the German writer Gustav Meyrink published in 1915, more than a decade after Apollinaire’s visit to Prague in 1902. If the German, Jewish, and Czech intersections of Prague culture are well known (one of the most recent contributions to this topic is Peter Demetz’ Prague in Black and Gold), it is only

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recently that Prague has been discussed as a meeting point of Eastern and Western European (Russian and French) cultures between the wars (see Tihanov’s article in vol. 1 of our History). The 1920s are generally seen as the zenith of the European Avant-garde. Helen Epstein lists among the trends that entered Czech cultural life at this time German Expressionism and French Cubism. In the context of Czech theater, the term Avant-garde includes Poetism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. One of the small and short-lived theaters called Dada declared its allegiance (Obst and Scherl 54, 156) to Dadaism, but this movement was weak in the Czech context. Elements of Dadaism feature prominently in the prose of Jaroslav Hašek (Guski; Ambros, “Avantgarde”). Since Expressionism deserves separate attention (see Bojtár in vol. 1 of our History), it is Poetism and Surrealism I wish to discuss here. Although I borrowed the title of my article from the “first” surrealist text Les Champs magnetique, written by André Breton and Philippe Soupault in 1919, I will be concerned primarily with the literal meaning of this image, with the way in which the Czech stage attracted and repelled the Russian and French artistic experiments and theories. Their bond reaches far beyond Jarka Burian’s claim that the Soviet influence was mainly evident in staging, the French in texts (“E.F. Burian” 95–116). Although the historical Avant-garde was an international movement, in the spirit of Paul Mann’s observation that “the avant-garde is first the instrument of an attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by the tradition itself” (11), I will take into account the Czech cultural context as well. The traditional role of the Czech theater was to substitute for the political arena. After 1918, however, the Czech stage opened up to all kinds of artistic experiments. The list of the set designers, composers, and choreographers reads like a version of who’s who of modern Czech art, and includes Vlastislav Hofman, Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, Karel Teige, and Jindřich Štýrský. International artists such as Pirandello, Marinetti, Breton, and Mayakovsky visited Prague; their texts and those of many other representatives of the Avant-garde were performed on Czech stages. Finally yet importantly, Otakar Zich’s study from 1931, Estetika dramatického umění (The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art), coincided with several attempts to redefine the role of art in general and the performing arts in particular. Zich’s work generated a semiotic performance theory based on the cooperation between artists and theorists. Directors E[mil] F[rantišek] Burian (O nové divadlo) and Jindřich Honzl (“Ritual and Theater”) challenged the traditional understanding of theater, not only on stage but also in theoretical contributions. At the same time, theorists such as Petr Bogatyrev, Jan Mukařovský, Roman Jakobson, Jiří Veltruský, and Karel Brušák — all of them members of the Prague Linguistic Circle and proponents of structuralism in literary theory — paid special attention to the artistic experiments of their contemporaries. Unlike the Russian Formalists who, with a few exceptions, derived their theories from poetry as the dominant literary genre of the Russian Avant-garde (Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov in particular), their Czech colleagues paid special attention to drama, theater, and dialogue (e.g., Mukařovský, “Dvě studie o dialogu” [Two Studies on Dialogue]). Their works are indicative of the altered position of Prague. As the city shook off its provincialism, becoming the capital of the Czechoslovak Republic, it transformed new impulses coming from abroad into a new blend of modernism. Czech contacts with Russian culture after 1918 came about through different types of mediators: exiles, official representatives, and visitors. The division among these groups was fluid. Many Russian intellectuals found refuge in the newly formed Czechoslovakia, for the Masaryk administration offered asylum to Russian refugees and financial support to Russian émigré scien-

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tists and writers. One of the most prominent exiles who stayed in Prague during the twenties was the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Her sentiments about her former host country were expressed after the Munich treaty of 1938 in Stikhi k Čechii (Verses for Bohemia), a collection of passionate poems in which she expressed her grief about the destruction of Bohemia. Although most Czechs did not notice the presence of the newly emerging Russian community in Prague, some were directly affected by it. The “forerunner of structural ethnography” Petr Bogatyrev (Matejka, Sound 4) extended his examination of Russian folklore to Czech and Slovak folk theater. It was also Bogatyrev who carried over “the concept of language phenomena to art” (Deák 90). Furthermore, Bogatyrev cooperated closely with the theater director Burian when he turned to the tradition of the Czech folk theater. Most influential among the young Russian scholars was the linguist Roman Jakobson, a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926. His impact on the theater was “pervasive” (Quinn, “Jakobson” 153). As a representative of Russian Formalism, Jakobson was instrumental in forming a new approach to the theory of Czech verse and, therefore, a new viewpoint on literature. Jakobson was also an important mediator between the two cultures, above all by introducing Czech artists to the poetry of his Russian compatriots, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. The 1984 Nobel Prize winner, Jaroslav Seifert mentions in his memoirs (Všecky 319) that Jakobson asked him to translate Aleksandr Blok’s famous poem “Dvenadtsat΄” (Twelve; 1918). When Seifert failed to produce an acceptable translation, Honzl, who did not understand the text properly, replaced the prostitutes of the original with soldiers of the Red Army (Seifert 319). Blok’s verses transposed into Czech by Seifert also mark Honzl’s first attempt to stage poetry for and with workers. Following the traditional tendency of Czech theater to function as a substitute for a political forum, Honzl founded in 1920 a group called Dědrasbor (acronym of Workers Dramatic Chorus) that recited modern Czech and foreign poetry (Montmarte 157n). Inspired by Revolyutsiya i teatr (Revolution and Theater; 1918), in which Platon Mikhailovich Kerzhentsev, one of the leaders of the Russian Proletkult movement, expressed his ideas on the new theater (the book was reviewed in the Czech leftist newspaper Právo lidu), Honzl attempted to create new forms of theater aimed at the proletariat (Obst and Scherl 16; Kleberg 58). As a member of the Devětsil group, Honzl was “devoted to revolution in art, life and politics” (French 21). The name of the group (literally “nine powers,” denoting the plant digitalis — foxglove) alludes to the nine muses and to the nine original artists of the group, representing different branches of art (Seifert 152). Devětsil, founded in 1920 in Prague as an association of young, predominantly Marxist, poets, critics, musicians, architects, and painters, represented the Czech Avant-garde movement of the twenties. The organization became first a platform for proletarian art. Soon, however, the young artists subscribed to Ilya Ehrenburg’s claim that “the new art will cease to be art” (Seifert 37). Seifert, one of the most influential authors of the group, bid farewell to traditional art in his poem “Všecky krásy světa” (All the Beauties of the World; 1922): “umění je mrtvo, svět žije bez něho” (art is dead, the world lives without it; Chvatík and Pešat 12n). Seifert’s poem begins the transition from proletarian art to Poetism, the only exclusively Czech “ism,” which functioned approximately from 1924 to 1929. The term Poetism designates a blend between Dada and Surrealism, with Marxism as its ideological base. Enthusiastic about the revolutionary art of their Soviet colleagues, the poetists foresaw a general revolution in life and art that would dissolve the two in harmony. Art was considered a “modus vivendi” and was no longer

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confined to traditional genres, products, and categories. The “optimistic” attitude of the “poetists” towards present and future prepared readers for “a world that laughs” (Teige 123). Květoslav Chvatík calls the poetist attitude “historical optimism” in order to contrast it with that of Franz Kafka (“Setkání” 24). The attribute “historical” seems to echo, however, the Marxist ideology of the proletarian era, and contradicts the rather unorthodox Poetist treatment of history. Poetism did not regard itself as yet another literary trend or aesthetic method but claimed to be “a modernized Epicurism” (Teige 125–26). In contrast to the proletarian legacy, Poetism was more playful and buoyant. According to its theoretician, Karel Teige, film and radio, sport and dance, circus and music halls were the sources of pure poetry; among its teachers were clowns and Dadaists. To Alfred French this period of Czech art connotes the carnival (43n). The Bakhtinian notion of reversed order applies to this period in which lowbrow art was constitutive of the highbrow culture even though the Poetist theorists rejected this division. André Breton, key figure of French Surrealism, claimed that beginning with Jarry, “the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle” (Shattuck 168). Breton’s statement corresponds in spirit with “Papoušek na motocyklu” (Parrot on the Motorcycle), the first manifesto of Poetism, written in 1924 by Vítězslav Nezval, the poet “whose name was to dominate Czech avant-garde for twenty years” (French 26). The text of the manifesto precedes Nezval’s poem “Poetika,” according to which athletes, poets, and prostitutes march together (Pantomima 69) — both art and life are games. In 1925, Devětsil created its Liberated Theater (Osvobozené divadlo), which became one of the foremost stages of experimental productions. Its directors, Honzl and Jiří Frejka, rejected realistic and psychological theater, and attempted instead to merge the Constructivism of their Russian models, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexandr Tairov, with Poetism. The opening night of this experimental scene was devoted to a pastiche of Molière dubbed Circus Dandin. The Constructivist bent of the set shocked the conservative audience, while younger spectators were delighted (Pelc 8n). The name Liberated Theater (originally called the “Czech Scene”) alludes to a Russian, possibly also to a French source. First of all, it evokes Das entfesselte [unchained] Theater, the German translation of Tairov’s Zapisky rezhissyora (Notes of a Stage Director; 1921), but it may also play on the title of André Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre (Montmarte 25). Originally, the repertoire of the Liberated Theater consisted of French or original Czech texts (Obst and Scherl 91), such as Depeše na kolečkách (Dispatch on Wheels) by Nezval, written in 1922. Alfred French claims that Dadaism influenced Depeše na kolečkách, while Wolfgang Schwarz places it within the poetist tradition avant le mot (35). One can support both views and add a Surrealist one. This play, written two years before the first poetist manifesto was published, anticipated two trends Nezval himself helped create or re-create in the Czech context: Poetism and Surrealism. In Depeše, Nezval proclaimed the “revoluce veselí” (revolution of merriment), thus foreshadowing the poetist attitude of the Czech Avant-garde and rejecting the “collective pessimism” (Balakian 140) of the Dadaists. The Liberated Theater, where Nezval worked as the dramaturge between 1927 and 1929, produced Depeše twice. In 1926, Frejka presented it at a Nezval evening, along with a dance performance based on Nezval’s poem “Abeceda” (The Alphabet). It was published together with Depeše in the 1924 collection Pantomima (Pantomime). The

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stage set and costumes were the work of the distinguished Avant-garde painter Josef Šíma. Burian played one of the clowns. Honzl directed Depeše in 1928. One of the most important performances of the Liberated Theater was the staging of Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias) in 1926, which reconfirmed the importance of Apollinaire and of modern French poetry for the Czech Avant-garde. Karel Čapek introduced him to the Czech audience with his translations of French poetry in the anthology Francouzská poesie nové doby (French Poetry of the New Era; 1920), which marks a new era in Czech literature. Apollinaire’s faith in the future without sacrificing the present paralleled the optimism of the Poetists. As Milan Kundera, another translator of Apollinaire into Czech, claims, “every nation has its own ‘history of world literature.’ In our Czech history of literature, Apollinaire probably occupies a more important place than in any other” (Apollinaire, Alkoholy života 7). As Angelo Ripellino writes: Apollinaire also contributes to the myth of the Prague pilgrim in the story “Le passant de Prague” (1902), in which he strolls through the Bohemian capital with Isaac Laquedem, a reincarnation of the Wandering Jew. Apollinaire’s Ahasuerus is every bit a match for the wayfarer-philosopher of the Bohemian tradition. (56)

In 1929 Honzl summarized the first phase of his work at the Liberated Theater as an attempt to create a “scenic poem” (Obst and Scherl 93). According to a 1948 account, the stage of this early period was like a cubist picture, in which all materials and techniques, such as mobile lights and screen projections, and new movements were used (Obst and Scherl 137). Nezval, the dramaturge, suggested that in Honzl’s productions it was not only the people but also the objects that acted (Obst and Scherl 105). Honzl’s use of real objects was inspired by Meyerhold who achieved antirealistic effects, according to Honzl, by presenting “reality on stage” (Obst and Scherl 90). The prominent role of objects in theater was also explored theoretically in “Man and Object in Theatre” (1940), one of the first studies by the drama specialist of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Jiří Veltruský, as well as in Honzl’s own articles. Objects-things also played a crucial role in the surrealistic movement hosted by Prague in the thirties. In the mid-twenties, some members of Devětsil took a critical stand against Soviet art. Jiří Voskovec, while a high school student in Dijon, had rejected its propagandistic tendency already in 1925: “The agitation, with which the waters of the Neva are penetrated, ceases to be noticed. Agitation in opera, cinema, and exhibition is of no use — it devours itself. In the name of agitation, remove agitation from art” (Chvatík and Pešat 142). It was not this statement, however, but Voskovec’s acceptance of a role in a commercial movie that led to his exclusion from Devětsil. The case illustrates the increasingly rigid attitude of the group and its thorough contempt for bourgeois art. Nevertheless, Vest Pocket Revue (1927), a play by Voskovec and his friend Jan Werich (referred to by the acronym V+W), opened a second phase of the Liberated Theater (Ambros, “Vest Pocket”; Jarka Burian, “The Liberated Theatre”; Montmarte). Soon this became the “most popular theater in Czechoslovakia between the wars” (Quinn, “Liberated Theater” 153). Meyerhold, who visited the theater on his way home from Paris in 1936, shared the enthusiasm of the Czech audience:

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In 1913, my friend, the late poet Apollinaire, took me to the Cirque Medrano. After what we’d seen that night, Apollinaire exclaimed: “These performers — using the means of the commedia dell’arte — are saving the theater for artists, actors, and directors.” […] Only tonight, October 30, 1936, I saw the “zanni” again in the persons of the unforgettable duo of Voskovec and Werich, and was once more bewitched by performers rooted in the Italian commedia improviso. Long live commedia dell’arte! Long live Voskovec and Werich! (Jarka Burian, “The Liberated Theatre” 317).

On the occasion of the theater’s tenth anniversary, in 1937, Jakobson wrote an open letter to V+W on the epistemology and the semantics of fun (“Dopis Romana Jakobsona Jiřímu Voskovcovi a Janu Werichovi o noetice a sémantice švandy”), in which he points not only to Alfred Jarry as a source of inspiration but also to the Dadaist tendencies in Hašek’s novel The Good Soldier Švejk (see vol. 1. of our History). Voskovec translated Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Ubu King; 1896) into Czech and acted together with Werich in Honzl’s staging of it. The Communist critic, Julius Fučík, counted this evening among the most beautiful ones spent in the Liberated Theater (Pelc 66). It was also well received in Paris (Montmarte 74). The art of the thirties was affected by the political situation in and outside of Czechoslovakia. The Liberated Theater kept its ludic character but turned increasingly into a satirical stage. In 1929, the Devětsil was dissolved and many artists turned to Surrealism. An exhibition in 1932 presented Czech and international artists alike and was also the first international Surrealist show outside France, featuring Arp, Dalí, Ernst, Giacometti, Miró, and Tanguy. The participating Czech artists included Toyen, Štýrský, and Šíma, artists whose set designs contributed largely to the imaginative art of the Liberated Theater. In 1934 Prague’s Surrealist Group was founded; a year later it published the Bulletin international du surréalisme jointly with André Breton and Paul Eluard, who were impressed by the works of Nezval, Toyen, Štýrský, and the theoretical writings of Teige and of the journalist Záviš Kalandra. Nezval, the author of many surrealist poems and books, wrote in Praha s prsty deště (Prague with Fingers of Rain; 1936): I felt you, the city of a hundred spires, still half-submerged in old legends, and wearing before our eyes an enchanted robe spun from Spring’s lights, you could place all your old magic and youthful uncertainty in the service of the poetry we love. (Trans. Alfred French, in French 103)

The merriment of Prague slowly evaporated, however, and Eluard captured the decline by calling Prague “the capital of old Europe” (Demetz 351). The political trials in the Soviet Union led eventually to the downfall of the Surrealist group. Following the Munich treaty of 1938, Jakobson, Voskovec, and Werich fled Czechoslovakia. However, the Prague Linguistic Circle continued its work until 1948. During the war, many of the articles written by the theorists of the Circle focused on drama and theater, and their semiotics became its primary research field (Quinn, The Semiotic Stage). In the late forties, the “revolution of merriment” turned into a dance macabre. Prague, the metropolis of a nominally independent state, became just another capital on the fringes of the newly established Muscovite realm. Attempts to resurrect the Liberated Theater after the war

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failed. Voskovec, who briefly returned to Prague, left for the United States and became there an acclaimed Shakespearean actor. Werich stayed in Prague but was unable to have his own theater until the mid-fifties. One of the stagehands there was Václav Havel, the future playwright turned president. Many members of the surrealist movement were subjected to severe persecution in the early fifties. In 1953, at the exhibition of Toyen in Paris, Breton mourned the deaths of Kalandra, Štýrský, and Teige. Kalandra was tried in one of the first Czech political trials and executed in 1950. E. F. Burian’s reaction was to denounce Kalandra in a play à clef called “Pařeniště” (The Hotbed). By contrast Breton stood up for his friend and openly protested against the death sentence, but another former friend of Kalandra, Paul Eluard, “danced in all socialist countries and recited his verses about joy and brotherhood” (Kundera, Kniha 75), while ignoring his fate. In 1949, when Surrealism was attacked and Socialist Realist poetry was in demand, Nezval wrote a poem to “Stalin” and next year the officially praised “Zpěv míru” (Song of Peace). The latter is often regarded as an embodiment of Socialist Realism in Czech poetry, yet, ironically, it continued Prague‘s tradition as a magnetic field, a meeting point of different cultures, by incorporating the socialist impulse.

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Cities in Ashkenaz: Sites of Identity, Cultural Production, Utopic or Dystopic Visions Seth L. Wolitz, Brian Horowitz, with Zilla Jane Goodman

I.

Jewish Visions of the City (Seth L. Wolitz)

As Charles Baudelaire had already recognized in 1856, the nineteenth-century city represented modernity. It broke with the customs and traditions of the rural or provincial towns or even small cities. The great city presented an urban space never seen before, a space shaped by the new inventions and technological developments that changed forever communication and movement. Across Europe large cities had actually more in common with one another than with their own national hinterlands. Cultural life flourished, institutionalized its numerous activities, and integrated them into the city landscape. The opera house, the library, the museum, and numerous theaters played architectural roles that confirmed the status of culture as central emblems of civilization. Publishing houses and newspapers reinforced this vision with the massive production of literature and criticism. Alongside the dominant cultures of German and Russian in the two Empires in East-Central Europe, cultures like those of the Poles and the Czechs served as models for other cultures in the area seeking to modernize and attain recognition of their distinctiveness. Artists from a subaltern

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group sought to grasp the principles of the new poetics as part of their efforts to enter into the new cultural discourse. The Jews of Ashkenaz (for a comprehensive description of the position and role of Ashkenaz culture in East-Central Europe, see “Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe” in this volume) were no different. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, their artistic talents flocked to the city with other migrants from the depressed or culturally inert shtetlekh but also, paradoxically, from progressive shtetlekh where the aesthetic needs of the artist had become inadequate. The Jewish artist brought with him a vision of his Jewishness, both on a folk level and via the textual inheritance that was mainly religious. But the very need to seek aesthetic expression required a breaking with the inherited mold and the formulation of a new Jewish identity. In moving from the shtetl to the city, the Jewish artist often experienced the alienation of the new that he desired, however painfully he might have achieved it. His rejection of the shtetl world did not necessarily imply a total separation from it. Often enough the city functioned as an expansion of the vision of the shtetl, a vision that contained richness and variety but lacked opportunities of growth in the actual shtetl. Alternatively, the city provided the means of total escape from the shtetl culture. Individual choice and conditions came into play when a minority artist moved into a multicultural milieu. Most often, the city provided a vast mental space and territory of intellectual endeavor, a sort of super shtetl. Sholem Aleykhem, the most Ashkenazic of writers, never felt “decentered” or “deterritorialized” while he lived in Switzerland or traveled constantly for health. His shtetl, Pereyaslav, gave him his mental “centering,” and his move to Kiev marked the beginning of a geographical and mental expansion. Even his most famous fictional characters, Tevye and Menakhem Mendel, who represent a folk shtetl culture in transition, have different centering devices. The former is completely rooted, “centered,” on his piece of land and comfortably ensconced among his Gentile neighbors until the State exiles him. Exile does not destroy the shtetl whose member he continues to remain in his mind. His shtetl is the matrix of his values and material identity wherever he might find himself. By contrast, Menakhem Mendel finds the traditional shtetl confining for his imagination, and he escapes it literally to the cities of the Empire, particularly Odessa and Warsaw. His letters to his wife, who tries to reason with him to return home, make clear the conflict between the traditional world and the city world looming in his imagination. Still, while he never returns to the shtetl, he is not decentered but rather expands the shtetl into the city vision. In the novels of the modernist prose master in Yiddish, Dovid Bergelson, who represents the Jewish middle class and already Westernized Jewish figures, both the shtetl and the city contain individuals who may be alienated emotionally — but not necessarily culturally — from the shtetl traditions. Still, even here the Ashkenazic city dweller does not feel automatically decentered or deterritorialized — even with all the state restrictions placed upon the Jew living in the city. The modern Jew can reject shtetl traditions but still identify as a centered modern secular Jew with both the shtetl and the city. From the shtetl perspective, the city can appear utopian, as Mirel tended to believe in Bergelson’s masterwork, Nokh Aleman (When All Is Said and Done; 1913), until she moved there and found it as dystopic as the shtetl. Attempts to place the complexes of Heine or Kafka on the Eastern European Jews, to project their alienation from Judaism as a faith group and even from their ethnicity, are often futile, bringing questionable theoretic models to bear on them. Ashkenazic Jews lived in multicultural empires and not in newly emergent nation-states like Germany and Czechoslovakia, where a minority

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ethnic identity was a severe handicap (it is still true that Heine and Kafka had more difficulty with religious identity than with their Jewish ethnicity per se). Even the case of the “non-Jewish Jew,” to use the term coined by Isaac Deutscher, reveals that the decentering is problematic, for the Jew is still present but nonpracticing. This does not mean that one has become assimilated or “recentered”! Quite the contrary, it can show that the Jew may be in limbo. Some Jewish writers may have sought “to pass” for Gentile, but their condition is one of Jewish subalternity, angst, if not despair. Others sought to create a new cultural hybridity in the multicultural city, using the dominant language but constructing a Jewish adaptive perspective inside it and reworking the language cultural domain. Moving to cities in Ashkenaz proved less stressful than exiting from Ashkenaz. From Kiev to Warsaw, the Jews experienced less decentering than might have been expected, bringing along institutions from the shtetl and learning gradually to adjust to metropolitan existence. In a poem from 1919, Dovid Hofshteyn captures the excitement and despair of a young man drawn from the shtetl to the city (Kiev): City! you called me from afar with humming electric wires! I always stared at you from the hilltop! You drew me to you from afar compelled by your brightness and shimmer — you deceived me and you imprisoned me! (“Shtot” 1)

Shtot! Du host mikh fun vaytn gerufn Mit hudien fun drot! Kh’hob shtendik oyf barg dikh gezen! Du host mikh fun vaytn getsoygn Mit tsvangen Fun shayn un fun shimer — Du host mikh farnart Un du host mikh gefangen!

The major “shock” of the metropolis came from its modernity and machinery, and the full awareness it awakened of the Gentile world and its power. The cities of both Empires were multicultural and multilingual realities, though dominated by an official state language. The Jewish writer looked to the dominant culture and the mainstream cultures of Europe for models in literature. In the Yiddish literary activity, regionalism did play a role, of course, and the Jews in Warsaw would be more prone to follow Polish cultural models than Russian ones, whereas in Kiev, Jewish writers were more conscious of Russian models than of any other. For example, Sholem Asch, a Polish Jew, was influenced by Stefan Żeromski and other Polish prose masters whereas Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovich) and Bergelson in Kiev looked to Russian Silver Age models. Any study of a short story, poem, or play written by a Jewish writer in any language will reveal that there is little variance in terms of generic structures and literary techniques among the sophisticated practitioners. The differences appear more at the level of tone, theme, and emphasis. Obviously the closer the Jewish writer approached an assimilationist stance, the less overt his Jewish content would appear. This does not mean that the condition of his Jewish status can be removed: it may appear covertly on the level of style and through the extreme absence of Jewish matter — including even the absence of a self-hating anti-Semitic barb. In whatever language he chose to employ, the “centered” Jewish writer of Ashkenaz would use and exploit the poetics of

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the dominant culture. For example, as various modern “isms” entered Ashkenaz, Jewish writers tended to follow the lead of the majority culture in which they lived. The city helped define the cultural orientation of the Jewish writer in Ashkenaz by placing before the artists and their circle the cultural options at hand. The city (shtot, in Yiddish) meant not only the Gentile city that would be entered and explored if Jews were permitted to do so, but more specifically the Jewish city — a recognized juridical space in the larger city, the Jewish section, which was a center of meaningful Jewish life, and served as a beacon for advanced learning and new ideas. II. Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania (Seth L. Wolitz) If, in the Jewish realm of Ashkenaz, there is a capital city, its name is Vilna (see in this volume also Venclova’s article on the multiculturality of Vilnius). In Rabbinical Hebrew Vilna was called Yerushelayim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, for it was indeed a capital of rabbinical learning, and its synagogues and kloyz (small study houses) were filled with the sharpest Talmudists whose analytic minds, tempered with mystical Kabbalah, combated the Khassidim and their rabbis, and took on the Haskala Mavinim (brains) as well. This city’s preeminence in rabbinic thought began in the seventeenth century, and it was due to intelligent rabbinic scholars and philanthropic figures who worked well together and supported scholarship. Jews needed centuries to become tolerated in the Gentile part of Vilna. But in Jewish Vilna they were completely at home. Jewish life was organized around the shulhoyf (synagogue courtyard) that held the religious and secular buildings and communal services, in particular the Great Synagogue of the Vilna Gaon, and the Strashun Public Library with its Hebrew manuscripts and rare tomes. From the gated courtyard one entered Zydowska Ulica (Jew Street), known as such for some 400 years or more. If the synagogue was the Jewish court in Ashkenaz in both senses of the term, the God of Israel was its Supreme ruler. The other key institution of this Jewish capital was its spiritual treasury, the Rom publishing house. Vilna was the great publishing center in Ashkenaz. So long as the Jews had access to a printing press, they managed to keep their culture intact in spite of censorship and economic difficulties. For two centuries, the Rom family — the leading house among other small publishers — produced key texts of rabbinic Judaism, most especially the complete Talmud with critical standards of accuracy and print quality that stand the test of time. A young religious student could enjoy a wide selection of books available in the city. The young modern poet or writer went to more secular publishers. Yet Rom did publish the first White Russian grammars after the Revolution, and even Byelorussian poetry. Rom also published the works of the most successful nineteenth century Yiddish writer from Vilna, Ayzik Meyir Dik, whose more than four hundred chapbooks and humorous stories reached every corner of Ashkenaz. For twentieth-century Yiddish literature, the most important publisher in Vilna and throughout Ashkenaz was Boris Arkadyevitsh Kletskin. He published the early works of Dovid Bergelson and Sholem Asch, the new contemporary stars. His complete editions with bronze medallions of the authors inserted on the cover of each volume reinforced the perception that Yiddish literature had a full-fledged literary culture like any other.

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Vilna lay on the main trunkline from Berlin to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the trade routes covering Europe from East and West passed regularly through the city, even before the introduction of the railroads. As a result, Vilna Jewry was apprised of the latest intellectual, cultural, and political developments. Vilna accepted many of the Berlin Haskala concepts in modern secular education and appreciated the Hebrew maskilim (followers of the Enlightenment movement), both native-born and those who chose the openness of Vilna to develop modern ideas and create a secular Hebrew literature. Abraham Dov Lebenson and his son Micah Joseph Lebenson embraced the Haskala ideals and wrote Hebrew poetry; Micah studied in Berlin and translated German poetry into Hebrew. Perhaps the most influential Vilna maskil and Hebrew poet was Judah Leib Gordon, who sought Jewish emancipation without the loss of Jewish identity. He was inspired by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov to write Mishle Yehudah (The Fables of Judah; 1859). He encouraged accommodation to the Gentile world (“Be a Jew at home and a man in the street”), but the pogroms of 1881 ended his belief that knowledge of the Russian ways helped the Jew. He later encouraged immigration to America! In the interest of its program of Russification, Russia won over a certain number of maskilim from 1847 to 1881, enrolling their support for state-sponsored rabbinical seminaries following the German model. This period allowed some Jews to embrace Russian as their literary language in conformity with their accommodationist beliefs. Lev Levanda came to the Vilna Seminary and became not only a Russian writer but also the “Jewish expert” who advised Vilna’s Governor-General. The Russian-Jewish writers at this time were harsh critics of the traditions that were in their eyes outmoded. The pogroms of 1881–82, which broke out in Vilna following the assassination of Alexander II, brutally terminated their trust in the value of their accommodationist position, but did not end their use of Russian. Two major Jewish movements developed subsequently, in which the Jerusalem of Lithuania played an eminent role. The Hovevei Tsiyon movement (Lovers of Zion) held its convention in Vilna in 1889 and evolved into political Zionism. Other Jews in Vilna preferred socialist and Marxist solutions. The Bund, a Jewish socialist democratic movement led by Arkady Kremer and Yulius Martov (who in 1894 coauthored the Russian pamphlet Ob Agitatsii [On Agitation] that called for a Jewish workers’ party) held its first, clandestine meetings in Vilna in 1897. Vilna witnessed also the growth of the Poelei Tsion, the Zionist worker’s party. Abraham Cahan, Aron Liberman, and others who later played an important role in Jewish-American labor life, were Russified Jewish intellectuals, brought up on socialist and Haskala ideas, who learned their political skills from Russian radicals and from working with the Jewish laborers in Vilna. The Jewish workers helped shape the resistance model for the Empire and, through Jewish immigrants, brought it into the American labor milieu. If in 1897 the Jewish population of Vilna had reached 41% of the total population, by 1931 it had declined to 28%. Between 1900 and 1939, Vilna was a hotbed of political and cultural life in Yiddish and Hebrew. With the establishment in 1924 of YIVO (the Institute of Higher Jewish Studies of the Eastern European Jewry in Yiddish), Vilna continued to be the flagship of Jewish learning even in secular studies. Max Weinreich, who played the decisive role in its establishment, ensured that YIVO become the scholarly arbiter of language problems, cultural interpretations, and Jewish history. His magnum opus is the 4-volume, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh (History of the Yiddish Language; 1973), which was published, unfortunately, after most of the native speakers

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of Yiddish had been exterminated. However, YIVO did establish the orthographic norms of the written language, and Vilna Yiddish served as the basis for the written literary language. We must note that there was little contact in Vilna between the Polish and Jewish writers (the latter using either Jewish or Gentile languages) and even less with the developing national Lithuanian writers. The Polish poet Czesłav Miłosz has openly admitted that, while living in interwar Vilna, he had no idea that there was an active Jewish literary culture. Upon reading Chaim Grade’s short novel on Vilna, Der Shulhoyf (The Synagogue Courtyard; 1958), one is struck by the isolation of the Jews: the Gentile never appears even as a passing figure. Nevertheless, much of Vilna Jewry was secularized to various degrees throughout the twentieth century, and Russian served as the key language of acculturation until 1918, when Polish slowly entered the culture. Vilna was cosmopolitan by virtue of the variety of its nationalities but not necessarily by their interaction. The Polish university barely admitted acculturated Jews and then only in a strict numerus clausus. Selected Jews entered the Academy of Beaux Arts when Vilna was Tsarist. Vilna produced the first great Jewish sculptor, Mark Antokolski, and its academy graduated native-born Lazar Segall and a significant number of creators in the “Ecole de Paris” (Michel Kikoine, Chaim Soutine). A new period of Yiddish culture began during World War I with the formation of the Vilner troupe (1916), which introduced S[emen] An-Ski’s Der Dibuk (The Dybbuk; 1920) in the original Yiddish version. This became the most famous Jewish play of the century. The 1922 version of The Dybbuk, produced by the Habima Theater in Moscow, in a Hebrew reworking by Chayim Nachman Bialik, is best known in the non-Jewish world (the Habima later became the National Theater of Israel). The play was also developed for the Moscow Art Theater with the encouragement of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who helped shape the structure of the drama. A Russian version existed as well, a fact that underlines the flow of cultural interaction when Jews as bilingual and bicultural writers worked comfortably with liberal non-Jewish artists. The “golden Age” of Yiddish literature in Vilna belongs to the interwar years. The major poetic figure and novelist of the period was Moshe Kulbak, who combined German expressionist techniques with Russian symbolist sensitivities. His long poem entitled “Vilna” captures the atmosphere of the six-hundred-year-old Jewish Vilna, still alive in his time: You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania. Old gray writing-mossy, peeling, Each stone a book; parchment every wall. Pages turn, secretly open in the night, As, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier, Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars. (Trans. Nathan Halper; Howe and Greenberg, A Treasury 216)

The thirties spawned a group of young poets and novelists, Yung Vilne (Young Vilna), the last Yiddish literary movement in Ashkenaz. Their Almanacs of 1934–35 and 1936 introduced the lyricist Elkhanon Vogler, the surrealist Avrahom Sutzkever, the populist Leyzer Wolf, and the religiously oriented Chaim Grade, whose verse incorporates the tensions of the last theological movement in

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Ashkenaz, the Musar (Ethics), dedicated to ethical revivalism. Grade’s post-War novels depict the intense Jewish life of Vilna, particularly in its traditional milieu. After the outbreak of World War II, half of the Vilna Jewry was murdered; the 40,000 surviving Jews were driven in September 1941 into a ghetto occupying a few blocks in the old Zydowska Ulica area. During the brief time of the Vilna Ghetto, these Jews created an educational system and a cultural life, including some performances. The poet Sutzkever was active in the educational program and in planning an uprising; the Vilna partisans intended to melt the lead plates of the Rom Press: Letter by melting letter the lead, Liquefied bullets, gleamed with thoughts: A verse from Babylon, a verse from Poland, Seething, flowing into the one mold. Now must Jewish grit, long concealed in words, Detonate the world in a shot! (“The Lead Plates at the Rom Press,” September 12, 1943; trans. Neal Kozodoy in Howe, Wisse, and Shmeruk 679)

Hirsh Glik, a young Vilna partisan and poet, wrote the lyrics to the most famous song to emerge from the ghettos set up by the Nazis, “Zog nit keyn mol as du geyst dem letsn veg” (Never Say You Are on Your Last Road). The Vilna ghetto was totally liquidated on September 23, 1943. Part of the YIVO archives of Jewish culture survived hidden away in walls. The Soviets, however, confiscated them and smothered Jewish culture until 1989. In independent Lithuania, Vilna is hardly multicultural. The few old Jews left have reconstituted a Jewish community, but the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” is now as much a metaphysical reality as Ashkenaz. III. Kiev: City in Ashkenaz (Seth L. Wolitz) Kiev, on the Dniepr, has been an important urban center for the Jews of Ashkenaz. Whereas the Orthodox Christians and Polish Catholics have considered the city, with its great churches on the hills, Holy Kiev, the Jews were restricted by law to live below in Podol, on the flood plain along the river, and in Lyebed, a new area to the West. The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko commemorated in “Babi Yar” (1961) the major monument of Jewish Kiev, the ravine where 100,000 Jews were massacred by German troops and Ukrainian militia in 1941. Despite frequent expulsions and pogroms, Jews have continued to live in Kiev on and off for a thousand years. No other city in Ashkenaz was as notorious for its violent anti-Semitism. However, as a counterpoint to this bitter memory, Kiev will live in Jewish literary transmogrification as Yekhupets, the city of the rich Jews. Sholem Aleykhem, the most popular Yiddish writer of Eastern Europe, who lived in Podol and corresponded with Tolstoy and Gorky, gave Kiev that uniquely Jewish name, containing as it does the Hebrew word, khof(p)ets, desirable. Kiev was home to the Brodskys, the great sugar merchants of the Empire, and other Jewish families promi-

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nent in the flour mills and banking. Not all the Jews living in Kiev were as fortunate: twenty-five percent of them were so impoverished they needed food charity. Sholem Aleykhem’s most famous character, Tevye the Dairyman, captures the magic of the city as he chatters on: Layt hobn glik! Tsi, vos geyt-op, zog ikh, unzer shoykhet’s eydem? Vos volt fun im geven, ven er lost zikh nit avek keyn Yekhupets? Emes, di ershte etlikhe yorn iz er gut farshvartst gevorn, shier nit geshtorben fun hunger. Derfar ober atsind, khuts zayn shoden, alevay af mir gezogt gevorn: er shikt shoyn gelt aheym. Er hot shoyn kheyshek aroysnemen ahin zayn vayb un kinder, lozt men im dort nit zitsen. Ay iz dokh di kashe: vi azoy zitst er? Mutshet er zikh take […]. (“Dos Groyse Gevins” 28) Some people are lucky, like our kosher butcher’s son-in-law. What would he ever have amounted to if he hadn’t gone to Yehupetz to live? It is true, the first few years he nearly starved to death. But now I wouldn’t mind being in his shoes. Regularly he sends money home, and he would like to bring his wife and children to Yehupetz to live with him, but he can’t do it, because by law he isn’t allowed to live there himself. Then how does he do it? Never mind. (“Tevye Wins a Fortune” 134)

Sholem Aleykhem launched in 1888 a publishing house and literary journal, Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek (The Yiddish Folk Library), which is a landmark in modern Yiddish letters and ascribes Kiev the status of an important cultural city in Ashkenaz. In spite of all the difficulties that living in Kiev presented for Jews, the city was a place of modernity for them. More Jewish students were allowed to enter the university there than anywhere else in the Empire, but they still had to conform to the restrictive numerus clausus. The wealthy Jews performed their important charitable work, opening hospitals and orphanages but also underwriting literary journals and contributing to Jewish cultural and political parties. The Jewish intelligentsia and upper class were conversant in at least two languages, Yiddish and Russian, and also possessed a reading knowledge (or more) of Hebrew and German. The difference between shtetl life and city life has been masterly rendered in the prose of the Kiev Yiddish writer, Dovid Bergelson. In his short story, Yosef Shur, Bergelson allows a rich provincial Jew to discover modern Jewish life in Kiev in the difficult years 1908–1914. In the following excerpt, Joseph Schur arrives from Greater Setternitz to seek the hand of Abraham Rappoport’s orphaned niece in Kiev: Schur made his way along the noisy street, not at all sure that he was going in the right direction to find the Rappoport house […]. He moved slowly, almost aimlessly, until, turning a corner, he came upon a dimly lighted theater entrance before which stood two signboards describing in Russian a lecture on a Jewish theme. The place had an aura of shy intimacy about it; it was a sort of Jewish hiding place amidst the tumult and probing Christian bells and candles. The entryway was empty and Joseph Schur, after hesitating for a moment, went in […]. On the brightly lighted bare stage, a redheaded young man of medium height stood beside a podium, wearily wiping his face with a white handkerchief. He was wearing a student’s uniform with brand new buttons and seemed to be working very hard as he spoke to his audience about the problems the Jews had in Russia and in other countries. All that the student said was true, but Schur felt

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himself a stranger to that audience and aloof from their concerns. He stood for a while longer and left the hall. At the corner of the fashionable street where Abraham Rappoport lived, Schur felt once more a twinge of his family stubborn pride […]. As he entered the handsomely lighted dining room, Joseph Schur, apparently calm, gathered that the topic of conversation was a pogrom that, rumor had it, was being readied to take place in the town just before the holy day. “It’s a fact.” A flushed and weary Madame Rappoport made a grimace. As she leaned forward toward the person speaking, she caught a glimpse through her dining room window of a gentile in the street hurrying homeward protecting a lighted candle from the wind. In the exhausted voice of a newly delivered mother she complained, “Didn’t I ask to have the shades drawn?” (“Joseph Schur” 61, 62–63).

The original text is in Yiddish, but the author’s style makes it clear that Jewish speakers of this social class are using Russian, unless Bergelson informs the reader that they have switched to Yiddish or another language. This odd linguistic situation reveals the transitional position of the upper class Jews who accepted Westernization through the Russian language. The Jewish students all speak Russian to one another. Bergelson, who was bilingual, presents accurately the cultural ideology that sought to make Yiddish — not Russian or Hebrew — the literary language of the modern Jew. Bergelson notes elsewhere the presence of electricity and a telephone in a private home, the automobile of a family member, and even a passing plane in the air. We are introduced to the world of modern comfort enjoyed by the upper Jewish class that nevertheless could suffer a Kiev pogrom. The modern Jews of the Ashkenazic city seem to be fully accommodated to a Westernized cultural lifestyle quite removed from the shtetl world before World War I. Bergelson introduced in Yiddish literature an impressionist prose style influenced by Russian Symbolism. His writing style can be considered the most sophisticated in Yiddish prose. His novel Nokh Aleman artfully depicts the generation that broke with traditional shtetl life. His friend Der Nister (The Hidden One) wrote remarkable short stories based on kabalistic and Jewish esoteric knowledge, in an ornamental-symbolistic prose style. Together with the poet Dovid Hofshteyn, they represented the Kiev Avant-garde in the period preceding World War I. Immediately following the first Revolution of 1917, Kiev became the center of the freshest Yiddish writing and Jewish art in Europe. Joining forces with the literary critics Nakhum Mayzels and Moshe Litvakov — later to become the major arbiter of Soviet Yiddish letters — Bergelson formed in 1918 Di Kultur-Lige (Culture League), a secular Yiddish educational and cultural institution that, at its inception, was supported in part by the first liberal Ukrainian government. A secular Yiddish school system was put in place rapidly throughout the Ukraine. The Kultur-Lige founded a major Yiddish publishing house, which brought out many important literary works and school texts, established a plastic arts section, and underwrote a major art exhibition at which Jewish artists in or passing through Kiev were presented (among them El Lissitsky, Issakar Ribak, Alexander Tishler, and Boris Aronson). The key Yiddish poets of this short Golden Age were Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and the revolutionary expressionist Peretz Markish, whose “Poem” from 1918 reveals all the fresh fervor inspired by the longed-for social change: I don’t know whether I’m at home

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or homeless. I’m running, my shirt unbuttons, no bounds, nobody holds me, no beginning, no end my body is foam smelling of wind Now in my name. I spread my arms, my hands pierce the extremes of what is (Trans. Armand Schwerner; Howe and Greenberg, A Treasury 180)

In this gathering of Yiddish talent, one could find also the poet and critic Yekheskel Dobrushin and the most important feminist poet, Kadya Molodovski. The latter’s “Women’s Song” of 1924 spoke the clear tones of the independent woman: I will come to him who was the first to give me woman’s joy and say, Husband, I’ve given my gentle glance to another, too, and one night laid my head beside his, and now I have grief like bees swarming and stinging around my heart, and no honey to soothe the wound. And when he takes me by the braid, I’ll fall down and lie on the doorstep like Sodom in stone. I’ll lift my hands to my head as my mother did lighting the (Sabbath) candles, but my fingers will stand like ten enumerated sins (Trans. Irving Feldman; Howe, Wisse, and Shmeruk 320–21)

In the great upsurge of creativity in post-revolutionary Russia, these Yiddish writers and painters were in close contact with the Ukrainian and Russian avant-gardists residing or passing through Kiev. The Civil War of 1918–20 repeatedly threatened Kiev. The city passed rapidly back and forth between the Germans, the Whites, the Ukrainian Nationalists, and finally the Bolsheviks. This recurrent change of control left the Jewish population particularly terrorized. Pogroms and massacres of the Jews took their toll throughout the Ukraine. All the Yiddish poets wrote dirges in response to the murderous wave of terror but Markish’s expressionist “The Mound” (1921) pushed Yiddish language to its extreme: Nit! lek nit, kheylev himelsher, mayne farpapte berd,

Seth L. Wolitz

192 Fun mayne mayler khliupn ritshkes dzhiegekhts, Oh, broyne roshtshine fun blut un fun gezegekhts, Nit! rir nit dos gebrekh oyf shvartser dikh fun dr’erd. Avek! se shtinkt fun mir, se krikhn oyf mir fresh! Du zukhst dayn tate-mame do? Du zukhst dayn khaver? Zey zaynen do! Zey zaynen do! Nor s’shtinkt fun zey an avir! M’hot undz do oysgeleygt di gantse shtot-a kupe-ale, ale, 11 Tishrey 5681 […] (Di Kupe 32) No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards. Out of my mouth’s brown streams of pitch Sob a brown leaven of blood and sawdust. No. Don’t touch the vomit on the earth’s black thigh. Away. I stink. Frogs crawl on me, Looking for mother-father here? Seeking a friend? They’re here. They’re here, but taint the air with stink. […] They laid us out here. The entire town — a Mound. All, All […] September 23, 1920 (the day after Yom Kippur) In Horoditshche, the town on the Dniepr, Kaddish! (prayer for the Dead)

The short independent Yiddish cultural Renaissance in Kiev ended when the Bolsheviks finally assumed control of Kiev in December 1920 and immediately proceeded to impose their own cultural ideology. At this time, the Jewish population of Kiev amounted to some 32% of the city’s inhabitants. To serve their own ideological ends, the Bolsheviks allowed the Kultur-Lige to continue its operations. During the NEP period (the transitional, more liberal New Economic Policy), the publishing house of the Kultur-Lige introduced some of the major new Soviet Yiddish poets: Itsik Fefer, Moshe Khashtshvatski, Aaron Kushnirov, and the conflicted Shmuel Halkin, whose “Russland — 1923” (Russia — 1923) captures the psychology of the Jews just after the Civil War and the NEP period: Russia, if not for my deep faith in you, I’d argue with you differently. I’d say that you misled us, you Bewitched us like a gypsy. Each blow of your hand is precious to us, And painfully hard to bear — But however great the misfortune or shame, We turn to you and implore:

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What is the promise that lies overseas? What lands and what countries? Here on Russia’s happy streets, We’ll gladly live out our lives. Till now you weren’t fated to see us Snuffed out by our wild birthright, And now we go harnessed, Now from your kisses we die. (Trans. Edwin Honig; Howe and Greenberg, A Treasury 186–87)

Although Yiddish schools were Sovietized, as were all other educational institutions throughout the emerging Soviet Union, they were permitted to retain Yiddish as their language of instruction until 1936, when they were all abruptly closed. Yiddish theater flourished in Kiev, as did a Yiddish newspaper and a variety of serious journals. In 1930, the Institute of Proletarian Jewish Culture brought together major Yiddish scholars and published valuable linguistic, folkloric, and sociological studies. Everything ended, however, during the Purge years (1936–38) that liquidated Yiddish cultural institutions. Archives and libraries were hidden, dispersed, or destroyed. On August 12, 1952, large numbers of Yiddish artists and intellectuals that had been arrested in steady waves from 1947 onwards were murdered by the NKVD on direct orders from Stalin. The intellectual and creative Yiddish elite of the Soviet Union was utterly wiped out. Among the Kievan poets and writers thus liquidated were Bergelson, Markish, Kvitko, and Fefer — the latter in spite of the hyperbolic encomiums he heaped on Stalin: When I mention Stalin — I mean beauty, I mean eternal Happiness, I mean nevermore to know, Nevermore to know of pain. (Qtd. in Howe and Greenberg, Ashes 17)

After the Holocaust, the Jews who had escaped the destruction returned to Kiev or moved there so that by 1959 they constituted 14% of the city’s population. However, they were denied any rights to cultural expression in Kiev or anywhere else in the Soviet Union. During the Thaw that followed Stalin’s death, a few Yiddish books were allowed to appear and some remarkable prose sprang from the few returning camp survivors of the Gulag: Itzik Kipnis, Natan Zbara, and Eli Shekhtman. Shekhtman managed to emigrate to Israel where he continued to write an epic novel about Jewish life in the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Ukraine, there is a revival of Jewish culture in Kiev in various languages. IV. The Hebrew Literary Circle in Odessa (Zilla Jane Goodman) The start of modern Hebrew literature is dated by some around 1881, coinciding with the arrival of Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller; pen-name of Scholem Ya’aqov Abramovitch)

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in Odessa, where he became head of the Talmud Torah (Hebrew School). Though the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment Movement of 1750–1881) stipulated the rejection of Yiddish as a legitimate language, most of the important Hebrew authors and poets wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew, and knew Russian. Mendele, considered the “Father of Modern Hebrew Literature,” has also been accorded the epithet of “Grandfather of Modern Yiddish Literature” for having written many works in that language, especially between 1864 and 1881. That Mendele’s move to Odessa signaled his return to Hebrew writing is a reflection of the effects of the city’s Jewish cultural milieu. Jews had begun to settle there in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. By the time Mendele arrived in Odessa they represented about a quarter of the population (some 70,000), and on the eve of the community’s destruction in 1942 their number was 180,000 or more. Culturally these Jews were the most “westernized” of the communities in Eastern Europe. They were fairly acculturated due to a schooling system that emphasized secular learning and the study of Russian language and culture. In spite of their “assimilation” and the derision heaped upon them by the rest of the EastEuropean Jewry for what was seen as their low Jewish learning, the Odessan community in the 1880s was a stronghold of the new Hebrew culture (see Zipperstein) and the center of a burgeoning proto-Zionist thought expressed in the writings of Moshe Lilienblum and Leo Pinsker. Their brochure, Autoemancipation (1882), offered arguably the inspiration for the formation of the first Zionist groups known as Choveve Tziyon (The Lovers of Zion). Jewish cultural life in Odessa was especially noticeable in the local literary activity. In addition to the three Jewish Russian newspapers established there in the 1860s, Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals, such as ha-Melits (The Interpreter) and Qol ha-Mevaser (Voice of Him who Brings the Tidings), were published in Odessa during the period of the Haskalah. It was in Odessa that the study of Jewish literature was first legitimized, and it was to this town that a critical mass of Hebrew writers was attracted in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. A number of new publications were started that served as outlets for both belletristic and polemical writing, among them Kaveret (Beehive), Pardes (Grove), and ha-Olam (The World), the latter the Hebrew counterpart of Die Welt, the German language organ of the Zionist organization. Their editors, the Hebrew poet Chayim Nachman Bialik and Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg) had as significant an effect on Hebrew writing and thought as Mendele. Odessa was probably the most influential place for the development of modern Hebrew literature. When Mendele started to write again in Hebrew, he decided to draw on all levels of the language to create an idiom suitable to the literary register of social realism, and not to confine himself to the Haskalah’s ideology of biblical Hebrew. His success in this endeavor earned him the paternal title mentioned above. Abramovitch’s nom-de-plume (Mendele the Bookseller) is shared also by the narrator of his stories, who travels across the Ashkenaz and reports on the things he sees and the stories he hears, most of them tragic but told in a tone of compassionate satire. Mendele’s most important narratives, some translated by the author from Yiddish into Hebrew with some changes in content, include “Sefer ha-Kabtzanim” (Fishke the Lame), with its Hebrew version by Bialik, “Be-Emek ha-Bakha” (The Vale of Tears), and “Kitser Masaot Binyamin hashelishi” (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). Other residents of Odessa who partook of its Literary Circle were Chayim Nachman Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, and Saul Tschernichowski. Bialik was the most influential poet of the new literature

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(see Aberbach; also Abramovich’s article on him in the upcoming vol. 4 of our History). This prolific author is best known for his “Beit Ha-hareigah” (In the City of Slaughter; 1903) and “Al ha-Shehitah” (On the Butchery; 1903), songs of rage against the pogroms wrought upon the Jews of Eastern Europe, for his laments about the move away from the traditional world, such as “haMatmid” (The Talmud Student; 1898), and for nationalist poems such as “Mete Midbar” (The Dead of the Desert; 1905). Bialik also wrote short stories and articles on language and literary criticism; together with Yehoshua Chana Ravnitzky, he collected Jewish legends in Sefer ha-Aggadah: mivhar ha-agadot she-ba-Talmud uve-midrashim (The Book of Legends: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash; 1908–11). Asher Ginzberg, writing under the name of Ahad Ha’am (One of the People), was a conservative Zionist thinker who spoke of the “eternal values” of (what he saw as a monolithic) Judaism and advocated a cultural but not political center in Israel. The literary work of Ahad Ha’am comprises texts about these subjects, sometimes set in the form of laudatory tales about major Israelite figures such as Moses (Moshe) or as exhortative thought pieces such as “Hatsi nehemah” (A Half Comfort), which contains a section on the power of general consensus and its effect on people. His clear prose style served as a guide for literary essay writing, much in the manner that Mendele’s did for Hebrew fiction and Bialik’s for Hebrew poetry (see Weinberg). Both Ginzberg and Bialik moved to the Land of Israel and died there, unlike Mendele who passed away in Odessa. Bialik and Ravnitsky were also responsible (together with a few others) for establishing two important Hebrew presses in Odessa, which provided a platform for younger writers. Another important Odessan literary figure was Saul Tschernichowski (see Silberschlag), Bialik’s contemporary and poetic foil, who wrote with admiration of Ancient Greece and pantheism in “Mul Pesel Apollo” (Before a Statue of Apollo). His Hebrew phrasing was idiosyncratic, due to the private tutoring he received. Yaakov Rabinowitz, who wrote sketches, short stories, and novels joined them later. His novel, Neveh-kayits (Summer Resort; 1934), is set in Odessa although it was written after the author settled in Palestine. Another writer who spent time in Odessa was Shlomo Zemach, whose novel Eliyahu Margalit (Elijah Pearl; 1921) dramatized the tension between the worldviews of Ahad Ha’am and those of his rival M. J. Berdichewski. Odessa’s importance as a center of Hebrew writing and culture waned with the Bolshevik Revolution and Mendele’s death in 1917. The Bolsheviks outlawed Hebrew as an ecclesiastic language. The life of the Jewish community came to a halt in 1942 with the slaughter of at least 25,000 Jews. Jews returned after the city was liberated, but Odessa never regained a Hebraic cultural prominence — the center of Hebrew activity had by then become concentrated in Israel. V.

St. Petersburg in the Russian-Jewish Literary Imagination (Brian Horowitz)

In his memoir, Amolike Peterburg (Petersburg of the Past; 1944), the historian Saul Ginzburg notes that by the second half of the nineteenth century the capital of Russia, St. Petersburg, had become the intellectual center of Russian Jewry (185). In terms of population, Vilna, Odessa, Zhitomir, and Minsk were denser, but Petersburg had struck the imagination as the embodiment of an ideal Jewish identity that the Jew in Russia might someday attain. While Jewish businessmen figured in the equation, it was ultimately culture that made St. Petersburg a Jewish metropolis. But culture

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here stands not merely for actual achievements — those came late, only in the first two decades of the twentieth century — but for potential ones, for the possibility for the Jew to be considered equal in every way to a Russian. And that hope could only be contemplated in Petersburg. Jews have lived in Petersburg since the city’s establishment in 1703. During the eighteenth century, the Jewish community was rather small. Mostly composed of doctors, dentists, and skilled artisans (among them at least half conversos), the Jews of St. Petersburg boasted Czar Peter’s clown, Czarina Elizabeth’s doctor (a marrano), and several important financiers. Russians decried the Jewish economic competition and urged the government to enforce strict prohibitions against Jewish habitation in the city. Nevertheless, a chosen few were left untouched. This unfair treatment at least partially inspired rabbi Lev Epshtein to explain in a treatise from the 1750s that God had intended Jews not to live in St. Petersburg. After all, in the summer months, during the white nights, one cannot tell when to hold morning or evening prayers (see “Sankt-Peterburg” 939). The first work of Russian-Jewish literature, the work of a maskil or advocate of Western education, is associated with St. Petersburg. Vopl’ dshcheri Iudeiskoi (Lament of a Daughter of Judah; 1803) by Leiba Nevakhovich, a Jew from Shklov living in St. Petersburg, was written partially in Russian with another part as the author’s translation from Hebrew. It included an ode celebrating the coronation of Czar Alexander I in which Nevakhovich made a plea to the Czar, in inelegant Russian, to care for his Jewish subjects. Leon Mandelshtam, another enlightener and the first Jew to graduate from a Russian university, took up the task of translating the Hebrew Bible into Russian in the 1840s. His dream of making available a bilingual edition that would aid Jews to learn Russian did not come to pass; the government prohibited its circulation until 1869. The Jewish community grew in size and prestige during Alexander II’s reign (in 1855 there were 700 Jewish inhabitants). Important bankers and intellectuals descended on the city, as laws were enacted allowing certain “useful” classes of Jews legal right to live in St. Petersburg. While the rich and meritorious lived in comfort in the area behind Senate Square (a great synagogue was later built there), the “temporaries,” with permission to stay for a short while, and the illegals lived on Vasilevsky Island, often in squalid and crowded conditions. Legends of attempts to remain in the capital by any means include the tale of a young Jewess who takes a yellow ticket, i.e., agrees to work as a prostitute for the right to study in the capital. However, when checked by a doctor, it is revealed that she is still a virgin! Another story describes a man barking like a dog before the passing city governor. If he were a dog, he reasons, he would be given permission to stay (Kliachko 23–45). The Jewish nouveau riche, however, were not entirely indifferent to their poorer co-religionists. In 1863, the banker Baron Ezekiel Ginzburg, together with his son Horace and the businessman Leon Rosenthal, established the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia, which set as its goal to subsidize activities that promoted secular knowledge. The members gave subventions for book publishing, supported the creation of schools with a Jewish curriculum, offered fellowships for scholars, and aided Jews seeking higher education. In 1879, St. Petersburg became culturally energized. Suddenly three Jewish newspapers in Russian appeared in the city — Voskhod (Sunrise), Russkii Evrei (Russian Jew), and Rassvet (Dawn) — which was as many as had been published throughout all Russia previously. They featured the Russophile writings of Lev Levanda, whose Goryachee vremya (Ardent Times; 1875)

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was extremely influential. In this novel, set during the Polish uprising of 1863, Levanda pontificates through his hero Sarin to the Jews of Poland and the Northwestern provinces to accept Russia as their true fatherland: “Our program consists in turning our brethren from the vicious circle in which inauspicious conditions have placed them, and set them on the path of Russian citizenship. Briefly, our program consists in turning Jews into Russians. […] It doesn’t matter to us which civilization is higher (Russian or Polish) […], the issue is not about civilization but about nationality, that is about spirit and language. We live in Russia and, therefore, we must be Russians” (187). The dominant point, crudely expressed as “Let us be Russians,” had earlier been associated with Odessa, but it became widely circulated in St. Petersburg in the 1870s and 80s. For example, M. N. Lazarev claimed in the first important work of criticism about Russian-Jewish literature (1885 in Voskhod) that Russian-Jewish literature was essentially a transient hybrid, the result of a transitional period. He hoped that within a few years Russian-Jewish literature would cease to exist. “Populist Russian-Jewish literature merely awaits an initial push from the outside, the first beneficial occasion to unite entirely with Russian literature” (Lazarev 38). However, the dissolution of Russia’s Jews into the fabric of Russian cultural life did not quickly come to pass. Perhaps as a result of this social frustration, Russia’s rejection of her Jews became itself a major theme of Russian-Jewish literature and criticism. For example, Akim Volynsky, the future symbolist, complained in his famous critical essay of 1888, that Russia did not welcome its Jewish authors. Deploring anti-Semitism in Russian culture, he spoke in favor of a synthesis of Russian and Jewish elements. Nationalities inhabiting the same space, employing the same language, and sharing the same culture, are not markedly distinct, he argued, and therefore Russians have nothing to fear from Jewish writers (46). Nevertheless, Volynsky’s article signaled an increased hostility in the Russian press. After all, in the period following the enactment of the “May Laws” in 1882, Russia’s Jews were persecuted with renewed zeal, especially concerning their legal rights to open a business, live in the countryside and the cities outside the Pale of Settlement, or gain admission to Russian universities. It was often said that Russians were free to do anything that was not prohibited, but that Jews could do only what was explicitly permitted. The resulting melancholia is best expressed in the poetry of Semen Frug, a major writer of the time. His poem, “Why Have They Poisoned My Songs,” ends with: Our brother! Pale, exhausted brother! We are suffocating, we are afraid […] Do you see, brother how our enemy exults around us? […] Do you hear how our chains rattle? We are perishing in deep darkness […] There is neither a sunrise, a path, nor a ray of light ahead Oh, why have they poisoned my songs! (155)

But the Russian intelligentsia of St. Petersburg was not synonymous with the government. Its leading lights often battled on behalf of the Jews. For example, in 1890 the philosopher Vladimir Solov΄ev organized a petition of Russian luminaries against the government’s anti-Jewish policies, signed among others by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Korolenko. Solov΄ev was not only sympa-

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thetic to the Jews, his interests also drove him to study Biblical Hebrew, Kabbalah, and rabbinical thought. In 1883–84, the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov criticized the government’s repression of the Jews, although in a brochure that was commissioned and paid for by St. Petersburg’s Jews and that was privately printed for distribution to the so-called Pahlen Commission. The most important “thick journal” of the time, Vladimir Korolenko’s Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe), published in 1882 N. Naumov’s [Naum Kogan’s] story, “V glukhom mestechke” (In a Godforsaken Little Town; 1892), which introduced the Russian public to the problems of Jewish life in the shtetl. Jewish artists, such as Mark Antokolsky and Isaak Levitan, were exhibited in Russian museums and showered with awards. Later, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Maxim Gorky published in his journal Znanie the best Jewish writers of the time: David Aizman, Sholem Asch (in translation from the Yiddish), Sholem Aleykhem, and Semyon Iushkevich. This growing cooperation among Jewish and Russian authors culminated in the 1915 publication of Shchit (The Shield), edited by Gorky and containing works on the Jewish theme by major Russian writers, such as Fyodor Sologub, Leonid Andreev, Valerii Briusov, and Viacheslav Ivanov. Lev Jaffe, an enterprising Zionist intellectual, developed further cooperative endeavors, publishing several volumes of Hebrew poetry with translations by Russia’s finest poets. The greatest successes of St. Petersburg Jewish culture were perhaps in historical studies. Shimon Dubnov, Albert Harkavy, I[osif] V[ladimirovich] Gessen, Saul Ginzburg, and Israel Zinberg completed studies that are still unsurpassed today. Dubnov was responsible for the establishment of the Jewish Ethnographic Society (1907), and he edited the scholarly journal Evreiskaia Starina (The Jewish Past), which appeared 1907–25. Collectively they created the 13-volume Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Jewish Encyclopedia; 1906–13), which remains a rich source of knowledge on the history of Judaism worldwide. Ethnography, the study of the Jewish masses in Russia, elicited wide interest at the time. The modernist writer Semen An-Ski enlisted the support of the wealthy Ginzburg family and organized the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in the Pale of Settlement. His small team of artists, musicologists, and ethnographers gathered the artifacts of Jewish life, and none too late. An-Ski had premonitions of the end of the shtetl and he rushed to save whatever could be salvaged for posterity. In 1917, the Bolsheviks found a well-organized St. Petersburg Jewish life. In addition to a beautiful synagogue designed in the Sephardic style (completed in 1893), the community had over 16,000 members, representing 2% of the population. The community had its own kosher shops, schools, numerous intellectual and professional societies, newspapers in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and even boasted a Jewish university (1919–25). Jewish contributions were vital to the cultural life of the city. Artists such as Marc Chagall, Yehuda Penn, Natan Altman, El Lissitzky, Solomon Yudovin, and Robert Falk were instrumental to the flowering of Russia’s visual arts. Most of the Formalists, the new literary scholars of the time, were of Jewish descent: Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikenbaum, Iurii Tynianov, and Roman Jakobson. Isaac Babel, Ilf [Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzil’berg] of the literary duo Ilf and Petrov, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Eduard Bagritsky, among the best writers of the period, were Jewish. Pasternak and Mandelshtam were typical of their generation in that they felt ambivalence toward Judaism and Jewish identity. Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1964, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, while Mandelshtam expressed a stronger affinity with the classical world and Christian-European culture. The influ-

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ence of both can be seen in the future generations of St. Petersburg poets of Jewish descent, such as Joseph Brodsky and Anatoly Naiman, who also considered themselves more Russian than Jew. While Jews had been well represented in the leftist parties before the October Revolution, Jews flocked to the Communist Party in the new Soviet state. After all, Communism had granted the Jews full equality, seemingly fulfilling their most precious dream. However, before long it became clear that Judaism as a religion and Jewish nationalism as a competing ideology would not be tolerated. Many members of the old Jewish intelligentsia emigrated westward, while those who remained tried to deflect attention from their Jewish background. Those who did not, experienced the fate of the great historian Israel Zinberg, who perished in the Soviet concentration camp of Vladivostok in 1938. In Stalinist times, St. Petersburg ceased to be a cultural center of Russian Jewry, as the renewed prominence of Russian nationalism, accompanied by the rise of anti-Semitism, choked off Jewish national creativity. Jews were suspected of disloyalty, because they had international connections outside the Comintern. The intense official anti-Semitism of the late Stalinist period can be seen in the murder of Shimon Mikhoels in 1948, the “Doctors’ Plot” of the early 1950s, and the arrest and murder of the majority of the Anti-Zionist Committee. Among Jewish writers who managed to avoid persecution, Ilya Ehrenburg is remarkable. Residing long periods in Paris, where he led a very Bohemian life, he was ultrapatriotic during the war. During the Thaw he wrote his famous memoirs, Lyudi, gody, zhizn’ (People, Years, Life; 1960–65), which offer a glimpse of a lost pan-European, not just Russian or Jewish culture. As Ehrenburg confessed: My character was formed by the traditions, the ideas and the moral values of the nineteenth century. Today it all seems like ancient history, but in 1909, when I filled exercise-books with wretched verse, Tolstoy, Korolenko, Anatole France, Strindberg, Mark Twain, Jack Péguy, Verhaeren, Rodin, Degas, Mechnikov and Koch were still alive. I do not repudiate either the boy with his prickly hair-cut, who condemned the “deviators” and scoffed at Nadya Lvova’s enthusiasm for poetry, nor the raw youth who, after discovering Blok, Tyutchev and Baudelaire, was outraged by talk of the minor and essentially subsidiary role of art; today I understand them both. (Post-War Years 332)

Under the threat of persecution, Russian-Jewish authors turned to other subjects. Soviet censors did not permit open discussion of the Holocaust, and Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman’s Chernaya kniga (Black Book; 1980), a catalogue of Nazi crimes committed on Soviet territory was suppressed in Soviet Union (one volume appeared in 1947 in Bucharest). Avoidance of the Jewish theme lasted until the Thaw in the early 1960s, when writers were again permitted to publish works with a Jewish content. Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar,” dedicated to the memory of the thousands of Jews killed near Kiev in 1941, was a significant milepost in this regard — by a non-Jewish writer. With Samuil Marshak’s V nachale zhizni (At Life’s Beginning, 1961), Vasilii Grossman’s Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Life and Fate; 1980) and Vse techet (Forever Flowing; 1970), and Anatoly Rybakov’s Tyazhelyi pesok (Heavy Sand; 1979), Jewish authors broke the taboos of writing about distinct Jewish, as opposed to undifferentiated Soviet suffering. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Russian-Jewish literature regained new life in non-Communist St. Petersburg and in the emigration. Among its best representatives today are F[ridrikh] Gorenshtein (presently living in Germany), Grigory Kanovich (real name, Iakov), Felix

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Roziner (presently living in Israel), and the poets Yunna Moritz and Elena Shwarts. The rediscovery of Jewish national identity, recently begun in Russia and evidenced in the myriad of historical and political journals published there, will likely stimulate an expansive development of RussianJewish literature. For as long as Jewish identity remains distinct from Russian, Russian-Jewish literature will not die out, but provide a living expression of literary creativity, directed at those who, despite blandishments and fears, hold on to this identity. VI. Jewish Warsaw (Seth L. Wolitz, with Zilla Jane Goodman) 1.

City as Site of Cultural Identity The long row of wagons winds through the streets of Prague towards the iron bridge that throws its mighty framework across the river Vistula. Through the network of the iron-bridge, there gleams the shimmer of the hoary-frost that lies like a linen coverlet over the roofs and church spires on the other bank of the river. That is Warsaw. (Asch, Three Cities 2: 278) A broad river with the sky in it stretched beneath us. Ships floated by. Over the bridge, which had intricate ironwork columns, trolleys and omnibuses raced. We came upon tall buildings, crooked roofs, ironwork balconies. It looked as if there was always a fire raging in Warsaw, because people were always running and shouting. (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Father’s Court 59)

Both Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote important fiction about Warsaw — the Jewish Warsaw, for Warsaw was the Jewish city par excellence of Europe if not of the world (see also Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Anthony Polonsky’s article on “Polish Jewish Literature” in vol. 1: 435–44 of our History; and Michael Steinlauf’s article on Yiddish Theater in Warsaw, in the forthcoming vol. 3). By 1910, the temporal reference point of both of these writings, New York, had a larger Jewish population but Warsaw represented deep Jewish authenticity and resonance. Like the Poles themselves, most of the Jews at this time were newcomers from the Polish provinces or, like the Jewish “Litvaks,” from the Pale of Settlement outside Congress Poland. The Jews settled here and felt rooted. No other city, including Vilna, had such an intense Jewish life running across a broad spectrum: from assimilationists adopting Polish culture, to socialist atheists, Zionists fighting for Hebrew, Bundists insisting on Yiddish, and entrepreneurs with no patience for any of the above; and from toiling artisans and abject workers seeking amelioration, to the most intense Gerer khasidim all dressed in caftans, skull caps, and sidelocks, whose Rebbe and his court dwelled in Warsaw. The city of Warsaw was Ashkenaz in miniature! The two quoted texts represent the metropolis as a unity held together by the onomastic signifier Warsaw and by the multitudinous riot of nature, the Vistula River, the sky, and the land beyond; as an urban cartography built on some labyrinthine grid undergirded by a steely bridge; as a teeming landscape of human types, with semiotic potential in the street names and placards. Alongside Jerusalem, Montreal, Capetown, or San Antonio, Warsaw was one of the few truly bilingual and bicultural cities in the world, a city whose spatial coordinates incorporated two worldviews living in uneasy tension.

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Jews had been living in Warsaw since 1423, well before it became the capital city of Poland in 1572, but they were constantly expelled. Still, the Jews always made their way back into the city. They constituted almost ten percent of the city’s population in 1796, when the final partition of Poland made Warsaw a captive of Prussia. Their numbers continued to grow as Warsaw experienced the hegemony of Tsarist Russia between 1815 and 1915. In 1816, Jews constituted 19.2% (15,600) of Warsaw; in 1864 32.2% (72,800); in 1882, 33.4% (130,000); and by 1910, 39.2% (306,000). The years between the end of the nineteenth century and the start of World War I were years of economic expansion and massive population growth. With the establishment of a newly independent Poland, the Jews in Warsaw increased their numbers but went into a percentile decline: in 1917, the 343,400 Jews represented 41% of the city’s population; in 1938, the 368,400 Jews counted only as 29.1% of the population. In the interwar years, Warsaw had the most Jews of all European cities. By the end of 1943, the extermination of the Jews permitted the German occupying forces to declare Warsaw Judenrein. The German imposed ghetto of 1940 covered the most intensely populated area of traditional Jewish Warsaw and its poorest district. It was located north and west of Srodmiescie, the central district of Warsaw. Gentile Warsaw had forbidden Jews to take up residence in the nicer areas but these “exemptions” were rescinded by 1860; still, the majority of Jews remained in the northern area until forcibly packed into the narrow German ghetto. Two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust writing their memoirs of Warsaw, one in Yiddish, the majority language of the Warsaw Jews, the other in Polish, the majority language of the newly independent country, emphasize from different angles the estrangement of the Jews from the Poles and vice versa: Jewish Warsaw was not integrated with the Gentile one. There were two Jewish centers: in Northern Warsaw, in the area of the Danzig Railroad Station with Nalewki as its spinal cord and (secondly) the “other streets” with Grzybowski Place. These two centers were separated by Gentile streets that from childhood on were etched in my memory. In those years when I had to go from one Jewish center to the other, I always ran through the Gentile streets, frightened by the Gentile youth […]. (Zonszajn 8) The Jewish quarter in Warsaw occupied one-fifth of the city. There were no drawbridges or guards on its borders: the ghetto had been abolished long before, but nevertheless there still existed an invisible wall that separated the quarter from the rest of the city. Many Polish children spoke about it with fear, and their elders often treated it with contempt. (Bernard Singer, Moje Nalewki 45; trans. Stephen Corrsin in Corrsin 45)

Notice that both writers consider Warsaw as home and are intensely aware of streets as territory and boundaries. Both groups claimed Warsaw as home but lived separate lives. Yet Jews did attempt to Polonize without assimilation or conversion. The writings of Bernard Singer in Polish reveal a trend that by 1939 was important: bourgeois Jews functioned fully in Polish and had a daily newspaper, Nasz Przeglad (Our Review), the cultural quality of which enriched Polish literature. The majority of Warsaw Jews, nevertheless, read the major Yiddish dailies Haynt (Today) and Moment that were bitter rivals. Both Jews and Poles lived in a condition that a Canadian aptly called “deux solitudes.”

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Sholem Asch depicts accurately the physical misery of the Jewish Northern area in his Warsaw section of Farn Mabul (Three Cities): The house in which the Hurvitzes lived was not in one of the shopping quarters of Warsaw, in Franciszkanska Street, for instance, or on the Nalewki Boulevard, but lay in the middle of the working class district in Boniface Street. It was a typical tenement barracks with a labyrinth of courtyards where workshops leaned against workshops: there was no corner into which a small roof was not squeezed with four walls to prop it up. And the barracks surrounding the uncannily dark workshops were packed full of human bodies that worked at machines of some kind from morning lamp-light until evening lamp-light: weaving-machinists, knitting-machinists, bagmakers and strap makers. From the open windows in summer issued sad songs of apprentice workgirls who bartered their young eyesight for halfpence during the long summer days and the longer winter evenings […]. The basement cellars were crammed with stores of leather, dyes, herrings, benzene and petrol, next door to bakeries and sausage shops. (Three Cities 2: 294)

Even Isaac Bashevis Singer becomes entranced in his rhetorical accumulatio, as he depicts the fervid activity and crushing presence of goods and bodies in Jewish Warsaw: The Nalewka was lined with four- and five-story buildings with wide entrances, plastered with signs in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. A world of trade: shirts and canes, cotton and buttons, umbrellas and silk […]. Wooden platforms were piled high with wares. Draymen unloaded crates and yelled out in hoarse voices. Crowds went in and out of buildings. (The Family Moskat 22)

The street and the courtyard are the basic narrative settings in the Jewish novels of Warsaw. The street and its name determine its ethnic and sociological character. For the Varshever (Warsaw Jew), the street address was iconic: one said Tlomacki 13 and meant the Jewish Pen Club Center, or Ceglana 1 and meant Peretz’s salon. Street names were like pawns in a chess game. Both Jews and Poles knew that Nowy S˙wiat and Jerozolimskie Avenue were Polish territory. 12 Kroch-malna (near Grzybowska Place), Bashevis Singer’s boyhood address, was Jewish. Bolesław Prus, the leading writer of Polish Warsaw, hardly describes the Jews in his Kroniki (1895), only Polish Warsaw with its streets and tenement courtyards. The shared misery of the Polish and Jewish poor is never presented. The same is true for the Yiddish novelists. As Annamaria Orla-Bukowska puts it, “Even in fiction, Polish Catholic authors tended to portray no more than one or two Jewish characters, while Polish Jewish writers often completely overlooked the Gentile population among which their characters would have lived” (91). Warsaw was the cultural locus in which two cultures shared the same topology transparently, and when opaque, danger lurked. 2.

Jewish Warsaw under the Russian Occupation

During most of the nineteenth century, Jewish Warsaw was no cultural Mecca. It was extremely traditional and, while buffeted by the Enlightenment movement, it took no leading role. It did become an important center of publishing, though, which added to its later significance. The early popular Yiddish novelists, Jacob Dinezon, Shomer (Nahum Meyer Shaykevitsh), and Mordkhe

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Spector mainly published in Warsaw. Spector published a good novel in 1884, Der Yidisher Muzshik (The Jewish Peasant), and joined Isaac Leyb Peretz and David Pinski in the important periodical Yom-tov Bletlakh (Holiday Pages) in 1894, which published quality Yiddish writings. In the 1880s, Warsaw became also a center of Hebrew publishing, its literary activity at times rivaling that of Odessa. The first Hebrew periodical, Ha-tsfira (The Morning Star), which later became a daily, was published there in 1862. The Hebrew daily, Ha-Tsofeh (The Watchman), also appeared there in the early part of the twentieth century, as did the periodicals Ha-Shiloah (The Shiloah River) and Ha-Dor (The Generation). Many of the authors who spent time in Odessa also lived in Warsaw. The Thursday evening gatherings in Peretz’s home also discussed the concerns of Hebrew literature. Among those attending were Bialik, David Frishman, Josef Klausner, Hirsch David Nomberg, and, from the younger generation, Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz, Yaakov Steinberg, and others. Klausner, an important literary critic and a brilliant Jewish scholar who also resided in Odessa at intervals, published Ha-Rayon ha-meshihi be-Yisrael (The Messianic Idea in Israel; 1949) and an informative book on Yeshu ha-Notsr (Jesus of Nazareth; 1922). Frishman was an important translator into Hebrew (of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and Ibsen’s play Nora, among other works), critic, and editor. Between 1909 and 1911, he contributed to the daily HaBoker (The Morning), and moved to Warsaw the important printing press Shtibel from Moscow. He also wrote literature: following the Maskilic tradition, his early stories are critical of the religious establishment. He later changed the tenor of his work to a more romantic-exotic one. Nomberg, finally, wrote in Hebrew mainly in his early career. He later became one of the important creators of modern Yiddish literature. His novella Fligelman (1905) encapsulates the mental and emotional paralysis of the young Jewish intellectuals, men caught between two worlds, a rejected traditional past and the uncomfortable new. But Warsaw became a great Jewish center primarily because of Isaac Leyb Peretz, who first spent time in the city in 1875, returning in 1889 and staying there until his death. Peretz represents the iconic figure of Warsaw Jewry. His name and presence dominated modern Jewish cultural life in Eastern Europe and his salon attracted the major writers of two generations. In his private home he spoke Polish, Yiddish in the salon, and he gained a law degree in Russian; he wrote in Polish first, then moved to Hebrew and finally to Yiddish. He was a poet, thinker, polemicist, editor (with other writers he edited two Yiddish periodicals, Yiddishe Bibliotek [1891–95], and the Yontev Bletlackh [1894–96]), a short story writer of neo-Chasidic tales, and a dramatist influenced by Symbolism and neo-Romanticism. He reworked his two major dramatic pieces, Baynakht oyfn alten mark (Nighttime in the Old Market Place; 1907) and Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain; 1909), up until his death. He is best known for his revival and reconstruction of the Chasidic tale in Khasidish (Chasidic Tales; 1908) and Folkstimlikhe Geshikhtn (Folk Tales; 1909), from which he took the valorization of the simple and downtrodden of the community as a vehicle for his socialist message. Peretz was innovative in his fiction. His Hebrew works “Haisha marat chana” (The Lady, Mrs. Channa; 1895) and “Veber-Liebe” (The Weaver’s Love; 1906), have a sophisticated epistolary structure. Peretz appears today as an autodidact of sorts, who in his writings and speeches galvanized the Jews to adapt to modern times and realities. He considered Bildung as the key to Jewish revival and that meant coming to terms with contemporary Western Civilization. A conflicted man, he championed the importance of individualism as a liberal, but sought to maintain the Golden Chain

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of Jewish history and ethics. He was a Herderian who believed in the “Jewish nation,” but he also had strong socialist universalizing drives. Peretz opposed assimilation although he loved Polish culture and Wagnerian opera. His originality emerged in his attempts to reuse traditions such as Chasidism, which he saw not as a decayed obscurantist folk movement but rather as a force that once fully expressed the spirituality of Ashkenazic Jewry. As all nineteenth century cultural nationalists, he sought in folklore the “essence” of Jewish Geist. He leaned towards Bundism (the Jewish Socialist movement) and was sympathetic to Zionism. He eschewed, however, any party membership. He was a distinguished orator who indulged in polemics against anti-Semitism. In 1908, he was one of the leaders of the Czernowitz conference that legitimized Yiddish as one of the two languages of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, he loved both languages and wrote many of his works first in Hebrew and then translated them into Yiddish. For the Eastern-European Jews, Peretz was the standard-bearer for their modernizing goals up to the end of World War II. His artistic influence has slipped since then in spite of efforts to revalorize it. Peretz appears today mostly as a gifted cultural and ideological leader who gave voice and form to the yearnings of his culture at a transitional moment but whose aesthetic accomplishment has withered. Still, one can hear accents from Isaac Bashevis Singer in the opening of “Yom Kippur in Hell” (1915): Once, on a perfectly ordinary day, without a fair or even an auction, a clatter of wheels and a splatter of mud aroused the merchants in the marketplace. Who, they wondered, could it be? It was a horse-drawn carriage. As soon as they saw it, though, they turned away in fear and revulsion. Both horse and carriage were well known. They belonged to a police informer from the neighboring town who was on his way to the provincial capital. God only knew who would be the victim of his tale bearing this time. (Trans. Hillel Halkin; Wisse 258)

Peretz attracted younger writers in Yiddish and Hebrew from all over Eastern Europe who came to his apartment in Warsaw and hoped for his blessing. His first “disciples” were David Pinski, Peretz Hirshbeyn, both playwrights, and Sholem Asch. Many stayed for a while in Warsaw and helped Peretz with his publications. Sholem Asch became the first Yiddish “superstar,” his plays being performed all over the world and his novels becoming international successes. His play Der got fun Nekomeh (God of Vengeance; 1907) depicted the Warsaw Jewish underclass, a world of prostitutes and pimps, with a mix of naturalism and romanticism. Asch learned his craft quickly, absorbing plot structure and bringing to Yiddish literature the well-made novel tradition. His models were purely Western; he did not innovate or follow the experimental tendencies of the Russian Silver Age or German Expressionism. His art was middlebrow, but within this traditional frame he displayed a remarkable production. His Wanderlust brought him to Palestine, America, and Western Europe, and each trip provided him with new material. His Farn Mabul (Three Cities; 1928–1931) portrays from a liberal Polish-Jewish angle the coming of the Russian Revolution and its effect upon the Jews of the Tsarist Empire, and their own performance before and during the Revolution. If the characterizations are thin, Asch’s ability to weave into the narrative the conflicting issues inside and outside of the Jewish community stand the test of time. The second volume of the trilogy, called “Warsaw,” depicts the options before the Jews in Warsaw with remarkable concreteness. Asch’s best work captures Polish-Jewish life across the centuries, from the Khmelnitski Uprising of 1645

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and the horrendous slaughter of Jews in Kiddush Hashem (Martyrdom; 1919), to the life of the simple Jew who attains fulfillment in the world of nineteenth-century Chasidism in Der Thilim Yid (Salvation; 1936). His Christological novels, The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949) were international successes, but he lost his Yiddish readership, which felt that his efforts at Jewish-Christian rapprochement were insensitive, given the Holocaust. From today’s perspective, Asch’s novels are marked by the passing time, for the writer lacked the enduring art of his contemporary rival from Kiev, Dovid Bergelson. Asch’s younger colleagues in the Warsaw Peretz circle did not display his cautious optimism and panoramic vision. Ezer Varshavsky’s novel, Shmugler (Smugglers; 1920) returns the reader to the demoralized shtetl of World War I, as does Shimon Horonchik’s work, produced under the influence of an important figure in Warsaw Jewish culture, the prose writer and editor I. M. Vaysenberg. Asch moved to America before the War, as did other writers who found Peretz stimulating but Russian-occupied Warsaw stifling. Hebrew writing at the beginning of the twentieth century was represented primarily by Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz, who, because of his personal circumstances, served as a link between two generations of authors. He was the son-in-law of Scholem Aleykhem (who also lived in Warsaw for a time) and his Hebrew translator. After wandering across eastern and central Europe and spending time in the United States, he moved to Israel in 1928 and remained there until his death. Like Nomberg, Berkowitz wrote about alienation and in the title of a famous short story coined the term Talush (Uprooted; see “Sipurim ve-mahazot. Talush”), which was to become the signal word for the alienation of the acculturating Jew, who finds home nowhere. Yaakov Steinberg was one of the few writers who acknowledged the plight of Jewish women oppressed by traditional society, for instance in “Ha-Iveret” (The Blind Woman) and “Bat ha-Rav” (The Rabbi’s Daughter). Arguably, the most “modernist” of the Hebrew writers living in Warsaw was Uri Nissan Gnessin. From the Chekhovian influence discernible in his early work, Gnessin moved to his own version of stream of consciousness writing, which he first developed in the story “Ha-Tzida” (Sideways) published in 1905. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the outburst of Hebrew literary activity in Warsaw had dwindled. Berkowitz noted this on his return there in 1909: he observed the Hebrew landscape “deserted” and “enthusiastically replaced” by Yiddish writing. By the twenties, the writing of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe had slowed down significantly. Since the 1910s, it had been gradually establishing itself in Palestine and by the thirties found a fertile home there. A writer who stayed on in Warsaw was Hillel Tseytlin [Zeitlin] (see below). He began his literary career writing Hebrew monographs, for instance one on Spinoza, and later wrote on subjects that were very much in the neo-mystical vein opened by Peretz. He also wrote poetry and worked, as did many of the post–1910 Warsaw Hebrew writers, in the Yiddish press. The death of Peretz in 1915 marked the end of the pre-War era. Warsaw was now occupied by the Germans, who took the city in a swift offensive. The city reemerged in 1918 as the capital of the new Polish nation-state. For Jewish Warsaw, it meant the same continuous economic hardships and the complexities of adapting to the same minority role, though no longer in a multicultural Empire but rather in a modern nationalist Polish state. Polish Jewry was now isolated from the rest of the Jews in the former Empire. Culturally, Jewish Warsaw went into stasis.

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The Interwar Years in Jewish Warsaw (1918–39)

The first post–World War I attempt at a Jewish cultural renaissance crystallized in Łódź, in 1919, where a group of poets and artists tried to fuse Expressionism and Russian-influenced Futurism with a Judaic content to form a new modern culture. Moshe Broderzon arrived back from Moscow after absorbing the new freedom of language play, new forms, and experimental reworking of folk motifs. El Lissitzky illustrated Broderzon’s narrative poem, Sikhes Khulin (Small Talk; 1917), an erotic variant of Peretz’s first Yiddish poem, “Monish.” From Germany came Yankl Adler and Marek Shvarts, both influenced by Expressionism. They joined forces and issued a manifesto, declaring themselves Yung-Yiddish: For Art, for young beautiful Yiddish, and for the eternal speech of the Prophets! Without beauty, the world is not possible [gemolt zayn: pun of words, to be possible or drawn.] […] In our leaning towards impressionism, expressionism, cubism, we shall combine all perspectives with the name futurism. (Manifesto of Yung-Yiddish 2)

Their short-lived journal and movement represents in Poland the emergence of Jewish Modernist plastic art and the beginning of Yiddish Modernist poetry. Broderzon was the chief poet and spokesman for the new era. He introduced the kleyn-kunst teater (chamber theater), encouraged puppet plays, and wrote witty “Judaized” commedia dell’arte or dramaletn. He was joined in his efforts by the Hebrew/Yiddish poet Yitskhok Katsenelson. In its six issues, Yung-Yiddish also published the Galician Yiddish poets Melekh Ravitsh, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Israel Stern. The latter brought against Broderzon’s light aesthetic and stylized touch the expressionist seriousness of Mitteleuropa with its intensity and apocalyptic vision. By the end of 1920, Jewish Warsaw reemerged as the cultural center of Polish Jewry. The native Łódźers remained at home but the Galitsianer expressionists gathered in Warsaw. They contributed to Alter Kacyzne and Mikhl Vaykhert’s new literary journal Ringen, which appeared in 1921. The journal rapidly evolved from a prewar Jewish neo-romanticism, influenced by Peretz’s cultural nationalism, into full-blown Expressionism. Its publication coincided with the Dybbuk fever engendered in Warsaw by the first production of the S. An-Ski’s play, Der Dibuk, performed by the Vilna Troupe in Yiddish at the end of January 1921. This rather old-fashioned, well-made play, originally written in Russian for Mkhat in Moscow, put into Yiddish by An-Ski and into Hebrew by the great poet Bialik, mesmerized its audience with the image of a shtetl world absorbed in Chasidic mysticism and superstitions. The love plot is a Tristan and Iseult à la juive, in which the lover is dead but returns to inhabit the beloved’s body. The play’s powerful encounter of worlds, the supernal and the material, enchanted audiences, becoming the iconic play of Jewry. The Warsaw Jewish audience, fragmented spiritually after seven years of war and occupation, held on to this play because it proffered a holistic world and allowed them, through the aesthetics of theatrical performance, to participate in religious scenes that many regarded as dated. At the same time, the play reinforced the theme of individual rights, especially in love, as opposed to communal duties. Theater in Yiddish continued to flourish in interwar Warsaw, but never produced a play with such cathartic meaning.

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The Jewish plastic artists had more direct contacts with their Polish counterparts than any of the Yiddish writers. Henryk Berlewi, for example, who made the Dybbuk poster and the banner of Ringen, exhibited in Zakheta, the Polish Society for the Development of Fine Arts, and frequented Polish futurist milieus. Berlewi moved to Constructivism in 1923, and joined the Polish Avant-garde group, BLOK, displaying his theoretical work, Mechano-Faktura (which foreshadowed “conceptual” and “op art”), in a Warsaw automobile store, in the first abstract-constructivist exhibition in Poland. The modern Jewish artist demanded the freedom of expression that the Yiddish writer would soon require as well. As Henryk Berlewi, the first Polish-Jewish artist to enter abstract art wrote in 1921: “Form is autonomous. It has its own sphere of activity” (“In kamf far der nayer form” 32). a. The Yiddish Warsaw Avant-garde: the Khalyastre Period, 1920–24 By 1922, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Melekh Ravitsh, and the newcomer from the Soviet Union, Perets Markish, broke with Ringen and its Peretzian epigones and national aesthetics. They began their own journal, the Khalyastre, and consciously placed as its motto Broderzon’s verse: “Mir Yungen, mir-a freylekhe tsuzungene khalyastre” (We, the young, a happy boisterous gang). Their manifesto, written by Markish, recalls the typical violent expressionist style (“our measuring stick is not beauty but horror”) and their texts never allude to the Yiddish or Hebrew traditions. These poets brought Yiddish to its full modernist potential as a purely aesthetic instrument. Every language register is exploited for its verbal effect. To use Yiddish was already a “national” feature; the contents, however, were to be universal! The most advanced modernist journal in Yiddish, Albatros, was published in Warsaw in 1922 by Uri Zvi Greenberg, the finest Jewish expressionist poet in both Yiddish and Hebrew. His expressionist Modernism rejected Markish’s “socialist” aesthetics. Greenberg was a cultural nationalist who shocked many left-leaning intellectuals by making use of expressionist techniques for intense right-wing nationalist views. The second edition of Albatros was confiscated by the Polish authorities because Greenberg used a calligram of the cross and addressed Jesus as one more Jewish victim. Greenberg fled to Berlin and published there in 1923 Albatros 3, which brought together the abstract works of the most advanced Jewish plastic artists with a wild series of his own poems that fused lamentation, denunciation, and prophetic insight. “In Malkhus fun Tseylem” (In the Kingdom of the Cross), we find the lines: On the branches, the dead are still hanging with bloody wounds. […] For two thousand years a silence beneath the trees burns here in the abyss, Such venom that collects and pools in the abyss — and I do not know What is wrong: for two thousand years bloodletting endures, silence endures And no mouth has ever heaved up the venomous spittle from the throat. And in the holy books are written down all the murders at the hands of Gentiles, But the answer is not to be found there, our answer about the murders. […] Great Europe! Kingdom of the Cross! […] Clad me in a wide Arab abaya, cast a prayer shawl over my shoulder. Suddenly in my poor blood flames up the nearly extinguished East. And-take back the frock coat and the tie and the patent-leather shoes That I bought in Europe.

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Seth L. Wolitz with Zilla Jane Goodman Put me on a horse and order it to race off, carrying me to the desert. Give me back my sands. I yield the boulevards. I yearn for the sands of the desert.

Greenberg, whose parents were murdered in a pogrom in Lvov, was disgusted with Europe that, as he complained, had not recognized the Jews or their literature. He advises Jews to learn about guns if they will not abandon Europe. This edition of Albatros was his last. He cursed the Yiddish language as a streetwalker and abandoned it almost entirely, leaving for Tel Aviv and a new career as an intensely nationalist Hebrew poet. The Khalyastre itself broke up by 1924. Certainly, differences of ideology and the inability to find solutions to the pressing Jewish realities, except in political movements, played a role. So did the withering of international Expressionism. But it was also true that the poets and artists surpassed the cultural and aesthetic sophistication of the Yiddish reader. They abandoned Warsaw because they could not support themselves with such a weak base. By the mid-thirties, of the early modernists and Khalyastre figures only the native Broderzon, Stern, and Katsenelson remained. The key painters, Berlewi, Shvarts, and Adler had already departed. In fact, Markish published Khalyastre II in Paris to a small readership. The Khalyastre group had wanted Warsaw to be the capital of world Jewish culture and this explains why so many non-Polish Jews had flocked to Warsaw. The Jewish Warsaw “Bohemia” had enjoyed the antics of the Khalyastre; they taunted the traditional world by holding poetry recitals on Saturday morning (the Jewish Sabbath) and wild all night recitals. Hillel Tseytlin, the leader of the Warsaw religious intelligentsia, published in Moment a denunciation of their tactics, suggesting that khalyastre (gang) was the nickname they deserved. The passing of the Khalyastre ended the highest point of Warsaw Yiddish literary life that had participated in both the Western Avant-garde and in the world Yiddish literature. Warsaw now returned to a more middle-of-the-road cultural expression. Still, the Khalyastre continued to influence Dvoreh Fogel, the cubist poet from Lvov, and the Yung-Vilne movement in the thirties. Echoes of it could be heard also in the weekly Warsaw literary journal, Literarishe Shriftn (1924–1939), where some of the Khalyastre writers were editors for a short time. b. Retrenchment: Jewish Warsaw 1925–39 Jewish Warsaw always had a strong religious component, but there were children from “modern Orthodox” and traditional homes who took more liberal interpretations of their inheritance. Hillel Tseytlin (Zeitlin), a “modern” religious thinker and columnist for Moment, hosted at home a literary circle before World War I, which brought together many of the Yiddish and Hebrew writers, critics, and folklorists. He was a mystic concerned with restoring Jewish spiritual life. He was less sure of the European/Jewish symbiosis represented by the Peretz salon. He wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish but threatened to produce an Aramaic novel because he wanted an “educated audience!” His son, Elhanan Tseytlin, captures the first years of this Warsaw salon in In a literarishe Shtub (In a Literary Home; 1937). His brother Aaron Tseytlin was a poet, dramatist, and mystic in Hebrew and Yiddish. Fascinated, as was his age, with Jewish False Messiahs, he wrote the play Jacob Frank (1929), which explores such a figure seeking Evil to hasten a messianic age. He also wrote poetry about Jewish Warsaw. Another religious family, the Singers, from the poverty-stricken quarter “Krakhmalne Gas,” produced three Yiddish writers, all of whom were to be translated and read in the Western world. The oldest was Israel Joshua Singer, who joined the Khalyastre and wrote about Warsaw and Jew-

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ish life, emphasizing the theme of his generation: seeking social justice and always finding loneliness if not being eventually crushed. He was active in Warsaw’s Yiddish cultural life between 1922 and 1928. He is best known for Yoshe Kalb (The Sinner; 1932) and his prose epic of Jewish life in Łódź, Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi; 1936). The latter, depicting the rise and cruel end of an Ashkenazi family spanning a century, is a paean to Jewish stalwartness. He wrote it in New York, after abandoning Warsaw and its grim realities in 1933. The work of his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, represents the world of the author’s Warsaw childhood. In My Father’s Court (1966) suggested how much of a Varshever he was. His very name functions today iconically as the last voice of Polish Jewry and the last image of Yiddish culture. The writer’s ideological position was highly conservative, and he never had patience with Socialism or utopian visions. Mankind must face up to its limits and work within its bounds. He shared this rather dour view with Aaron Tseytlin, his friend and editor of Globus (1932–34), a cultural journal that first published his masterpiece, Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray; 1935). This novel reworks three old Jewish genres — the chronicle, the epistle, and the wonder tale — providing three perspectives, all of them partial. Each voice interprets events in the shtetl of Goray, where in 1665, after the Khmelnitsky Uprising, the Jews yield to dreams of the coming of the Messiah and experience a moral and spiritual collapse more demoralizing than the violence of the Cossacks. This historical novel may be an Aesopic commentary on the realities of Polish Jewry after World War I and the utopian dreams rampant in Zionism, Bundism, and Socialism — all of which Singer rejected. Still, if he was not an active believer in the Chasidic world of his father, Singer nevertheless valued and exploited this Jewish ethical inheritance. His later novels treat Polish-Jewish relations in various historical settings. Der knekht (The Slave; 1962) is set again in the seventeenth century, The Manor (1967) focuses on Poland after the 1863 Uprising (see vol. 1: 507–508 of our History), and Singer’s family novel, Di Mishpahat Muskat (The Family Moskat; 1950), portrays the decline of a patrician Jewish family of Warsaw, from 1900 to the Hitler years. These novels follow the late nineteenthcentury style of Stefan Żeromski, Knut Hamsun, and Russian Realism, lacking the “reactionary Modernism” of Satan in Goray. Singer’s best work may well be in his short stories, where his narrative skills are honed for rapid and efficient action, with carefully chosen detail free of realistic constrictions and sustained descriptions of characters. Singer tests various narrative perspectives and makes full use of wit and irony: I, a demon, bear witness that there are no demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my substance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pabulum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own. I don’t have to tell you that I am a Jew. What else, a Gentile? I’ve heard that there are Gentile demons, but I don’t know any, nor do I wish to know them. Jacob and Esau don’t become in-laws. (“The Last Demon,” Singer, Collected Stories 179)

These short stories abound in fantasy, in material drawn from cabbalistic, Polish-Jewish, and even Polish folklore. Singer plays with eroticism and fears in the dreamtime of Polish Jewry, providing

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against the rationalism of Talmudic rabbinical life a vision of the nonrational side of the PolishJewish mindset. Saul Bellow’s English translation of “Gimpel the Fool” (1953) set off a worldwide appreciation of this master storyteller. Bashevis Singer himself altered texts from language to language, especially from his original Yiddish into the sellable English. Singer left Warsaw in 1935 for New York and never returned. I once asked him why not? He replied: “The Poland I want to see again is only in my head.” Bashevis is the heir to the Hillel Tseytlin side of Warsaw Jewry. His sister, Ester Kreytman, represents the emancipation of Jewish Orthodox women who sought to make something more of their lives than tradition allowed them. She wrote earlier than her brothers did but destroyed her writings before embarking on her disastrous arranged marriage. She published short stories and two novels, the first in Warsaw, Der sheydim-tants (The Devil’s Dance; 1936), and the second in London, Brilyantn (Diamonds; 1944). The former book is an autobiographical novel in which the heroine struggles to make something of herself. Needless to say, she had less than warm feelings for her more famous brothers, and correctly intuited that their coolness toward her was tinged with old gender biases. Her vision of Warsaw is affected by these family tensions. Orthodox women in interwar Poland began to write verse and prose and sought publishers in Warsaw. In Mayn Bobes Oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure; 1922), Miryam Ulinover achieves a pure folk-style rendering of traditional Polish-Jewish feminine culture. Kadya Molodovski, the finest woman poet in Yiddish, came to Warsaw from Lithuania. She wrote a collection of mature poems entitled Dzhike Gas (Dzika Street; 1931), depicting that Warsaw street with its poor Jews and the conflict between her poetic emancipation and her social sense of responsibility. In Freydke (1935), the Jewish workers perform their various legal and illegal activities on the Warsaw streets, going on strike or trying merely to survive. By 1935, Molodovski had seen enough of that scene of tension and emigrated to America. Itzik Manger, however, felt the attraction of Jewish Warsaw and, considering it the place to be in Eastern Europe, he moved from “provincial” Romania to the capital of Yiddish culture in 1929. He loved Warsaw Jewry and they considered him their most popular poet. He published in Warsaw his second collection, Lamtern in Vint (Lanterns in the Wind; 1933), fusing the German ballad tradition with the Romanian-Jewish bardic style. His idiomatic verse has the light precision of Heine, with a soft ironic bite. Later, Manger reached back to pure Jewish subject matters, reworking Biblical tales in ballad form, turning stern Biblical figures into jolly Carpathian characters with contemporary foibles. These poems were first published in 1935 and 1936 as Humesh lider (Bible Poems); the expanded version after the War became his masterpiece: Medresh Itsik (1953). His ballad, “Afn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (On the Way a Tree Is Standing), was set to music and became an instant success in Warsaw, maintaining its appeal to this day because of its allegorical implications: To my mother then, I say, “If you won’t meddle, please, I’ll turn myself into a bird Right before your eyes…” My mother cried, “Oh Itsik, love,

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In the name of God, Take a little scarf with you, To keep from catching cold.” […] I try to fly, but I can’t move Too many, many things My Mother’s piled on her weak bird And loaded down my wings. I look into my Mother’s eyes And, sadly there I see the love that won’t let me become The bird I want to be. (Trans. Leonard Wolf; Howe, Wisse, and Shmeruk 588–89)

Manger’s work captures the folk Yiddishkayt into which Warsaw Jewry retreated from its contemporary misery, seeking solace and reconfirmation. He also published a comic novel, adapted an old Goldfaden play, and wrote a memoir on the earliest Yiddish bards, Noente geshtaltn (Nearby Figures; 1938). He left Warsaw, not expecting to be able to return to it. In the late 1930s, Warsaw Jewry experienced difficult times of impoverishment and anti-Semitic persecution. Writers turned inward or were forced into defending their way of life. Jechiel Lerer wrote his long poem, Mayn Heym (My Home; 1937), capturing the traditional world of Ashkenazic Jewry; and Yehoshua Perle wrote his large autobiographic novel, Yidn fun a gants yor (Jews for All Seasons; 1935), which also portrayed a Jewish Eastern European way of life. These works represent today the last artistic expressions of a doomed community. They do not contain the slightest trace of modernist poetics that once brought Warsaw Jewry to the cutting edge of European literature. The Warsaw ghetto set up by the Germans did not stop Jewish cultural pursuits. Emmanuel Ringelblum’s detailed memoirs survived the War, and so we know what intense efforts took place there to maintain morale. Most of the writers continued to compose new work, and some of the texts survived and were published after the war. Lerer’s ghetto verse, for example, was published in 1948. Almost all the people discussed above perished by being starved in the ghetto, beaten to death, or shot or gassed in Treblinka. A few survived to participate in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. 4.

Jewish Warsaw: an Icon of Total Destruction

After World War II, the Polish Communist government allowed Jewish cultural life to recommence under its aegis. It established a Jewish section that set up an educational system in Yiddish; a publishing house, Yidish-Bukh, which printed classics and memoirs of the War years; a daily newspaper, Folks-shtime (The People’s Voice); and the Jewish Historical Institute. Ida Kaminska, from a Warsaw theater family of two generations, was given a stage (the Jewish State Theater) where Yiddish plays were performed by aging actors, replaced finally by Poles. This theater was a sort of Potemkin village, meant to show the world that the new Polish regime was not anti-Semitic. But in 1968, Poland followed the Soviet Union in denouncing Israel, and a purge of Jews began in Warsaw. The number of Jews in all Poland was reduced to 6,000. Most of them could not read

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the Yiddish books published by Yidish-Bukh or by Folks-shtime, which served mainly for propaganda. The departure of Ida Kaminska in 1969 spelled the end of any dream of restoration. With the end of the communist regime, good-will attempts are being made to reestablish a Jewish life in Warsaw. The Jewish Historical Institute, a communist institution designed to present a communist interpretation of history, has been revamped, and synagogue life has returned cautiously. The Yiddish theater in Warsaw has been revived and modern Hebrew is taught at the university, but the Jewish community has all but ceased to exist in the city (Mazor, The Vanished City). Jews use Polish, not Yiddish, and the picture of what was Warsaw Jewry, when two of every five persons was a Jew speaking Yiddish, has evaporated from memory (see Adamczyk-Garbowska in vol. 1: 438–41 of our History). Warsaw itself is no longer the same city after being destroyed by the Germans during the Polish Uprising of 1944. The Warsaw that at the beginning of the twentieth century was a place of Jewish life, modernity, and tradition, has become for Jewry the symbol of slaughter and tragic interruption. Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish author discovered belatedly in Warsaw, put it best in a prophetic sentence from his story “Kometa” (1938): And so it stood, unprepared and unfinished, in an accidental intersection of time and space, without closing of accounts, without reaching any goal, caught in a half-sentence, as it were, without full stop or exclamation mark, without trial. (Opowiadania 347).

2. Regional Sites of Cultural Hybridization

Introduction: Literature in Multicultural Corridors and Regions Marcel Cornis-Pope Even though, as Csaba Kiss admits, the writers of the East-Central Europe knew relatively little of each other, “cast[ing] their glances towards Paris, from Warsaw and Prague, Belgrade and Bucharest,” their work often reflects a “shared world, with its own contradictions naturally, an odd mixture of pain and nostalgia, negative sentiments, affection and hate, gibes and national injuries” (126, 127). For example, the writings of the Polish Wyspiański, the Hungarian Ady, and the Croatian Krleža reveal a similar turn-of-the-century worldview characterized by “decadence, the literary expression of Lebensphilosophie and the radical reformulation of national mythologies” (126). Even when they reflect highly individualized projects, such works reinforce certain regional features. Therefore, the literatures of East-Central Europe represent an ideal object of study for a regional comparative history, freed from nationalistic agendas but also from a leveling notion of globalism. As I suggested in the general introduction, regionalism is a complex and problematic concept, located somewhere between fiction and reality, manifesting itself as a continually rediscovered but never quite fulfilled aspiration. The integrative impulse sometimes took utopian forms, as in the countries along the Danube whose interactions converged towards a tenuous concept of “Danubianism” (see below the articles on the “Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor”); or it sought concrete topographic support as in the case of the large area between the Oder-Neisse, Poland, the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia and Southern Romania associated with the more or less coherent Ashkenaz culture of the East-Central European Jewry discussed in this volume by Seth Wolitz. Elements of regional awareness and transnational hybridity can also be found within areas that we usually associate with a national paradigm, such as the present territory of Albania that is for Robert Elsie the epitome of the “hybrid soil of the Balkans” (see below), allowing for a dialogic development of Albanian literature at the interface of Christianity and Islam, Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire; or the Croatian literary topography that in Vladimir Biti’s description interplays an “up-universe” of utopia and a “down-universe” of realism and retrenchment (see below). While highlighting the intercultural dialogue within these regions, the essays of this section on multicultural corridors and regions are careful not to idealize the transnational impetus, emphasizing the contradictory ways in which these areas were redefined from competing ethnocultural positions. For example, Transylvania’s literary cultures illustrate for John Neubauer, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Sándor KibédiVarga, and Nicolae Harsanyi a conflicting paradigm that mixes rivalry with mutual neglect and cautious interaction. Likewise the articles of Cornis-Pope (with Petković) and Verona emphasize the divergent ways in which the Danube corridor was perceived up-course and down-course, in the literature of both Western writers and indigenous writers, resulting in a hierarchical opposition

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between a “Mitteleuropa” Danube at the center of the Habsburg Empire and a more “oriental” Danube on the eastern “periphery.” Neubauer also reminds us that, in addition to connecting west and east, the Danube functioned as a north-south axis that encouraged migrations and exchanges between Slavic and non-Slavic populations. Writers like Miroslav Krleža, Miloš Crnjanski, Aleksandar Tišma, Péter Esterházy and others (discussed in the three articles on the Danube corridor) complicate further these perceptions, transcending nationalistic interests in favor of a broader transcultural (Danubian) perspective. Their protagonists are tempted or forced to “migrate” in search of new “homes” or are “unhomed” irremediably. Other essays in this section follow the literary production across national boundaries into more or less imaginary cross-cultural spaces: Galicia (discussed by Agnieszka Nance), Pannonia (rediscovered by Guido Snel), the Balkans (pieced together in the articles by Petković, Elsie, Biti, Mihelj, and Peleva). While all literary mappings are imaginary, engaged in delimiting/inventing new boundaries and crossing them, the authors mentioned above are directly concerned with the myths that underlie particular geocultural constructs and their translation in literature. Thus, Guido Snel emphasizes the contradictory nature of the literary cultivation of the Pannonian myth, which features both as an imaginary “home” for several literatures of the area and a space of geocultural homelessness. Galicia, which is the focus of Agnieszka Nance’s article, and Macedonia, treated by Inna Peleva, function in somewhat similar ways as both topographic realities and myths that other cultures (Polish and Bulgarian, respectively) emulate and appropriate. Multicultural Galicia, for example, allowed not only a more complex reflection on Polish (and German, Ruthenian, or Jewish) identity, but also a richer Polish literature, expanded with the work written there in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Macedonia similarly inspired several ethnic narratives (“Slavonic,” “Macedonian,” “Bulgarian,” “Greek”; the author could have added “Aromanian” and perhaps “Muslim”) but these emerged as impure and hybrid, suggesting “multiple belonging” rather than exclusive rights over a certain territory. The case of Istra (considered by Sabina Mihelj) is even more complicated: this topographic area, corresponding roughly to the peninsula in the North Adriatic Sea and including the city of Trieste and its surroundings, is currently shared by three nation-states — Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. The literatures of each nation remap the area along its own lines of interest, but cannot entirely suppress the multicultural crossings. For example, the Slovenian literary constructions of Istra both reflect and react against the homogenizing pressures of the national culture, problematizing the boundaries of Istra and introducing another constructed literary region in it: Šavrinija and Šavrinian identity. Other overlooked identities (those of the Aromanians and Macedo-Romanians, for example) emerge briefly in the essays that focus on the Bulgarian reidentification with Macedonia (Peleva) and on Albania’s struggle to define its cultural identity (Elsie), suggesting that the search for national identity is always more complicated, benefiting from the input of other ethnic groups that, for various reasons, were never given the opportunity to develop their own national culture. On the basis of these and other essays in our History, we can argue that regionalism functioned (however briefly) as an alternative to the national centralization of East-Central European cultures both in the nineteenth century, when these cultures went through a process of nation-building, and again after World War I. In what Virgil Nemoianu has called the “Biedermeier” phase of postRomanticism and early Realism, various ethnic groups in East-Central Europe developed some interest in each other’s literatures that led, if not to sustained collaboration, at least to a respectful

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coexistence (see Nemoianu, “A Biedermeier Cultural Intertextuality in Transylvania”; also the article on “Transylvania” in this volume, though the latter is more skeptical in its evaluation of these interethnic collaborations). A similar example can be found in the multiethnic region of the Banat, examined in the essay on Timişoara (see pp. 105–124 in this volume). Beginning in the eighteenth century, this region inhabited by Romanians, Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Slovaks, Turks, and Armenians, developed the rudiments of a “transethnic” East European civilization (see also Neumann, Identităţi). As the great “turning plate” between Vienna and Constantinople, the Banat area redefined Europe itself as an intercrossing of multiple traditions, rather than a homogeneous cultural space. Romania’s first important novelist, Ioan Slavici grew up at the interface between Transylvania and the Banat with the conviction that one needed to relate to each individual’s ethnic culture and language. The multilingual press of Timişoara shared a similar conviction at the beginning of World War I, maintaining a surprisingly balanced attitude in its reports (deploring the collapse of the Habsburg Empire without vilifying its enemies such as the Serbs). Unfortunately, the regionalist impulse in East-Central Europe was greatly eroded by the totalitarian regimes that followed one another through the latter half of the twentieth century. For example, the takeover of Northern Transylvania by Miklós Horthy’s Hungarian troops (1940, culminating in mass deportations under Szálasi’s government, 1944), and of Northern Bucovina and Bessarabia by Ion Antonescu’s Romanian troops (1941), included also a process of “ethnic purification” with disastrous effects on traditional ethnic “others” such as the Jews and the Gypsies. The Soviet occupation of East-Central Europe led to further persecutions not only of the German minority, who were deported to labor camps, but also of the Romanians and Hungarians who were submitted to a process of forced Russification. Eastern Europe did not become a truly integrated region, with a “mutual interpenetration of national economies and national cultures,” or “any widespread cross-frontier contacts between nation-states”; on the contrary, “its basic premise was the maintenance of mutual isolation whenever possible” (Kusý 93–94). In response to forced cultural assimilation, which threatened East-Central Europe’s most basic sense of identity through the “transplantation of Soviet life-style, Soviet models, Soviet literature — Soviet everything” (Kusý 93), a number of communist regimes in the area developed a nationalist form of Communism, with xenophobic and ethnocentric accents. These nationalist and ethnocentric tendencies have been exacerbated after the collapse of the Soviet system, especially in the Baltic and the Balkan areas. Confronted with new conflicts and divisions, the essays below try to retrieve alternative ways of identity making in the area, which emphasize regionalism and transnationalism. While not ignoring the products inspired by nationalistic passions, they foreground the work of those intercultural writers who crossed national boundaries in the past and who more recently have submitted the nationalistic-ethnocentric paradigm to critical questioning and parody. Against the unsettling effects of centuries of imperial domination and ethnocentric rivalry, these articles seek to valorize the transnational (pan-European or simply regionalist) consciousness that has periodically reemerged in the literary production of East-Central Europe. As I have argued in the general introduction (pp. 6–7), the contributors to this volume share a concept of dynamic regionalism. Each essay foregrounds the various relationships that authors and texts establish within and across the national boundaries, as they balance regional/transnational aspirations with a focus on local differences.

A. The Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor

Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic Marcel Cornis-Pope, with Nikola Petković (on Kyselak and Krleža) The Danube is German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe, polemically opposed to the Germanic Reich. It is a “hinternational” ecumene, for which in Prague Johannes Urzidil praised it; it is a hinterworld “behind the nation.” (Magris, Danube 29)

According to Claudio Magris, himself a product of the various cultures of this “hinternational” region (Triestine, Austrian, Italian), the cultural mosaic along the Danube opposes the idea of coherence and purity embedded in the Germanic Mitteleuropa as symbolized by the topography and mythology of the Rhine river. But the waters of the Danube do not lead entirely away from those of the Rhine: elements of the Germanic model, whether nationalist (Prussian) or multicultural (Austrian), continue to reflect in the Danubian world. And there are other, subtler connections between the Germanic and non-Germanic Danube: the first king of modern Romania at the end of the nineteenth century, Carol I, came from the Hohenzollern-Simaringen family of princes, with their castle on the Upper Danube. The Danubian mosaic of cultures has been idealized at times as a “harmony” (in the heydays of the Habsburg Empire or more recently, after the collapse of the Soviet block), but it has just as often been marred by interethnic conflict and totalitarian barbarity before and after World War II. The journey down the Danube that Magris and many others before him have undertaken, moves simultaneously through “a string of battlefields, past, present, and future,” with castles, trenches, concentration camps, and other divisive fortifications (Danube 33, 155), and through never fullyrealized utopian visions for a “Danubian federation” — from the one imagined by Baron Miklós Wesselény in 1842, to the scheme proposed all too late by Kossuth, to Aurel Popovici’s 1906 proposal for a “United States of Greater Austria,” to the plans of Oszkár Jászi, and the Danubianism of László Németh. The Danube cultural region is thus both a “fortress” against the “fear of losing oneself in perfidious reality” (Danube 155), and an invitation to fluidity, a continuous reinvention of reality in the smoke-filled Viennese and Balkan cafés. Much of the lower course of the Danube and the cultures inhabiting its banks were still great unknowns in the second half of the nineteenth century when the French explorer Guillaume Lejean shifted his attention from the Nile, whose course he had successfully mapped, to that of the Danube. His travels through the Balkan Peninsula (1857–70) resulted in some of the most detailed maps of the region. Other traveler-writers, however, continued to produce half-fictive maps and testimonies, strewn with little understood spots. It is also true that reality along the Danube often changed its boundaries and meaning, trying to fit together local, regional, and “global” (panGermanic, pan-Slavic, or multicultural) visions. Even the great imperial city that is supposed to anchor this region, Vienna, is for Magris a city of post-modern (un)reality, in which “strong cat-

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Figure 1. The Course of the Danube River on the present-day political map

egories weaken, and the universal […] dissolves into the ephemeral” (Danube 188). Beginning in Germany, the Danube itself is a “sinuous matter of irony, of that irony which created the greatness of Central European culture, the art of outflanking one’s own barrenness and checkmating one’s own weakness; the sense of the duplicity of things, and at the same time the truth of them, hidden but single” (58). This radical irony has made over the centuries more palatable the region’s contradictions and imbalances (political, social, and linguistic-cultural), allowing paradoxical syntheses to emerge. The Danube’s very course has been continually remapped, stretched, and compressed according to economic, political, and cultural pressures. Ancient geographers mistakenly believed that the river had two branches, one that ended in the Black Sea, the other that flowed into the Adriatic. Accordingly, they located “Istria” in two different places: on the shores of the Black Sea and on the peninsula of that name in the Adriatic. Likewise, the distinction between an Upper and Lower Danube has shifted in different descriptions. From a hydrographic point of view, the Upper Danube stretches for 1,100 km, from its source at Donaueschingen to the confluence with the March (Morava). From the viewpoint of international law, the upper course stretches for twice as long, to the Iron Gate (Romanian Porţile de fier, Serbian Gvozdena Vrata) in Southwestern Romania. The Bavarians see it ending at the Regensburg stone bridge; for the Austrian engineer Ernst Neweklowsky, who authored a three-volume treatise entitled Die Schiffahrt und Flösserei im Raume der oberen Donau (Navigating and Rafting on the Upper Danube; 1952–58), it stretch-

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es to Vienna (Magris, Danube 59–60). More to the point, the river that emerges from the coming together of the Ilz, the Inn, and the Danube at Passau could equally well have been called the Inn, for that is the deeper and wider river at the confluence. Perhaps the uncertain (hybrid) origins of the Danube make it a fit topographic reference point for hybrid East-Central Europe. The Danube corridor has mediated for centuries the encounter of European and Ottoman (oriental) cultures, an encounter that has produced many violent frictions but also dreams of new cultural mixtures such as a Roman-Muslim Empire. Francesco Griselini, who traveled through the crown territory of the Banat in 1774–76, described this area as a mosaic of ten different peoples — the Walachians (Romanians), Raciani (Serbs), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Greeks, German colonists, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, and Jews (Magris, Danube 294). This mosaic flourished unimpeded after Prince Eugène of Savoy rescued Timişoara from the Turks in 1716 and the region’s governor, Claudius Florimund Count of Mercy, drained its marshes and repopulated the deserted areas with colonists from various countries. While these areas were not spared often violent national-ethnic conflicts, there is some truth in Ivo Andrić’s metaphoric suggestion in Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina; 1945) that the Slavic and non-Slavic populations south of the Danube attempted beginning in the sixteenth century to coexist in spite of their different ethnic interests and religious faiths (Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, and Judaic), defending together a fragile bridge originally imposed upon them by the invading Turks. The fact that the bridge over Drina, both contested and tolerated by the local populations, is finally destroyed at the end of the Austrian era, further suggests that the decentered Ottoman imperial model was more advantageous for the Balkan-conscious Slavic cultures than the unifying Austro-Hungarian model. Likewise, the fiction of Miroslav Krleža describes the flat lands along the Danube as a “melting-pot of peoples and cultures, in which the individual discovers plurality, and the uncertainty — though also the complexity — of his own identity” (Magris, Danube 254). This region also witnessed unpredictable migrations that brought the various ethnic groups in new vicinities and interactions. The epitome of the region’s ever-changing demographic are the Donauschwaben, the Danube Swabians who between 1711 and 1787 were encouraged to settle in the lands of Southern Hungary and the Banat, impoverished by over 150 years of Turkish occupation. Subsequently, they made an important contribution to several cultures in the area (German, Romanian, Serbian) but found themselves divided between three countries after 1918 (Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania) and dispersed after World War II, first in the postwar labor camps, then through emigration to a Germany that they had some difficulty adapting to. Their dramatic fate has been reflected in the work of Johann Lippet, Richard Wagner, Herta Müller, and other writers associated with the Banater Aktionsgruppe (see the article on Timişoara in this volume, pp. 121–23). The challenge of maintaining one’s cultural identity in this shifting cultural and political environment is central also to Miloš Crnjanski’s novel Seobe (Migrations; 1929). The second volume of this narrative epic, Druga kniga Seobe (The Second Book of Migrations) appeared only in 1962 because of the author’s own difficult position after World War II as a refugee in London, with his work banned for a time in his country of origin, Yugoslavia. Crnjanski’s epic focuses on the fate of the eighteenth-century Serb refugees from the Turkish occupied territories to the Austro-Hungarian province of Vojvodina, on the Danube. In return for their military service to the Empire, the Habsburgs give them land, allow them to use their own language, and to practice their Eastern Orthodox religion, but they still feel estranged from their roots and from the majority

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of Serbs who continue to live under Turkish occupation. The main character, Vuk Isakovič, a colonel in the Austrian army, serves his masters well but he dreams, together with thousands of other Serbs of one day living in a free Slavic country like Russia. His dream comes true for his son Pavle, in the second volume of the novel, but the Serbian colony in Russia gradually erodes until only a few Serbian village names survive. The novel seems to suggest that the only chance that the small nations along the Danube corridor have for maintaining a modicum of identity is to be continually on the move, in constant migration (the word “seoba” can be translated also as “wandering,” “moving to a new place”). As a self-chosen exile, Crnjanski himself reinvented his identity, several times. The strenuous and rather naïve effort to leave one’s own imprint on the fluid Danubian world is embodied by Magris in the historical figure of Josef Kyselak (Danube 154–57), who between 1820 and 1830 scribbled his name (“Kyselak war hier!”) on rock faces and other highly visible places along the Danube, until he was reprimanded by the Emperor: It was perhaps the transience of the river that by way of contrast stimulated Herr Kyselak, assistant in the country registry of Vienna during the nineteenth century, and a tireless walker, to nourish a yearning for eternity, a craving to counter those fleeting waters with something stable. Unluckily nothing better came to mind than his own name, so he began to leave his signature, J. (Josef) Kyselak, in large black letters done in indelible oil paint, throughout his wanderings along the banks of the Danube, especially in the vicinity of Loiben and among the vineyards of the Wachau. He traced it on all sorts of things, for example on rock-faces. Like all those who have to sully Greek columns or the tops of the mountains, Kyselak aspired to a little scrap of immortality, and he got it. (Danube 154)

As author of two pompous volumes of travel sketches (1829), Kyselak inspires little sympathy (Magris describes him as a “haughty” and “disdainful” traveler who would have been better off had he never written anything — Danube 156), but his repetitive autographs dramatize for Magris the essential paradox of the Danubian world. Herr Kyselak wanted to challenge the eternal flux by asserting some form of (individual) stability, some permanent identity. Yet his effort to contain the unstable nature of the Danubian world is undermined by Kyselak’s own unstable identity as traveler that can only be fixed in repetitive, self-proclaiming graffiti. In his struggle with questions of identity at the heart of the Habsburg Empire, Kyselak still found solid enough ground to try to inscribe himself onto it. By contrast, the people inhabiting the southern and eastern edges of the Danubian world had to confront an even more mutable and vulnerable destiny. While the situation was complicated but relatively stable at the center of the Monarchy — if a citizen knew how to do the paperwork, his or her business was usually taken care of — on the “margins” people like Hašek’s Švejk could never get their papers issued properly, since Austro-Hungary’s center kept changing its rules on them. Miroslav Krleža illustrates dramatically the position of a liminal writer, trapped between the impositions of a hegemonic center and the conflicting ethnocultural messages emerging on the periphery. His book of essays, Deset krvavih godina (Ten Years Soaked in Blood; 1937), which dealt with Croatian national and political questions, “retarded mentalities” in Croatian culture, and his understanding of Danubian and Balkan history, including the identity question of the Southern

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Slavs, was confiscated straight away by the Royal Court of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and the Slovenes. A slightly different (expanded) version of the book was planned for the fall of 1940 but could only appear in the Second Yugoslavia, seventeen years later (in 1957), under the title Deset krvavih godina i drugi politički eseji (Ten Years Soaked in Blood and Other Political Essays). In a section of Deset krvavih godina, entitled “Teze za jednu diskusiju iz godine 1935” (Theses for a Discussion from 1935), Krleža comments on the tenuous position of Croatia (and of a Croatian writer like himself) in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: The statement, “You are ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’” [“The bulwark of Christianity”] does not only refer to us, Croats. It has been repeatedly addressed to all the miserable national catholic commoners who lived on the Danube and the Visla — to the poor devils who have been dying on the bloody frontiers of European profits. […] The fact that we bled to the last drop on the ramparts of Western Civilization, fighting for foreign kings, has always been told from the Austrian perspective (from 1527 to its defeat in 1918). Today when someone reproduces in the press the most banal compliments from foreigners about our local costume balls or beautiful ladies from Zagreb, we brag and quote those stupid lies with pride and thus sink to the rock bottom of our primitive provincial self-awareness. Our mind slavishly wags its tail while confronting those pages, and childishly proves that we are exactly what we do not want to be: a servile embodiment of worthlessness. Alas, how many times have I heard or read […] that I am an internationalist renegade, and that I hate Croatia and everything Croatian […]. The other day, Srpski knjizevni glasnik [The Serbian Literary Voice] accused me of “Croatocentrism,” not knowing that for years I have yearned for my “Serbocentric” counterpart to appear in the Belgrade press. (Deset krvavih godina 120– 21)

This excerpt both illustrates and challenges the simple division between us and them, whether this division pits Croats and other “miserable national catholic commoners” against imperial Vienna, or Croat nationalists against Croat “internationalists” like himself. The all-encompassing division between an internal us, the members of an underrepresented ethnic and social community, and an external them (foreign potentates but also feudal lords) frames a strong set of confrontations between the oppressed and their oppressors. In his other texts, Krleža did not hesitate to focus on some of the most prominent oppressors of the marginalized Danubian lands. According to Krleža, most of what the world had traditionally known about Croatia was written and interpreted from Austrian perspective (Deset 120). Although the echoes of a new pan-Slavic movement — inspired by the Ilirski preporod (Illyrian Rebirth), with its emphasis on a Croatian national language and a broad Yugoslavian cultural identity — grew stronger towards the end of the nineteenth century, Croatia remained a country mastered by others. After World War I, when Krleža wrote his lament, Croatia continued to struggle with its “slavish” mentality towards strangers, “a servile embodiment of worthlessness” (Deset 121). Croats found themselves deprived of a meaningful language in which to communicate their lingering — in Krleža’s apt phrase — “moral subcolonial condition” (122), vestige from a period when they were dominated by a culture (the Hungarian) that was itself subordinated to the Imperial Austrian one. Ironically, Croatia’s internal divisions perpetuated that condition long after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Not only conservative Croats, but also nationalist Serbs attacked Krleža

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for his cosmopolitan views that appeared too dangerously progressive to their colonized minds. Trapped between external pressures and internal divisions, Krleža had a difficult task in establishing his authorial identity. His identity remained multiple and contested, as Magris would argue. Internal divisions are quite familiar to this region. The East-Central European lands north and south of the Danube are marked by centuries-old ethnic hatreds that flare up periodically in massacres perpetrated by one ethnic group upon another. Knjiga o Blamu (The Book of Blam; 1971), the novel of the Serbian-Jewish writer Aleksandar Tišma, is a powerful expression of this collective psychosis. Set in the city of Novi Sad after World War II, this novel focuses on Miroslav Blam, the only member of his family to survive the 1942 slaughter of 3,000 Jews and Serbs by an infamous detachment of the Hungarian Army and the csendörs (Hungarian gendarmes). Miroslav survives the roundup through the intervention of Propadic, an ambiguous character who vouches for him in front of the Hungarians but who also takes his post at a Novi Sad newspaper after Miroslav is fired as a Jew. Like so many other survivors, Blam is torn by the guilt of not sharing the fate of his parents, sister, lover, and friend, of not being able to face death like them or go down to the Danube in order to rescue another human being at the cost of his own life. After the war, he continues to live an empty life hoping that some future war will allow him to commit an act of supreme sacrifice. “The Central Europeans are ignorant of the science of forgetting, of filing away events” (Magris, Danube 220), and this is both their strength, allowing them to preserve local and regional histories, but also their weakness that makes them prone to repeated conflict. The memory of their great national traumas have often prevented the peoples in the region to “forget” or “reinvent” history, seeking new possibilities of interaction. But this obsessive memory has also allowed them to retrieve those periods, however short-lived, when multicultural interaction seemed like a real possibility, as in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet block, the idea of establishing a multinational “Danubian University” has resurfaced both in Hungary and Romania, coming behind the new interest in a multicultural Mitteleuropa launched in the 1980s by György Konrád, Milan Kundera, and others (see the Introduction to vol. 1: 5, 46 of our History). Thus, the Danubian basin has been submitted to both idealizations that emphasize the multicultural character of the area, and to one-sided treatments that tease out the national and ethnic fault-lines and lament national wounds. A number of writers have emphasized the hopeful and despondent nature of the cultures along the Danube. Péter Esterházy’s Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása: lefelé a Dunán (The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn [Down the Danube]; 1991), for example, evokes the dreamlike past and precarious present of a disappearing world as it moves from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. The traveler-observer (an unnamed nobleman originally from Budapest), uses the year 1989 as the ambiguous reference point for his journey and the history he is recalling — ambiguous because it represents both a possible new beginning and another failed experiment at defining Central Europe’s “own way” (see John Neubauer’s essay below; also vol. I: 387, 396–98 of our History). The work of Sorin Titel likewise reflects on the waning mosaic of populations and traditions in the Banat area, north and south of the Danube, on their effort to maintain a certain regional spirit against ethnic frictions and the imperial plans of various neighboring powers (see also the article on Timişoara in this volume, 115–16, 118). The Danube has also been conceived of as a border — often disputed, defended, crossedover — between Austro-Hungary, Croatia, the Serbian Kingdom, Romania and Bulgaria, or more

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broadly, between “Europe” and the Balkans (the “Orient”). In Mihai Eminescu’s “Scrisoarea a treia” (Third Epistle; 1881) the Danube is thrice crossed in 1394: first in the Turkish sultan’s arrogant dream, as his empire extends its shadow over the Tigris, Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube (Poezii 154); then in reality, as Bayazid’s armies cross into the Walachia of Prince Mircea the Old, “darkening” with their numbers the battle field north of the Danube (155); and finally one last time as his hordes scurry back defeated and end up engulfed by the “furious Danube” (157). The Romanian and Bulgarian towns along the Danube were the sites of other important confrontations with the Turks and of national revolts such as the battle at Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade) in 1456, Mohács in 1526, and the failed 1876 Bulgarian uprising in Ruse, reflected in Ivan Vazov’s novel, Pod igoto (Under the Yoke; 1899). They were also relatively successful sites of cultural exchange: towns like Vidin and Russe had, until recently, a richly layered culture, with various civilizational imprints. Belgrade, the former capital of multinational Yugoslavia, was also a mediator between the cultures of the East and West, North and South. In Magris’s view, Tito “ended by resembling Francis Joseph more and more, […] because of his awareness of inheriting a supra-national, Danubian legacy and leadership from him, and his desire to accept this legacy” (Danube 332). This legacy goes through a process degradation and disappearance in Momo Kapor’s Foliranti (The Fakers; 1974), the novel of the 1960s generation caught between a vanishing old Belgrade and a new consumerist one, remnants of ideological rigidity and capitalist prosperity. Bucharest underwent a similar fate in the latter half of the twentieth century, its melting pot of cultures and religions being eroded by the leveling ideology of Soviet communism (reflected in Eliade’s Pe strada Mântuleasa [The Old Man and the Bureaucrats; 1968]) and of Ceauşescu’s nationalist communism (presented in Bănulescu’s Cartea de la Metopolis [The Book of Metopolis; 1977]). As the two novels suggest, however, neither totalitarian assaults could entirely eradicate the hybrid potential of this city north of the Danube. As the river prepares to turn towards its destination, the Black Sea, it “merges with the meadows in a vast, inextricable jungle of water, dense trees overhanging the river to form liquid caverns, deep flowing lairs, dark green and blue as the night, in which it is impossible to tell the soil from the water and the sky” (Magris, Danube 386). Balta Brăilei (the Brăila Wetland) and the Danube Delta further east were until recently — before they were threatened with destruction as a result of canal work — a natural refuge; they were also a historical place of refuge, the nearby city Brăila being a haven for the Bulgarian revolutionary exiles during the nineteenth century, for the astute Greek merchants, and for the wanderer-genius, Panait Istrati. The delta itself is the scene of perpetual change, of short-lived destinies and momentary stories that nevertheless carry traditional-archaic meanings as in Mihail Sadoveanu’s stories. This is the land of Lipovenians, fishermen, and Old Believers who fled Russia in the eighteenth century because of religious persecution. They inhabit a world where there is little distinction between water and land, with branches dying into marshes, resisting linear regulation. Sulina, the port where the main branch of the Danube allegedly ends without forming a proper mouth, is a destination place for European human destinies, a place of decadence and broken promises as in the novel of Jean Bart (Eugeniu P. Botez), Europolis (1933). The writer, maritime governor in Sulina, offers a monograph of the provincial port Sulina, a place where the Danube loses its waters and name into the Black Sea and where East and West meet to produce a motley multinational humanity, resembling that of Istrati, caught between sudden passions and dramatic disappointments.

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As Magris concludes, “It may be that Danubian culture, which seems so open and cosmopolitan, also creates these feelings of anxiety and shutting things out,” of attraction and “obscure terror of the Other” (Danube 389). Except that the “Other” always fluctuates, becoming each ethnic group’s challenge and complement. The “other” in this region is always already inscribed in each ethnic group, questioning its claim to a single identity and singular destiny.

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Upstream and Downstream the Danube John Neubauer One of Mór Jókai’s best novels, Az aranyember (A Man of Gold; 1872), starts with a paean to the Iron Gate on the lower Danube: A mountain chain cleft in the middle from top to bottom, four miles deep. Perpendicular rock walls rise from 600 to 3000 feet on both sides; in the middle flows the giant river of the Old World, the Ister, the Danube. Did the weight of the water mass itself break the gate, or did underground fire burst the mountain range? Did Neptune create this or Vulcan? Did they collaborate? This is god’s work! Not even the iron-fisted men of our god-imitating age are able to fashion anything comparable. […] The Iron Gate’s history of two-thousand years is told in the language of four nations. (Összes 24: 5)

This learned image of the Iron Gate (Jókai had not seen it yet when he wrote about it) is followed by memorable chapters on the passage of a boat through treacherous waters near Turnu Severin. In a later notable scene, the protagonist loses his way in the fog while trying to cross the frozen Danube at Komárom. Turbulent, friendly, and frozen — Jókai’s protean river is perhaps the novel’s most “rounded character.” Having braved natural and political dangers on the lower Danube, the boat uneventfully moves upstream through the great Hungarian plain (passing Buda/Pest silently, though Jókai offers elsewhere memorable scenes of overnight crossings of the river at Pest and the city’s devastation in the 1838 flood) only to capsize in sight of its goal, Komárom, Jókai’s birthplace and the setting for several of his novels. Early-nineteenth-century Komárom is where much of Az aranyember takes place, but the primary plotline weaves its way back and forth between this city, which is not far from Vienna, and a little island in the Danube near Orşova, a no-man’s land between the Turkish-subjugated Serbian, and the Habsburg-dominated Hungarian sides of the river. Mihály Timár, the novel’s hero, saves the ship while passing through the Iron Gate, recuperates from the capsized boat its cargo of wheat, and discovers the fabulous wealth that the ship’s escaping Turkish official stashed away in a sack. The official dies on the trip and the treasure becomes legally Timár’s, though it should have gone to the official’s young daughter, whom Timár places, according to her father’s wishes, with a Greek merchant’s family in Komárom. Out of guilt as well

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as love, he marries her later but she remains aloof and the marriage is never consummated. Timár becomes a Midas, a man with the touch of gold, by investing the initial sum into ever more daring and brilliant schemes. Though he climbs to the top of the social ladder and is even knighted, he finds happiness only on that no-man’s island with another girl, who leads a simple rustic life away from society. The torn Timár vacillates for years between the two women, between society and “nature,” and between different points of the Danube, until he finally vanishes from the “upper” crust of life without a trace. What is “up” and what is “down” here? The geographic coordinates are unequivocal, but taken as metaphors they become ambiguous. The novel, like its hero, shuttles upward and downward the Danube: wealth and social achievement are upstream, in Komárom, but the protagonist’s moral and emotional ties make him finally gravitate southward. His ultimate withdrawal from the world ends Timár’s long identity confusion, but his rejection of the modern world and his withdrawal to a primitive form of life is not tantamount (as it is in so many other novels) to a return to ethnic or racial purity. In April 1877 — five years after the publication of Jókai’s novel — a Turkish delegation traveled by train from Istanbul to Budapest and was greeted everywhere on the way with music, flowers, and even fireworks. In Temesvár, the city authorities forbade the crowd to enter the station but several thousand people broke through the police barricades with such force that the station windows shattered; in Szeged, the reception was comparable only to Kossuth’s famous visit in 1848; in Budapest, the celebration lasted for some six days and involved all the dignitaries of the city (see Erődi). Did all those celebrants of the Turkish delegation forget that Hungary had been occupied and plundered for 150 years by the Ottoman Empire, being gradually liberated only in the decades around 1700? Of course not. However, by 1877 the enthusiastic crowds and Budapest’s official speakers remembered much more vividly the suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49 by Habsburg Austria and Tzarist Russia. And the Sultan, keenly aware of the intense anti-Russian sentiments in Hungary, made a conciliatory gesture on the eve of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78 by deciding to return to Hungary treasures of great national pride: 35 codices, 14 of them from the famous Renaissance Corvina library of King Mátyás. The government of the Dual Monarchy, eager not to offend the Russians, clumsily responded to the Turkish gesture by insisting that the gifts be delivered in Vienna, from where they would eventually make their way to Budapest. The Turkish delegation thus arrived empty handed, but the Sultan’s clever wooing of the Hungarians met with an enormous popular success. Indeed, friendlier attitudes with respects to the Turks could be observed earlier already, for instance in Mór Jókai’s novels about Hungary under Ottoman occupation, which include surprisingly positive Turkish characters (see p. 252 below). Let us now move from 1877 just a few months ahead, to the period reflected in the opening scene of Bolesław Prus’s novel Lalka (The Doll): Early 1878, when the political world was concerned with the treaty of San Stefano, the election of a new Pope, and the chances of a European war, Warsaw businessmen and the intelligentsia who frequented a certain spot in the Krakowskie Przedmieście were no less keenly interested in the future of the haberdashery firm of J. Mincel and S. Wokulski. (Prus, The Doll 1)

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As readers soon learn, Wokulski, the hero of the novel, actually made a fortune in the RussianTurkish war by working together with a Russian businessman whom he befriended during his Siberian exile after the 1863 uprising against Russia. The former freedom fighter now prospers by means of his Russian connections. Poland’s political and economic life is tied not only to the oppressive powers east and west, but also to the equally suppressed countries south of it. Indeed, Wokulski’s best friend and business associate, Ignazy Rzecki, cherishes to the end of his life the halcyon days spent in the service of Józef Bem, fighting in 1848–49 with the Hungarians against the Austrians and Russians, suppressors of his country as well. II My introductory scenes should remind us that the struggles of the East-Central European people against political and cultural domination from the East and the West were time and again interlinked with movements of people and ideas along a North-South axis. To be sure, the great wave of migrations from East to West in Europe’s early history, as well as the main military moves during World War II, and Europe’s post-war division through an Iron Curtain were all deployed on an East–West axis. The conventional view expressed in many variants has been that civilization, like the Danube, flows from West to East, and culture radiates from civilized Vienna into increasingly barbaric provinces. As Jakob Bleyer put it in 1933, a cultural incline (Kulturgefälle) determines that artistic and intellectual currents flow from west to east; Eastern Europe is merely a receiver (234–35). Yet, East-Central Europe’s post-medieval history was shaped as much by North–South conflicts, foremost among them the Ottoman invasion and subsequent withdrawal from the region. And — though East-West tensions by no means disappeared after 1989 — it seems that the expansion of the European Union eastward is becoming increasingly a North-South problem: as of 2004 only the northern part of the region has joined, and further expansion poses once more, and with increasing urgency, the future relationship to Turkey. The following pages attempt to offer concrete literary and cultural examples for these general questions by focusing on the historical, cultural, and literary significance of that section of the Danube that flows North-South rather than West-East, roughly between the Hungarian Visegrád and Belgrade. I like to think of the North-South section along the Danube as a kind of symbolic “hinge” that interconnects what is often called Mitteleuropa or Central Europe with the Balkans. Without that “hinge” East-Central Europe falls into two distinct regions, and the Danube discourse is dominated by Western conceptions. Such is the case, too, with Claudio Magris’s popular Danubio (1984), which refrains, of course, from making grand generalizations in the manner of Jakob Bleyer, but relates the Slovakian and much of the Hungarian Danube back to a German/Austrian culture. With the exception of Budapest, this book pays little attention to the North-South section of the Danube and becomes increasingly derivative and arbitrary in its choices when it gets to the lower Danube, beyond Belgrade. Responding to idealizations of the Danube as a cohesive and integrative West-East axis of Central Europe, Péter Esterházy proposes in Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása: lefelé a Dunán (The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn [Down the Danube]; 1991) a soberer and more ironic view. His speaker-traveler debunks the Danube pathos by enumerating worn clichés about the Danube’s

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power to connect and reconcile the peoples of Central Europe. The list appropriately ends with the phrases “people-binding handcuff,” and “freedom fetter” (259). Central Europe, Esterházy suggests, has no reality, for it is but “a beautiful glass bead that Kundera found for himself in his Parisian loneliness and sadness” (310). If soccer teams are held together by alcohol and a common hatred against their coach, Kundera’s Central Europe was sustained by the hated Soviet Union (347). The narrator finds the spreading murmur of the “Central-Europe prayer” in the 1980s cloying and annoying (347); he wishes to confront the pious “Danube-thoughts, Danube-ethics, Danube-past, Danube-history, Danube-pain, Danube-tragedy, Danube-dignity, Danube-present, and Danube-future” with the equally real “Danube-nothing, Danube-hatred, Danube stench, Danubeanarchy, Danube-provincialism” (347). Esterházy and Magris agree that the Danube is protean, but they differ as to what this means. Magris’s Danube discourse is part of that Central European rhetoric in which Esterházy’s narrator detects a certain “haughty elevation” and the smooth intonation of a tourist guide (348). A much more dramatic but no less ironic view of a reconciling Danube emerges from Péter Forgács’s stunning documentary film, The Danube Exodus (1999), based on films made by the captain of a Danube boat during World War II. The downstream section chronicles a semi-illegal exodus of Bratislava Jews to the Black Sea (and beyond that to Palestine), while the upstream one follows the transfer of Ukrainian Germans to settlements in Poland (from which they were then evicted in 1945). These down- and upstream shippings of Germans and Jews to their putative homelands are inversions of each other, yet ironically also analogous in that both grew out of a nationalism born in the nineteenth century. While the Germans formerly migrated towards the East, by 1900, Jewish as well as German-speaking writers and intellectuals moved westward and upstream, to Budapest, Vienna, and beyond, retaining nevertheless a nostalgic attachment to their birthplace. This is true of Ferenc Herczeg, who became assimilated in Budapest, as well as of Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn and Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, both of whom settled in Vienna. The latter’s novel Donaukind (Danube Child; 1918) is an affectionate and at times plaintive recollection of a childhood spent in Bersasca and Bela Crkva (see also the article on Timişoara, p. 120 above). The German exodus westward continued in a trickle after World War I and during the Hitler years (e.g., Heinrich Zillich), became a disconcerting mass movement after World War II when large groups of ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern-European countries, and continued in the 1970s and 80s, when the German Federal Republic paid Romania for the release of ethnic Germans from Transylvania and the Banat (see the article on Timişoara). Similar pecuniary and ethnic interests moved Ceauşescu to allow most of Romania’s remaining Jews to emigrate to Israel. Miloš Crnjanski’s epic Seobe (Migrations; 1929–62) reflects another, smaller exodus: a Serb migration to Russia from the Banat, forced out by the Habsburg importation of German settlers into the region in the eighteenth century (see also art. “Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic, pp. 219–20). The East-West migrations in East-Central Europe were endlessly varied, painful, and complex.

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III The West-East movements of Crnjanski’s Seobe were actually secondary effects of devastations caused by the northward push of the Ottoman Empire. Some of the great battles that marked the advancement and retreat of Ottoman power took place along the Danube, most notably its NorthSouth section: Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade in 1456, Mohács in 1526, the defeat of the Habsburgs at Buda and its subsequent Turkish capture in 1541, and its recapture by the Habsburg alliance in 1686. Crnjanski’s Serbs came to the Banat in 1690, when the Orthodox Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević III of Peč led some 40,000 Serb families on a northward exodus to Hungary, partly because of a Turkish counter-offensive, partly to accept an invitation of the Emperor, who issued two patents in 1690 to grant the Serbs religious freedom and a certain autonomy. According to Seobe, some these freshly settled Serbs of the Banat were soon squeezed out by a Habsburg policy that gave preference to German settlers. However, the Bácska (Vojvodina) actually remained heavily populated with Serbs, and Serbian settlements along the Danube and as far north as Eger (the birthplace of the Hungarian-Serbian poet Mihály Vitkovics/Mihailo Vitković) remained strong throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. Some Serbs (Rác in older Hungarian parlance) fled already in the 1440s and 50s to Ráckeve, just South of Buda/Pest. The village declined during the nineteenth century, and most Serbs have in the meantime moved over to the neighboring village, but Ráckeve has remained a quaint haven for fishing aficionados to this day. Esterházy devotes eight pages to it in his down the Danube book (349–57), right after he had mocked the Danube and Central Europe discourses. Is Ráckeve really the center of the world, as the aficionados claim (349)? The novel’s narrator-traveler is skeptical, but he dutifully mentions that the village boasts Hungary’s oldest Serb Orthodox church (1487), and he recounts the stories that were endlessly repeated to him while fishing with the “greatest Danube fisherman” or just visiting with families in the village. After a magnificent fish dinner, further reflections, and a visit to the nearby André Kertész museum in Szigetbecse, he admits that such concrete experiences may make Ráckeve unique, perhaps even the center of the world for those who partake in its pleasures. The stories of its present and past inhabitants, as well as the physical experiences of fishing and playing soccer, come to represent in the book a counterpart to the abstract idea of Central Europe. Moving upstream and northward to follow the Serbian communities along the Danube we bypass Buda and Pest, whose important nineteenth-century Serbian culture we discuss in the article on Budapest (see pp. 165–66 above), but we stop just north of it, in Szentendre (Sentandreja), where some 6000 Serbs led by Patriarch Čarnojević III settled. The settlers brought with them what were claimed to be the remains of Czar Lazar, the legendary Serb leader who died in the battle of Kosovo (1389). Though these remains were returned to Serbia later, the name of Szentendre reemerged in patriotic Serb internet propaganda during the recent wars in Yugoslavia, as a symbol of Serb suffering and banishments throughout history. The Serb settlers of Szentendre preserved for a while their village communities by building an Orthodox church for each. The village flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, boasting a Serb gymnasium and a teachers’ training college (now a museum for the Hungarian artist family Ferenczy). It also had well-to-do merchants, a professional class, and a bishop; for a while, it was also the seat of the Serb Orthodox Patriarch. The less illustrious part

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of Szentendre’s past is commemorated by the Rab Ráby square and the Ráby house, named after the Hungarian Mátyás Ráby. Born in Pozsony, he became associated with Szentendre through his brave but hopeless battles against the corruption of the town and county officials. Ráby served in the Habsburg administration, sought (and for a while received) help from the Emperor, but was finally jailed and then exiled. His passionate indictment of Hungary’s feudal abuses, published 1797 in Strasbourg, was refashioned by Mór Jókai into Rab Ráby (Imprisoned Ráby; 1879), a complex and highly successful novel that centers on the clash between the enlightened but foreign rule of Joseph II and the backward nationalism of the Hungarian nobility. As Antal Szerb suggests, Jókai wanted to foreground Hungary’s most tragic eighteenth-century conflict, the clash between humanism and nationalism. The enlightened humanism of the Habsburg ruler favored the suppressed classes, but the Hungarians who took his side had to confront a Hungarian nobility that defended its prerogatives (varázsló 300–301). Szentendre’s most prominent Serb literary son, Jakov Ignjatović, admired his hometown. He started his law practice there in 1847, participated on the Hungarian side of the 1848–49 revolution (becoming the secretary of Novi Sad’s Hungarian Commissar), and was briefly arrested when the revolution was suppressed. After years of quasi-exile abroad, he returned to Szentendre in 1853 as a lawyer and journal editor, but moved in 1859 to Novi Sad, where he became a civic leader and was elected to the Hungarian parliament in 1861. Ignjatović, editor of such important Serb journals and papers as the Srpski letopis (Serbian Annals), the Srpske novine (Serbian News), and the Nedeljni list, turned to novel writing only in the last decades of his life. His Vasa Rešpekt (1875) opens with a praise of Szentendre, the location of the frame story. The hero of the embedded story, Vasa Ognjan, leaves the town early, lives most of his life in great poverty, and gets into conflict with the law, but distinguishes himself as a Mordskerl (a sort of daredevil) in battles. In 1848, he fights on the Hungarian side, though not out of political conviction, and he asks to be transferred when he is supposed to fight his fellow Serbs. If Vasa Rešpekt is a romantic adventure story revolving around a torn identity, Večity mladaženja (Eternal Groom; 1878) is a humorous story about two generations of Szentendre Serbs. The first part describes in great detail the preparation and departure of a well-to-do merchant on a trip to the Cracow fair in 1812; the second part is focused on his no-good sons who fight among themselves for the inheritance and finally waste it. The more attractive of them, Samika, is a great womanizer who always manages to pass on his bride to somebody else. The cheerful dictum of this “eternal groom” is “if I don’t marry her I find her a husband.” Ignjatović followed Serb/Hungarians writers like Mihály Vitkovics a generation earlier, but by mid–nineteenth century “bigamous” identities became more difficult to sustain. With his “two souls,” Ignjatović is closer to the Romanian Liviu Rebreanu, who portrayed divided loyalty during World War I, though with more dramatic tension. Although Ignjatović described himself prophetically as a Yugoslav (i.e., South Slav), he was skeptical about the Serbian drive to take over the Vojvodina, and he got himself almost killed for his moderation by the nationalistic crowd that convened at the famous Carlovac meeting. Luckily, he was only imprisoned, and, strangely enough, was shortly afterward appointed editor of the new Vojvodina Serb paper, the Vjesnik (The News Herald). His own people continued to condemn as well as recognize him in later decades: time and again he was accused of being a magyaron (friend and supporter of Hungary), yet he was also trusted with literary and public offices. For a long time, his clumsy style and inability to fashion

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good plots detracted from his literary reputation, but in the twentieth century he came to be recognized as one of the founders of Realism in Serbian literature. As Jovan Deretić writes, “more than any other realist, he presented the most sweeping social panorama and the richest gallery of characters. In spite of the weaknesses in his artistic elaboration, language and style, he was a powerful writer, an intuitive observer of life, and an excellent judge of people. He is the only resourceful novelist among the Serbian Realists, who were mostly story oriented” (192). The commemorative tablet that the Hungarian History Society and the Hungarian-Yugoslav Committee of Friendship placed on his house of birth honors him as a participant in a joint Hungarian-Serb struggle against feudal lords, but ironically the tablet was affixed in 1948, just when Stalin’s break with Tito set Serbs and Hungarians once more against each other. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Serb vineyards of Szentendre were hit by philoxera, and difficult economic circumstances, as well changing political conditions, decimated Szentendre’s Serbian population. But Szentendre, in contrast to Ráckeve, came to a second flowering when an artist colony settled there in the late 1920s. Szentendre became the home of an impressive line of artists in the pre- and postwar decades. Today, the busloads of tourists usually just stroll through the town’s narrow streets, sampling the souvenirs but blissfully ignoring most of the small artist museums, as well as what reminds of Szentendre’s Serbian past, above all the impressive Orthodox cathedral and museum on the hill above the town. Another Orthodox church is open only one day a year; several others have been converted to serve catholic and protestant communities. IV Ignjatović’s migration to Novi Sad/Újvidék was symptomatic of the southward migration of Serbian culture in and around Buda/Pest in the nineteenth century. Matica Srpska, the distinguished cultural and publishing institution founded in Pest, moved in 1864 to Novi Sad, north of Belgrade on the Danube. Though it remained part of Hungary until 1918, Novi Sad functioned as a center of Serbian culture at least until the 1870s. The National Museum (1844), the University (1863), and the Academy of Sciences were founded in Belgrade, but Novi Sad was where Matica Srpska brought out its publications and where the Serbian National Theater opened its doors in 1861 (in the vicinity of the Hungarian Theater). The Hungarian authorities tried to suppress Serb nationalism in Novi Sad and the Vojvodina (Bácska), but the Serb national movement continued to make progress. Gone were the days when Pavel Josef Šafařik, the first director of the city’s Serb Gymnasium and later a prominent Czech-Slovak historian, had to resign from his post due to harassment by the Hungarian authorities. Novi Sad retained some of its multicultural tradition after it became part of Yugoslavia in 1918 and after a Hungarian occupation during World War II. Its Hungarian Theater reopened in 1973; its university, established in 1960, has Departments of Romanian, Ruthenian, and Slovak Studies; also a Department of Hungarian Language and Literature, whose first professor was Ervin Sinkó [Spitzer; Šinko], a veteran communist and author of the two-volume novel Optimisták (The Optimists; 1965) on the Hungarian revolution of 1918–19. Sinkó also wrote a daring and revealing account of his years in Moscow exile.

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During the bloody Hungarian “razzia” in the winter of 1942, thousands of Serbs and Jews were killed. The event was memorialized in Aleksandar Tišma’s Knjiga o Blamu (see CornisPope’s article, p. 222), Tibor Cseres’s Hideg napok (Cold Days; 1964), and Vérbosszú Bácskában (Blood Feud in Bácska; 1991), as well as in Danilo Kiš’s following autobiographical recollection: At the age of seven, I was witness in the Hungarian-occupied Novi Sad of the massacre of Serbs and Jews perpetrated by the Hungarian fascists. On this day my father was saved by a miracle. The miracle was that the holes that they cut into the ice of the Danube in order to lower the corpses became overcrowded. So he got an extension of two years before he was deported to Auschwitz. (Homo 229)

Kiš survived the Holocaust on account of his Arian mother. He grew up between three religions (the Orthodox, the Jewish, and the Catholic) and two languages, what he still called the SerboCroatian, and the Hungarian. Kiš’s birthplace was not Novi Sad but Subotica/Szabadka, the other major city of Vojvodina, off the Danube and closer to Szeged on the Tisza river. The city’s Hungarian Theater was inaugurated in 1854, and was reopened under the name of Népszinház after 1945. Its Hungarian writers included the distinguished modernist Dezső Kosztolányi and his nephew Géza Csáth, a music critic and writer of short stories, though a physician by profession. Kosztolányi often returned to his early experiences in Szabadka (where his parents continued to live), and he once remarked: “What interests me is the Hungarian country-side” (see the Budapest article above, pp. 173–74). What fascinated him was neither the landscape nor the cityscape but rather the loneliness of smalltown existence. After the melancholy evocations of childhood in the early poetry collection, A szegény kisgyermek panaszai (Complaints of the Poor Little Child; 1910), Kosztolányi wrote in the mid-twenties two novels that are set in a fictional version of Szabadka, unflatteringly called Sárszeg (Mudpoint). Pacsirta (Skylark; 1924) is a depressing story about the relationship between an ugly young woman and her parents, reflecting problems in the writer’s own family. Life in the Sárszeg of Aranysárkány (The Golden Kite/Dragon; 1925) is even lonelier and more inhuman: the mild and sensitive teacher Antal Novák is driven to suicide when his daughter elopes and he himself is beaten up. Severely demoralized during World War I, Géza Csáth became a morphine addict and finally committed suicide near Szabadka, on the Serbian/Hungarian border. His many newspaper articles for the Bácskai Hirlap (The Bácska Newspaper) testify to his attachment to the city. Perhaps most disarming are the quaint little texts “A Varázsló kertje” (The Magician’s Garden; Mesék 41–44) and “Szabadka ‘szépségeiről’” (About Szabadka’s ‘Beauties’; Rejtelmek 226–30), which attempt to bring back the magic children once experienced in the city. That charm is definitely absent from the opening chapter of Sinkó’s Optimisták, which gives a devastating portrayal of the city at the end of World War I. Szabadka’s most complex image is to be found in Kiš’s Rani Jadi (Early Sorrows; 1969) and Bašta, pepeo (Garden, Ashes; 1965), the first two volumes of his autobiographical trilogy, written in Serbian but informed also by Kiš’s Hungarian-Jewish background. While the first volume affectionately depicts early childhood through the eyes of a young boy, the second one describes how the family was forced to move to more and more destitute quarters, and how the father became gradually insane before disappearing in the Holocaust.

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Sinkó and Tišma ended their lives in Novi Sad, but the career trajectories of other major twentieth-century writers from along the North-South section of the Danube led away to the metropolitan centers north and south (Budapest and Belgrade). Kiš studied and started his career in Belgrade; Kosztolányi went to Budapest, as did Mihály Babits, the leading poet of the Nyugat circle after Endre Ady’s death. Babits was born and raised in Szekszárd, and his last, autobiographically inspired novel, Halálfiai (Sons of Death; 1927 — translated by Tišma into Serbian), recreates the image of this town, which lay by the Danube before the river was diverted. Szekszárd accommodates the Deutsche Bühne, the only permanent German-speaking theater company in Hungary today. More disturbing than these individual career trajectories were the forced mass exoduses from the north-south section of the Danube after each world war and the flight of refugees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While each wave of relocation produced some cultural enrichment in select metropolitan areas, for the last hundred years the sad overall trend in this Danube region has been towards the separation of cultures and languages.

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The Intercultural Corridor of the “Other” Danube Roxana M. Verona As the Danube flows from Vienna eastward, the alleged blue color of the river celebrated by Strauss’s 1867 waltz fades away and the “landscape” presents a Babel-like mixture of unfamiliar sounds and spaces. In Metternich’s words, at the gates of Vienna the Orient begins. We could argue, however, that Danube is nowhere blue and that Vienna — pace Metternich — is as Babellike as the territories East of it because of its mixture of European and Middle Eastern cultural influences and languages. In spite of this, the traditional cultural geography that distinguishes the upper course of the Danube from the lower course lingers on; so does the distinction between Europe (West-Central) and the “other” Europe (Eastern). According to this division, to the west are the German-speaking countries, well established in the European cultural mainstream. To the east, one finds a mosaic of ethnic populations, whose uneven cultural development seems regulated or deregulated by history: from the Greek and Roman antiquities and the Ottoman occupation, to the nineteenth-century formation of independent states, and from the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires to the forty-five years of status quo created by the Yalta accord and, more recently, to the war in Kosovo. The cultural landscape of the “other” Danube represents home for the native insiders and a puzzling no-man’s land for the outsiders. On the axis between the west and the east, this area has been regarded as a buffer zone but it could be described more appropriately as a “contact zone,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense of the term, for it allows the coming together of people from different cultures. It also creates a “contact” perspective that “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in

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and by their relations to each other” (Pratt 1–11). Indeed, as I intend to show, the spiritual geography of this area that includes Romania — my main point of reference — as well Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary, is characterized by a multitude of cultural channels that follow the Danube from west to east, from one bank to the other. Diverse elements coming equally from the West and the East are confronted, rejected, or integrated into the cultural landscape of the area. The “East” is constructed simultaneously from the inside and from the outside, and so are its modes of representation. The network of cultural models under consideration in this article — the West’s construction of the East, the East’s celebration of “difference” from the West, or the East’s synchronization with the West — are separated only for analytic purposes. Their confluence implicitly addresses important contemporary questions: which Europe and whose Europe are we discussing? Who belongs to it and who is excluded? Where are its boundaries and how have they shifted? Today, these questions have acquired particular poignancy in the countries on the “margins,” which are still waiting to be admitted into the New Europe. In this context, a regional reevaluation of the literary production of these countries is particularly useful, helping us move beyond narrow national allegiances or superficial divisions between center and periphery, “major” and “minor” (or western and “other”) literatures. The regional approach allows an investigation that transcends national borders, creating a map of intersecting and overlapping literatures; these literatures participate in a dynamic of relations that expands their boundaries, connecting them to other literary cultures within and beyond the EastCentral European area. I am particularly interested in what I call “cultural commuting,” i.e., the spiritual comings and goings between countries, expressed by actual travel (circulation of people) and by cultural diffusion (circulation of ideas). Rather than insisting on the “influence” or “predominance” of one literary culture over another, the concept of cultural commuting allows me to emphasize “change” and “exchange” (from the Latin commuto, -are). “Cultural commuting” accounts for the dialogue and interchange between literatures but also for incompatibilities and misreadings. “Cultural commuting” in the Danubian zone has produced a body of works whose story is yet to be written. In what follows, I will examine some of these works with an emphasis on their place in the cultural field and their points of contact with other literatures of the area. And while the irregular aspects of these literary encounters warn of the difficulty of a truly transnational exchange, this regional regrouping allows us to observe patterns that transcend national and ethnocentric divisions. 1.

Going East

Since the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire started the conquest north of the Danube, going east has meant going on an expedition rather than an excursion. It implied an act of courage and endurance: not only was the traveler confronted with different geographical, linguistic, and ethnographic realities but also, allegedly, with a variety of perils and certainly with different cultural practices. Post-Renaissance travel literature clearly discriminates these in-between territories. They are considered mostly a “lieu de passage,” a transitory space en route to worship in Constantinople or Jerusalem (Todorova 65). In fact, travel to the “other” Europe was represented as a trip to

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“Barbaria.” In his 1785 book on the barbarians who settled in ancient times on the banks of the Danube and the Black Sea, Charles de Peyssonel establishes repeated analogies between the ancient barbarians, the Scythians, and the modern ones — a “collapsing of chronology” (Wolff 285) that suggests a devaluation of the actual state of the Danubian countries and their inhabitants. This translates into a long list of clichés about “disorder,” Turkish tyranny, and Christian victimhood that fails to include any positive aspects of the region’s culture. The misconceptions about the Eastern Danubian area may explain the scarcity of travelers there, as well as the blindness or indifference to the human and physical environment of those who went. To travel, says Lamartine in his Voyage en Orient (1835), is “to translate freely with the eye, the thought, and the heart of the reader” (I: 123). Nonetheless, as Edward Said has shown, rather than a “free translation,” traveling is a controlled enterprise. Traveling “creates” geographies and cultures, and, as such, can be a form of colonizing (5). As part of the process of discursive reconstruction that Said has identified with “Orientalism,” the non-Western space has been used by travelers, writers, and philosophers to signify Western superiority. In transferring the discourse of “Orientalism” to the “Extreme (Eastern) Europe,” these travelers made certain concessions to the region, allowing for what Larry Wolff has called a “demi-Orientalization” (7), a mixture of European and non-European features. Still, very few travelers would have agreed with Hans Christian Andersen, who noted in his travel journal from 1841 that the lands of the Danube were impressively beautiful and rich, and urged people to come and live there, instead of going to America (148). To the extent the Oriental Danube was perceived as another version of the New World, it clearly lacked the mythic attraction of the latter. Most eighteenth-century travelers complained about bad weather and the poverty of the inhabitants. In her letters published posthumously in 1763, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote about the difficulties of her trip from Vienna to Constantinople. She describes the landscape as bleak, the color of the water as yellowish and muddy, the shores as scarcely inhabited, and the population poor and menacing (The Complete Letters I: 296–303). For the Marquis de Salaberry d’Irumberry, who traveled to Constantinople in 1790, the spectacle assumed an operatic character: the city of Buda reminded him of Voltaire’s Thunder-ten-tronckh castle, and the strange Walachian creatures clad in sheepskin coats provided a frightful and primitive appearance (95–126). Later German and French travelers en route to Constantinople chose to look at the landscape from the passing carriage or the boat’s deck. This “elevated” position allowed them to register the “ethnographic kaleidoscope” of the people living on the river’s banks, genuine “primitives” compared to the other Europeans. Such superficial impressions belonged to an accidental traveler’s literature, conveying the perceptions and the misperceptions of “tourists.” The philosophers put these vague impressions of “Oriental” difference into conceptual systems. The Enlightenment philosophers “invented” Eastern Europe as an unclear zone between civilization and barbarism, identified by some as “the Orient of Europe” (Wolff 6). In their footsteps, nineteenth-century writers like Byron, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and later Gérard de Nerval created their own imaginary map and drew attention to the East as a new source of literary inspiration. Through the power of their imagination, they devised a “poetic” Orient and consoled themselves, like Chateaubriand in Greece, with a perfect sunset. Again, they were more interested in using their impressions for creating powerful works than understanding the realities of the eastern countries (Christopher Miller 698–700).

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The East turned into a reservoir of raw material for good adventure works and for Gothic literature. Such was the case of the German writer Karl May, who situated some of his fictions in the Balkans without ever having set foot in the region. Likewise, the French Charles Nodier (Smarra; 1821) and Alexandre Dumas (Histoire de la Dame Pale/ The Pale Lady, written with Paul Bocage; 1849) narrated their stories against the backdrop of the Carpathian Mountains, though they had little knowledge of that topographic site. Decades later Jules Verne also focused two of his novels on a region he never visited and which he interpreted loosely. Le Château des Carpathes (The Castle of the Carpathians; 1892) features characters (Rodolphe de Gortz, a precursor to Dracula, Orfanik, Frik) with names that have more Gothic flavor than Romanian origin, as well as a host of simple peasants and nameless “troglodytes” who live in the village of Werst, where “civilization cannot penetrate” (37). Le Beau Danube jaune (The Beautiful Yellow Danube), posthumously published by Verne’s son in a significantly altered form under the title Le Pilote du Danube (The Pilot of the Danube; 1908), and republished in its original form only in 1988, evokes a world that Verne knew solely from reading the report about a journey from Paris via the Danube down to the Black Sea, printed in the French journal Le Tour de Monde. In Verne’s fiction, the trip is undertaken by a wise and self-sufficient Hungarian angler (winner of a great fishermen’s competition in Sigmaringen), who gets innocently caught up in a major police offensive against an international contraband. Though Verne’s portrayal of the Danube region is not authentic, it is overall sympathetic to the unsophisticated local cultures (see also Verona, “Jules Verne” 135–46). As in Le Château, the narrator’s interventions help the reader navigate from civilization to Barbaria, but Verne’s “voyages extraordinaires” to Transylvania and the lower Danube can also be interpreted as journeys into “our unconscious” (Gelder 2–6), into the darker side of European civilization itself. Works like these inaugurated the literary tradition of Oriental Europe, providing a readymade script for popular novels populated by kings and queens, spies, strange creatures and their strange obsessions (Goldworthy 42–101). Culminating a long tradition of vampire literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1892) finds an appropriate decor in the dark settings of an imaginary Transylvanian landscape. In the same vein, Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda, published in 1894 and a best seller in its time, sets its plot in “Ruritania,” an archetypal Balkan country. Love affairs, duels, and murderous intrigues are part of a collective imaginary linked to these lands. Ruritania is followed by Kravonia, Romanzia, Thracia, and Herzoslovakia, all imaginary places that translate the clichés and prejudices about real countries (see also Spiridon’s discussion of the imaginary cartography of the Balkans in Les Dilemmes, 83–84). Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1935) continues in this vein: the Danube’s waters are still menacing and the train traverses gloomy landscapes that the travelers watch from their luxurious cabins (Todorova 13; Goldsworthy 103). The region serves as a museum of curiosities and place of escapist dreams. Pierre Loti’s writings on his travel to Romania — “Constantinople en 1890 (1892) and L’Exilée (1893)” — and Paul Morand’s short novels L’Europe galante (Gallant Europe; 1925), Flèche d’Orient (The Arrow of the Orient; 1932), and Bucarest (1936), display a special brand of exoticism and aesthetic voyeurism that is not far from the Marquis de Salaberry d’Irumberry’s observations in the eighteenth century. Morand, especially, indicates the degree to which the “cosmopolitan” traveler collaborated with the politically and economically expedient construction of the East as “oriental” or “Balkanized,” an undefined zone between civilization and barbarism: “the Orient of Europe” or a “Near Orient” (“Proche” Orient), as Morand repeatedly labels it (see Verona, “Cosmopolitan

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Orientalism” 157–69). These works open the doors to an operatic Oriental Europe, usually dark and retrograde as in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy (1960–65), which could be visited, appropriated, and reinvented with every new mise-en-scène (see also Pia Brânzeu’s article on “Lovely Barbarians: British Travelers in Romania,” in vol. 4 of our History). Throughout the twentieth century, the dichotomy “civilized vs. barbarian people” still coincides, in the Westerner’s imaginary, with the European east/west partition. The European East is still too far from the “center,” — “ubi leones [sunt]” in Czesław Miłosz’s witty formula (Witness 7). The “leones” are in fact the “peasants of the Danube,” the successors of those frightful apparitions that scared travelers away. Now, in a variation on the myth of the savage they live supposedly untouched by civilization, “in harmony” with nature (Longinović 14). But this idealizing myth is dialectically connected with a derogatory designation suggesting naiveté and rough manners. In the peasant of the Danube, the images of the noble and ignoble savage coincide. For example, the Bulgarian Bay Ganyo, who personifies insolence, greediness, and an inability to develop civilized relationships, serves as a parodic Homo Balkanicus, as do similar characters from Romanian, Serbian, and other literatures (Todorova 39–40). Thus, even when positive features are being emphasized, the Western construct of the Danubian “peasant” still casts the latter as the weaker, the subordinate, and the backward in a series of dichotomies that define European values against those of others: center-periphery, progress-backwardness, democracy-dictatorship, culture-nature, etc. This paradigm changes significantly when the area is considered from the perspective of the “native.” 2.

A “Danubian Library”

The Danubian area east of Vienna is a “zonal entity” with a relatively similar geography and history and a specific cultural life of its own (Cornea 27–28; 201–202). As Martin Graff shrewdly notes, the peoples living in the Danubian territories are caught in a surprising paradox: on the one hand, they have fought for centuries with invaders or with one other; on the other, they continue living side by side in multiethnic communities (19). Indeed, the circulation of ideas, books, and people defies social, political, and national boundaries and enables cultural crossover and dialogue. Already during the Ottoman occupation, local scholars and princes were interested in redrawing the cultural map in ways that encouraged exchanges across borders. In 1561 Despot-Vodă, prince of Moldova, opened a college at Cotnari with German professors, while the courtly academies in Iaşi and Bucharest attracted teachers and students from South of the Danube, where the Turkish domination was more oppressive (Duţu 233–36; Neumann, The Temptation 150–53). Bulgarian scholars and writers went to Serbia, Moldavia, and Russia; Serbians crossed the Sava river and settled in southern Hungary and in the lands east of the Danube called Vojvodina (Mihailovich and Vasa 35); Hungarians fled to the Western provinces, the semi-independent Transylvania, or abroad. Like Transylvania, the Romanian principalities enjoyed a relative autonomy from the Ottomans, hence Greek, Albanian, and Bulgarian scholars printed books in their own language in Bucharest, Iaşi, Rîmnic, and Brăila (Duţu 115; 235–41; Georgescu 65). Transylvania had played a similar role through the sixteenth to the eighteenth century for Hungarian, German, and Romanian books (see article on Transylvania in this volume). The written word circulated even more than

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people, in the form of manuscripts transmitted from one generation to the next, in beautiful copies printed in Italy, France, Germany, and in the area’s urban centers. The activity of printing stimulated the circulation of ideas and made possible the diffusion of humanist and later Enlightenment ideology into the eastern and southeastern Danubian lands. Especially through the nineteenth century, the Danube itself was no longer a divider but an efficient enabler of cultural contacts. The ports along its course competed with the traditional land routes that connected East and West; they became cauldrons of hybrid populations and privileged sites of memory, stimulating a lively production of stories and legends. Dr. Kien’s twenty-five thousand-volume library in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé is an appropriate metaphor for the richness (and futility) of this “Danubian library.” The river created a landscape saturated with never-ending stories. As the Serbian-Romanian poet Vasko Popa writes in “The Story of a Story,” in literature’s story of a story the “end comes / before its beginning / And the beginning comes / After its end” (Collected Poems 122). “Reading” the landscape means knowing to decipher and reactivate signs that constitute the memory of the place and the tensions of its cultural texture. A different perspective operates in the process of the East’s construction of the East, which enriches and contradicts the West’s version of the East. This “Eastern” paradigm differs from the “Orientalism” theorized by Said as a discursive construction of the “Orient” (specifically the Muslim one) from the perspective of the Westerner. Described alternatively as “literary balkanism” (Todorova 27), the manifestation of a “South-Eastern European spirit” (Muthu, Literatura română), or the “temptation of the Orient” in East-Central European cultures (Vighi, Tentaţia Orientului, especially 1–12), this brand of “Orientalism” acknowledged, however cautiously, the cultural exchanges with the Eastern Mediterranean world. Even if this Oriental “temptation” cannot be separated from the Occidental one, analyzed by Neumann in The Temptation of Homo Europaeus, it generated nonetheless a specific space of fabulation with certain themes and types of characters that circulated in the entire area, both in the popular and written literatures. Thematically, it has been associated with diverse elements such as the predominance of the aquatic (Mór Jókai, Attila József, Mihail Sadoveanu, Gala Galaction; see Vighi Tentaţia 13–14), with Oriental escapism and hedonism (as in the “Turkish” novels of Mór Jókai or in the picaresque novels of Panait Istrati), with seditious fervor (Attila József, Ladislav Novomeský, Elin Pelin) but also with political stagnation and (false) utopianism (Ştefan Bănulescu, Milorad Pavić, and Ismail Kadare), with the tense encounter between Europe and Ottoman cultures (Ivo Andrić, Zaharia Stancu), or between different regional cultures (Germanic, Slavic, Hungarian, Romanian — Krleža, Crnjanski, Sadoveanu), with narrative multivocality and hybrid experimental structures (Péter Esterházy, Danilo Kiš, and Sorin Titel). Typologically, it is often populated with “Danubian peasants,” “hajduks/haiduts,” and trickster/sages (see below), but also figures of “others” (Gypsies, Jewish, Greek, and Arab merchants, Turkish administrators, or “German” travelers — Vighi, Tentaţia 103–23, 125–27). From the perspective of the “East,” folklore productions have left their imprint on “regional” identities. The circulation of oral productions in this area indicates that, despite all odds, literature crossed the river easier than people — a process facilitated by a comparable mentality, some bilingualism, common religions, mixed marriages, and a sense of destiny in front of a common enemy — especially the invading Turks. The folklore that the nineteenth century constructed reflects a parallel world of popular heroes — real or fictional — whose mission is to defend the

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East-Central European “frontier” from foreign (especially Turkish) incursions and avenge the occupant’s wrongdoings. The haiduks — outlaws, hunters, freebooting soldiers, rebellious shepherds, or thieves — can be found in folk literature on both banks of the Danube, from Albania to Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine (Muthu, “‘Haiducul”). A specific landscape — the forest for Romanians, the mountain for the South Slavs, the puszta for Hungarians, the waters of the Danube for all of them — became a catalyst for people’s epic and lyric imagination, though at times they lost their broader regional significance, being turned into national symbols (see section on folklore in vol. 3 and article on outlaws in vol. 4 of our History). These oral productions provided inspiration for written literature, assisting with its project of celebrating localism and redeeming the past by emphasizing the struggle against the Ottoman occupiers. The transfusion of topics, motives, and images from oral to written literature took place by “a mysterious translation,” as Elias Canetti would put it. Born in 1905 in a small Danubian town, Canetti would remember and transpose in his writings the childhood fairytales about werewolves and other creatures told on low Turkish divans, during harsh winters, when the Danube was frozen (The Tongue Set Free 6). The ballads, legends, and fairytales of the Danube corridor represented the region’s rural life mixed with fantastic elements, as in the ballad of “The Girl Ravished by the Turks,” the legend of the Babakai rock, the tale of the beautiful Caliopi, the legend of Ada Kaleh (the Turkish island in the middle of the Danube, now submerged as a result of the construction of a major dam in its vecinity), or the ballad of Constantin Brâncoveanu. One particular character, the crippled sage Nastradin Hodza, transgressed national borders, being popular north and south of the Danube and also in the Near and Middle East. Hodza was a storyteller, a wise man and sometimes a trickster, a member of the pícaro family, perfectly adapted to the spirit of the place. The Turks considered him one of theirs but, in fact, he was alternatively Christian and Muslim and took on the nationality of every country he dwelt in, always displaying resourcefulness, sociability, humor, and deep wisdom. His more distant brothers are the equally wily and resourceful Hitar Petar (Sly Peter) in Bulgaria and Păcala in Romania. The blend of the local and the oriental produced variants with a specific local originality. For example, the folklore collections and poetic productions of Anton Pann — Năzdrăvăniile lui Nastratin Hogea (Hoja Nasruddin’s Waggeries; 1853) and Culegere de proverburi sau Povestea vorbei (A Collections of Proverbs or The History of the Word; 1847) — mixed Walachian and Balkan features (in addition to Romanian, Pann knew Turkish very well), “linguistic” and “human comedy” (Călinescu, Istoria 215). Later, in Ion Luca Caragiale’s fantastic novella Kir Ianulea (1908) or in his satirical sketches, the Nasruddin-type of wisdom is associated with popular humor and anecdotes. The figure of the haiduk was likewise reinvented and localized in the works of Lyuben Karavelov, Khristo [Hristo] Botev, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Panait Istrati, to name only a few. The latter reconstructed the life of the small Danubian port of Brăila, where Turks, Greeks, and Romanians lived side by side in an imaginary feudal Balkania. Called by Romain Rolland the “storyteller from the Orient,” Istrati — son of a Greek smuggler and himself a vagabond, a drudge, a stevedore in harbors or hired hand on ships — depicted picturesque haiduks confronting feudal lords or pícaros in quest of adventure and freedom in the Danubian marshlands. His cycle Viaţa lui Adrian Zografi/La Vie d’Adrien Zograffi (The Life of Adrian Zograffi; 1938) is populated with dark, earth-bound characters who tell their dramatic lives marked by unjust fate and violence in a manner that recalls the Arabian Nights (see also vol. 1: 448 of our History).

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The Gothic-Romantic representation of the Eastern Danubian world began to compete at the turn of the nineteenth century with a more realistic approach. Writers began to focus on the region’s small provincial towns and villages as places immobilized in traditional frames where nothing ever happens or where everything seems to happen “Pe decindea Dunării” (Poezii 26; “On the Other Bank of the Danube,” MacGregor-Hastie 46) — as the title of one of Vasile Voiculescu’s poems suggested. This basically feudal world is featured in both the historical and the contemporary shorter novels of the Romanian master storyteller Mihail Sadoveanu: Creanga de aur (The Golden Bough; 1933) emphasizes the historical mythic aspects of Orientalism, centering the narrative around the figure of an oriental sage, Kesarion Breb; Împărăţia apelor (The Kingdom of Waters; 1928) focuses on the hard but picturesque life of fishermen in the Danube Delta. In the fiction of the Bulgarian writer Elin Pelin, this world is already shaken up by peasant revolts. The Danubian world, populated by a mix of ethnic groups with common aucestry, was also a source of inspiration for the Hungarian poet Attila József’s “A Dunána' l” (By the Danube) — see epigraph to vol.1. When the celebration of traditionalism and orientalism reached a saturation point, modern(ist) literature brought these emphases under critical scrutiny and alternatively shifted the focus from their thematic to formal aspects. In Romanian literature, the fascination with the world of Byzantium became a figure of rhetorical refinement but also of irony in the work of Mateiu Caragiale. His cycle of poems Pajere (Royal Eagles; 1936) and his novel Craii de Curtea–Veche (Old-Court Libertines; 1929) illustrated for G. Călinescu the style of “literary Balkanism” (Istoria 814), but one infused with elements of Western decadence and dandyism (Ovidiu Cotruş 146). A similar mixture of orientalism and modernism can be found in Ion Barbu’s poetry, especially his cycle of poems “Isarlik,” which reinvented an imaginary Balkan cultural geography, complete with a revamped Nastratin Hogia as poet/prophet/clown. More recently, in Ştefan Bănulescu’s novel Cartea de la Metopolis (The Book of Metopolis; 1977), the Oriental model turns to parody as a small theater in a Danubian town perfoms a play entitled “A Byzantine Masquerade.” The reevaluation of the local thus turns to devaluation. Images of decay and despair become part of the landscape, as in The Return of Philip Latinowicz (1932) by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža. The Pannonian mud becomes in this novel — much like the dust of Brăila in Istrati’s — an obsessive metaphor for the layers of civilizations along the Danubian banks that inexorably turned into marshy soil (Magris, Danube 253; see below Guido Snel’s article on Pannonia). Latinowicz’s return home from Vienna and Paris is charged with disillusionment and a feeling of emptiness as his European vision is confronted with the irredeemable parochialism of his home place. When Western culture was imported into Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth century, its rejection or acceptance, with the parallel enhancement or suppression of regionalism became part of an identity crisis that periodically polarized the cultural discourse of the countries in the region. What has been called “the complex of Europe” testifies — among other things — to the impossibility of a perfect cultural alignment with Western cultural trends and to the overvaluation of the Western models. Nonetheless, the opposition “western progress” (present) vs. “oriental stagnation” (past) often informed the evaluation of local cultures, biasing them against their eastern traditions. Most of the Eastern Danube countries, at one time or another, viewed Western Europe as a cultural model that could free them from “barbarity” — i.e., feudalism, parochialism, and foreign occupation (Marino 10–16; Stoianovich 267). The ideals of the French Revolution discovered through

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books, travel, schools and scholars, became an ideological topos, inspiring movements of national “awakening” and reconstruction in the Eastern Danubian states (Marino 14–16). However, the models of (Western) Enlightenment and Romanticism were not the only ones followed: revamped indigenous traditions also played a role in building a national and regional consciousness. The impact of foreign models stimulated a process of discovery and self-discovery, but it also created a crisis of identity in the young literatures of the East. Inferiority and superiority complexes went together; so did the will to be included and the will to be recognized independently. Intellectuals East of Vienna oscillated between the desire to follow Western models and the desire to build an authentic national culture. In Romania, for example, warnings against the obliteration of the local literature by foreign models (Titu Maiorescu) vied with theories about the necessary synchronization of Romanian culture with the West (Eugen Lovinescu). But can the notion of cultural synchronization explain the substantial East-Central contribution to the European avantgarde through Romanian Dadaism, Russian futurism, Hungarian and Serbian constructivism, and Czech structuralism? What meaning can “authenticity” have in view of the “high level of hybridization” (Longinović 9) that characterizes each country’s specific cultural legacy? 3.

On Cultural Commuting

Any answer to these questions should take into consideration the “in-betweenness” of all cultural aspects in the region. Its intellectuals and writers have continued to struggle with the tensions between east and west, trying to find some workable synthesis. For Endre Ady in 1905, Hungary is a “ferry-land” that connects the Seine with the Danube (“Morituri” 633–35); yet he “could not work out a comforting solution to the dilemma of East versus West,” between his “native Orientalism” and his admiration for Paris” (Czigány 294). For his compatriot, Mihály Babits, on the other hand, the writer was “a living ambassador of the West in the stormy East” (Moses Nagy 19). But, as Jacques Rupnik asks in his book on “the other Europe,” not without irony toward the messianic overtones of this discourse, are we talking about “the east of the West or the west of the East” (4)? In response to these complications and a continued over-valuation of the Western model in relation to the Eastern (regional) ones, the local intelligentsia has periodically searched for some kind of third solution that would reflect the need for both cultural self-definition and participation in a broader European dialogue. For example, the twentieth-century literary interest in a “Byzantium after Byzantium” — as historian Nicolae Iorga (Byzance après Byzance; 1935) called it — suggested an effort to foreground that synthesis between the Eastern and Western paradigm that had never in fact ceased to exist. Even under the Ottoman occupation, the use of the Greek language by the Turks in their correspondence with the occupied countries, the libraries that conserved Byzantine books, and the lingering Byzantine influence in art and in literature, spoke of a continued cultural hybridity in this area. Throughout the twentieth century, this dialogue has helped question monolithic ideas of Europeanism, bringing forth a cultural heterotopia. This position has parallels in some Hungarian writings; like Romanians, Hungarians often felt out-of-place in an East-Central Europe dominated by Germanic, Slavic, and Turkish cultures. In this space all paradoxes and incompatibilities are possible. When Eugène Ionesco, the selfexiled Romanian playwright living in Paris, confronted the western models with those coming

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from his native land, he took comfort in his strong attachment to the Danubian space: “I hope I still have in me that Danube peasant I once was” (Simion 383). Here the “Danube peasant” has a positive connotation. His colleague and friend Mihail Sebastian, who remained in Romania, exiled in the land of books (Apolzan 99), also acknowledged that he belonged to the Danubian space. In his novel, De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years; 1934), he proclaims himself to be both “a man of the Danube” and a “Danube Jew” (224–25). By contrast, the philosopher Emil Cioran, who initially praised the Danube basin for producing sturdy peoples, not yet devitalized by rationality, later thought that countries like Romania had no realistic chance for cultural development beyond a passive “horizontal sliding” that denies the “gothic pathos” of vertical aspiration (Schimbarea 63). The Danube region confers multiple cultural identities and unstable national affiliations. The biographies of the local intelligentsia often unfold along paradoxical trajectories that display complex forms of cultural commuting. The Slovak poet and essayist Ladislav Novomeský, for example, went to grammar school in Budapest, studied to become a teacher in Bratislava, and then became a public figure in Prague and Bratislava. The poet Attila József, born in 1905 in a Budapest slum from a Cumenian (“kún”) mother and a “half” or “full” Romanian father, traveled across Europe from Budapest to Vienna and Paris and back to the “cloudy, wise and great” Danube waters, proclaiming himself a European in “Ó Európa” (1927; Winter Night 31). The poet Vasko Popa, born in Vojvodina of Romanian parents, studied in Bucharest, Belgrade, and Vienna, and wrote in both Romanian and Serbo-Croatian. In the Danube’s veins, he writes, flows the life of his birthplace (“Marea doamnă Dunărea,” Câmpia neodihnei 159; “Her Great Ladyship Danube” Collected Poems 212). The great Austrian poet Lenau was born near Timişoara from Slavic, German, and Hungarian roots. Similarly, mixed cultural allegiances and experiences can be found in the nineteenth-century Serbian-Hungarian Mihály Vitkovics or the twentieth-century Montenegrin-Hungarian-Jewish Danilo Kiš, and others. Even more interestingly, the Hungarian avantgarde poet Róbert Reiter became after 1945 the traditionalist Swabian poet Franz Liebhard who encouraged the development of German poetry in Romania (see also the article on Timişoara). In his autobiography, Elias Canetti looks back at his childhood in the little town on the Danube, Ruschuk (today Ruse), where Bulgarians, Turks, Romanians, Spanish (Sephardic) Jews, and Albanians lived side by side. As he remembers, one could hear simultaneously seven or eight different languages: “As a child, I had no real grasp of this variety, but I never stopped feeling its effect” (The Tongue Set Free 6). This Babel of voices has taken on quasi-surreal proportions in the poetry of Ivan Gadjanski (born in the Banat area) whose multilingual poems — in Hungarian, Romanian, and Romany — reflect the colorful linguistic fabric of the land. The multiplicity of cultures has also generated disorientation. Danilo Kiš, born of a Montenegrin mother and a Jewish-Hungarian father, grew up at the frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later worked in France as a professor of languages. As he confessed in his “Birth Certificate” (1988): “[W]hen I wake up, I sometimes don’t know where I am” (348). This openness/disorientation of definitions translated in Kiš’s work into a permanent questioning of the cultural map and its shifting borders, although the writer remained aware of “all historical and geopolitical memories, political stakes, coalitions, and local antagonisms, conflicts and wars” that constitute as many obstacles for a frontier-free continent (“Variations on the Theme of Central Europe” 2–3). Similarly, the fiction, essays, and poetry of the Croat Miroslav Krleža, who spoke German and Hungarian fluently, occupy

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a literary geography of their own that spreads between Rome and Greece, Paris and Vienna. For Krleža writing cannot be segmented regionally, unfolding in a supranational space of aesthetic wandering (“Entretien avec Krleža” 242; Bogert 67). The concern for cultural independence has often been accompanied by the search for solutions that defy the political and stress the cultural (see Konrád’s Antipolitics). The proposal for the creation of a Danubian confederation or for the re-creation of Central Europe has come mostly from the East-Central European intelligentsia and not from governments. It has resurfaced periodically in moments of crisis — around 1848, after World War I and II, and in the 1980s — with the clear intent of counteracting the Habsburg, the Russian, and more recently the Soviet Empires (Kiš, Homo Poeticus 105). In 1850, the leader of the Hungarian revolution, Lajos Kossuth, wrote from his exile in Turkey an address to the People of the United States in which he discussed a plan for a confederation of European small countries based on self-government (“True Liberty is Impossible without Federalism”). These ideas were shared by some Romanian politicians: already in May 1848, Dumitru Brătianu went to Pest to discuss a federalist plan with the Hungarian leaders and in 1949, Nicolae Bălcescu discussed a joint plan of action with Kossuth and even drew up a constitution for a confederation of the Romanians, Magyars, and South Slavs. Later, in 1862, Kossuth also revealed a specific plan for a Danubian confederation that would include Hungarians, Slavs, and Romanians, but the momentum of the 1848 revolutions had been lost by then because of, among other things, a lack of sufficient interethnic support. Seventy years later, Tomáš Masaryk, political philosopher and founder of modern Czechoslovakia, also envisioned a regional solution for the Middle zone nations, but the federalist idea was used exclusively in political contexts. Other twentieth-century politicians and intellectuals shared the idea of a “Helveticized zone” in Central Europe (see Francis Wagner 18). In 1918, a group of Hungarian writers, artists, and scholars — which included Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Endre Ady, and György Lukács — signed a Manifesto calling for the creation of a Danubian Federation (Francis Wagner 285–87), but again their initiative came too late, as the nationalities emerging after the collapse of Austro-Hungary chose nationalism over any dream of Central European federation. The concept was revived in February 1932, when a group of politicians formed a Comité Permanent pour le Rapprochement Économique des Pays Danubiens — Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia — under the chairmanship of the Hungarian Paul Auer. Though this plan was exclusively economic, and it garnered the support of the French Foreign Minister, André Tardieu, the Great Powers rejected it. The federalist plans were replaced with narrower political alliances, such as the Little Entente formed after the First World War between Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and the Balkan Entente established by Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, and Turkey in 1934 both of which broke apart in the turmoil of World War II. After the Second World War, the January 1945 issue of the Danubian Review, published in New York, returned to the idea of a Danubian Confederation or an “Eastern Switzerland” that would unite small countries against big powers, and protect them from nationalistic conflicts. And while the list of countries differed with each new proposal, the existence of a Danubian space that could be shared at least culturally was emphasized in several of them (see also László Németh’s concept of Danubianism in the article on Transylvania below).

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In the 1980s, the parallel concept of Central Europe reemerged in discussions as a way of defining common “Central European attitudes” that belong to the area between the Western Europe and the East (Russia). Czesław Miłosz spoke about “my corner of Europe” situated somewhere at “the borderland of Rome and Byzantium” (Witness 13), and Eugène Ionesco revealed his own corner of Europe: “while intellectually my writing belongs to France, culturally it belongs to the vast mental space of the Center.” Ionesco proposed a new Central European confederation to include Austria, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Czechoslovakia, as a shield against Russia (“The Austro-Hungarian Empire” 7; Todorova 149). In his essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” Milan Kundera lamented — much like Ionesco — the communist oppression in the region but also argued that it is not politics but culture that gives identity to these small countries, which are placed equidistantly between East (Russia) and West (see the Introduction to vol. 1 of our History). For these and other writers who participated in the debate, Central Europe was a mental space, the locus of a spiritual family. But a family involves exclusions, too: as Maria Todorova notes, the Balkans have been systematically left out of any reconstructions of the region, as the “constituting other to Central Europe” (156–57). In Stoianovich’s view, the Balkans have become a forgotten space constructed as the “other” within, and as such, it is both Europe, and non-Europe — as evidenced more recently by the rhetoric of the Kosovo war (322). Ultimately, the idea of a Danubian or Central European confederation turns into utopia. It becomes a state of mind, nostalgia for what it is not: “This Europe of the mind tends to be the domain of intellectuals” (Rupnik 4). In Homo Poeticus, Danilo Kiš acknowledged his “nostalgia” for a “virtual Europe” defined “with no precise borders, with no Center or rather with several centers” (98). But Kiš also reminds us that this space is not to be considered a “whole supranational entity,” because for small countries differences are more vital than similarities. This is the spirit in which we should view the Danubian cultural corridor: just as the river’s waters cannot be separated, “the fictions of a Danubian civilization” defy artificial borders, continually redefining the topographic space and the cultures that inhabit it. They tell, since immemorial times and in many variants, the story of the “peasant of the Danube” who is also, despite all odds, a “Homo Europaeus.”

B. Regions as Cultural Interfaces

Transylvania’s Literary Cultures: Rivalry and Interaction John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, with Sándor Kibédi-Varga and Nicolae Harsanyi Transylvania (Ardeal, Erdély, Siebenbürgen) designates today a geographical area embraced by the south-eastern swing of the Carpathian Mountains, and, in the north and west, by the so-called Partium and the Banat. During the Turkish suzerainty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the latter two areas were included in Transylvania. The region’s pre- and early history is imagined radically differently by its various ethnic inhabitants and their transborder “motherlands,” giving rise to a disparate body of myths, legends, sagas, historical plays, novels, and romances, most of which were produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to support ethnic identities and their historical legitimacy. From the Middle Ages onward, Transylvania’s population was primarily Székely-Hungarian, Romanian, and German (called Saxon), although it also included Armenians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks, next to a sizable (mostly Hungarian-) Jewish population that all but disappeared in the Holocaust. Transylvania, which has enjoyed relative religious freedom, has few Roman Catholics; the Székelys are Calvinists or Unitarians, the Saxons Lutherans, and the Romanians adhere to the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholic churches (the latter constituted in 1698 to allow Romanians in Austro-Hungary access to the Western centers of education). These ethnic and religious divisions have been historically underlined by social and class differences: the Székelys had a powerful nobility and serfs, the Romanians were for a long time a rural population with elements of a traditional nobility concentrated in the Făgăraş area, while the Saxons (in contrast

Figure 1. Map of Transylvania at the end of the sixteenth century

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to the Swabian farmers of the Banat) had a prosperous urban population in Sibiu/Nagyszeben/ Hermannstadt, Braşov/Brassó/Kronstadt, and other cities. This radically changed in the twentieth century. Ethnic, religious, social, and political complexities have prevented until now the writing of integrated and reliable histories of Transylvania. The most ambitious attempt so far, the threevolume history of Transylvania by Béla Köpeczi et al (1986), revised and abridged as History of Transylvania (1994), was written only by Hungarians and from a decidedly Hungarian perspective. A similar national perspective informs Heinrich Zillich’s Siebenbürgen (Transylvania; 1957), Din Istoria Transilvaniei (From the History of Transylvania) by Constantin Daicoviciu et al, Ştefan Pascu’s 1982 A History of Transylvania, and Coriolan Suciu’s Dicţionar istoric al localităţilor din Transilvania (Historical Dictionary of Transylvanian Dwelling Places; 1967–68). Köpeczi and his team tell Transylvania’s post–1918 history in a most cursory fashion, and they all but ignore Transylvania’s arts, above all its treasure house of legends, folktales, poetry, novels, and memoirs. To ignore this literary culture is to exclude the imaginative manifestations of the constituent populations and their contribution to the construction of Transylvania’s conflicting identities. Our essay approaches Transylvania from a literary angle that foregrounds and interrelates the fictional narratives of the constituent communities. Hence we will deal with Transylvania’s prehistory by means of the various myths and legends that were constructed about it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and with its history in the 1500–1800 period by means of historical fiction and plays. Of course, these fictions are not “faithful” depictions of how “it really was.” But, then, neither are the equally biased national histories mentioned. Fiction and history writing reflect not only the time they depict but also the age in which they are written (see pp. 463–512 in vol. 1 of our History). The Transylvanian historical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals the conflicting perceptions and desires of the communities that generated them; it also continues to shape the thoughts and feelings of its reading public. A reading of Transylvania’s literary history must, therefore, telescope different levels of time, and superimpose upon each other various ethnic perceptions of space. Nineteenth-Century Images of Pre-Historic Transylvania Most of the stories generated within Transylvania and for Transylvanians during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century had identificatory functions: they established foundational (ethnic) myths that often competed with one another. Almost all of these emerged in the nineteenth century, from irretrievable sources. They are jointly mentioned, probably for the first time, in a sober sixteenth-century text by bishop Miklós Oláh, also known as Nicolaus Olahus on account of his Romanian paternal ancestors (in Hungarian, his last name means Walachian). Note that Oláh distinguishes between Hungarians and Székelys: Four different nations live here: the Hungarians, the Székelys, the Saxons, and the Walachians. Among them, the Saxons are less suited to war. The Hungarians and the Székelys speak the same language, though the Székelys have national words of their own […] It is said of the Saxons that they are German colonizers from Saxony, sent from there by Charles the Great […] According to

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tradition, the Walachians [descend from] Roman colonizers. That they share many of their words with Latin is an evidence for this […] Apart from Csaba’s army, which went to Greece, three thousand Huns escaped death after the battle at the field of Sycambia. They settled at the field of Cegléd, where the village of that name now is. But since they were afraid of the power of Detre and the other Germans, they moved in fast tempo to the Dacian area now called Erdély [Transylvania] or seven fortresses [Siebenbürgen] (named after the seven Hun leaders, who set up their tents here when they entered Pannonia for the second time). And in order to make it more plausible that they are not the remainders of the Huns they changed their name from Hun to Székely. We consider these people even today as the oldest Huns remaining in Hungary. They are loath to tolerate mixing their family and house with foreigners: in terms of customs, rituals, and laws they sharply differ from the other Hungarians. These Székelys believe to this day that Csaba did not return to Scythia but died in Greece. (Oláh 5–6)

What Oláh relates here, without claiming historical veracity, nineteenth-century writers shaped into narratives designed to endow their people with an identity. Oláh’s Saxon Detre, known as Dietrich in the German epics that early-nineteenth-century Germanists “discovered,” reappears in János Arany’s epic poem Buda halála (Buda’s Death; 1864), the first and only completed part of a trilogy about Prince Csaba that was to provide a link between the Huns, the Székelys, and the Hungarians. Arany’s epic poem relates how Buda (Bleda), the Hun ruler, relinquishes half of his power to Attila, his younger brother, who is married to Ildikó (the Krimhilde of the Nibelungenlied). In the ensuing conflicts, Buda builds the fortress that carries his name but is finally killed by Attila. According to Arany’s plan, Part II would have confronted Ildikó and her son, Aladár, with Csaba, Attila’s son from a later marriage; Part III (“Prince Csaba”) would have shown how Ildikó murders Attila out of jealousy and a wish to secure the throne for Aladár. Csaba loses his battle with Aladár because he is betrayed by Detre and the Goths. He flees to the eastern home of his ancestors, leaving the Székelys on the Transylvanian border to battle the Goths until the arrival of the Hungarian kins centuries later. Arany thus planned to link Hungarian legends to Germanic sagas, and the Hungarian people via the Székelys to the Huns, trying to provide thereby historical legitimacy for their present home. In Arany’s epic, God from above observes the fratricide and sheds a tear, not for Buda but for Attila and the Huns: Isten, alant földjén, ő lehetett volna; De nagy ily kísértés, földi halandóra — Szólt; és megnyugodott, könnyét letörülvén, Hogy örök-állandó amaz erős törvény God, on grounds below, he could have become; / But great is the temptation for earthly mortals / he said, and calmed himself, drying his tear / adding that eternal and permanent is that strong law (Költői Művei 3: 751)

Others continued this legacy, providing Hungarian political and public opinion with Attila myths of Transylvania that attribute a sense of fate and doom to the Huns/Hungarians. We ought to remember that Arany turned in the 1850s and 60s to Attila’s heroic overreaching in order to offer

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the nation a legitimating myth after the failure of the 1848/49 war of independence. As Antal Szerb has summed up this symbolic drama: “A new world, the young Orient, confronts the aged West, apparently wins, but its power is destroyed by internal fate” (Magyar irodalomtörténet 361). Arany’s eloquent lines speak not only of fate but of “the eternal attitude of the Hungarian soul when confronting it. The Hungarian in his finitism always senses and knows the limits set by fate. He submits to this ‘strong law’ with greater humility than any other European: ‘Hungary is a nation of amor fati’” (362). Romanian historians and intellectuals claimed Transylvania to be the true matrix of the nation, the place where the Roman legions of Emperor Trajanus and the original Dacian residents were welded together, giving birth to the Romanian nation. Moreover, as in the case of the Hungarians, Transylvanian Romanians were upheld by poets, early historians, and chroniclers as a shining example of pure customs and morals, a reservoir of innocence, wisdom, and courage, unspoiled by “Levantine” ingredients. The earliest articulations of Romania’s constitutive narrative can be found in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical chronicles published in Walachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania that used oral lore and certain documents to emphasize the common Latin origin of Romanians in those three regions. This narrative became more coherent and better documented in the works of the Şcoala Ardeleană (The Transylvanian School). Gheorghe Şincai’s 3-volume Hronica românilor şi a mai multor neamuri (The Chronicle of Romanians and Other Nationalities; 1807–09) reconfirmed the Latin origin of Romanians but retold their history in its multiple interrelations with neighboring nationalities. His younger colleague, Petru Maior, reworked the Daco-Romanian Enlightenment theory about the origin of the Romanians in Istoria pentru începutul românilor în Dachia (History of the Beginning of Romanians in Dacia; 1812). In this work and in a subsequent response to the historian Jernej (Bartholomeus) Kopitar, who questioned the idea that the Romanians were pure descendants of the Romans, formed in the Transylvanian basin, Maior articulated a connection between the territory of ancient Dacia and the ethno-genesis of Romanians. The Istoria became a foundational work for young Romanians on both sides of the Carpathians. The historical arguments of the Transylvanian School were developed further by the romantics of the 1840s, who fleshed out the narrative of ethno-genesis, making the Dacian element a constitutive part of Romanian identity through intermarriages between Romans and Dacians. According to their argument, this continued even after the retreat of the Roman army south of the Danube (AD 245). Mid-nineteenth-century literature became populated with mythic-historical figures: with Burebista, who is said to have united in the first century all the Dacian tribes from Moravia to the Balkans and the Tisza River; with Deceneu, Burebista’s high priest and follower; Decebal, ruler at the end of the first century A.D.; and, especially, Zalmoxis, god-prophet and teacher of Pythagoras. Gheorghe Asachi, a Moldavian writer of Transylvanian ancestry, mythologized the beginnings of Romanian culture in “Dragoş” (1859), a short story in which the legendary Dacian maid Dochia meets Emperor Trajan on Mount Pion (Ceahlău). The Transylvanian prince Dragoş participates himself in a number of exploits that lead to the founding of another Romanian principality, that of Moldova. Trajan and the Dacians feature also in the Walachian Dimitrie Bolintineanu’s national epic poem Traianida (The Trajan Epic; 1869). Here, Eudochia, wife of Zalmoxis, revenges her rejection by the Dacian hero Oneu, by triggering a war with the Romans that leads to the defeat of the Dacians. The Moldavian Mihail Kogălniceanu started in 1840 the

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founding periodical of modern Romanian literature, Dacia literară, named so to further a common literature for all Romanians. Mihai Eminescu, who received his education in Cernăuţi from Aron Pumnul, a Transylvanian teacher and participant in the 1848 revolution, inherited the image of a mythic-nostalgic Dacia. In a number of poems he allowed the Geto-Dacian myths to supersede the more predictable Romantic focus on German mythology and Indian mysticism. The ancient Transylvanian kingdom of Dacia features directly in Eminescu’s 1872 “Memento mori. Panorama deşertăciunilor” (Memento mori. The Panorama of Vanities; Poezii 269–313). This long poem recapitulates the succession of cultures in the “ocean of peoples,” from primitive times through the ancient civilizations to mythic Dacia. The largest section of the poem is devoted to the latter, described as an enchanted, shadowless world, traversed by “the river of song,” where a fairy-tale queen Dochia animates magic rituals in the margin of dream (Poezii 270–91). Dacia remains for Eminescu an important philosophic and historical landmark, outshining the invasion of the Goths, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Eminescu never realized his plan for an epic on Dacia, but he left two more sections that continue the theme: part of a projected play, called Decebal, in which the Dacian poet Ogur, Decebal, and Dochia (a kind of Cassandra) meet to both decry the fall of Dacia and praise its elevation to myth; and the short monologue, “Rugăciunea unui dac” (The Prayer of a Dacian; Poezii 92–93) from 1879, in which a Dacian warrior prays to a pre-Christian God to undo his creation so that he can be spared life in subjugation. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Transylvanian poet George Coşbuc tried to synthesize the myths and oral lore of Romanian culture into a modern “epic.” He never achieved this, but interestingly Dacia continued to play an important part in Coşbuc’s effort to build an “epic-lyrical monograph of the Romanian village” (Micu, Istoria 64). In “Decebal către popor” (Decebal Addressing His People), the Dacian king encourages his people to choose death over subjugation by the Romans, which can be read as an allegorical allusion to the fate of Transylvanian Romanians under the Habsburgs: Din zei de-am fi scoborîtori, C-o moarte toţi suntem datori! Totuna e dac-ai murit Flăcău ori moş îngîrbovit Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori Ori cîine-nlănţuit (From Gods themselves were we descended / This life of ours would still be ended! / It makes no difference when you die / An old hunchback or a youthful guy; / It matters, though, if you die a lion / and not a dog in chains) (Balade şi idile 105)

The ancient Dacian substratum of Transylvanian civilization continued to be an important topic in the twentieth century, both in scholarly works such as Nicolae Densuşianu’s Dacia preistorică (Prehistoric Dacia; 1913), and in literature. In Paşii profetului (The Footprints of the Prophet; 1921), Transylvania’s most important Romanian poet, Lucian Blaga, emphasizes the Dionysian

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energy of the Dacian and Greek heritage by evoking Pan; but some of that energy is already lost, tainted by a declining modern civilization. Blaga’s expressionist play, Zamolxe. Mister păgân (Zalmoxis: A Pagan Mystery; 1921) tries to rescue that archaic existential tradition, opposing the cult of nature to official Christianity. Picking up Blaga’s suggestion, Mircea Eliade dedicated a book to the myths of Dacia and Eastern Europe in De Zalmoxis à Genghis-Khan. In his view, “myths and legends are true in a different way than historic reality, […] for they are two different modes of existing in the world, two different paths that our spirit follows in interpreting it” (De Zalmoxis 132). As Eliade was first to point out, myth can also be misused for propaganda purposes. A number of writers tried to justify Ceauşescu’s nationalist despotism by associating it with the Dacian mythic-historic figures Burebista, Deceneu, and Decebal, and further back with the ancient Thracians, described by Herodotus as the greatest people after the Indians and considered by Iorga as the best embodiment of the Carpathian-Balkan-Byzantine spirit. A veritable “Thracomania,” which proclaimed the ascendancy of the Daco-Thracian civilization over later civilizations, seized the official culture under Ceauşescu. One of the inspirers of this trend, the businessman and amateur historian Iosif Constantin Drăgan, printed in his Italian press a series of works on the Thracians as ancestors of the Romanians and on Dacia’s Imperial Millennium. The historians Constantin Daicoviciu and I. I. Russu published more authentic scholarly work on the Dacian substratum, but even some of their work, and the literature they inspired, continued to articulate what Elena Tacciu describes as a continuous “myth-history” of Romania from Dacian times to the heroes of the Middle Ages and beyond (see her Romantismul românesc, vol. 1; see also below pp. 252–53, 260). Aurel Rău’s collection of poems, Mişcarea de revoluţie (The Movement of Revolution; 1985), for example, interrelated the key moments in Transylvania’s Romanian history into a continuous narrative of strife and self-sacrifice, from the Dacian resistance to the Roman legions to the peasant rebellions of György Dózsa/Gheorghe Doja, Horea, and Avram Iancu, and further to the sacrifices of two world wars. This grand narrative of the Dacians and their heirs illustrates the stoic survival of Romanians. The Transylvania Saxons were less persistent in their search for ancestors, but they, too, have claimed time and again to have historical priority in the region, by descending from the Dacians or the Goths. As late as 1957, Heinrich Zillich claimed that Transylvania was first settled and cultivated by Germanic tribes, beginning with the Bastarnen and followed by, above all, the Dacians (Schicksal 9ff). Michael Albert portrayed in Die Flandrer am Alt (The Flemish at the Alt/Olt; 1883) how the invited Saxons (not the Flemish!) arrive at the Transylvanian Olt river in 1150 to save the area from the Cumanians and establish there a homeland. Images of Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Transylvania Martin Opitz, the German Baroque poet who briefly taught at a Transylvanian gymnasium upon the invitation of Prince Gábor Bethlen, disliked not only the climate (Opitz, Gesammelte 65) but also the customs, the language, and the mentality of the Saxons. Yet he called the Saxons “Germanissimi Germanorum” for their intense attachment to their German customs and local autonomy, and he attributed idyllic peace to the area around the gold mine of Zlatna in his long

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didactic poem “Zlatna.” More typically, Transylvania figures in the imagination of westerners as a quasi-oriental counterpart of Western rationalism, as the realm of a threatening unconscious, not as the locus of the Golden Age. Witness Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the innumerable horror novels and films it spawned. These seized upon the historical figure of Vlad Ţepeş — the cruel but brave fifteenth-century Transylvanian-born prince of Walachia, who halted for a while the Turkish drive northward — projecting Western fears and anxieties onto a blank spot on the mind’s map. Interest in Transylvania’s rise and fall in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inspired in the 1830s the first Hungarian historical romances, Miklós Jósika’s Abafi (1836) and Az utolsó Bátori (The Last Báthory; 1837). After 1848–49 the historical romances continued with Mór Jókai’s Erdély aranykora (The Golden Age of Transylvania; 1852) and Törökvilág Magyarországon (The World of the Turks in Hungary; 1853), and culminated in 1862 with Zsigmond Kemény’s last, deeply pessimistic historical novel, Zord idő (Grim Time). Of the veritable deluge of twentiethcentury historical fiction about seventeenth-century Transylvania we mention here only Károly Kós’s Varju nemzetség (The Varju Clan; 1921) and Zsigmond Móricz’s panoramic Erdély trilogy (1922–35). Zord idő marks the mood of the aborted war of independence, whereas Móricz’s trilogy and Kós’s Varju nemzetség arise from the sense of crisis that followed the loss of Transylvania and its integration in Romania. Together, these narratives cover the Turkish capture of Buda in 1541, which sealed the tripartite division of Hungary and led to the emergence of a quasi-independent Transylvania, through its “golden age” and fall in the seventeenth century: Zord idő covers the years 1541–51, Az utolsó Bátori those of 1609–11, the chaotic years of Prince Gábor, though not his assassination in 1613. This is at the center of Móricz’s Erdély trilogy, which contrasts the two Gábors, Báthory and Bethlen, showing the dissolution of a weak visionary and the rise of the great Prince Bethlen. Varju nemzetség follows the fortunes of a lesser clan from 1629 to the consequences of Prince György Rákóczy’s disastrous campaign in Poland (1657); Jókai’s novels take place under the mild rule of Prince Mihály Apafi (1661–90), ending with the aborted Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, in which Transylvania fought, reluctantly, on the Turkish side. The end of Apafi and Transylvania’s power inaugurated the Habsburg rule in the eighteenth century. These romances and novels use, even quote, historical documents, though historical accuracy is not their prime aim. Jósika spins an unabashedly sentimental romance between Coelesta, fictional daughter of Michael Weiss, the Saxon judge and leader of Hermannstadt, and Gábor Báthory, who becomes the Prince of Transylvania, responsible for the defeat and death of the judge. Wild and improbable romances also color Jókai’s stories, although they also attempt to portray historical figures and events accurately. Zord idő is the historically most reflective, but also most desperate nineteenth-century Hungarian historical novel. Published just two years before Arany’s epic, it deals with another “death of Buda,” the Turkish takeover of the castle that Arany’s hero built on the Danube. Kemény’s most poignant historical character is the Polish-born Queen Isabel, widow of János Szapolyai, whom the diet elected as King John I of Hungary against the rival claims of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Fráter (Brother) György [born Juraj Utješenović], bishop and governor of Hungary, repels with the help of the Turks Ferdinand’s effort to capture Buda. Kemény’s Isabel is surrounded by inept Hungarian nobles who fight among themselves and waver between the Emperor and the

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Turks, loosing the trust of both. She assumes the leadership only for the sake of her son but grows in stature and wisdom once the Turks infiltrate and peacefully occupy Buda. Sultan Suleiman II adopts her infant, but banishes mother, son, and Fráter György to Transylvania. This banishment under Turkish protection inaugurates a fragile province in the shadow of Istanbul and Vienna. Instead of chronicling these beginnings, Kemény concludes with Isabel’s sad departure in 1551 for a second exile in Silesia after ceding her crown to Ferdinand. Jósika and Jókai often romanticize the past, but neither they nor Kemény and Móricz portray Transylvania’s past as idyllic or glorious, not even in its finest hour. Doomsday always lurks around the corner. Tündérkert (Enchanted Garden), the title of Móricz’s first volume, designates not historical Transylvania but the mirage that the miserably failed Gábor Báthory has of its future. Transylvania functions in these novels as an allegory of Hungary’s and Transylvania’s woes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not as a utopia. Even more remarkable, these novels neither glorify the Hungarians and Székelys nor vilify others, not even the Turks. Though external powers inflict many woes on the Hungarians and Székelys, the worst tragedies are due to internal political and religious strife, or simply to a hunkering for power and money among the noblemen. The events are seen from a Székely perspective, but the Romanian and Saxon figures often appear superior to the Hungarian ones. In Jósika’s Az utolsó Bátori the real hero is the Saxon Coelesta, not Gábor Báthory. Her protective father, Michael Weiss, becomes a wise and heroic man in Móricz’s trilogy. The central plot of Jókai’s Törökvilág Magyarországon starts with the wedding of a rich Walachian bride to Gheorghe Ghica, Price of Moldavia, which is attended by the Hungarian Imre Tököly (later the leader of the kuruc rebellion against the Habsburgs) and the Turkish Beg Feriz, a military hero as well as a great bard. Several years later, when a despotic Turk threatens to execute Ghica and his wife, Tököly and Feriz join in rescuing them. These Hungarian novels do not cover Transylvania’s first peace and prosperity under István Báthory (Prince of Transylvania and King of Poland) and the devastation of Transylvania under his successor, Zsigmond Báthory by the Turks in the 1590s and by the Habsburg troops in 1603–1604. The gap is partly filled by Romanian artistic representations that tell the story of the Walachian prince Michael the Brave, who defeated the Turks in the Battle of Călugăreni (1593), joined the Holy League in 1594, linked up with István Bocskai and Zsigmond Báthory, defeated the Turks at Giurgiu in 1595, and András Báthory at Sellenberg, but lost out finally in 1600–01, after briefly becoming king of Transylvania as well as of Moldova, uniting thus the Romanians under a common rule. Michael the Brave was an ideal figure for the emerging Romanian nationalRomantic novel. Budai-Deleanu had contemplated already an epic on him, but found both himself and the Romanian language still inadequate for the lofty task (Ţiganiada 69–70). The first major work on Michael the Brave, by Nicolae Bălcescu, was written in the 1840s but published only posthumously in 1878, under the title Românii supt Mihai-Voievod Viteazul (Romanians under Prince Michael the Brave). In the vision of this leader of the 1848 revolution in Walachia and supporter of the one in Transylvania, Michael the Brave embodied Romanian aspirations to a unified national state (an idea that Bălcescu articulated in terms of a national destiny), but he committed a significant error by keeping the peasants enslaved as a concession to Hungarian and Romanian landowners. In this masterpiece of Romantic historical exegesis and narration, which emphasizes the right of all nations to self-determination, Michael emerges as a half-mythic figure (Bălcescu resorted to both oral legends and historical documents), comparable to Homer’s demigods but fal-

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lible in his social options. The historical novelist N. D. Popescu also devoted a number of works to Michael the Brave and his age: in Maria Putoianca (1892) the political events of “the most glorious period in Michael the Brave’s life” (as the subtitle states) merely serve as a background for an erotic intrigue; Bătălia de la Călugăreni (The Battle of Călugăreni; 1894) and the novellas Juneţea lui Mihai Bravu (Michael the Brave’s Youth; 1872) and Mihai Viteazul şi călăul (Michael the Brave and the Executioner; 1895) on Michael’s assassination in 1601, focus more directly on the hero. Popescu’s characters and situations are often schematic and sensational, but they acclimatized historical fiction in Romania. Michael the Brave remained important in the twentieth century. Nicolae Iorga devoted not only historical pages but also a play to him (Mihai Viteazul; 1920). Under Ceauşescu’s regime Michael was deftly exploited a symbol of the nation. Radu Theodoru’s two-volume Brazdă şi paloş (Furrow and Sword; 1954–56) and his stage tetralogy Vulturul (The Eagle; 1971–74), focus on the social and political life during Michael’s reign. The voivode features in the former as a picturesque character traveling through the country disguised as a tradesman, occasioning interesting social observations, but also heroic exploits that oppose Walachians to Turks. Another Transylvanian novelist and playwright, Titus Popovici, wrote the screenplay for Sergiu Nicolaescu’s Mihai Viteazul (1970) — also for his 1966 Dacii —, which mobilized the techniques of epic cinema in the service of Romanian nationalism. Transylvania’s troubled past is reflected also in the discrepant literary images of two leaders of peasant revolts: Dózsa/Doja, leader of the 1514 uprising of Hungarian and Romanian peasants, and Horea, who led in 1784, together with Cloşca and Crişan, a rebellion of Romanian farm workers. Horea remained an ambiguous figure for the representatives of the Transylvanian School, who could not condone the destruction of private property, but he became a positive protagonist already in Ioachim C. Drăgescu’s Nopţile carpatine sau Istoria martirilor libertăţii (Carpathian Nights or The History of Martyrs for Freedom; 1867). Drăgescu saw Horea’s movement as both national and social, and he blended realism with fantasy (Horea himself becomes aware of the social inequities around him during a dream vision). The newly established Austro-Hungarian administration censored the novel and expelled Drăgescu from the Universities of Budapest and Vienna. Horea’s Romanian rebels did not elicit warm sympathy from the Hungarian nobleman Miklós Bánffy who, in his early but skillfully structured short story Farkasok (Wolves; 1908), compared a bloody fight for the booty among Horea’s rebels to the savage ways of wolves. By contrast, Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Crăişorul (Prince of the Mountains; 1929) presents Horea as the leader of a social movement and an emblem for Romanian aspirations on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains. Under Communism, for example in Ion Brad’s conventional poetry, Horea became a means of propaganda, but the period produced also genuine literary explorations. In Radu Ciobanu’s novel Călăreţul de fum (Rider of Smoke; 1984) Horea is an avatar of the collective subconscious, feeding the need of common folk for myth and sacrality. In Roata fără sfîrşit (Endless Wheel; 1984), subtitled “documentary novel,” Radu Selejan recreated the history of Horea’s rebellion from historical documents and reports, trying to avoid propagandistic distortions. As to Dózsa/Doja, the Cluj-based writer, I. D. Muşat presented him in Răscoala iobagilor (The Uprising of the Serfs; 1951) primarily as a mercenary disconnected from the serfs. Muşat’s more epic and ideologically correct 1956 version replaced “Uprising” with “War,” and showed Doja as a humane and involved hero who sacrifices himself for the oppressed.

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The nineteenth-century Saxon figures of the past are cultural rather than martial. In contrast to the Székelys and the Romanians, the Saxons had urban self-governance, political power, and considerable civic liberties, but their military might was limited and seldom heroic. Hence the Saxon awakening tended to focus on figures who got involved in politics and war only because of their cultural roles. Their main cultural hero was not, as one would expect, Michael Weiss, the wise judge and leader of Hermannstadt, who figures prominently in Jósika’s Az utolsó Báthory and Móricz’s Erdély. The first significant work about him, Adolf Meschendörfer’s play Michael Weiss, appeared only in 1919. Traugott Teutsch, the most important nineteenth-century Saxon writer, wrote about Kronstadt’s, not Hermannstadt’s, burgers. The hero of his Johannes Honterus (1898) was the internationally known scholar, educator, and geographer who returned from Western Europe to Kronstadt in 1533 to establish a school, and a press (1538–39) that also printed Romanian texts written by German Humanists. He played a key role in establishing and institutionalizing the Lutheran religion in the Saxon community, preventing thereby the religious split that came to divide the protestant Székelys from the Catholic Hungarians under Habsburg rule. Following Daniel Roth’s novel, Johann Zabanius Sachs von Harteneck (1847), Teutsch published in 1874 a work on Sachs von Harteneck, another major figure of Saxon cultural history, who fled to Hermannstadt because of religious persecution and became a pro-Habsburg leader once the Turks had been driven away. He is said to have been responsible for securing from the Emperor the Diploma Leopoldinum (1690), which regulated the status of Transylvania and its various ethnic and religious constituents, but was executed in 1703 for having overstepped his jurisdiction, and, above all, because his adulterous wife became involved in a murder case. In Saxon literary and cultural history he is remembered as a brave leader, a loyal subject of the Emperor, and a victim of Hungarian intrigues against him. Transylvania’s Literary Cultures, 1800–1918 1800–1848 The gradual liberation of Hungary from Turkish occupation in the early eighteenth century unburdened Transylvania from one of its hegemonic allies but deprived it also of the opportunity to maneuver, as in the seventeenth century, between the two suzerain powers so as to attain a quasiindependence. Once “liberated,” Transylvania became a province — of the Habsburg Empire, of the Monarchy, of Romania — with little autonomy. The literature and culture of its three major constituents have in the last two centuries been oriented towards their linguistic “mother countries,” Romania, Hungary, and Austria/Germany. Two literary-cultural figures of eighteenth-century Transylvania foreshadow future trajectories. Kelemen Mikes, a towering and lonely Transylvanian Hungarian writer, followed Ferenc Rákóczi II into exile and wrote between 1717 and 1758 in Terdağ, Turkey (called Rodostó in Hungarian), his Törökországi levelek (Letters from Turkey) to a fictional aunt. They were published posthumously in 1794. The key Romanian writer of early eighteenth-century Transylvania was Ioan Inochentie Micu-Klein, a Uniate (Greek-Catholic) bishop, politician, and historian, who paved the way for the Romanian awakening. He was the first to claim, in his 1735 petition to the

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Emperor, that the Romanians had been inhabitants of Transylvania since Trajan and thus its oldest inhabitants; in his 1742 petition he further asserted that the Romanians were the largest of the four major constituents in Transylvania and deserved, therefore, to be recognized as a “nation valachica.” The Transylvanian Diet of 1744 offered the same rights to the Romanian nobles and Uniate clergy but refused to recognize Romanians as an equal nation. The next generation of the Romanian awakening, Samuil Micu-Klein, Bishop Inochentie’s nephew, Şincai, Petru Maior, Ion Budai-Deleanu, and other members of the Transylvanian School, educated in Transylvanian Jesuit and Piarist schools and in western universities (Vienna and Rome), emphasized the Latin identity of Romanians in order to enhance their cultural and political prestige in Europe. The political expression of their cultural ideas, the memorandum Supplex Libellus Valachorum Transilvaniae (1791), to which several of them contributed, demanded that the Romanians be given the same rights as the Hungarians, the Germans, and the Székelys, and be recognized as a “nation” along with the other three that had constituted the Unio trium nationum since 1473. The Transylvanian School exaggerated the purity of the Latin descent but supported its assertion with multicultural arguments and broadly liberal views. Thus Petru Maior urged that the Romanians adopt the Latin script by noting that the Hungarian language, though very different from Latin, used Latin characters (Şincai also reminded Romanians that, prior to the Council of Florence in 1439, which finalized the division of Western and Eastern Christianity, they had also used the Latin alphabet) and Budai-Deleanu drafted an ambitious history of all the nations of Transylvania (De originibus populorum Transylvaniae …). While his claims that the Székely directly descended from the Scythians and the Romanians exclusively from the Romans were speculative, the project revealed Budai-Deleanu’s erudition and multicultural sensibility. The same sensibility is evident in his Ţiganiada (The Gypsiad), written in 1800 and revised in 1812, which drew on European epic and mock-epic models as well as on Transylvanian chronicles in several languages. The Transylvanian School influenced the culture of the other Romanian principalities, anticipating the socio-political thought and activities of the 1848 generation — a generation also influenced by Kant and Victor Hugo. Constantin Diaconovici Loga’s “Call for the Publication of Romanian Books” (Chiemare la tipărirea cărţilor româneşti), a pamphlet from 1821, was heeded also in Moldova and Walachia, where local and transplanted Transylvanian writers founded journals, educational institutions, and new literary genres. The Transylvanian heritage was important when Titu Maiorescu, the great critic and leader of the Junimea literary circle, laid the foundations of modern Romanian literary culture. Descendant of a family related to Petru Maior (his father changed his patronymic to Maiorescu in memory of Maior), Maiorescu became an organizer and reformer of cultural life. He thought of the members of the Transylvanian School as founders, cultivators, and civilizing forces of the region’s literature, though he did not consider them to be great writers, and he criticized their excessive reliance on loan words from German and Latin. As the ethnic constituents of Transylvania went through national awakenings during the first half of the nineteenth century, their cultural and political interests clashed on the matter of language. The Saxons, though unhappy that Vienna’s political centralism infringed on their ancient rights, welcomed the Habsburg rule and the 1784 declaration that German was henceforth the official language of administration. A handful of Saxons supported the Hungarian liberals, who attempted to push a bill through the Transylvanian diets of 1834 and 1841–43 that would have made Hungarian the official language of the province and eventually the language of instruction

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in schools. But Stephan Ludwig Roth, the leading Saxon reformer, found Hungarian unsuited for official use; he would have accepted the language of the majority, Romanian, for purposes of everyday communication. The Romanians vehemently opposed the Hungarian draft bill of 1841. The Greek Catholic Bishop, Ioan Leményi, came to support it when its most offensive passages were deleted, but the majority, under the leadership of the Romanian philosopher and ideologue of the 1848 revolution, Simion Bărnuţiu, continued to reject it. Invoking the idea of natural law and Herder’s notion of language, Bărnuţiu asked for an autonomous multinational Transylvania, with equal rights for all constituent nations. The various nationalities were supposed to form entities of their own on the model of Swiss cantons and to be governed by a federal diet on the model of the United States. In Transylvania, as elsewhere (see vol. 3 of our History), the national awakening generated theaters, cultural and literary societies, printing and publishing ventures, as well as newspapers and journals. The great Hungarian and German dictionaries were written in the “mother countries.” The major Transylvanian-Hungarian linguistic contribution was a sensational curiosity: Sándor Kőrösi Csoma departed in search of the ancient Hungarian homeland but ended in Tibet and compiled his famous Tibetan-English dictionary. The most important Romanian philologist, Samuil Micu-Klein, published in Vienna with Şincai as early as 1780 the Elementa linguae dacoromanae sive Valachicae (Elements of the Daco-Roman or Walachian Language), the first printed grammar of the Romanian language. His Lexicon românescu-latinescu-ungurescu-nemţescu (Romanian-Latin-Hungarian-German Dictionary), an etymological dictionary of Romanian written with Petru Maior, was published in Buda in 1825. The philologists and historians of the Transylvanian School published many foundational texts of Romanian culture, ranging from histories to dictionaries, grammars, and treatises on Romanian etymology, ethno-genesis, and religious doctrines. They believed in spiritual awakening and secularization (Micu-Klein, Şincai, and Maior had prepared themselves for a religious career but abandoned it subsequently, critical of rigid religious institutions), national emancipation, humanism, and modernization. Although amateur theater had existed in the Hungarian and Saxon schools as early as the seventeenth, and in the Romanian schools in the early eighteenth century, professional theater emerged only towards 1800. The urbanized Saxons relied on visiting companies from Austria and Germany and opera companies from Italy. Martin Hochmeister’s short-lived journal Theatralisches Wochenblatt (Theater Weekly; 1778) reported on German literature in general. Their permanent theater, built upon Hochmeister’s initiative, staged works by Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, and Goethe. The transfer of Transylvania’s administrative seat to Kolozsvár/Klausenburg (later Cluj-Napoca) in 1790 strengthened the theater culture of the new capital. The first professional Hungarian theater group, the Erdélyi Nemes Jádzó Társaság (Transylvanian Noble Play Society), started there on November 11, 1792 with actors recruited from the schools, and soon developed professional standards, especially under the controversial leadership of the actor János Kótsi Patkó. Upon the initiative of the elder Baron Miklós Wesselényi, the Transylvanian diet of 1794–95 voted to support the theater, but Wesselényi, a playwright himself, had to take over the faltering business venture in 1797. To attract spectators, the company staged mostly translations of plays by August von Kotzebue and other popular German playwrights, but it also performed Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller (see Enyedi). The company regularly played in Marosvásárhely/Tîrgu

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Figure 2. Map of Transylvania in 1843.

Mureş; in Kolozsvár it had to compete with the richer German one, though the two occasionally cooperated, and even merged briefly in 1798. After several years of disarray, the permanent building of the Magyar Nemzeti Játékszín (Hungarian National Theater) opened on March 12, 1821 with an amateur staging of Theodor Körner’s Zrinyi (see pp. 512–21 in vol. 1 of our History), followed the next day by a performance of the company. Governor György Bánffy helped establish the Próba Társaság (Trial Society; 1793–1806), a philological society that also subsidized the theater. The Siebenbürgische Quartalschrift (Transylvanian Quarterly; 1790–1801) collaborated with the Próba Társaság, publishing articles written by its members. The first theater performances in Romanian were given in Transylvania: in the towns of Blaj (as early as 1755), Oraviţa, and Arad (where Romanian theater houses were inaugurated in 1817 and 1818, respectively). The Transylvanian Ioan Popovici Barac wrote the earliest plays in Romanian, most of them foreign adaptations that remained unpublished. He even translated Hamlet from French. His plays, just like his long poems and tales, have little literary merit, but they helped introduce certain genres and motifs into Romanian culture. Barac also edited in Sibiu one of the

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first Romanian illustrated magazines, Foaia Duminecii (The Sunday Paper; 1837), which printed especially adventure literature, mainly in translation. In 1821, Zaharia Carcalechi started in Buda the first Romanian periodical, the Biblioteca românească (Romanian Library), but further issues appeared only in 1829–30 and 1834. The newspapers and journals that emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century became major forces in Transylvania’s political and cultural life. The first important Hungarian journal was the Erdélyi Múzeum (1814–17) of Gábor Döbrentei, an important translator and language reformer who settled in Transylvania. The Erdélyi Hiradó (Transylvanian Courier) of Kolozsvár became in the early 1840s the voice of the Transylvanian Liberals who advocated “reforms immediately; union with Hungary as soon as possible.” Its editor between 1841 and 1843 was the writer Zsigmond Kemény. Transylvania had an eminent tradition in printing. As mentioned, Honterus opened in the 1530s a German printing press in Kronstadt; Gáspár Heltai followed with a Hungarian one in Kolozsvár in 1550. Neither Buda nor Bucharest had comparable printing presses then. The press in Kronstadt, where Deacon Coresi worked beginning in 1559, published also a number of religious texts in Romanian that contributed to the formation of literary Romanian language. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch-trained Miklós Tótfalusy Kis had an internationally famous printing press, and the first Romanian presses, notably the one in Sebeş/Szászsebes, also opened. Unfortunately, Transylvania lost its preeminent position in printing and publishing during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, for the center shifted to Buda and Pest. In particular, the Printing Press of the University of Buda became a major publisher for books in most EastEuropean languages (see Péter Király, Veress, and the article on national awakening in vol. 3 of our History). There were also exceptions: by the late 1830s, Kronstadt became the publishing center for the Saxons and the Romanians. The publisher Johann Gött, a recent emigrant from Frankfurt, started there, with the Moravian Anton Kurz and the Prussian Leopold Max Moltke, the Siebenbürger Wochenblatt (Transylvanian Weekly) and its literary supplements, Blätter für Geist and Der Satellit, which adopted a radical tone of social criticism. In 1838 Gött entrusted George Bariţiu with the editorship of the Gazeta de Transilvania (The Transylvania Gazette) and its supplement, Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură (Paper for the Mind, Heart, and Literature), which soon became a leading publication in the Transcarpathian Romanian principalities — until they were banned there. Bariţiu’s Gazeta assumed a reasoned and conciliatory position in the ethnic-nationalist debates on alleged historical priorities: “Why do we conjure up the spirits of our ancestors from their graves to frighten one another?” (Gazeta, December 15/27, 1847; qtd. in History of Transylvania 478). Mihály Apafi, László Haller and his father Gábor, and some other Hungarian and Székely noblemen built up impressive personal libraries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Sámuel Teleki was the first to open his to the public (1798) in Marosvásárhely. Still, the Saxons were ahead of the other nationalities, for the first Saxon lending library opened in 1782 in Hermannstadt, and the first reading society was founded in 1784. The outstanding Hermannstadt library and museum of Baron Samuel von Bruckenthal (chancellor of Transylvania until 1787) opened to the public in 1817. Kronstadt had its Honterus Library. The emerging Transylvanian literary cultures generated surprisingly few significant literary works during the first half of the nineteenth century. The most important Romanian work,

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Budai-Deleanu’s mock-epic, Ţiganiada (The Gypsiad; 1812), focused on the exploits of Gypsies in Walachia as a means to reflect on the various cultures (including the Transylvanian Romanians) at the margin of Europe, emphasizing the need to reform and rethink the social and political priorities. The Gypsiad is a hybrid from a literary point of view, for it blends Greco-Latin epic models with Renaissance comic realism and Enlightenment satire. As Dumitru Micu put it, Budai-Deleanu described the Gypsies with a “realism of Renaissance extraction,” neither disdaining, nor exonerating their foibles: “Uncompromisingly revealing their infirmities, especially those of a moral kind, the poet presents this community as perfectible” (Istoria 59). A number of Budai-Deleanu’s characters argue (in the main text or in elaborate prose footnotes) that governments must adapt to the specific conditions of time and place. The most important Transylvanian Hungarian works of that half century were Jósika’s mentioned historical romances and novels, as well as the American travelogue (1834) of Sándor Bölöni Farkas. The Saxon community, strong in journalism, produced no significant literary works during this period. Historically important is, however, Moltke’s “Siebenbürgenlied” (Transylvanian Song; 1846), which praised Transylvania as “the tolerant land, / Haven safe for every faith” and became the anthem of the Transylvanian Saxons. 1848–1867 The events of 1848–49 (see vol. 1: 263–92 of our History), deeply divided Transylvania’s peoples. The Hungarian diet united Transylvania with Hungary in the spring of 1848, “solemnly assuring preservation of the autonomy and privileges of Transylvania and her three ruling nations” (Kann 1: 310), but this promise remained on paper and could not satisfy the Romanians and Saxons, who had their own political and linguistic agendas. A Transylvania united with an independent Hungary threatened the German identity of the Saxons and thwarted Romanian efforts to achieve cultural and political independence. Saxons and Romanians looked to imperial Vienna for support of their wishes but received only vague promises. The afore-mentioned Stephan Ludwig Roth thought that the Saxons ought to mediate between the Hungarians and the Romanians, though in a letter of October 14, 1848 he urged them to adopt “constitutionalism, the sense of being German, and loyalty to the emperor” (qtd. in History of Transylvania 507). His execution by a Hungarian tribunal on May 11, 1849 (although Joseph Bem had granted him safe conduct) was one of the tragic mistakes of the Hungarian war of independence. Some seventy years later, Mária Berde, granddaughter of a member who voted against the death sentence, wrote a conciliatory ballad about the affair. Many liberal Saxons, some of them expatriates from Germany and Austria, supported the Hungarian revolution. Anton Kurz was Bem’s adjutant and died, like Petőfi, in the battle of Segesvár. Moltke praised Kossuth as “the president of the first Republic of Eastern Europe (History 517). Avram Iancu, the leader of the Transylvanian Romanians during the 1848 revolution, initially also supported Kossuth but turned against him when the latter ignored the Romanian cultural and political demands. The architect of the 1848 movement in Walachia, Nicolae Bălcescu, tried but failed to mediate between them because Kossuth was at that time willing to grant only limited rights to the Romanians, Croats, and Slovaks, and supported Transylvania’s unification with Hungary. The Hungarian diet’s willingness to compromise came too late, when the combined armies of Austria and Russia were already winning.

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Iancu’s image in literature blends history with myth. Ioan Pop-Florentin’s novel, Avram Iancu, regele Carpaţilor (Avram Iancu, King of the Carpathians), published in 1891, was followed in 1900 by Simion Florea Marian’s collection Poezii poporale despre Avram Iancu (Folk Poetry about Avram Iancu). In Blaga’s play Avram Iancu (1934) the hero is a symbolic descendent of the Dacians and participates in a mythic, historical, and existential drama. Similar themes appear in Pavel Bellu’s novel Avram Iancu (1972). The hero of the Moldavian Al. Voitin’s Avram Iancu sau Calvarul biruinţei (Avram Iancu or the Torment of Triumph; 1970) models himself after Horea — also treated in Voitin’s Procesul Horia — by acting with wise flexibility rather than rigid passion. The Austrian neo-Absolutism of the 1850s led to a further weakening of Transylvania’s independent cultural life. The important writers sought to live and publish in Budapest, Bucharest, and the cities of Western Europe. Miklós Jósika, who lived between 1831 and 1848 alternatingly in Pest and Transylvania, went into exile and lived the rest of his life in Brussels and Dresden, though he continued to write about Transylvania — as did Zsigmond Kemény, who moved to Pest in 1847. The Transylvanian Pál Gyulai became in Pest a leading writer and literary scholar of the next generation. The Habsburg neo-Absolutism also suppressed the Romanian and Saxon striving for autonomy and independence. Characteristically, Bariţiu’s Gazeta de Transilvania was suppressed for a while in March 1850 and came under heavy censorship afterwards. The successors of the Romanian Transylvanian School, among them Gheorghe Lazăr and Aron Pumnul, sought a more congenial atmosphere on the other side of the Carpathians and contributed to the modernization of Romania by founding schools, periodicals, reading societies, and other cultural institutions. Transylvania’s cultural life recovered only slowly. In 1853, Mór Jókai’s Transylvanian tour generated great enthusiasm. In 1857, Imre Mikó’s campaign led to the foundation in Kolozsvár of a Hungarian cultural and scientific association, the Erdélyi Múzeum Egylet (Transylvanian Museum Association). In 1861, Timotei Cipariu launched in Sibiu the Asociaţiunea transilvană pentru literatura română şi cultura poporului român or ASTRA (The Transylvanian Society for the Literature and Culture of the Romanian People), whose activities included the cultivation of history, linguistics, and literature, in the Transcarpathian provinces as well. Cipariu, a former participant in the 1848 revolution in Transylvania, also started in 1867 the first journal of Romanian philology, Archivu pentru filologie şi istorie (Archive for Philology and History). In retrospect, the most important literary activity during the post–1848 decades seems to have been the collection and publication of folklore. Although a character in Budai-Deleanu’s Ţiganiada, appropriately called “The Erudite,” had pleaded as early as 1800 for the recording of oral poetry produced by the humble and overlooked village artists, folklore collecting emerged in Transylvania later than in several other areas of East-Central Europe (see vol. 3 in our History). But in 1856 Joseph Haltrich published Saxon folk tales, and a year later Friedrich Müller a collection of Saxon legends. Atanasie Marian Marienescu followed with the publication of the first collections of Romanian carols and folk ballads from Transylvania in 1859; finally, János Kriza published in 1863 his Vadrózsák (Wild Roses), a collection of Transylvanian Hungarian folk poetry. Kriza, who became a Unitarian bishop in Kolozsvár, worked for twenty years on his project with the help of some twenty-five collaborators. The final form and the publication were furthered by Kriza’s contact with Pál Gyulai; through Gyulai’s mediation, Mikó provided the sums neces-

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sary for the printing (nevertheless, the publisher was never fully paid). Kriza used ample diacritical marks to record as accurately as possible the actual Székely dialect, but Gyulai responded to the page proofs by suggesting that Kriza’s scholarly accuracy diminished the popular force and appeal of the texts. Kriza, no longer able to change the proofs, defensively admitted in his foreword that by seeking the finest nuances of dialect and intonation he injured perhaps the “expression,” the true “Székelyness” of speech (Kriza 36). In retrospect, Kriza’s inability to revise seems a blessing in disguise, for the conflicting sides were not just linguistic scholarship vs. folklore (Gyulai) or nuance vs. overall expression (Kriza) but rather langue vs. parole, or, to adopt Bakhtin’s terminology, uniform language expressing a hypothetical “Székelyness” vs. multiplicity of lived dialects and intonations. The choice was politically loaded and linked to 1848–49 and its aftermath. As Kriza wrote in the foreword, with the passage of time after the political tragedy “the reanimated soul of the nation descended deeper into itself in order to fortify and solidify the roots of its very national essence against destructive calamities” (34). While Kriza thought of his collection as a contribution to his nation’s search for identity, his linguistic faithfulness to the variety of spoken Transylvanian dialects questioned the consistency of the material, the postulated unified national creativity behind it, and ultimately suggested Transylvania’s difference from Hungary proper. How heterogeneous and cross-cultural his material was became evident in the vadrózsa per (wild-rose litigation) that followed the publication of his book (see Vilmos Voigt’s article in vol. 3 of our History): the Romanian folklorist Iulian Grozescu, who later published with Iosif Vulcan the first Hungarian translation of Romanian folk poetry (1870), asserted that some of Kriza’s best ballads were actually Romanian. Over time it has become evident that these motifs and plots have circulated among many peoples, so that absolute priorities are impossible to demonstrate. Such ballads cannot express Székely, Romanian, or Hungarian national essences. The production of new literature during these decades was meager. Next to Kemény’s already discussed Zord idő (1862), one can mention Ion Codru-Drăguşanu’s Peregrinul transilvan (The Romanian Peregrine; 1865), a travel report that covered the years 1835–48. Not without literary merits, it revealed a multicultural and reformist sensibility that compared realities observed elsewhere in Europe with realities back home. 1867–1919 The 1867 Compromise radically changed Transylvania’s internal and external relations. It empowered the Hungarians, who enacted laws about minority rights in 1868 but started an aggressive policy of Magyarization. Nevertheless, they had to contend with alliances between Vienna and the other Transylvanian constituents, for instance with the informal “workshop” led by the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent of Franz Joseph, in which the minorities were heavily represented. Aurel Popovici, one of the participants, was indicted in Kolozsvár for political agitation and fled to Vienna, where he published a federalist conception of the region, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Gross-Österreich (The United States of Great-Austria; 1906). Transylvania’s political and cultural life gradually atrophied in the decades following 1867, in part because many of its most talented figures departed for Budapest, Bucharest, or metropolitan

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centers abroad. The positive cultural developments included the foundation of a Romanian Department at the University of Pest in 1862 (for politically acceptable scholars) and the founding of the University of Kolozsvár in 1872. Romanian requests to make the latter bilingual were rejected, but it did receive a Romanian Chair. Hugó Meltzl published between 1877 and 1888 at the new university the Acta comparationis litterarum universalum / Összehasonlító Irodalomtörténeti Lapok (Papers on Comparative Literature), the first of its kind (see vol. 3 of our History). The Kemény Zsigmond Társaság was founded in Marosvásárhely in 1876, the Erdélyi Irodalmi Társaság in 1888 in Kolozsvár. Prior to World War I, more than a third of the books published in Hungary went to Transylvania, but local printing shriveled (History of Transylvania 596). In the 1860s, the Transylvanian Romanian press switched from the Cyrillic to the Latin script. Bariţiu published the Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură (Paper for the Mind, the Soul and Literature) in Sibiu; Iosif Vulcan’s Familia, the first important Romanian cultural and literary

Figure 3. Map of Transylvania in 1882.

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periodical, was launched in 1865 in Pest but moved to Oradea/Nagyvárad in 1880. Familia published the first poems of Eminescu, George Coşbuc, and Octavian Goga, and introduced Hungarian poets to Romanian readers. In recognition of his intercultural work, Vulcan was elected both to the Hungarian Kisfaludy Society and the Romanian Academy. Ioan Slavici, one of the most important Romanian writers of the late nineteenth century, participated in the Romanian search for identity but did not categorically reject the Monarchy. He started writing at Eminescu’s encouragement while both of them were studying in Vienna, moved later to Bucharest, where he worked with Eminescu and Caragiale on the editorial board of Timpul (Time), but returned to Transylvania periodically and launched on April 14, 1884, the cultural daily Tribuna in Sibiu. In it, Slavici advocated both a new “popular realism” in Transylvanian literature to replace Familia’s “arcadian Romanticism,” and a multicultural sensitivity instead of nationalist excesses. He also encouraged the standardization of Romanian language against both exaggerated attention to dialect and the forced “Latinization” of Romanian promoted by other Transylvanian scholars. He pleaded for Romania’s siding with the Central powers, and contributed to a magazine published by the German troops during their occupation of Bucharest — for which he was imprisoned in 1919. Slavici’s politics was rather naïve and awkward but his cultural horizon was wide. He translated Jókai, wrote about the situation of Jews in Romania and Romanians in Hungary, as well as about the multiculture of Bucovina. As Romania’s first modern short-fiction writer, Slavici mapped the social and cultural diversity of rural Transylvania and the Banat, exploring the effects of this diversity on the psychology of characters. His novel Mara (1894) focused on powerful psychological conflicts against a background in which Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Serbians, Slovaks, and Bulgarians interact but preserve their ethnic individuality (see vol. 1: 444–45 of our History). Tribuna became under Slavici a powerful cultural and political platform for Romanian Transylvanian intellectuals. It encouraged, for example, the “Memorandum” movement, initiated in 1892 by Ioan Raţiu’s National Romanian Party. The Memorandum, drafted by Raţiu, Vasile Lucaciu, and others, denounced the oppression of the three million Romanians in Transylvania and demanded equal rights for them. A delegation took the petition to Vienna but, under pressure from the Hungarian government, the Emperor refused to receive it. The Hungarian government subsequently put on trial in Kolozsvár the twenty-eight leaders of the National Romanian Party, which brought about 25,000 people to the streets. In 1895 the petitioners were all freed upon the intercession of the Romanian king, but interdictions were introduced: books and actors from the Romanian provinces were not allowed to enter Transylvania, the “Congress of Nationalities” (composed of Romanians, Serbs, and Slovaks) was prevented from meeting, and Tribuna was suppressed in 1903. These measures radicalized the Romanian intelligentsia: Goga, Vasile Lucaciu, and others opted for a union between Transylvania and Romania; others, among them the leader of the National Party and future Prime Minister of Romania, Iuliu Maniu, adopted a more prudent policy, waiting for a favorable international conjunction to press for Romanian autonomy in Transylvania. The Romanian press, pioneered by Vulcan, worked first in the spirit of cooperation, but fiercely resisted the Budapest-directed Magyarization policies after 1867, expressing in a semicoded form the desire of unification with the Romanian state established in 1859. Poets were in

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the forefront of this reorientation. George Coşbuc, launched in Slavici’s Tribuna, focused on the social and political fate of Transylvanian Romanians in his first collection, Balade şi idile (Ballads and Idylls; 1893). The poems excelled in describing the cycles of seasonal works, landscapes, and village customs, but alluded also to the tribulations of Romanian peasants in Austro-Hungary. In 1901, Coşbuc launched with Al. Vlahuţă the magazine Sămănătorul (The Sower), which continued the traditionalist, village-oriented approach with some nationalist accents. Still, Coşbuc revealed an international outlook as a translator. Next to the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy, he also translated Opitz, Schiller, Heine, and Petőfi. Goga was also traditionalist in orientation. His pre–1918 poetry was animated by elegiac and mythic-allegorical themes that expressed the estrangement of Transylvanian Romanian culture in the Habsburg Empire. In the collection appropriately called Cântece fără ţară (Countryless Songs; 1916), the iconology of “hearth,” “household,” “tradition,” “ancestors,” and “village bards” continues to dominate: Eu sunt un om fără de ţară, Un strop de foc purtat de vânt, Un rob răzleţ scăpat din fiară, Cel mai sărac de pe pământ. Eu sunt un mag de legea nouă, Un biet nebun orbit de-o stea, Ce-am rătăcit să v-aduc vouă Poveştile din ţara mea. (“Fără ţară”; Poezii 150) (I’m a countryless man / A spark of fire carried by the wind, / a slave escaped from chains, / The poorest man on earth. / I’m a diviner of the new law, / A wretched madman blinded by a star, / A wanderer who brings you all / the stories of my country.)

Goga’s later work, particularly his essays, heightened the nationalist rhetoric, adding to it anti-Semitic accents. However, he continued to translate from Hungarian and German, the two languages he learned as a child from his mother. Post-World War I Romanian poetry in Transylvania was dominated by two “modes” (Micu 218–20), one emerging from Coşbuc’s contemplative-elegiac poetry, and the other from Goga’s rebellious and romantic-prophetic voice. The first mode is illustrated by the poetry of Emil Giurgiuca, which mixed traditionalism and Modernism to describe the Transylvanian rural landscapes both before and after World War II; the second by that of Emil Isac, combined social realism with Symbolism, offering dramatic-grotesque descriptions of the Transylvanian rural and city culture, and depictions of the poet’s existential isolation. Transylvanian critics, radicalized by the ethnicnationalist conflicts that led to World War I, viewed such efforts to synchronize Transylvanian poetry with Western Modernism as a betrayal of the national-political agenda. They preferred the oracular-nationalist mode launched by Goga and continued by Aron Cotruş (born in Sibiu), who exposed with apocalyptic imagery and in a rhetorically charged poetry the suffering of humble villagers at the hand of both Hungarian landowners and the Romanian nouveau riche. After World War I, Cotruş directed new Romanian publications in Arad and Timişoara and continued to pub-

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lish expressionist, often violent poetry in Romanian and (as of 1945, when he settled in Madrid) in Spanish, which focused on the ethnic and social battles of the Romanians (Horea was one of his favorite figures). Apart from Slavici and Rebreanu (see below), Romanian prose in Transylvania had few important contributors prior to 1918. Among these was Ion Agârbiceanu, who anticipated Rebreanu’s rural fiction with the short narratives in De la ţarǎ (From the Countryside), published in 1905 and, enlarged, in 1912. The humble central characters usually serve to illustrate an entire village community; descriptions of rural Transylvania are informed by a certain Christian didacticism (Agârbiceanu was a priest by profession). His Arhanghelii (Archangels; 1913), followed Slavici’s Mara by blending individual destinies with the collective drama of a whole village of miners in the Western Carpathians. Saxon literature in the second half of the nineteenth century included the mentioned works on Honterus, von Harteneck, and Albert’s drama Die Flandrer am Alt. One of the first signs of Saxon literature’s opening was Adolf Meschendörfer’s journal Die Karpathen (The Carpathians; 1907–14), which familiarized readers with Naturalism, Scandinavian psychological Realism, and other modern literary trends. Transylvania’s last decades in the Monarchy were portrayed from different ethnic perspectives and at different historical moments in three important but problematic novels: Dezső Szabó’s Az elsodort falu (The Swept-Away Village; 1919), Miklós Bánffy’s trilogy Erdélyi történet (Transylvanian History; 1934–40), and Heinrich Zillich’s Zwischen Grenzen und Zeiten (Between Borders and Times; 1936). Szabó’s novel is the only one among the three that was still written before Transylvania became Romanian. The author, a former member of the Nyugat circle, turns here against his liberal and western-oriented friends, chastising them in a highly emotional, metaphoric-mystic language. Az elsodort falu, published on May 23, 1919, ends with an apotheosis of its idealized Székely hero, János Böjthe, who returns to his Transylvanian village after the war devastations to start a new life and family. Unaware as yet of the short-lived Soviet Republic in Hungary, and Transylvania’s integration into Romania, he embodies the superhuman energies and ethical purity that lay dormant in the Székelys. János’s two village friends (as well as all the remaining important characters) are failures: Miklós Farkas, the great poet resembling Endre Ady, vacillates between his belief in peasant values and his (mental, physical, urban, and cosmopolitan) decadence. He finally goes insane. Judit Farcády, the angelic beauty of the village, loves Miklós but becomes the mistress of Jews and finally a dissolute prostitute in Budapest. The novel’s true villains are Hungarians who import destructive foreign values into the country. Foremost among them are the Jews (whose depiction includes some shocking stereotypes), western-oriented intellectuals and writers, feminists, the aristocrats, the clerics, officers that champion a war that the narrator portrays as senseless, the corrupt and foreign-oriented middle class, and many lower-class people overwhelmed by poverty, greed, or alcohol. Applying Nietzsche to Transylvania, Szabó believes that the weak and ugly rule over the strong and healthy. He glorifies in János Böjthe the strength and purity of the Székelys, as well as their un-Nietzschean compassion with the downtrodden.

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World War I ended with the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the unification of Transylvania with Romania. What was a dream-come-true for the Romanians became a hard adjustment to minority status for the Hungarians and a reorientation for the Saxons. For Romanian literature, the annexation of Transylvania and Bucovina brought new opportunities, but also challenges resulting from the expansion and reconfiguration of the national space (now including significant minorities), the tension between national and regional interests, and the exposure to alternative cultural traditions that filtered through the Hungarian and German regional literatures. The Hungarian writers of Transylvania had to come to terms with their minority status and reconceptualize their relation to the writers in Hungary; the Saxon writers, who had functioned already as a minority culture, had to assume a new attitude with respect to the now dominant Romanian culture, and reconsider their relation to the German literary culture beyond the borders. In spite of these new political and cultural challenges, a rich Transylvanian literature emerged in all three languages in the 1920s. High-quality journals testified to this. The most substantial Romanian intellectual journal, Gândirea (Thought; 1921–44), was launched by the Moldavian born Cezar Petrescu and D. I. Cucu in Cluj-Napoca but moved to Bucharest at the end of 1922. Gândirea published in its first two years translations from Ady, Mihály Babits, and others, but especially after 1926, when Nichifor Crainic became the magazine’s sole editor, it adopted a more rigid nationalism that emphasized local myth, folklore, ethnicity, and religion.

Figure 4. Transylvania and the Banat after Unification with Romania

The Saxon journal that replaced Meschendörfer’s Die Karpathen was Heinrich Zillich’s Klingsor (1924–38), published in Braşor. The Hungarians had three quality journals: the conservative Pásztortűz (Campfire; 1921–45), edited 1927–37 by Jenő Dsida; the Marxist and internationalist Korunk (Our Times; 1926–40), edited from 1929 onward by Gábor Gaál (until its demise

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when Northern Transylvania was reannexed by Hungary); and the Erdélyi Helikon (1928–44), whose chief editor was Miklós Bánffy, flanked by the editors Aladár Kuncz (1928–31) and Károly Kós (1931–44). As Lajos Áprily wrote in the greetings of the first issue of the Erdélyi Helikon, its Transylvanian orientation was no provincialism but an “observation deck unto the world.” Cluj-Napoca became Transylvania’s cultural center in the interwar years. Gândirea was launched here; Korunk and the Erdélyi Helikon, as well as almost half of the rapidly multiplying Hungarian language books were also published here (Pomogáts, Transzilvánizmus 67–68). Áron Tamási lived here most of the time (until 1944), Kós permanently, and Blaga time and again. Blaga dominated Romanian literature in Transylvania as well as in the other provinces. He was the first important Romanian poet who effectively synchronized Romanian poetry with European art forms. In adapting to Romanian poetry the Expressionism he came to know during his studies in Vienna, Blaga reappraised the models and experienced the “will to modernity” in terms specific to Transylvanian Romanian culture. His first collection, Poemele luminii (Poems of Light; 1919) violated poetic conventions by resorting to free prosodic forms attuned to the flow of poetic thought. Thematically, these poems combined visionarism and Dionysian vitalism, drawing on the elementary, “archaic” landscapes of Transylvania. Light, the central motif of this volume, reinforces the duality of Blaga’s poetry: “the solar light of reason contrasts with his lunar or stellar extra-rational lights” (Balotă, “Blaga” 41). The first negates mystery, the second enhances it: I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders And will not kill with reason the mysteries I meet along my way in flowers, eyes, lips, and graves. The light of others drowns the deep magic hidden in the profound darkness. I increase the world’s enigma with my light much as the moon with its white beams does not diminish but increases the shimmering mystery of night (At the Court of Yearning 3)

In Blaga’s subsequent poetry Dionysian fervor is replaced by a more skeptical attitude. His images, even when borrowed from a mythic-pastoral Transylvania, are now jarring and distorted. “The Soul of the Village” still promises deliverance from the pain of time: Child, put your hands on my knees. I think eternity was born in this village. Here every thought is slower, And your heart does not beat in your chest But deep in the earth somewhere. (At the Court of Yearning 67)

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But the hope of reconnecting the fragmented human world to a cosmic whole gradually receded. While Blaga’s philosophic essay Spaţiul mioritic (Mioritic/Transhumantic Space; 1936) tried to build a typology of Romanian culture around the gracefully undulated space of the Transylvanian hills and valleys, the poems of La cumpăna apelor (On the Great Water Divide; 1933) undercut that grace by showing a Transylvania afflicted by a mysterious cosmic sickness. Tension and dissolution are present also in Blaga’s posthumously published poetry, written between 1943 and the year of his death, 1961. Postwar critics tended to privilege those poems that celebrate late love and the mystery of cosmic germination; but the poems that focus on the ravages of time and change (both social and cosmic) are equally prominent. Blaga’s anxiety about his marginalization by the communists is softly audible. Blaga liked to associate his later poems with the “heretic” spontaneity of the popular genius. He inculcated that spirit in his students and followers, including Negoiţescu, Doinaş, and Sârbu, who adopted a liberal and cosmopolitan stance against Blaga’s more conservative one. Almost every postwar Romanian poet, especially those originating from Transylvania, followed Blaga’s poetic trajectory from euphoric Expressionism to introversion and from discursiveness to somber reflexivity. Blaga spent most of his adult life, when he was not on diplomatic assignments or traveling abroad, in Cluj-Napoca; Rebreanu, the most important twentieth-century Romanian Transylvanian novelist, left for Bucharest in 1909. As a refugee from Austro-Hungary, Rebreanu was imprisoned on both sides of the Carpathians: at Văcăreşti (at the Hungarian government’s request) and at Gyula, after he was extradited back to Hungary; he managed to return to Bucharest at the end of 1910. Rebreanu’s life and fiction reflected dramatically the conflicting cultural allegiances and self-contradictions experienced by Transylvanian Romanians during and after World War I. His first attempts at fiction were written in Hungarian and German, but remained unpublished. Răscoala (The Uprising; 1932) oscillated between Transylvania and Southern Romania, village and city, providing an ample fresco of social and psychological tensions in the first decade of the twentieth century. In Pădurea spânzuraţilor (Forest of the Hanged; 1922), the various political and ethnic conflicts that underlie World War I torment even more painfully the souls of a Romanian and a Czech officer, who are forced to choose between their allegiance to Austro-Hungary and their emerging national feelings (see vol. 1: 181–82 of our History). Rebreanu’s play Apostolii (1926) portrays the growing pressures of nationalism in the 1920s by satirizing the credulity of the patriotic Mrs. Harincea, wife of a would-be minister: she is ready to marry her daughter to a Bucharest rascal, Mitică Ionescu, who pretends to be a descendent of Michael the Brave. On the whole, Rebreanu’s work questions both imperial domination and the nationalisms that replaced it, arguing for ethnic coexistence in multicultural regions such as Transylvania. Rebreanu’s idea of ethnic coexistence had some influence on later writers, though the failures of multiculturalism seemed to capture more attention than its moments of harmony. For example, Pavel Dan’s posthumously published collection of stories, Urcan bătrânul (Old Man Urcan; 1938), shows intimate knowledge of Transylvania’s regional culture and dialects, but conflict, death, and poignant remembrance often dominate it. Several stories deal directly with interethnic confrontations, such as Horea’s peasant uprising against the Hungarian landowners, a theme also treated by Rebreanu in Crăişorul. Rebreanu also inspired Dan’s unfinished novelistic project, Ospăţul dracului (The Devil’s Feast), focused on World War I and the peasants’ struggle to acquire

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land. As we will argue below, some Transylvanian novelists of the post–World War II period followed the epic-tragic dimensions of Rebreanu’s work, while others resonated with Rebreanu’s multicultural sensibility. The Hungarian-Transylvanian literary activities of the interwar period never crystallized into a single cultural ideology. Four clashing political views emerged in Hungary and Transylvania: (1) the irredentists demanded that Transylvania be reunited with Hungary; (2) the Transylvanianists sought coexistence and local autonomy within a federalist structure in the spirit of the slogan, “Transylvania belongs to the Transylvanian nations!”; (3) the Danubianists sought a transnational federation of the Danubian countries in the spirit of Oszkár Jászi; and (4) the Communists, allied with the radical left around Gaál’s Korunk, wanted to reconstitute all of Eastern Europe by means of a transnational social revolution. Due to the persecution of the leftists under Horthy’s regime, some radical intellectuals sought refuge in Transylvania and became cultural mediators. Gaál was able to recruit a number of non-Hungarian contributors. The four groups actually overlapped and each of them was internally divided. Korunk published writings by liberal opponents of the Horthy regime; Sándor Reményik, who agonized over the loss of Transylvania and wrote irredentist poems in the immediate postwar years under the pseudonym Végvári (implying that he defended Hungarian culture as ferociously as the defenders of outpost fortresses against the Turks) but became an advocate of reconciliation and Transylvanism by the late 1930s. The populist and irredentist József Nyirő, heavily influenced by Dezső Szabó’s Az elsodort falu, was a cofounder of the Erdélyi Szépmives Céh (see below). Szabó himself moved away from the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-urban chauvinism of Az elsodort falu and became to the end of his life an opponent of the Nazis and right-wing formations. Various Hungarian writers and intellectuals adopted Transylvanism, which advocated a vaguely autonomous Transylvania, with equal rights for and participation from the Romanians, Hungarians, and Saxons, and full freedom for the Jewish, Armenian, and other smaller minorities. This idea found certain parallels and support in the work of Lucian Blaga, who sought to describe the cultural-topographic specificity of Transylvania, or in the work of the Saxon writer Heinrich Zillich, who wavered “between nationalistic tones and accents which are fraternally supranational,” looking for what binds Transylvanian ethnic groups together (Magris, Danube 316). But this idea should have been launched when Transylvania was still part of Hungary. Bánffy’s Transylvanism around 1910 was firmly based on the idea of Hungarian supremacy; by the 1920s it was unable to attract sufficient Romanian and Saxon support. Still, the Transylvanianists had some success in opposing Hungarian irredentism by advocating the acceptance of the new borders and striving only for regional autonomy within Romania (the latter an anathema on both sides of the border). In 1924, the architect and cultural historian Kós founded in Cluj the quality publishing house Erdélyi Szépmives Céh (Transylvanian Artist’s Guild), which published important works until 1944 and launched a competition that led to the writing of Antal Szerb’s excellent Hungarian literary history (see vol. 3 of our History). The Céh also published the journal Erdélyi Helikon (see below). Kós, the leading and most consistent spokesman for “Transylvanism,” held that the externally imposed decisions of 1848, 1867, and 1918 were neither desired nor accepted by the majority of Transylvania’s inhabitants. The votes in the Hungarian Transylvanian Diet in 1848 and in the Romanian one in 1918 were divided (Transylvania 106–107). Kós saw the region’s uniqueness

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precisely in the variety and coexistence unknown in other parts of Hungary and Romania. In Transylvania, the national constituents traditionally “lived their own lives, building their own social and cultural institutions side by side, not mingling with each other, but not really bothering each other; rarely crossing each other’s path, yet in touch with each other, learning from each other, influencing each other” (Transylvania 81). Centuries of living side by side meant “sharing a common fate” (namely dependency on powers beyond Transylvania’s borders) and being exposed to, even enriched by, external cultural currents, including the Turkish one (Transylvania 87). The other leading spokesperson for Transylvanism was Miklós Bánffy, descendent of an ancient Transylvanian aristocratic family — writer, painter, representative of Kolozsvár in the Hungarian parliament between 1910–1912, director of the Budapest Opera and the National Theater (1913–18), and Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1921–22 — who moved back to Transylvania (as did Aladár Kuncz and others) and became a Romanian citizen in 1926. In 1943 the Hungarian government commissioned Bánffy to negotiate with Iuliu Maniu’s Romanian opposition about turning jointly against the Nazis, but Maniu insisted on the return of Northern Transylvania to Romania and the attempt failed. Bánffy stayed in Transylvania after the war but finally left for Budapest in 1950. Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy shuttles back and forth between aristocratic life in Transylvania and Hungarian politics in Budapest, between the private life of a young conservative Transylvanian politician and Hungarian politicking. The portrayal of Transylvania is affectionate, the sketches of its declining aristocracy both ironic and sympathetic. Bálint Abády, somewhat of an autobiographical figure, cares little for the liberals and admires the conservative István Tisza. But Bálint understands that change is inevitable, and he is sensitive to Transylvania’s multiculturality. He is present when “the banner of the Transylvanian Movement” is unfurled on March 12, 1910 in Marosvásárhely. As the novel suggests from the perspective of the later 1930s, when Bánffy wrote his book: [this movement] had come into being as a result of a widespread feeling in Transylvania that its individual traditions and history, as well as its own very special spirit, had become less and less recognized, let alone respected, by the central government in Budapest, who were all too apt to think of Transylvania as just one of a string of otherwise insignificant provinces. Nothing of its riches, neither of historical achievement and individual culture, nor of its real problems, was accorded any real importance in the capital. The Transylvanian spirit was slowly being drained away in the maw of Hungarian self-sufficiency and at best was ignored. (And They Were Devided 30f)

Tisza, who is in the opposition at this point, listens politely but offers no support because he thinks that the movement smacks of particularism (31). Bálint subsequently promises support “for a new law governing the rights of minorities” (32), but he is forced to postpone discussing the details when the Székely representatives start “to demur” (32). His speech to the delegates, entitled “To all the Peoples of Transylvania” (32–36), is supposed to encapsulate (according to a note by Bánffy’s daughter) Bánffy’s maiden speech in the Hungarian Parliament in 1910. It is a particularist complaint that addresses the question of minority rights only in general terms:

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we are forced to witness the degradation of our ethnic minorities […] A national policy that is as uncaring as it is ignorant regarding our minority problems is now increasingly provoking dangerous irredentist and seditious tendencies, tendencies which can be justified as provoked by unfair treatment. […] [F]or centuries in Transylvania people have lived happily together regardless of race or creed or language. (33) Everybody who is or wishes to be at home in this country must be welcomed and made to feel at home with confidence that nowhere will he find any form of discrimination. (34)

As if to illustrate this, Bálint successfully defends some Romanians who are ruthlessly exploited by corrupt Hungarian local potentates. But we encounter non-Hungarians only in this episode, and the novel nowhere addresses concretely the question of linguistic, political, and cultural autonomy for the minorities. In 1926 Bánffy became the leader of Helikon, a loose association of Hungarian Transylvanian writers (including Áprily, Dsida, Kós, Kuncz, Nyirő, Sándor Makkai, Reményik, and Tamási) that gathered yearly in János Kemény’s castle at Brâncoveneşti (Marosvécs). Helikon’s “literary plein-air parliament” (Babits, “Transsylvanizmus” 481) was dedicated to the ideals of coexistence and cooperation with the other Transylvanian nations, though not everybody subscribed to these principles all the time. Reményik came to accept them by the 1930s, whereas Bishop Makkai, who served for years in the Romanian Senate and wrote in 1931 the self-searching essay Magunk reviziója (Revision of Ourselves), reversed himself after moving to Hungary, in Nem lehet (It Can’t Be; 1937). Noting correctly the rise of nationalism in all of Europe, he concluded, incorrectly, that the Hungarian minority’s existence in Romania was “impossible,” and came to support the Germans during the war. Áprily had settled already in 1929 in Budapest. The deeply Catholic Dsida stayed, but his “Psalmus Hungaricus,” written just before his death in 1938, passionately renounces international brotherhood and European culture in order to partake in the Hungarian misery: S ki eddig mondtam: ember! —, most azt mondom: magyar! És háromszor kiáltom és holtomig kiáltom: magyar, magyar, magyar! (295–96) (And I who said: man! / Now say Hungarian! / And thrice shout / and shout as long as I live: / Hungarian, Hungarian, Hungarian!)

What divided the three national literatures, namely their focus on their own ethnic traditions, was precisely what made them also similar: they all tended to uphold rural values against “decadent” urban ones. Witness Szabó’s Az elsodort falu, Nyirő’s stories in Havasok könyve (Book of the Alpine Mountains; 1936), and Tamási’s Ábel trilogy (1932–34), whose hero goes to Cluj-Napoca and then to America, but returns in the end to become a shepherd again. A populist cultivation of

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rural values is evident also in the works and activities of Kós and other Transylvanists. Similar themes can be found in Agârbiceanu, Dan, and to some extent in Rebreanu. In real life the Transylvanists engaged in a web of allegiances. Although Dsida, Reményik, Kós, Tamási, and Bánffy remained in Transylvania, their attachment to rural culture could not withstand the lure of the metropolitan centers of Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, Berlin, and frequently also of Paris. Coşbuc (in 1887), Rebreanu (in 1909), and Goga (in 1914, after imprisonment for his anti-Hungarian activities in 1912) left for Bucharest. After 1918, the exodus of minority writers gradually accelerated: in 1929 Áprily moved to Budapest, in 1936 Zillich left for Germany and Makkai for Hungary. Unlike his fictional hero, the Kolozsvár-born Szabó left Transylvania early in his life. The tension between rural and urban values was strongest in the Saxon community, which had a rural constituent next to a sophisticated urban middle class. The provincial tradition of Heimatliteratur came to clash with the Avant-garde currents coming from Austria and Germany; the villages preserved their folklore, while the intellectuals, usually educated in German-language universities, often sought their fortune elsewhere. Zillich’s Zwischen Grenzen und Zeiten portrays the tensions both within the Saxon community and among the Transylvanian ethnic communities, turning Bánffy’s 1914 Götterdämmerung into an extended agony reaching into 1919. Like Bánffy’s trilogy and Szabó’s Az elsodort falu, Zwischen Grenzen und Zeiten shuttles back and forth between a small Transylvanian community and the metropolis of Budapest. Like Szabó’s novel, it contains scenes from the war, devoting chapters to the misery of people fleeing the invading Romanian army in 1916; unlike Szabó, Zillich does not portray scenes of cruelty perpetrated by the invaders. Like Bánffy, Zillich and Szabó employ traditional, “omniscient” external narrators, whose perspectives and language essentially coincide with that of the “hero.” Zillich follows the Saxon/Hungarian/Romanian generation born just before 1900 through the eyes of a Saxon narrator, who is firmly convinced as to the Saxons’ cultural, historical, and ethical superiority. His Saxons resent the Magyarization and increasingly identify with their linguistic kins in Austria and Germany. Nevertheless, he gives ample attention to members of the other ethnic communities, many of whom are attractive (except for the only Jew of the novel). The novel ends in 1919, when the Saxon hero is drafted into the Romanian army to fight against the Hungarian Soviet Republic, but in 1936, the year the novel appeared, its author moved to Hitler’s Germany. As Ferenc Szemlér remarked in his Erdély Helikon review, the book was based on a single idea, the mission of Germans in Europe and even in the world. In spite of nationalist pressures from the metropolitan capitals of Bucharest, Budapest, and later Berlin, the Transylvanian literary cultures collaborated briefly but effectively in the interwar years, much more so than the political formations. The Hungarian party concluded in 1923 an agreement with Goga, who represented Partidul Poporului, to join in the elections and to introduce reforms concerning minority rights if successful. But the Hungarian party frequently switched its allegiances and the minor achievements were swept away by the Depression (History of Transylvania 680). The literary cooperation was more significant, and even writers with a nationalist agenda made significant overtures to the other Transylvanian literatures: Goga translated Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man; 1861) and Blaga protested when the Romanian authorities censored its stage performance (“Tragedia omului,” Patria, January 27, 1923). In a 1922 lecture at his Open University, “Români şi slavi, Români şi unguri” (Romanians and

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Slavs, Romanians and Hungarian), Nicolae Iorga advocated minority rights and a reconciliation between Romanians and Hungarians (see Méliusz, Sors 64). Emil Isac argued in C. RădulescuMotru’s Ideea Europeană (The European Idea) in favor of equal rights for all cultures; he repeated the plea in the Transylvanian Hungarian journal Napkelet (Pomogáts, Transzilvánizmus 101). In 1930, the Romanian historian Ion Chinezu published Aspecte din literatura maghiară ardeleană: 1919–1929 (Aspects of Transylvanian Hungarian Literature; 1930), an important attempt at crosscultural literary history. Klingsor, which regularly published translations and reviews of Hungarian writers, started a promising cooperation with the Hungarians around the Helikon in the late 1920s. The writers of the Klingsor and the Erdélyi Helikon hosted each other several times in 1928 and 29, and Zillich was invited to the Marosvécs meeting of the Helikon writers. There seems to have been even a Saxon-Hungarian-Romanian writers’ meeting in Mediaş/Medgyes on March 19, 1931. Meschendörfer’s Die Stadt im Osten (City in the East; 1931), about young people growing up in Kronstadt, was immediately translated by Kós and published by the Erdélyi Szépmives Céh in 1934, though with an epilogue that cautioned against some “unfair” and “exaggerated” depictions of the Magyarization. The promising Hungarian-Saxon relations went sour when the Hungarian Transylvanians criticized the Saxons for welcoming Hitler’s regime. Zillich, in particular, got engaged in polemical exchanges with the Hungarians and started to voice both anti-Hungarian and pro-Nazi sentiments (see Ritoók, “Der ‘Klingsor’”). After Zillich’s departure, Klingsor tempered its pro-Nazi tone and was, in fact, closed down in 1939 under right-wing pressure. The problems with Danubianism are best illustrated with László Németh’s account of his brief visit to Giurgiu, Bucharest, Constanţa, and, above all, Transylvania in August 1935. Born in Baia Mare/Nagybánya, Németh was a left-wing populist in the 1920s and 30s; as the most outspoken and consistent Hungarian “Danubianist,” he was genuinely interested in the literature and culture of the neighbors. Though he was no naive idealist, he got deeply depressed by the attitudes of the Romanians as well as the Hungarians. He admired the work of the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti and his students, and he noted the youthful élan and national fervor he found in Romania, but he was disturbed that many young intellectuals gravitated towards the Iron Guard and had no genuine interest in Danubian cooperation. This, he felt, seriously threatened the minorities, mainly the Hungarians. According to Németh, these students believed that “the minorities must be disowned by the Romanian state as much as possible, so that the Romanian intelligentsia is freed of competition […] In sociology, professor Gusti is their master, in politics they sympathize with the fascism of the Iron Guard” (Pál Nagy 48). Németh listened to the young Romanian intellectuals “with a certain sadness and irony,” for they radiated the vision and the will of a suddenly emerging people, “whereas I am the child of an ancient historical nation after a catastrophe — and this locks us up into two quite different mentalities. They, collecting themselves for a national life, represent an imported nationalism; myself, anxious for those who have been thrown into the jaws of nationalism, the disillusionment with it” (Pál Nagy 50). Sensing the gulf, Németh concluded that one should not expect significant results from cross-national dialogues, even if one engages in them. The Romanians were too young to have experienced the disillusioning lesson that their powers, too, were limited. Without that experience, “the warmth of a Danube sheepfold” held little attraction to them (Pál Nagy 92).

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On the Hungarian side, Németh also found a gulf between national politics and cultural cooperation. The Hungarians, he thought, were the “new Jews” in diaspora, destined to be in the vanguard of Central-Europe’s socialism and transnationalism (Pál Nagy 22); yet he saw a Hungary that sank lower than ever into irredentism, and the Transylvania Hungarians did no better (Pál Nagy 94). In the mid–1920s, Transylvanian Hungarian literature went through a heroic period, acquired a broad moral horizon, an awareness of destiny, and a sense of responsibility, but only one great writer emerged: Tamási. (Visiting him was the trip’s highlight for Németh). Most Hungarian Transylvanian writers yearned to emigrate; their heart chimed with the rattle of the railroad “towards Pest, Pest.” Németh’s depressing account was greeted with furor in both countries (see Pál Nagy). Independent of Németh’s visit and the ensuing debate, the Romanian magazine Familia (the publication which had mediated between the two cultures since the nineteenth century) devoted three consecutive issues in 1935 to the question, “Ne putem înţelege noi şi ungurii” (Can We and Hungarians Get Along/Understand Each Other?). The survey-discussion, moderated by G. M. Samarineanu, was meant to be a prelude to a planned meeting of Hungarian and Romanian writers in Oradea. The meeting apparently never took place, but the published responses to the question are instructive. Thirteen Hungarian writers, among them Babits, Berde, Lajos Zilahy, Gyula Illyés, and Sándor Márai, and twelve Romanian writers, including Blaga, Sadoveanu, Camil Petrescu, and Cezar Petrescu, were invited to respond to the following questionnaire: Do you think a Romanian-Hungarian collaboration is possible? 2. If yes, how do you see this collaboration? What efforts should both sides make? 3. Can the culture of the two people constitute a base solid enough to erect on it a monument of mutual understanding? 4. Can the writer, through his writing, counteract the divisive action that politicians perform consciously or unconsciously? 5. What is your opinion of the initiative for rapprochement, launched by the magazine Familia in Oradea? (Familia, 2.5–6: 66).

Samarineanu himself was highly positive (55): Hungarians and Romanians had been divided historically because of misleading policies that did not respect the other’s cultural values and right to self-determination (Familia, 2.7–8: 74). The postwar world had become too complex to allow splendid isolation. Dialogue was absolutely necessary since the two nations had a common path to travel, even if they chose to travel it in different manners (2.5–6: 65). The dialogue was to start with a study of the other’s literature, which offered the basis for a more intimate understanding of the neighboring culture (2.7–8: 75). The national approach had to be aware and appreciate the neighbor’s culture, acknowledging both its qualities and its defects (2.5–6: 65). Camil Petrescu, publisher of a multilingual Timişoara magazine after World War I (see the essay on Timişoara above), praised Familia’s publisher, Tiberiu Moşoiu, for initiating an honest cultural dialogue (2.5–6: 71), adding, however, that “cultural exchanges are insufficient for creating a genuine rapprochement between peoples.” Others agreed with his caveat: “We Romanians will have to forget our past suffering. Hungarians will have to forget that they once ruled over millions of Romanians,” wrote Corneliu Moldovanu (2.5–6: 72), and critic Octav Şuluţiu argued that sustained work and honesty, not just occasional congresses, were needed (2.7–8: 83).

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Most responses confirmed Samarineanu’s premise, though many of them did not go beyond predictable clichés. Thus Zilahy pleaded for an honest analysis of the linguistic, cultural, and religious similarities and differences (2.5–6: 67); Ferenc Szemlér suggested that, as western-influenced peoples, Hungarians and Romanians had a common Danubian destiny (2.9–10: 78). Others claimed that writers can achieve more than politicians: Marcell Benedek contrasted self-centered and greedy politicians with writers and scholars who “think in centuries and millennia and do not focus on themselves but on humanity” (2.5–6: 68); and Sadoveanu argued that “spiritual” and “cultural action” can resist the “passing interests of politicians” (2.5–6: 70). Gyula Germanus proposed that Transylvania’s three languages and cultures could become a genuine model for a polyglot Europe, short of an East-European Switzerland (2.7–8: 79). More concrete and useful were the remarks about the need to translate and to popularize each other’s literature. Indeed, several of the respondents, among them Babits, Cezar Petrescu, Berde, were also translators. Victor Eftimiu praised Familia’s translations from the Hungarian, and the Helikon’s from the Romanian. Pompiliu Constantinescu suggested a systematic collection of Hungarian literature in translation and the launching of a Hungarian magazine in Romanian, so that Romanians outside Transylvania get access to Hungarian cultural news (2.7–8: 82). Şuluţiu proposed the creation of an Association of Romanian and Hungarian writers interested in the mutual translation and promotion of literary culture (2.7–8: 84). A third topic was oral literature, which some folklorists regarded as an expression of a national essence but which actually had a transnational circulation. As Berde put it, cultural dialogues had always been taking place in the crafts, jokes, popular festivities, and dances of the lower classes (2.7–8: 75); Romulus Dianu agreed, noting that the work of Bartók and Liszt drew heavily on this intercultural folklore and was accordingly enriched by it (2.5–6: 74). One may add, indeed, that the most remarkable trans-cultural artistic achievement of the interwar years was probably Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930), a unique narrative for chorus and orchestra based on a Romanian colinda that Bartók had collected earlier in what was then still Hungary. Preparing it, Bartók worked together with his Romanian friend, the musicologist and folklorist Constantin Brăiloiu. The genesis of the Cantata Profana itself may be read as a credo of artistic interdependence and integrity. Unfortunately, right-wing chauvinism gained terrain in both countries (as well as, of course, in Germany) during the mid–1930s, confirming Németh’s skepticism and Camil Petrescu’s concern that all the shared cultural emotions and experiences will not prevent a Romanian-Hungarian war if politics imposes it: “Writers cannot prevent a war but can embellish and make productive peace” (Familia 2.5–6: 71). Indeed, the writers themselves became soon polarized. Goga, for example, led a right-wing National-Christian Party and, after becoming prime minister in 1937, promoted a law that restricted the rights of Jews. The measure triggered a diplomatic row with England and France, so that Goga had to resign after only forty days in office. He withdrew from public life, regretting his political mistakes and his distraction from writing. He died from a stroke in 1938. His posthumously published poetry collection, Din larg (From the Wide Sea; 1939), showed signs of stagnation and a darkening vision: many poems thematized failed love, death, and the poet’s estrangement. In 1940, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy imposed, with the tacit support of the Soviet Union and Western indifference, the Vienna Dictate, which split Transylvania diagonally and returned

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the Northern part to Hungary. The decision satisfied nobody: the Romanians were outraged and many fled northern Transylvania; for Hungarians like Reményik it meant the disintegration of the Transylvanian community. For the Jews, it meant being transferred from Antonescu’s military dictatorship, which ordered pogroms and expelled thousands of Jews from Eastern Romania, to murder and persecution under the North Transylvanian Hungarian occupation and the arrow-cross regime of Ferenc Szálasi. The inhumanity of it all is remembered by the Polish poetess Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówn, who lived during the war in Kolozsvár/Cluj. Her poem speaks of the victims but even more about the population at large: The town sheds a little tear; it does not praise the crime, / neither condemns nor opposes it. / It makes a wry face. Its oaths are false! / Doing injustice it pretends to be just / And it washes its stained hands like Pilate. So they are led away, these desperate people, looking like corpses, / and the rabble takes over. Whatever remained is pillaged by it. / Merchants, officers, ladies with a delicate skin, / the police chief, the doctor of law, even the mayor of the town / Pity still glues the eyes of the young neighbours, / when they are carrying a Jewish piano down the stairs; / “It will be stolen anyway!” (Iłłakowiczówna 275)

Transylvania under Communism: 1945–1989 Northern Transylvania was reunited with Romania in 1945 and for a few years Transylvanian literary life returned to a semblance of normalcy. Though the Hungarian and Saxon minorities had to assume a heavy war legacy, promising initiatives were taken. Gaál, former editor of Korunk, started in 1946 the new Hungarian journal Utunk (Our Road); Méliusz’s Sors és jelkép (Fate and Emblem), published the same year, treated the fate of Hungarians in southern Transylvania during the war in the spirit of Romanian-Hungarian understanding. Marcell Benedek, an illustrious intellectual figure, became professor of aesthetics and literary criticism at the University of Cluj (1945–47). But Romania, like Hungary, was subjected to Soviet-imposed totalitarianism after 1948 (see vol. 1: 112–123 of our History), and all literature in the country came under strict ideological control. Most of what managed to get published throughout the 1950s was, as in the other Soviet-dominated countries, of poor quality and shabby looking. The Transylvanian literature of the 1950s in Romanian, Hungarian, German, or Serbo-Croatian followed the precepts of Socialist Realism. Those who adopted the ideology out of conviction or opportunism were rewarded by the communist state. They included for a while the Saxons Franz Johannes Bulhardt (see Solms 109f), Erwin Wittstock, Alfred Margul Sperber, and Oskar Walter Cisek, and the Hungarians Ferenc Szemlér, László Szabédi, and András Sütő. A legmagasabb hőfokon (At the Highest Temperature; 1951) by István Nagy, an old communist and now Party functionary, was even assigned in the high-schools to exemplify the Socialist Realism of minority literatures. Writers who thought differently were silenced. In 1948, Blaga was dismissed from his chair in philosophy of culture at the University of Cluj that was created for him in 1938; he survived

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by working as a librarian in Cluj-Napoca and until 1960 he could publish only translations. Some of Blaga’s former students and members of the Sibiu Circle (see vol. 1: 149–50, 159 of our History) were submitted to systematic persecution: Negoiţescu was in prison between 1961 and 1964; Balotă was jailed in 1949, and again in 1956 (until 1963); Ovidiu Cotruş was held in detention between 1950 and 1964 and forbidden to publish for more than a decade; I. D. Sârbu served seven years in prison. Doinaş, who received the Lovinescu Prize in 1947 for his poetry manuscript could publish his first book only in 1964; he spent one year in prison. Most of Radu Stanca’s poetry and plays appeared posthumously. A similar fate befell many German and Hungarian writers: János Kemény and Méliusz were jailed in the late 1940s, Géza Páskándi and others in the later 1950s; Wolf von Aichelburg, Georg Scherg, and three other Saxon writers, as late as 1959. Leftist and old Communist writers, including Gaál, were often attacked viciously. Not all literature published during the Stalinist period and its aftermath was artistically worthless. The Transylvanian-born Mihai Beniuc began his long career with Cântece de pierzanie (Songs of Loss; 1938), a collection of insurgent neo-romantic poems focused on the social and political traumas of Transylvanian peasants; the volume continued Goga’s tradition and echoed also the revolutionary fervor of Petőfi and Ady. Beniuc’s subsequent collections, beginning with Un om aşteaptă răsăritul (A Man Awaits the Sunrise; 1946), succumbed to Socialist Realism, though as a “drummer” of new times, he still showed some poetic sensibility. His publications in the 1970s and early 80s redeemed him partly, returning to a more intimate poetry, free of slogans. Titus Popovici’s Străinul (The Stranger; 1955) focused on the effects of World War II on the city of Arad, while his Setea (The Thirst; 1958) thematized with narrative sophistication the conflict between the land-craving of peasants and the communist socialization of agriculture (see vol. 1: 168–69, 451 of our History). Ion Lăncrănjan, Dumitru Radu Popescu, and other Transylvanianborn writers approached Transylvanian subjects with diverse narrative techniques but avoided taboo subjects. The significant exception was Popescu’s later Vînătoarea regală (The Royal Hunt; 1973), which called into question communist ideology by means of allegory. The Transylvanian Saxon writers had even more traumatic wartime and postwar experiences, which remained taboo for a long time: the popularity of Nazism among the Saxon population; the loss of civil and property rights in the wake of the war; and the deportations to the Soviet Union in 1945 and to the forced labor camps of the Bărăgan in 1951 (first openly mentioned by the Banat writer Johann Lippet in “Biographie, ein Muster” in 1978). Hungarian writers had to avoid portraying ethnic conflicts, as well as the 1956 revolution and the resultant Romanian clamp-down on the Romanian and Hungarian cultures. Following Soviet policies, the Romanian communist authorities made some political and cultural concessions to minorities: in 1952, they created in the three Székely counties an Autonomous Magyar Region with a constitution of its own, and in 1945 reopened the Hungarian University, naming it after the mathematician János Bolyai. In 1959, this institution was merged with the Romanian University created in 1919 and subsequently named after the Romanian physician Victor Babeş; the new “Babeş-Bolyai” University used both Romanian and Hungarian in its teaching. Efforts were made to publish books in Hungarian, German, and Serbo-Croatian, but communist centralization often worked against them: the most important publishing houses and the editorial offices of the minority literary journals were moved to Bucharest (Hungarian books were entrusted to the Hungarian section of ESPLA, the publisher for literature and the arts); the

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Association of Hungarian Romanian Writers was merged in 1949 into the Romanian Association in Bucharest, and that of the German writers followed suit. The Autonomous Magyar Region, restructured in 1960 in a way that diluted its compact Hungarian character and ethnic autonomy, was finally dissolved in 1968, just when a “thaw” got under way, for the relaxation of Stalinist dogmas and the gradual emancipation from under Soviet domination went hand in hand with a growing nationalism under Ceauşescu. The later sixties and early seventies represented nevertheless a window of opportunity for the minorities as well as. After the Warsaw-Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (in which Romania refused to participate), the Romanian political elite considered it opportune to draw closer ties with the ethnic minorities, whose allegiance it needed. On November 15, 1968, representative bodies of the Hungarian, German, Serbian, and Ukrainian minorities were set up to help the party, state, and social organs to mobilize the minorities in support of the party policies (Shafir 158). Selective links with German and Hungarian literary traditions were allowed, and a certain minority cultural identity could be cultivated within the dominant Romanian one. When the jailed writers were released with the other political prisoners in 1963, they were allowed to publish — within the limits established by the Party. New policies with respect to publishing houses, newspapers, and journals were now introduced. Writers belonging to the ethnic minorities were encouraged to assert locally their ethnic identity, creating literature in dialect or with specific themes and literary publications that catered to local audiences. Kriterion, a publishing house for the minorities with offices in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest, was launched in 1969 and charged with the printing of books in Hungarian, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, and Yiddish. As a successor of the Hungarian section of ESPLA, Kriterion became unexpectedly successful by continuing the Forrás (Source) series for young Hungarian writers, and by publishing also German and German-Romanian authors, as well as Hungarian literature in Romanian translation. During the twenty-year directorship of Géza Domokos (1969–89), Kriterion printed some 3000 Hungarian books and almost 1000 German ones. The Dacia Publishing House, founded in 1969 in Cluj-Napoca, published German books as well. Furthermore, the Bucharest publishing houses Albatros and Ion Creangǎ (the latter for children) also began printing books in minority languages. In 1976, for instance, the eleven publishers in Hungarian and five in German produced about a hundred titles. Especially encouraging was the large number of quality translations from and to Romanian, Hungarian, and German (see Réthy and Váczy for Hungarian literature in Romanian). A few volumes of other ethnic literatures in translation, for instance Ion Apostol Popescu’s collection of Armenian fairy tales (1967), were also published. Transylvanian literary historians published a number of works on the literature of the “other” cultures. Nicolae Balotă’s volume on Hungarian writers from Romania (1982) and Gavril Scridon’s history of Hungarian Literature in Romania, 1918–89 (1996) deserve mentioning. The publishing houses, journals, theaters, and educational institutions served cultural needs but also provided livelihood for most of the minority writers. Franz Hodjak, from Sibiu, became in 1970 editor at Dacia in Cluj-Napoca; the Bucharest journal Neue Literatur (New Literature), an official publication of the Romanian Writers’ Association, employed at various times Dieter Schlesak, Anemone Latzina, Paul Schuster, Gerhardt Csejka, and Werner Söllner as editors. Peter Motzan taught at the University of Cluj, Joachim Wittstock worked at a social science research center in Sibiu. Among the Hungarians, Gaál and György Bretter edited the journal Utunk and

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taught at the University of Cluj, Géza Domokos was, as we have seen, director of Kriterion, and Árpád Farkas edited the journal Igaz Szó (True Word). In Sibiu, the Romanian magazine Transilvania became instrumental in promoting a new poetic and critical consciousness. At the University of Cluj, the faculty and students Marian Papahagi, Ion Pop, and Ion Vartic founded in 1969 the journal Echinox. This exciting venture, whose minority editors included Werner Söllner and Géza Szőcs, also published articles in Hungarian and German, and launched each decade new groups of minority writers. György Bretter, the theoretical leader of the Hungarians around Echinox, sought to “demythologize” contemporary thought and edited the important volume Szövegek és körülmények (Texts and Contexts) in 1974, with articles by Szőcs, Vilmos Ágoston, Gusztáv Molnár, and others. In the related poetry anthology, Ágoston’s Kimaradt szó (Word Left Out; 1979), the young Hungarian poets around Echinox turned against the tradition of pathos, seeking a radical cleansing of language. A similar shift of themes and techniques can be found in the Romanian poetry of the Echinox. The poetry of Dinu Flămând, Ion Mircea, Adrian Popescu, and Horea Bădescu still reflects Blaga’s concern with germination, death, and metaphysics, but his ceremonial solemnity is often undercut here by irony and a sense of lost meaning. In the 1970s and 80s, lyric poetry moved into the foreground not only in Transylvania’s Hungarian and German literatures, but, especially, in the German literature of the Banat (see article on Timişoara above). The most active and productive Transylvanian Saxon poets, Anemone Latzina, Oskar Pastior, and Werner Söllner (who studied in Cluj-Napoca) achieved a reputation beyond Romania and the latter two became leading German poets after their emigration. The Hungarian Transylvanian poets were in those years among the best ones writing in Hungarian. In contrast to the Banat German poets, they wrote in very different styles and orientations. Sándor Kányádi’s poetry in Fátol fáig (From Tree to Tree; 1970) had a popular, easily readable, and traditional manner, reminiscent of Petőfi’s style. Later he turned to longer and more meditative poems. Domokos Szilágyi, who made his debut in the Forrás-series in 1962, published Búcsú a trópusoktól (Farewell to the Tropics; 1969) and several additional poetry volumes but committed suicide in 1976. His early Avant-garde visions of the future gradually darkened and became desperate, turning into tortured poetry about the human condition, especially about the poet’s place in the modern world. An admirer of Bartók, he attempted to adopt musical structures in his poetry. Avoiding daring images, his poems treat traditional poetic conventions in a highly ironic manner, as in “Feszülő ideggé…” (Twisted into Tense Nerve …; 1978), which is a defiant protest against political and other “small daily compromises.” Aladár Lászlóffy, who made his debut in 1962, wrote prose as well as poetry that testify to broader social and political interests, linking his life as a Transylvanian Hungarian to European figures like Erasmus and Giordano Bruno. One of the first Romanian poets to abandon Socialist Realism in the late 1950s was A. E. Baconsky, editor of the Transylvanian magazine Steaua (1956–59), which gradually introduced a new, unconventional literary style and reconnected Romanian readers to European poetry through translations. Baconsky was also the author of an anti-totalitarian parable whose title recalls a Transylvanian medieval symbol, Biserica neagră (Black Cathedral), the gothic church in Braşov that suffered serious damage during successive political and natural calamities. This novel could appear only abroad during the author’s life; in Romania only after his untimely death in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. A former member of the Sibiu Literary Circle, Doinaş wrote reflexive-

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existential poetry in highly stylized traditional forms like the ballad (made popular in Transylvania by Coşbuc). As a literary critic Doinaş encouraged poetic productions that were intellectual and self-critical, willing to question received notions and commonplaces. Realism for him meant commitment to truth but also a capacity to see brute facts in terms of ideas. The younger Ioan Alexandru provided a bridge between Doinaş’s Transylvanian generation and that of the sixties. His poetry evolved from the joyful vitalism of Cum să vă spun (How Can I Tell You; 1964), explainable in terms of the new freedoms that writers enjoyed in the mid sixties, to the grave metaphysical meditation on life in Infernul discutabil (Questionable Inferno; 1966), and an increasing spiritualization that took on hymnal (and slightly nationalistic) accents in Imnele Transilvaniei (Transylvania’s Hymns; 1976). Ana Blandiana is perhaps the most original postwar poet who started in Transylvania and who reflects the Transylvanian lyrical traditions of Blaga and others. Born in Timişoara, Blandiana studied philology at the University of Cluj (1962–67). A year after publishing in 1959 her first poems in Tribuna, she was forbidden to publish until 1963; she was able to resume writing only at the start of the political “thaw” of the mid–1960s. But in the mid-eighties (after she received the international Herder Prize) Blandiana was banned again from all Romanian publications because of political poems she circulated in samizdat. An active participant in the December 1989 uprising against Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime, Blandiana was elected to the newly constituted Council of the National Salvation Front, but resigned from it as soon as its neo-Communist leanings became apparent. She remained a rallying figure in the pro-democratic opposition. Her first collection of verse, Persoana întâia plural (First Person Plural; 1964) surprised critics with its fresh, uninhibited treatment of subjective emotion. Her second volume, Călcâiul vulnerabil (The Vulnerable Heel; 1966), toned down the youthful rhetoric, introducing a more reflexive style that was to become Blandiana’s distinctive voice. By the end of the decade, she was the acknowledged leader of a group of women poets that made essential contributions to the poetic revival of the 1960s. Blandiana’s poetry written in the 1970s and 80s, before the political turnover, continued to reevaluate critically the relation of literature to existential and social truth. In fiction, the work of Augustin Buzura deserves mention. Born in Maramureş, he followed Rebreanu’s tradition, blending psychological analysis with political themes. His early Absenţii (Absentees; 1970) and Feţele tǎcerii (Faces of Silence; 1974) reflect his psychiatric training by portraying with clinical minuteness the effects of postwar socio-political changes on individuals. Buzura’s protagonists are determined to discover the truth about their lives and the society they live in but usually find themselves trapped in a labyrinth of ideological distortions and ambivalent recollections. In Orgolii (Vanities; 1977), for example, Dr. Ion Cristian is submitted to false denunciations, political chicanery, and blackmail in order to be dissuaded from running for the position of president of his Medical School. The novel’s contradictory narrative structure, composed of conflicting documents (including the journal of an informant of the political police) on Dr. Cristian’s life and career, calls into question the possibility of reaching any kind of truth in communist Romania. Al. Ivasiuc, who was also born in Transylvania but moved to Bucharest after the Vienna Dictate of 1940, dedicated to Transylvania his Corn de vînătoare (Hunting Horn; 1972), a historical novella that foregrounds with contemporary implications the violence underlying abusive political power (see vol. 1: 452, 502 of our History).

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In contrast to Transylvanian Hungarian poetry, which was full of gloom and agony, most of the Transylvanian Hungarian novels of the 1970s and 80s recaptured something of the region’s traditional humor and fantasy, as well as its somewhat special vocabulary. The leading prose writer, András Sütő, abandoned his earlier schematism in favor of an easy, humorous style in the manner of Tamási. His Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (My Mother Promises a Light Sleep; 1970) recounts an extended visit to his parents and his native village. Tibor Bálint took in Zokogó majom (Sobbing Monkey; 1969), a close look at the depressing every-day life in a poor, mostly Hungarian, district of Cluj-Napoca during the period from World War I to the Stalinist years. The gloom, occasionally lightened with humor, is not due to oppression as such but above all to the violence and corruption that deprivation brings about. The novel was made into a successful play and given a sequel in 1978. István Szilágyi wrote several postmodern historical novels in a rich and slightly archaic vocabulary. His major work, Kő hull apadó kútba (Stone Falls into a Receding Well; 1975), is a psychological study of an aberrant woman, as well as a socio-historical study of a Hungarian small town that is inevitably rushing towards its doom around 1900. János Pusztai’s A sereg (The Army; 1978) and his other novels are allegories of the Ceauşescu regime, negative visions in the manner of Kafka that also recall the French nouveau roman with their Avant-garde style and structure. Attila Mózes, from the Echinox circle, wrote about outsiders who speak about existence and society but are unable to accept life as lived by others. The Saxon community did not produce important novelists in the second half of the twentieth century; its best writers outlived themselves or chose to move abroad. Dieter Schlesak’s 1986 novel, with the symptomatic title “Days of the Fatherland and the Art of Disappearing” (Vaterlandstage und die Kunst des Verschwindens), was written in Italy and published in Switzerland (see Solms 160–77). The window of opportunity that opened in the sixties gradually closed in the wake of Ceauşescu’s offensive against liberalization. The decline started with the “Mini Cultural Revolution” of his “July Theses” of 1971 and led to the reinstatement of the Party’s ideological control over Romania’s cultural life. Proclaimed in a series of programmatic documents, the emphatically nationalistic guiding principle established national foundations for the Party’s hegemony. As Ceauşescu’s personality cult intensified, he came to represent both the Party and the nation. The regime embarked on a homogenization of the nation by forcing the Hungarians and smaller minorities to assimilate and by encouraging the Germans and Jews to emigrate. In the 1980s, Ceauşescu’s apparatus launched a campaign with the implied message that the Hungarian minority was unreliable because it had a fascist past and harbored irredentist or revisionist views. Several books and articles appeared on Hungary’s annexation of Northern Transylvania following the Second Vienna Dictate of August 30, 1940. The campaign began in 1982 with Ion Lăncrănjan’s Cuvânt despre Transilvania (Word about Transylvania) and continued in 1985 with Teroarea horthysto-fascistă în nordvestul României (The Horthy-Fascist Terror in Northwestern Romania) by Ion Ardeleanu et al. Hungarian positions on Transylvania, as reflected, for example, in the mentioned three-volume history of Transylvania edited by Köpeczi et al., were harshly criticized but not translated into Romanian. Faced with hostility, many Hungarian Transylvanian writers felt pressed either to prove their loyalty to Romania and the Party, or to settle in Hungary. Géza Szőcs’s Ellenpontok (Counterpoints; 1981–82), circulated as a samizdat, focused on minority-rights violations but did not represent a kind of frontal critique of the system that the

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young Banat German writers had attempted (see the article on Timişoara). Most Romanian writers remained indifferent. As Michael Shafir notes, the dominant mood between majority and minority writers was mutual distrust (173–74). On a personal level some bonding certainly existed, for instance in the editorial offices of the literary journals Steaua and Utunk in Cluj-Napoca, Vatra and Új Élet in Tîrgu Mureş, or Orizont in Timişoara, reflecting intercultural traditions in these cities. But these personal ties were insufficient to generate a joint front against the regime. The Party’s policy of emigration practically eliminated Romania’s German population and rid the nation of the bothersome German writers. Paul Celan’s Bucovinian generation, and the younger German writers of the Banat departed. Of the Transylvanians, Oskar Pastior left in 1968, Dieter Schlesak in 1969, Klaus F. Schneider in 1987, and Franz Hodjak in 1992. Only Anemone Latzina stayed behind in Bucharest until her death in 1993. Several Hungarian writers, among them László Szabédi (1959), Domokos Szilágyi (1976), and Gizella Hervay (1982), committed suicide. Páskándi left in 1974, others followed in the next decades. The remaining contingent, though weakened, represents the only vigorous minority literature in post–1989 Romania. After the prewar emigration of Saxons, the extermination of most Jews, the postwar migration of Hungarians to Budapest and some Romanians to Bucharest, and the further dismantling of the Saxon and Swabian communities through continued departures for Austria and Germany, Transylvania has lost its diversity. After 1989 a certain intellectual and cultural decentralization took place, giving rise to ethnic collaboration, but also to occasional ethnic flare-ups in Braşov, Sibiu, Tîrgu Mureş, and even ClujNapoca. It is encouraging, though, that Szőcs, Géza Domokos, Béla Markó, and other Hungarian writers entered Romanian politics by becoming leaders of the “Hungarian Party” (UDMR) that emerged after 1989. The Babeş-Bolyai University has become more clearly multicultural, adding to its full-range of humanities and sciences courses in three languages (Romanian, Hungarian, and German) also regional emphases on Romanian and Hungarian ethnography, Jewish Studies, and Central European Relations. This falls short, however, of a separate university desired by the Hungarians. Loss of state subsidies and adjustments to market economy brought rough times to Transylvania’s traditional journals, but these have also taken bolder steps to reopen discussions on the region’s ideological and cultural issues. Echinox, for example, dedicated special issues and articles to representations of the social and cultural imaginary, to censorship and minority literatures, and to post-totalitarian forms of discourse. Transylvania can also boast an international representative, the naturalized American poet and National Public Radio commentator, Andrei Codrescu (Perlmutter), whose experimental poetry in English echoes certain Transylvanian models such as Blaga (translated by Codrescu into English). The gradual expansion of the European Community in the region, and the concomitant gradual regionalization of the former centralized systems of East-Central Europe will, perhaps, revive Transylvania’s culture in the spirit of mutual understanding. While a Transylvanian identity with multiple discourses is now irretrievably lost due to fatal errors on all sides, a decentered and pluralist future within an integrated Europe may well be possible — though the road towards it will be rocky.

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The Hybrid Soil of the Balkans: A Topography of Albanian literature Robert Elsie A Rocky, Much-trodden Land Albanian literary culture reveals an apparent contradiction from the very start. On the one hand, Albania as a cultural entity, and thus Albanian literature as a product thereof, evolved over the centuries in relative isolation. The inaccessible, mountainous terrain that covers most of the country made Albania a virtual terra incognita until the late nineteenth century, and even the southern Adriatic coastline, marshy and malaria-infested as it was, attracted few foreign visitors who might have stimulated a minimum of cultural exchange. With the exception of the ports of Durrës and Vlora, used for a modicum of maritime trade, and of the Via Egnatia, which had been employed since ancient times to link the imperial cities of Rome and Constantinople, the routes of international communication tended to skirt Albania, leaving it an economic and cultural backwater in a decaying Ottoman Empire. Yet, at the same time, hardly any other region of Europe has been so much at the crossroads and been subjected to so much foreign control and influence as Albania. For a thousand years, from the division of the Roman Empire in 395 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Albanian territory constituted the immediate cultural, political, and military border between West Rome and East Rome (i.e., between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire). Even later, from the Ottoman conquest of the southern Balkans in the late fourteenth century virtually to the present, Albania continued to constitute a cultural interface in Europe, linking the Christian West with the Islamic East. In view of the thorough, though highly heterogeneous foreign influence exerted over Albania, it is a miracle that this tiny nation was able to survive at all, to consolidate its national culture and finally, to take its place among the nation-states of Europe. From the fifteenth century onwards, Albania found itself divided into three distinct cultural and linguistic spheres: that of the Muslim Turks, the Orthodox Greeks, and the Catholic “Latins.” Though the native mountain tribes had their own folk culture and a rich oral literature, they had no alphabet and thus no written traditions. Nor did they have access to formal education and intellectual culture that might have stimulated the creation of a written literature. These had to be imported from the three neighboring cultures that had partitioned the country culturally and many times politically. Among the many literary problems that had to be tackled when Albanian literary culture had finally attained a modest level of consolidation was consensus on a common alphabet for the Albanian language. This problem was not solved satisfactorily until the second half of the twentieth century. In the hundred-year period between 1750 and 1850, Albanian was written in no less than ten different alphabets. Without consensus on an alphabet, no national literature could be created. Secondly, although the Sublime Porte accorded its Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Romanian citizens cultural autonomy, including schooling and books in their languages, it denied these rights to the Albanians who, as Muslims in their majority, were considered Turks. Schools, books, and periodicals in Albanian were forbidden in the country right up to the time of Albanian independence

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in 1912; in Kosova, under heavy-handed Serb rule, they were virtually prohibited until the 1950s. As a result of these and other factors, Albanian literature was late to develop. Early Albanian literature (the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was an essentially religious literature of Catholic and “Latin” inspiration. It consisted initially of translations of Latin and Italian devotional texts in the service of the Counter-Reformation. Of more substantial literary value was the religious treatise Cuneus Prophetarum (The Band of Prophets), by Archbishop Pjetër Bogdani from Kosova, which was published in Padua in 1685 in Albanian and Italian. These beginnings of Albanian literature were abruptly interrupted by the Ottoman invasion and the Islamization of the southern Balkans. The Mountains of Calabria and Sicily — dheu i huaj (the Foreign Land) With the Ottoman conquest and the death of resistance leader Skanderbeg, large numbers of Albanians fled to southern Italy and took, one could surmise, the embryonic impulses of their literary culture with them. Sporadic groups of Albanians had found their way to Italy as early as the thirteenth century, but it was not until the mid–fifteenth century that settlements were established when Albanian troops under the command of Demetrius Reres were summoned to Italy by Alfonso I of Aragon, King of Naples, to put down a revolt in Calabria. For his assistance, Reres was offered land in Calabria, and there his soldiers and their families settled. His sons, George and Basil, are said to have later continued on to Sicily to establish the first Albanian colonies there. Mass settlement first began, however, with the Turkish invasion of the Balkans, which resulted in a great exodus of Albanians to Italy. More Albanians fled Greece in 1532–33, after Turkish encroachments in the Morea, and settled primarily in Sicily. All in all, the Albanians founded or repopulated over one hundred towns and villages in southern Italy, more than half of which are to be found in the mountains of Calabria. Today, there are about fifty towns scattered throughout the mezzogiorno, with an estimated Albanian-speaking population of about 90,000 individuals. In view of the destruction wrought by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, it is no wonder that the first attempts to create an Albanian literature should come from these Italo-Albanian or Arbëresh communities. Among the first Italo-Albanian poets were Nicolò Brancato of Piana degli Albanesi and Nicola Figlia of Mezzoiuso (Alb. Munxifsi). A decisive impetus to the intellectual and cultural advancement of the Sicilian Arbëresh came from the establishment of the Greek college or seminary in Palermo. The seminary soon became the intellectual center of the Albanian community on the island and was to produce many writers and scholars of note. One of the first and more prominent students of the Greek seminary in Palermo was Nicola Chetta of Contessa Entellina (Alb. Kundisa), who is credited with composing the first Albanian sonnet (1777). But it is to the mountains of Calabria that we must turn for the first Arbëresh poet of real talent. Born in San Giorgio Albanese (Alb. Mbuzati), Giulio Variboba, known in Albanian as Jul Variboba, is regarded as the first genuine poet in all of Albanian literature. His long lyric poem Ghiella e Shën Mëriis Virghiër (The Life of the Virgin Mary; 1762) is the only Arbëresh book printed in the eighteenth century. Girolamo De Rada, known in Albanian as Jeronim De Rada, is not only the best-known writer of Arbëresh literature, but also the foremost figure of the Albanian nationalist movement in

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nineteenth-century Italy. Born in the mountains of Cosenza as the son of a parish priest of Greek rite, De Rada published in Naples, in 1836, the first edition of his Albanian-language poem, the “Songs of Milosao,” under the Italian title Poesie albanesi del secolo XV, Canti di Milosao, figlio del despota di Scutari (Albanian Poetry from the Fifteenth Century, Songs of Milosao, Son of the Despot of Shkodra). In the revolutionary year 1848, he founded the newspaper L’Albanese d’Italia (The Albanian of Italy). This bilingual “political, moral, and literary journal,” with a final circulation of 3,200 copies, was the first Albanian-language periodical anywhere. De Rada’s fame as a catalyst of Albanian national awareness spread in the mid–nineteenth century. He corresponded with leading figures of the Rilindja (rebirth) movement and received encouragement from the French poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine sojourning on Ischia. Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, whose verse romance Mirèio (1859) was not without affinities to De Rada’s work, expressed his admiration for the “Songs of Milosao.” Before Albania had become a political entity, it was already a poetic reality in the works of De Rada. His vision of an independent Albania grew in the second half of the nineteenth century from a simple desire to a passionate political objective. De Rada was the harbinger and first audible voice of the Romantic movement in Albanian literature, a movement that, inspired by his commitment to the national awakening of Albanians in Italy and in the Balkans, was to evolve into the romantic nationalism characteristic of the Rilindja period. His journalistic, literary, and political activities were instrumental not only in fostering an awareness of the Arbëresh minority in Italy but also in laying the foundations for an Albanian national literature. The Romantic cultural awakening of the Arbëresh brought forth another writer of talent, Francesco Antonio Santori, author of poetry, plays, short stories, novels, adaptations of 112 Aesop fables, and an Albanian grammar written in verse. Much of his writing, in an original and rather difficult orthography, remained unpublished until recently. Of particular historical significance are Santori’s plays. His Emira (Emira) is regarded as the first original Albanian drama, but Santori wrote a number of other melodramatic comedies and tragedies, some incomplete, which remained in manuscript form during his lifetime. Santori was also a prose writer: with his two novels and six short stories published in modern times, he may be considered the earliest Albanian writer to have produced a substantial corpus of literary prose, though none of these works are of significant aesthetic value. Santori tried his hand at many genres, and it is this versatility that ensures him a place of honor in Arbëresh literature, right behind that of Girolamo De Rada. Italo-Albanian writing blossomed in the fertile soil of Italian civilization to form a body of literature that, in its origins and development, was quite independent of Albania itself. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was only in southern Italy that political, social, and economic conditions, dire as they may seem from a modern perspective, were stable enough to allow Albanians to pursue the modest written culture that laid the foundations for modern Albanian literature. But Albania, too, was finally awakening in the nineteenth century, both politically and culturally. In the collective memory of the Arbëresh, cast upon the shores of the dheu i huaj (foreign land) that they always regarded with a degree of suspicion, Albania evolved from a vague recollection to a concrete reality, a struggling motherland which inspired them to preserve their own fragile culture. The indefatigable Girolamo De Rada had cemented the bonds between the Italo-Albanian colonies scattered throughout the isolated mountain ranges of southern Italy and

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their original Balkan homeland struggling to find its identity. From then on, political, cultural, and literary ties were forged that proved beneficial to both sides. Arbëresh literature had blossomed of its own accord and was certainly mature enough by this time to go its own way, but the ties of the gjaku i shprishur (the scattered blood) enabled it to remain an integral part of Albanian culture. Albanian literature would be inconceivable without its Arbëresh roots. A Tulip on the Adriatic — Albanian Literature in the Muslim Tradition Before the arrival of the Turks on the Balkan Peninsula, Albanian culture was well within the sphere of Christianity: Catholicism in the north and Orthodoxy in the south. The exact border between these two Christian faiths varied over the centuries in accordance with the political and military gains or losses of the heirs to the two halves of the Roman Empire. By the end of the fourteenth century, the third great religion of the Balkans had entered the stage. On June 28, 1389, the Muslim Turks defeated a coalition of Balkan forces under Serb leadership at Kosovo Polje, the Plain of the Blackbirds, and established themselves as masters of the Balkans. By 1431, the Turks had incorporated all of southern Albania into the Ottoman Empire and set up a “sanjak” administration with its capital in Gjirokastra. Mountainous northern Albania remained in the hands of its autonomous tribal leaders, though under the suzerain power of the Sultan. The following four centuries of Ottoman colonization changed the face of the country radically. The new religion, Islam, had wedged itself between the Catholic north and the Orthodox south of Albania and, with time, was to become the dominant faith of the country. At the dawn of Albanian independence in 1912, about two-thirds of the Albanian population were Muslim. While the Turkish Empire left Albania the cultural and political backwater it had been from the start, Ottoman Turkish culture penetrated the country thoroughly. It reached its zenith during the Tulip Age of the eighteenth century. Central and southern Albanian cities like Elbasan, Berat, and Gjirokastra, with their newly constructed fortifications, mosques, and medresas, became centers of oriental learning and experienced something of a cultural renascence under Islam, as did Shkodra and Gjakova (Djakovica) in the north. Wandering poets, artists, and scholars began to enjoy the patronage of local governors and pashas as they did throughout Asia Minor. The first writers of Muslim Albania used the Turkish and Persian literary vehicles of the Ottoman Empire, many of them with notable success. One of the most original early Ottoman poets was Messiah of Prishtina, known in Turkish as Priştineli Mesihi. We assume that he was an Albanian from Prishtina, though he must have lived in Istanbul from an early age on. Messiah produced some of the best Ottoman verse of the period. Much quoted is his Murabba’-i bahâr (Ode to Spring), which, after publication with a Latin translation in 1774 by Orientalist Sir William Jones, was to become for a long time the best known Turkish poem in Europe. Another sixteenth-century writer of Albanian origin was Jahja bej Dukagjini, known in Turkish as Dukagin-zâde Yahyâ bey or Taşlicali Yahyâ. Of his five mesnevî, the most popular is Shâh u gedâ (The King and the Beggar), which he finished allegedly in just one week. This metrical romance idealizes the affection of a pious lover (stylized as a beggar because of his suppliant longing) for an Istanbul youth of unequalled beauty (stylized as the king because he reigns over the heart).

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The first early eighteenth-century attempts by Islamic Albanian writers to express themselves in their own native tongue were as momentous as the transition from Latin to Albanian had been for the creation of early Albanian literature. The literature of the Bejtexhinj, as the writers of this period are called, consists almost exclusively of verse composed in Arabic script. The Arabic writing system had already been adapted, albeit rather awkwardly, to the needs of Ottoman Turkish and was now being molded to fit the more elaborate phonetic system of the Albanian dialects. It proved to be just as unsatisfactory for Albanian as it had been for Turkish. The poetry of the Bejtexhinj was strongly influenced by the Turkish, Persian, and Arabic models in fashion at the time, in both Istanbul and the Middle East. Most of the genres and forms prevalent in Turkish and Persian verse are present in Albanian. We thus find, either as isolated poems, or within the divans: the murabba’, quatrain; the ilâhî, religious hymns; the qasîde, the longer panegyric odes favored by the Arabs; and the ghazal, shorter and often love lyrics, favored by the Turks and Persians. The metric system was basically syllabic, although occasional attempts were made to introduce quantitative meters. The subject matter was often religious, either meditatively intimate, or openly didactic, serving to spread the faith. The speculative character of much of this verse derived its inspiration from the currents of Islam: from authoritative Sunnite spirituality to the intense mystical spheres of Shi’ite Sufism and later, to the more liberal, though equally mystical reflections of Bektashi pantheism. Some secular verse also occurs: love lyrics, nature poetry, and historical and philosophical verse in which we encounter musings on the vacillations of existence from a world that is easily as exotic to the modern Albanians as it is to the foreign reader. The first major poet among the Bejtexhinj was Nezim Frakulla, alternatively known as Nezim Berati or Ibrahim Nezimi. Between 1731 and 1735, he composed a divan and various other poetry in Albanian, including an Albanian-Turkish dictionary in verse form. His divan includes verse ranging from panegyrics on local pashas and military campaigns, to odes on friends and patrons, poems on separation from, and longing for, his friends and (male) lovers, descriptions of nature in springtime, religious verse, and, in particular, love lyrics. The imagery of the latter ghazal, some of which are devoted to his nephew, is that of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish poetry, with many of their classical themes and metaphors: love as an illness causing the poet to waste away, the cruel lover whose glance could inflict mortal wounds, or the cup-bearer whose beauty can reduce his master to submission. Frakulla not only considered himself the first poet to write in Albanian, but also commended himself as the Sa’dî and Hâfiz of his times. Most experts consider this comparison somewhat exaggerated. While Nezim Frakulla had initiative and talent, his verse did not by any means reach the level of literary perfection of the Persian classics, nor was the clumsy mixture of Albanian, Turkish, and Persian he employed refined enough to enable him to do so. What he did accomplish was to lay the foundations for a new literary tradition in Albania that lasted for two centuries. Other Muslim writers of the period include Sulejman Naibi of Berat, who died in 1772, and Hasan Zyko Kamberi, a poet of the second half of the eighteenth century from the Kolonja region of southern Albania. Albanian literature was written in Arabic script for over two centuries. It flourished throughout the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century until it was gradually replaced by the romantic nationalist literature of the Rilindja period, written primarily in a number of newly devised versions of the Latin alphabet. The waning of the Muslim tradition in Albanian literature was concomitant with the decay of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Albanian nationalist movement, during which Albanians began to turn their backs on all things Ottoman and oriental.

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Voskopoja and the Schism of Cultural Identity: Greek Orthodox Traditions in Albanian Literature Even after the Ottoman invasion of Europe and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek population in the southern Balkans was not completely divested of the imperial heritage of two millennia. Despite forced submission to Turkish rule, a certain continuity of ideas and customs reigned among the Greeks, fostered in particular by the Orthodox Church, that quintessence of languishing Byzantine grandeur. In southern Albania and Epirus, which throughout the centuries have had a mixed population of Albanian, Greek, and Aromanian speakers, the Orthodox Church remained an expression of Greek civilization and was exclusively devoted to the Greek language as a cultural bulwark against the invading Turks. To be of Orthodox faith was to be Greek, just as to be of Islamic faith was to be Turkish. There was little room in either culture for the gradually awakening aspirations of Albanian nationalism. Albanians educated in the Orthodox tradition were thus of necessity oriented to Greek language and culture. Using the Greek script to write in the vernacular language of the Albanians was regarded by the Orthodox Church as eminently superfluous and, in later years, even heretical. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, we nonetheless find a number of Albanianlanguage documents written in Greek script, which show that interest in writing Albanian was not extinct in this mixed culture. These works, few of which were ever published, comprise translations of Orthodox religious literature, dictionaries, and grammar notes on the Albanian language. Though not a creative literature per se, they might, under other circumstances, have laid the foundations for a new literary tradition in Albania. Orthodox culture in eighteenth-century Albania is intimately linked to the rise of the city of Voskopoja, now an isolated mountain village of some five hundred inhabitants, twenty-five kilometers west of Korça. In the sixteenth century, Voskopoja, known in Greek as Moschopolis and in Aromanian as Moscopole, increased tremendously to become one of the largest cities in the Balkans. At its peak, before the city was pillaged for the first time in 1769, it is said to have had a population of about 20,000, greater than Athens, Sofia, or Belgrade at the time, and to include 24 churches, a hospital, an orphanage, a library, the only Greek printing press in the Balkans, and the so-called “New Academy” (Hellênikon Frontistêrion). The latter was a center of learning founded in 1744; similar academies existed in Bucharest, Iaşi, Constantinople, Metsovon, Janina (Iôannina), Mt. Athos, and Patmos. Many Greek scholars of note came to teach at Voskopoja among the Aromanian majority, the Albanians, and the Greeks. The New Academy was not an exclusively theological institution. It enjoyed a good reputation for its teaching in ancient Greek, philosophy, mathematics, and physics, and produced many writers and scholars of repute. Between 1769 and 1789, Voskopoja was pillaged several times and came to lose its vitality as a commercial center on the trading route between Constantinople and Venice. It was finally destroyed in 1916, during the First World War, and, with the exception of five beautiful Orthodox churches, the historical buildings that did survive were tragically razed in partisan warfare during World War II. Among the major figures of literary culture within the Orthodox sphere was Gregory of Voskopoja, also known Gregory of Durrës, an Orthodox cleric and teacher in Voskopoja who is remembered as the author of several hagiographies published there in Greek. He was elected Archbishop of Durrës in 1768 and died in 1772, probably at the monastery of St. John Vladimir in

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Elbasan. He is assumed to be the author of the “Elbasan Gospel Manuscript,” also called Anonimi i Elbasanit (Anonymous Manuscript of Elbasan), a work containing Albanian translations of part of the four gospels. It was written not in Greek script but in a special alphabet of forty letters, seemingly the oldest known example of an original Albanian alphabet. Other figures active at the New Academy in Voskopoja were Todhri Haxhifilipi, also known as Dhaskal Todhri from Elbasan, inventor of the so-called Todhri alphabet of fifty-three letters based on a Greek cursive script; and Constantine of Berat, author of — among other religious works — a forty-four-line Albanian poem known as Zonja Shën Mëri përpara kryqësë (The Virgin Mary before the Cross). Theodhor Kavalioti, known in Greek as Theodôros Anastasios Kaballiôtês, was an Aromanian scholar from Voskopoja who made an important contribution to Albanian lexicography. He is the author of a scholarly work entitled Prôtopeiria (Primer; 1770), which contains a threelanguage lexicon in Greek, Aromanian, and Albanian of about 1,170 words. Another work in this vein is the Eisagôgikê didaskalia (Introductory Study; 1802), a four-language lexicon in Greek, Aromanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian. It comprises about 1,000 entries, and 235 freely translated everyday phrases that are of interest for the study of Albanian historical morphology and syntax. The author of this second multilingual lexicon in Greek script was Daniel of Voskopoja, also known as Master Daniel, in Albanian as Dhanil Haxhiu, and in Greek as Daniêl Moschopolitês or Daniêl Adam Chatzis, no doubt an Aromanian scholar from Voskopoja and student of Kavalioti, who hoped to persuade with this work Albanians, Aromanians, and Bulgarians to abandon their “barbaric” tongues and learn Greek, the “mother of knowledge.” The predominance of Greek as the language of Christian education and culture in southern Albania and the often-hostile attitude of the Orthodox Church to the spread of writing in Albanian prevented the evolution of an Albanian literature in Greek script. While intent on spreading Christian education and values, the Orthodox Church in southern Albania was never convinced of the utility of writing in the vernacular as a means of converting the masses, as the Catholic Church in northern Albania had been, to a certain extent, during the Counter-Reformation. With the exception of an ephemeral printing press in Voskopoja, southern Albanians never had publishing facilities like those available to the clerics and scholars of Catholic Albania in Venice and Dalmatia. Though the influence of the Orthodox Church waned among Albanian believers due to its intransigence in matters of Albanian cultural autonomy, the influence of Greek culture remained strong among the southern Albanians. Albanians and Greeks had lived for centuries together in the border region between southern Albania and Epirus. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the mixed settlement patterns and the lack of a definitive borderline between the newly independent Greek state and Albania, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire, had transformed the region into a political powder keg that finally burst in the Balkan wars of the early twentieth century. The Greeks distrusted their wild and unruly Albanian neighbors, and the Albanians, for their part, were always somewhat ambivalent towards the Greeks. Nevertheless, many Albanians enjoyed the benefits of Greek schooling and culture, and had an unbounded admiration for Hellenic civilization. The Zosimaia secondary school in Janina provided young Albanians from the rugged mountain homeland with the rudiments of education and culture, and it facilitated intellectual contacts with the outside world. But the Albanians resisted complete assimilation into this more Mediterranean culture. Moreover, most Albanians, including many in the south, were Muslims and were thus looked upon as Turks by the Epirotic Greeks, who even today are not known

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for a surfeit of Turkophile sentiment. The Greek authorities, too, were unwilling to allow that not all Muslims were Turks, and were even more unwilling to comprehend that not all Orthodox were Greeks, an attitude that has lingered in many spheres of Greek life up to the present day. In the nineteenth century, the Greek Orthodox Church went to unbelievable lengths to suppress all signs of Albanian cultural activity. An act as harmless as supporting the opening of an Albanian-language school could lead to excommunication. The Albanian national awakening and the concomitant rise of national awareness were bound to come into conflict with Greek interests. If southern Albanians enjoyed many of the benefits of Greek culture, they also suffered from Greek cultural imperialism at the time. The large Albanian minority in Greece itself and the Albanians of Epirus made an important contribution both to the liberation of Greece in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to the Albanian national awakening in the second half of that century. Of all the southern Albanian figures, none was more active in the Albanian nationalist movement than Jani Vreto, born in Postenan near Leskovik, a town situated not far from the present Greek border. In 1879, he took part in the founding of the historic Shoqëri e të shtypuri shkronja shqip (Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing), which was to devote its energies to the publication of Albanian books, in particular school texts, and to the establishment of Albanian schools. About the same time he was excommunicated by the Orthodox metropolitan of Gjirokastra for having committed the heresy of “creating an Albanian question.” Aside from one youthful poem of limited artistic interest, “Istori e Skënderbeut” (History of Scanderbeg), Jani Vreto did not publish any works that could fall under the category of Albanian literature per se. Although he was a significant essayist, Jani Vreto’s major place in Albanian literary history does not rest on his writings. As an active member of the “Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing” in Constantinople and later in Bucharest, where the society moved after its activities were banned in Constantinople, Vreto played a key role in the realization of a major goal of the period. The Albanian printing press of Bucharest, which he set up and operated during his sojourn there, was as fundamental to the advancement of Albanian literature in the late nineteenth century as Johann Gutenberg’s invention of printing by movable type had been to European culture four and a half centuries earlier. For the first time, it provided Albanian writers with what they had always been looking for: readers. The one who had a greater impact on Albanian literature itself was the nationalist publisher and writer Anastas Kullurioti of Athens. Kullurioti was born in the Plaka district of the Greek capital. This former old town and present tourist center of Athens at the foot of the Acropolis, inhabited by Albanians at the time, still bears its Albanian name. Kullurioti is remembered not only as a publisher of the weekly newspaper Hê fônê tês Albanias (The Voice of Albania), but also for his Albanikon alfabêtarion or Avabatar arbëror (Albanian Primer; 1882), a bilingual primer or speller of his native dialect. It included an introduction to Albanian grammar and a selection of folk tales, poetry, and proverbs of the Albanians of Greece. That same year, Kullurioti also produced a 116page Albanian reader entitled Klumësht për foshnja (Milk for Babies; 1882), with a bilingual text, certainly one of the earliest works of children’s literature in Albanian. Kullurioti was concerned more with the preservation of Albanian cultural heritage in Greece than with the creation of literature. He was very interested, for instance, in Albanian and Arvanitika oral literature and was the author of a 196-page notebook of Albanian folk songs, as yet unpublished, which is now preserved

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in the National Library in Tirana. This notebook contains folk songs Kullurioti collected himself — ten of them, interestingly enough, with an interlinear English translation. Both as a publisher and as a nationalist figure, Kullurioti contributed substantially to an awakening of national identity among the Albanians of Greece and southern Albania. The native culture of southern Albania was to survive and flourish as a result of the activities of the Rilindja intellectuals. In central and southern Greece itself, however, the Albanians — despite their large numbers — were assimilated with such rapidity over the following decades that very little written literature in Albanian was ever produced there. The Greco-Albanian current of written Albanian literature thus ran dry. Though the version of Albanian language (Arvanitika) is still spoken by older people in some three-hundred and twenty Greek villages today, it has not withstood the onslaught of cultural assimilation and has long been reduced to the level of a village patois. It is now up to the folklorists to record the remaining oral literature from the collective memory of the Greco-Albanians before it, too, fades away. Constantinople: an Albanian National Identity Created on the Banks of the Bosporus By the mid–nineteenth century, the cultural links between Albania and the Ottoman capital Constantinople (Istanbul) had been firmly cemented. As a long-standing and integral part of the Ottoman Empire, Albania now had a 70% Muslim population that, despite much frustration with Ottoman incompetence in matters of government and economic management, looked to the Bosporus for direction. Quite a few Albanians, after all, had over the centuries risen to fame and fortune in the Ottoman administration. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the many Albanian intellectuals who had taken up residence in the Ottoman capital were devoting their energies primarily to the goals of the Albanian national awakening. This movement eventually led to an open struggle for freedom and self-determination against a decaying Ottoman Empire. Leading this movement were three brothers, Abdyl, Naim, and Sami Frashëri, from the mountainous village of Frashër in the southern Albanian district of Përmet. Naim Frashëri is now widely regarded as the national poet of Albania. He spent his childhood in the village of Frashër, where he began learning Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and where, at the local Bektashi monastery, he absorbed the spiritual traditions of the Orient. In Janina, Naim Frashëri attended the Zosimaia secondary school that provided him with the basics of a classical education along Western lines. Here he studied ancient and modern Greek, French, and Italian and was tutored privately in oriental languages. As he grew, so did his affinity for the pantheistic Bektashi religion, for the poets of classical Persia, and for the French Enlightenment. His education in Janina made of him a prime example of a late nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual equally at home in the Western and Oriental cultures. Around 1881–82, he took up permanent residence in Constantinople and, following the arrest of his politically active brother Abdyl, began to play a serious role in the activities of Albanian nationalists. Naim Frashëri is the author of twenty-two works: four in Turkish, one in Persian, two in Greek, and fifteen in Albanian. Most of these works were published not in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, but in Bucharest, where a substantial Albanian colony had settled and where an Albanian printing press had been set up by the Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing in 1886.

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Among his major works in Albanian is Bagëti e bujqësija (Bucolics and Georgics; 1886), a pastoral poem reminiscent of Vergil and laden with the imagery of his mountain homeland. It proved extremely popular among Frashëri’s compatriots and was smuggled into Albania on caravans. In it, the poet expresses his dissatisfaction with city life, no doubt from actual experience on the bustling banks of the Bosphorus, and idealizes the distant and longed-for Albanian countryside. This poem is a hymn to nature in the traditions of European Romanticism but also an earthy song of herds and flocks, and of the joys and toil of rural life: O malet’ e Shqipërisë e ju o lisat’ e gjatë! Fushat e gjera me lule, q’u kam ndër mënt dit’ e natë! Ju bregore bukuroshe e ju lumënjt’ e kulluar! Çuka, kodra, brinja, gërxhe dhe pylle të gjelbëruar! Do të këndonj bagëtinë, që mbani ju e ushqeni, O vëndethit’ e bekuar! ju mëndjenë ma dëfreni. Ti Shqipëri më ep nderrë, më ep emërin shqipëtar Zëmërnë ti ma gatove plot me dëshirë dhe me zjar. (Elsie, History of Albanian Literature 1: 232–33) Oh mountains of Albania and you, oh lofty trees! Broad blossoming plains, you are in my thoughts day and night! You fair highlands and you sparkling streams! Peaks, hills, slopes, cliffs and verdant forests! I shall sing of the herds you hold and feed, Oh blessed places! How you nourish and delight me! You, Albania, bestow upon me honor and the name Albanian, You have filled my heart with flame and desire.

The significance of Naim Frashëri as a Rilindja and, indeed, as a “national” poet rests not so much upon the artistic quality of his verse, but rather upon the social, philosophical, and religious messages it conveyed. These were aimed above all at national awareness and, in the Bektashi tradition, at overcoming religious barriers within the country. His influence upon Albanian writers at the beginning of the twentieth century was enormous. Upon comparing the state of Albanian literature before and after the arrival of Naim Frashëri, one becomes aware of the major role he played in transforming Albanian into a literary language of substantial refinement. The Frashëri brother with the most diverse talent, who fulfilled the roles of writer, publisher, and ideologist of the nationalist movement, was, however, Sami Frashëri, known in Turkish as Şemseddin Sami. Like his brother Naim, he was first confronted with the currents of Western thought in Janina, where he studied Greek, French, and Italian, and where he was privately tutored in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Sami Frashëri moved to Constantinople in 1872 to work in the government press office. In Constantinople, he made friends with the Turkish writers Namik Kemal and Ebüzziya Tevfik, as well as with the influential Albanian hodja Hasan Tahsini. Sami Frashëri is the author of about fifty works as well as of numerous newspaper articles. His interests were, on the whole, more scholarly than literary. Between 1882 and 1902, he published six teaching manuals in Turkish and Arabic. His publications in Turkish are of greater significance than

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his Albanian-language works. In 1872, Sami Frashëri published what is widely recognized as the first Turkish novel and the first novel written and published by an Albanian — Taaşşuk-u Tal’at ve Fitnat (The Love of Tal’at and Fitnat). Though a period piece, it did give some direction to the prose of the time. As a Turkish lexicographer, Sami Frashëri published a French-Turkish Dictionary (Kamûsu fransevî, fransizcadan türkçeye lugat; 1882); a Turkish-French Dictionary (Kamûs-u fransevî, türkçeden fransizcaya lugat; 1883), and a two-volume Kamûs-u türkî (Turkish Dictionary; 1900– 01), which is still regarded as useful and was consulted by the Turkish Philological Society in 1932, as a guideline for the creation of the modern Turkish literary language. After twelve years of work, Sami also published a monumental six-volume Turkish encyclopedia of history and geography entitled Kamûs al-a’lâm (Dictionary of the World; 1889–96). The Kamûs al-a’lâm was an exceptional work of reference for the period and contained extensive information on the history and geography of Albania. Of major importance for the Albanian national movement was Sami Frashëri’s much-read political manifesto Shqipëria — Ç’ka qënë, ç’është e ç’do të bëhetë? Mendime për shpëtimt të mëmëdheut nga reziket që e kanë rethuarë (Albania — What Was It, What Is It and What Will Become of It? Reflections on Saving the Motherland from the Perils that Beset It; 1899), which was translated into Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, and German. Sami Frashëri and his brothers Abdyl and Naim represented a new generation of Albanian intellectuals who, though educated in Greek schools, steeped in the great traditions of the Orient and residing in its cultural and political capital Constantinople, devoted their talents to the advancement of their Albanian homeland and its culture. As a result of their activities, the national awakening began to make its impact throughout Albania. Shkodra — the Cradle of Northern Albanian Literature The Rilindja movement was to take root more slowly in northern Albania than in the south of the country. The harsh terrain and the feudal structure of the population inhabiting the barren and isolated valleys of the Albanian Alps had made the northern Albanian “Gegs” a special breed — unbridled mountain tribesmen who were fiercely independent and lived by their own traditional customs and laws. As there were no easy means of communication in the rugged northern mountains, most of these tribes had little contact with the outside world. The ubiquitous blood feuding among them and their experience with Ottoman troops and tax collectors had taught them to be on guard against everything from the outside. Traditional laws, such as the fifteenth-century Code of Lekë Dukagjini (Alb. Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit), governed almost every facet of life in the isolated and otherwise lawless terrain of the northern highlands. With the help of this ancient code, the highland tribes preserved their identity though they were ostensibly part of the Ottoman Empire for five centuries. As their trading post, the highland tribes relied on the town of Shkodra. The ancient fortress of Shkodra was strategically positioned, overlooking Lake Shkodra and the Buna River that flows into the nearby Adriatic. The hybrid town that grew at the foot of the fortress became known in Italian as Scutari, in Turkish as Işkodra or Iskenderiye, and in SerboCroatian as Skadar. It soon developed into a major commercial center for most of the northern

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Albanian highlands and became Albania’s main point of contact with the Western world. In the mid–nineteenth century, this capital of northern Albania was not only the largest city in the country but also the literary and cultural center of the entire Albanian nation. It was only with the Communist takeover in 1944 that the new and more centrally located capital Tirana managed to overtake Catholic Shkodra as the focal point of Albanian writing and culture in general. The initial catalyst of Albanian literature in mid–nineteenth-century Shkodra was, as it had been in previous centuries, the Catholic Church. Although traditionally oriented towards Italy, northern Albanian Catholics were coming under the increasing influence of Austro-Hungary within the framework of the Kultusprotektorat (religious protectorate), a right Vienna had wrestled from the Porte in a series of peace treaties with the Sultans beginning in 1616. With Austro-Hungarian assistance, schools and churches were built throughout the north of the country, and the Catholic Church began to play a more active role in education and culture. Though various orders of the Church, in particular the Benedictines and Dominicans, had been active in Albania from the high Middle Ages on, it was the Franciscans and subsequently the Jesuits who had the decisive influence on nineteenth– and early-twentieth-century Albanian culture. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Catholic-educated Albanians, and to an extent the Italian clerics who had taken up residence in Shkodra, were the first to produce the rudiments of a new Albanian literature. This literature of religious inspiration consisted primarily of poetry (initially imitations and translations of Italian and Latin verse), but later also of prose and dramas. It set the pace for much of twentieth-century Albanian literature up to World War II. Among the early authors of nineteenth-century Catholic literature in Shkodra were Pjetër Zarishi from the village of Blinisht in the Zadrima area, Ëngjell Radoja of Shkodra, known in Italian as Angelo Radoja, and in particular Leonardo De Martino from the village of Greci (Greçi), in the southern Italian province of Avellino. Leonardo De Martino was a born poet whose talent surprised many of his contemporaries, particularly since he wrote not in his mother tongue but in the Geg dialect of northern Albania that he learned during his forty years as a missionary there. He is the author of Albanian translations of Italian religious literature, and of poetry of primarily religious inspiration written in both Albanian and Italian. His L’Arpa di un italo-albanese (The Harp of an Italo-Albanian; 1881) is an impressive compilation of mature and polished verse in Italian and Albanian. De Martino’s importance as a poet lies primarily in his prosodic finesse. He introduced new meters such as the iambic into Albanian and popularized Sapphic verse. However, the Catholic verse of the period gradually gave way to the ubiquitous poetry inspired by the romantic nationalism of the Rilindja period. One northern Albanian figure who played a key role in the Rilindja culture of the nineteenth century was Shkodra-born Pashko Vasa, also known as Wassa Effendi or Vaso Pasha Shkodrani. After his early years of hardship in Shkodra and Italy, Pashko Vasa became a career diplomat and functionary of the Sublime Porte, for which he held various positions of authority culminating with his appointment as Governor General of Lebanon. He authored a number of literary works of note. The first of these was a volume of Italian verse entitled Rose e spine (Roses and Thorns; 1873), composed of forty-one emotionally-charged poems devoted to the themes of love, suffering, solitude, and death, in the romantic tradition of Giacomo Leopardi, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Alfred de Musset. Bardha de Témal, scènes de la vie albanaise (Bardha of Temal, Scenes from Albanian Life; 1890) is a French-language novel which Pashko Vasa published under the

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pseudonym Albanus Albano. Though not written in Albanian, Bardha of Temal is, after Sami Frashëri’s much shorter prose work, The Love of Tal’at and Fitnat, the oldest novel written and published by an Albanian and the oldest such novel with an Albanian theme. Though most of Vasa’s publications were in French and Italian, one poem, perhaps the most popular ever written in Albanian, ensured him his place in Albanian literary history. Written some time between 1878 and 1880, “O moj Shqypni” (Oh Albania, poor Albania) is a stirring call to national awakening, in which Vasa urges all Albanians to overcome their religious and cultural differences and defend their homeland: Çonju, shqyptar, prej gjumit çonju,

Awaken, Albania, wake from your slumber,

Të gjith si vllazën n’nji bes shtrëngonju, E mos shikjoni kish e xhamija, Feja e shqyptarit asht shqyptarija!

Let us all, as brothers, swear a common oath and not look to church or mosque, The faith of the Albanian is Albanianism!

Qysh prej Tivarit deri n’Prevezë, From Bar down to Preveza Gjithkund lshon dielli vap edhe rrezë, everywhere let the sun spend its warmth and rays, Asht tok e jona, t’part na e kan lan, This is our land, left to us by our forefathers, Kush mos na e preki, se desim t’tan! Let no one touch us for we are all to die! Desim si burrat qi diqne motit let us die like men as our forefathers once did E mos turpnohna përpara Zotit! And not bring shame upon ourselves before God! (Elsie, History of Albanian Literature 1: 263–64)

Ndoc Nikaj, prose writer and publisher from northern Albania, has been called the father of the Albanian novel. He is the author of numerous, though now rare, volumes of prose and some plays. The best known of these are the novelettes Marzia e ksctenimi n’filles t’vet (Foolishness and the Origins of Christianity; 1892) and Shkodra e rrethueme (Shkodra under Siege; 1913). The latter is a history, in the form of a short novel, of the siege of Shkodra during the 1912 Balkan war. Nikaj was arrested by the communists in 1946, during the initial persecution of the Catholic clergy in northern Albania. He was accused rather absurdly, at the age of eighty-two, of “planning to overthrow the government with violence,” and died in a Shkodra prison five years later, in January 1951, a tragic end to a great figure of Albanian culture. Also from Shkodra was Luigj Gurakuqi, a major political figure of the late Rilindja movement in northern Albania, and the author of poetry and both didactic and educational works. His verse, imbued with strong patriotism and the sentimentality of romantic nationalism, was published posthumously in the collection Vjersha (Verse; 1940). Though it contains much lively imagery, including moving descriptions of the changing seasons in his mountainous homeland, it often lacks melody and rhythm. Gurakuqi did have the gift of language, but he was not a sophisticated poet. The classical poet Ndre Mjeda bridges the gap between the late nineteenth-century Rilindja culture and the dynamic literary creativity of the independence period. His poetry, particularly his collection Juvenilia (1917), is noteworthy for its classical style and purity of language. It is probably no coincidence that the title of this work, for which Mjeda is best remembered, is the same as Giosuè Carducci’s lyrical volume Iuvenilia, published almost half a century earlier. Though

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not covering an especially wide range of themes, Mjeda’s poetry demonstrates a refined language under the influence of the nineteenth-century Italian classics and a high level of metric subtlety. By far the most significant figure of Albanian literature in the first half of the twentieth century was the Franciscan father Gjergj Fishta who, more than any other writer, gave artistic expression to the searching soul of the now sovereign Albanian nation. Although he is the author of thirtyseven literary publications, his name is indelibly linked to one of the most astounding creations in the history of Albanian literature, Lahuta e malcís (The Highland Lute; 1937). “The Highland Lute” is a historical verse epic focused on the Albanian struggle for autonomy and independence, in particular the events in northern Albania from 1858 to 1913. This literary masterpiece was composed between 1902 and 1909, but refined and amended by its author over a thirty-year period. It constitutes the first Albanian-language contribution to world literature. The Fishta-dominated Scutarine Catholic school of letters entered a golden age in the early decades of the twentieth century and much credit for this blossoming of Geg culture goes to him. Franciscan poets and scholars like Pashko Bardhi, Marin Sirdani, Anton Harapi, Justin Rrota, Donat Kurti, Gjon Shllaku, and indeed virtually all other Albanian intellectuals who spent their productive years in Shkodra during the first four decades of the century, were influenced in one way or another by the imposing figure of Father Gjergj Fishta. Fishta and the Scutarine school represented the mainstream of Albanian literature up until World War II — creative, innovative, and yet traditionalist. Fishta raised the little Balkan country to the level of literary sophistication that the more advanced nations of Europe had known in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. This in itself was quite a significant step forward in view of Albania’s tardy consolidation as a nation and its sluggish political and cultural development. At this point, a young poet from Shkodra entered the scene, ignoring the now solid traditions of his written culture and taking Albanian literature along the solitary road to modernity. It is with Migjeni, acronym of Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, that contemporary Albanian poetry began its course. Migjeni’s one slender and yet revolutionary volume of verse, Vargjet e lira (Free Verse; 1944), composed over a three-year period from 1933 to 1935, radically altered the Albanian perception of poetry. We are for the first time confronted with verse of acute social awareness and despair. Whereas previous generations of poets had sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the lofty traditions of the nation, Migjeni was the first to open his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling level of misery, disease, and poverty he encountered in Shkodra and in the northern Albanian highlands. He painted a grim portrait of our earthly existence. Rarely did a breath of fresh air or a sublime vision of nature seep through the gloom. Though he did not publish a single book during his lifetime, his works, which circulated privately, were an immediate success. Migjeni paved the way for modern literature in his country, but, alas, his achievement was soon to be nipped in the bud. The year “Free Verse” was published also saw the victory of Stalinism in Albania and the proclamation of the People’s Republic. Tirana — a Lonely Isle of Revolution On November 28, 1944, the communist forces under the command of Enver Hoxha took control of

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Tirana, and on January 11, 1946, the People’s Republic of Albania was formally established with a Soviet-style constitution — an event that changed the course of Albanian history. From the start, the new leaders were suspicious of Albanian writers and intellectuals, regarding the vast majority of them as representatives of the “ancien régime.” It was, therefore, not indoctrination and education that became the primary means of persuading the established intellectuals to conform, but naked terror. The immediate post-war period became an apocalypse for Albanian writers. Large numbers of intellectuals were executed while others were imprisoned for long periods. As to budding young writers, no one will ever know how many of them were dispatched over the ensuing years to internment camps, to dangerous branches of industry, or to some isolated mountain village with no hope of return. The postwar persecution of writers, particularly severe for all those who had ever been abroad, and the break with virtually all cultural traditions in Albania, created a cultural vacuum in the country that lasted until the sixties, at least. The effects of this period of literary and cultural stagnation can still be felt today. The vast body of writing churned out in revolutionary Tirana in the fifties and early sixties proved to be sterile and highly conformist. The subject matter of the period was repetitive, and simplistic texts were spoon-fed to readers time and again without much attention to basic elements of style. Political indoctrination and the fueling of patriotic sentiments in the masses were considered more important than aesthetic values. Like everything else, literature was expected to reinforce revolutionary fervor and consolidate the socialist convictions of the “new man.” Whether this policy attained its objective at all is very doubtful. It could not, at any rate, stimulate talent and ensure literary quality, satisfying the aesthetic needs of the Albanian reader. Despite the extremely unfavorable conditions under which it evolved, Albanian literature managed to recover somewhat by the mid-sixties and continued to make some sluggish progress. The first turning point in the evolution of poetry and prose, after a quarter century of standstill, came in the stormy year 1961, which marked the definitive political break with the Soviet Union and thus with Soviet literary models; this year witnessed the publication of a number of trendsetting volumes, in particular of poetry. A cautious attempt was made by the new generation of writers, including Ismail Kadare, Dritëro Agolli, and Fatos Arapi, to broaden the literary horizon “in search of something new.” Though it constituted no radical change of course, no liberalization or political “thaw” in the Soviet sense, 1961 set the stage for a quarter century of trial and error, which, in the end, led to greater sophistication in Albanian literature. By far the best example of creativity in contemporary Albanian letters is Ismail Kadare, still the only Albanian writer to enjoy a broad international reputation. Kadare’s talent, both as a poet and prose writer, has lost none of its innovative force over the years. His courage in attacking literary mediocrity from within the system brought a breath of fresh air to Albanian culture. Though in Albania he is highly regarded also as a poet, his international reputation has rested entirely upon his prose, in particular upon his historical novels and short stories. Kadare made his literary breakthrough with the novel Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur (The General of the Dead Army; 1963). In the period of relative calm between the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 and the so-called “purge of the liberals” in 1973, Kadare published one of his most impressive novels, Kronikë në gur (Chronicle in Stone; 1971). This work chronicles the fate of Kadare’s beautiful native town of Gjirokastra in southern Albania under occupation during World War II. Known to the Greeks as

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Argyrokastron (“silver fortress”), this city with lofty stone houses, hanging from the mountainside over narrow cobblestone alleys, was successively occupied, like much of Albania at the time, by the Greeks, the Italians, and the Germans. In Ura me tri harqe (The Three-Arched Bridge; 1978) the author returns to the mythical origins of Albania’s haunted history to bring to life one of the most gruesome motifs in oral poetry, that of human immurement. Among Kadare’s more recent novels translated into English are Nëpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave (The Palace of Dreams; 1981), Koncert në fund të dimrit (The Concert; 1988), Dosja H (The File on H; 1990), and Piramida (The Pyramid; 1992). Kadare has done his utmost to emancipate Albanian literature, over which — thanks to his talent and, it must be said, to substantial support from the communist authorities — he reigned as an absolute monarch in the seventies and eighties. Throughout the long decades of dictatorship, he used his freedom, limited as it was, and his innate talent to launch many attacks against the regime in the form of subtle political allegories throughout his works. When the dictatorship finally collapsed and an initial flurry of freedom arrived in 1990, Kadare chose to fulfill his dream and moved to France with his family. From his Parisian exile, he has continued to make notable contributions to both Albanian and French literary culture. Ismail Kadare’s overriding position in contemporary Albanian literature, reinforced by his international reputation, has tended to overshadow the other contemporary Albanian poets and novelists who contributed in one way or another to the advancement of Albanian letters during the last terrible decade of Stalinist dictatorship and during the first, almost equally terrible, decade of freedom before the turn of the millennium. Dritëro Agolli of Menkulas, in southeastern Albania, is a poet of the soil whose verse is widely read and appreciated in his country. Agolli not only served as president of the Albanian Union of Writers and Artists from 1973 to his retirement in 1992, but was also a deputy in the People’s Assembly. Since retirement, he has devoted himself to publishing and has been extremely productive over the last decade. Agolli is also the author of a number of prose works, the best known being his satirical novel Shkëlqimi dhe rënja e shokut Zylo (The Splendor and the Fall of Comrade Zylo; 1973). An important contributor to modern Albanian poetry is Fatos Arapi from Zvërnec, near the port city of Vlora. He is the author of many volumes of philosophical verse, love lyrics, and poignant elegies on death. Of the other Tirana writers, we can mention poets Xhevahir Spahiu from the Skrapar region, Bardhyl Londo from Lipa near Përmet, Visar Zhiti, who served in the nineties as Albanian cultural attaché in Rome, prose writer Besnik Mustafaj from Bajram Curri, who served as Albanian ambassador to France and who has published a number of works in French translation, and short story writer and poet Preç Zogaj. Also noteworthy is the emergence of a generation of female authors, among whom are the prose writers from Tirana, Elvira Dones, now in Switzerland, and Mira Meksi, and poets Mimoza Ahmeti from Kruja, and Lindita Arapi from Lushnja. The post-liberation nineties have found Albania in a seemingly perpetual state of political, economic, and social chaos quite unmatched in any other European country. But what of literature? Publishing has been liberalized and privatized, which has resulted in a steadily growing number of literary publications each year but also in a total lack of quality control. Anyone who has the money can publish whatever he or she wishes. At the same time, after half a century of isolation, Albanian readers have been showing a definite preference for translations of the foreign

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literatures they were once denied, leaving most volumes of contemporary Albanian prose and poetry to gather dust in the bookstores. More worrisome for the preservation of Albania’s cultural heritage is another problem. In view of Albania’s low standard of living and the nation’s erratic political, economic, and social development, in particular after the destruction caused by the 1997 uprising, an extremely large number of intellectuals and young people have recently emigrated, legally or illegally. This ongoing brain drain, compounded by the climate of general despair in the country, has contributed to a perceptible decline in the cultural impetus and literary creativity in Tirana. The phenomenon is temporary and should reverse once a modicum of stability is restored. Prishtina — the Freedom to Be Albanian The fact that creative literature in Albanian was late to arise in Kosovo (Kosova) is a direct result of decades of political oppression that the Kosovo Albanians endured in silence. Albania itself attained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, whereas Kosovo, the “other half” of the Albanian nation, was conquered by the Serbian army and incorporated into Yugoslavia against the will of its Albanian inhabitants. From the start, Albanians were made to feel that they were unwanted guests in the new kingdom of the southern Slavs. Serbian became the only official language of the country, and books and newspapers in Albanian were as illegal in Yugoslavia as they had once been under the Turks. It was the founding in 1949 of the literary periodical Jeta e re (New Life) by poet Esad Mekuli that gave voice to the young generation of Albanian writers in Kosovo and served as an initial forum for literary productions. These as yet inexperienced Albanian authors began publishing in Kosovo during the years 1956 to 1960, at a time when creative writing in Albania itself had all but vanished under the heavy hand of Stalinism. However, it was not until the mid-sixties that Albanian and Kosovo Albanian literature began to be printed in Yugoslavia on a significant scale. Among the leading prose writers of this first generation were Kapllan Resuli, Adem Demaçi, Anton Pashku, Azem Shkreli, and Ramadan Rexhepi. Tragically, this literary generation, which might have laid the foundations for Kosovo prose, was politically annihilated by the ruling Serb authorities before it could give birth to a solid written culture. Of the five mentioned figures, only two — Pashku and Shkreli — survived unscathed. Demaçi languished in prison from 1958 to 1990, Rexhepi managed to escape to Sweden, and Resuli made the dire mistake of fleeing to Albania, where he soon found himself in prison, too. Due to the willful destruction of a whole generation of writers, Kosovo prose did not reach a quality level for many years to come, and the loss can be felt even today. With time, the Albanian language was finally proclaimed “one of the official languages of Kosovo,” but the linguistic and educational rights accorded to the Albanian population remained for a long time rather abstract. Tito’s would-be successor, vice-president Aleksandar Ranković, made active use of the secret police to repress the Albanian population until his fall at the Brioni Plenum of July 1966. Full cultural autonomy was first achieved after much delay under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974. With this change of policy, Albanian culture flourished in Kosovo as never before. It was a brief blossoming, in which education, culture, and literature achieved

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tremendous progress within a short period of time. Countless volumes of Albanian verse and much young prose appeared on the book market. Many works of foreign and Yugoslav literature were translated into Albanian, and a number of works of Albanian literature appeared in Serbo-Croatian translations, providing an initial platform for a better understanding between Albanians and their Slav neighbors. At this time, the Writers’ Union of Kosovo was still a joint institution serving all the Albanian, Serb, and Turkish authors in the province. Nevertheless, the age-old antagonism between Albanians and Serbs prevented any real cultural exchange. Writers remained firmly entrenched within their own language communities. Indeed, Kosovo Albanian writers were more influenced by Serbian translations of contemporary literary currents in France, England, Italy, or North America, than they were by the Serb and Kosovo Serb literature on their doorstep. Ethnic rivalry was simply too strong. The semblance of autonomy and freedom that the Albanians enjoyed throughout the seventies was brought to an abrupt end in 1981, when the demand for republic status and equality with the other peoples of the Yugoslav federation — a demand supported by over ninety percent of the population of Kosovo — was met by Belgrade with tanks and automatic rifles. The 1981 uprising signaled the end of any hope for peaceful coexistence in Kosovo and the beginning of the demise of Yugoslavia. Throughout the eighties, the political and economic situation of the province deteriorated and, as a result, relations between the Albanians and Serbs took a drastic turn for the worse, a harbinger of what was to come for all of Yugoslavia in the early nineties. The Serb military invasion of Kosovo in the summer of 1990 brought the province to the verge of war. It was only a matter of time before the devastation of war would befall Kosovo, too. From 1981 onwards, the Kosovo Albanian intellectuals, while never silent in their struggle for freedom, saw salvation increasingly in terms of inner emigration. Having no other option, the people of Kosovo simply began to ignore the Belgrade government and created a state within a state. They set up their own parallel institutions — schools, universities, health services, a tax system, a government-in-exile, and publishing facilities for books and newspapers — and turned their backs on everything linked to the Yugoslav state. It was in this difficult context that Albanian literature and culture in Kosovo tried to survive. Prose has been the weaker genre to the present, though some interesting works were published from time to time. Among the leading authors of the last two decades are Ramiz Kelmendi of Peja (Peć) and Rexhep Qosja, whose highly political novel Vdekja më vjen prej syve të tillë (Death Comes from Such Eyes; 1974), has appeared in Serbo-Croatian (1976), Slovene (1979), Bulgarian (1982), French (1994), German (1995) and Dutch (1998); also Eqrem Basha from Macedonia and humorist Arif Demolli from Gllogovica. It is, however, poetry that has remained the vanguard of Kosovo literature. The period of relative political peace from the seventies to the early eighties produced a solid generation of talented poets who experimented in a wide variety of styles. Among them are the already-mentioned Azem Shkreli and Eqrem Basha, Enver Gjerqeku from Gjakova, Ali Podrimja from Gjakova, a selection of whose works has been published in English (1997), and Kim Mehmeti from Skopje. In 1998, the long-expected war between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo finally broke out, resulting, in the spring of 1999, in the dramatic deportation of large sections of the Albanian population and in the destruction of much of the country. The city of Gjakova and much of Peja were razed to the ground. The twenty years of apartheid and oppression left their toll on the people

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of Kosovo and thus on their literature. For years, all literary creativity was channeled through a prism of ethnicity; all writing was subordinated to the struggle for national and ethnic survival. The cataclysm has now subsided, and the Albanians of Kosovo are free for the first time. Though it may take time for writers and intellectuals to put the traumatic events behind them and return to normality, the creative spirit in Kosovo/Kosova is strong, and significant literary works may be expected to emerge here.

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Up and Down in Croatian Literary Geography: The Case of the Krugovaši Vladimir Biti A Looping Distinction: the Intrusion of Time into Space In 1951, Ivan Slamnig, one of the prominent members of the generation of Krugovaši (whose name derives from the literary journal Krugovi, i.e., Circles, published from 1952 to 1958; see also Tomislav Brlek’s article on this publication in vol. 3 of our History) wrote the following short untitled poem, which was not published until 1973: Kad mi svega bude dosta evo oči, da ću poći k onome, što dolje osta.

When I’ve had enough of all my eyes I swear I’ll go towards the one left below.

Neću činit više, bome ono, što do sada morah, sjesti ću pod stari orah (sličan onom pokojnome!),

By God, I’ll no longer be what I had to be until now, I’ll sit below the old walnut-tree (similar to the one that’s gone!),

stol će prostrt bit bjelinom, the table will be spread in white, za nj ću sjesti, pa ću jesti I’ll sit at it and will then eat kruh sa sirom, ribu s vinom. bread and cheese, fish and wine. (Slamnig 25; this and other quotations are translated by Stipe Grgas)

Retrospectively, the poem appears significant in several respects. First, it is shaped as a promise or a vow addressed to an imagined circle of companions, or maybe to one of its select members. Endorsed by two oaths (evo oči, bome), which separate the universe of an imagined company from the outside universe, this utterance implies a remarkable stock of shared knowledge on the part of its addressee(s). As its “exteriorized” readers, we are confused at least by two emphasized words (dolje, onom), whose meaning strikes us as extremely vague, as if we were accidentally eavesdropping on a conversation between interlocutors who share an intimate universe of discourse.

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Furthermore, we face a couple of indeterminate pronominals (kad mi svega bude dosta, onome, što dolje osta, ono što do sada morah), as well as nouns (orah, stol) and adjectives (stari, pokojnome), which rely on the ability of their addressee(s) to fill them in with “appropriate” (i.e., intended) meaning. Secondly, the private universe shared by the speaker and addressee appears divided into a satiating up and a mythically stylized down. Inasmuch as this down is, on the one hand, “left behind” and (in the figure of the old walnut-tree) “forever buried” but, on the other hand, simultaneously projected onto a utopian future, it is paradoxically both irretrievably lost and full of promise. The up, on the contrary, appears to be an intermediary zone of the present that successively distinguishes between the buried and the promised down by keeping them connected until a final resolution can emerge. Thus the transient present of the up spreads from an undefined past point of time, when the subject began acting the way it was made to act (ono što do sada morah), to an undefined future point of time when the subject will have “had enough” of this (kad mi svega bude dosta), deciding to act according to the laws of its utopian projection. The up turns fittingly into a kind of necessary passage leading from the past down, fallen apart in a couple of vague vestiges (k onome što dolje osta, sličan onom pokojnome!), to the future down regained in the form of a mythically harmonious community. Finally, by linking the two points into a single line of argument, the “upward” (i.e., apostrophizing) communication cuts off the reader from the poem’s universe much like the “upward” temporal stream of the up-world pushes the uttering subject away from its past down-universe by dissociating the latter into mute vestiges. However, despite the almost unrecognizable character of this down-universe, the subject refuses to give it up, prefiguring thereby the manner in which a future reader, confronted with the poem’s semantically emptied universe, will nevertheless decide to keep faith with it. There is thus an important structural analogy between the vicarious way in which the past down-universe addresses the present up-universe of the lyrical subject and the vicarious way in which the uttering subject addresses its future audience. In both cases, we witness an exemplary mechanism of transference. If the dismembered down-universe demands of the present up-universe of the lyrical subject to keep faith with it until its future harmonious fulfillment, the uttering subject equally demands of the reader to bridge the gap that divides him or her from the frustrating universe of the poem, reading it against the grain. The displacement of the spatial unity of the past into a temporal activity of the present has to be compensated by the displacement of this frustrating and provisional present into a reunited future. This future appears in a quite familiar Romanticist shape: the innocent whiteness of the tablecloth, the fish, bread, and wine, provide together a well-known ambience and enable the emergence of an imaginary community established by intentional choice beyond all the historically inherited links of actual communities imposed by blood, territory, habit, and “social imperatives.” We are reminded of Ernest Renan, who argued “that the non-naturalist principle of the modern nation is represented in the will to nationhood — not in the prior identities of race, language or territory” (Bhabha, Location 160). To quote Renan directly, “The nation’s existence is, if you pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual existence is a perpetual affirmation of life” (19). Constituted by arbitrary signs, imaginary communities live in the “transverse, cross-time” of a perpetual “meanwhile” asking to be reproduced always anew (Benedict Anderson 30). To return to the poem, we are presented with a departure from a present company in the name of an invoked, to-be-consti-

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tuted one. As a point of departure, in both senses of the word, the poem suggests a transference of a supposed past onto a supposed future. (Un)fortunately, both turn out to be lying beyond reach. Out of History, Back to Identity! As the first literary generation after World War II, the Krugovaši were at the mercy of an apocalyptic history (compounded by the paranoia of the Cold War) that deprived them of any traditional background or notion of natural continuity. The literature of the time was drawn into a “revolutionary” narrative that brutally dropped the “decadent” forebears and “bourgeois” surroundings, putting itself completely in the service of the working class. Born in the mid-twenties to early thirties, this generation passed through the shattering experience of the war that left none of them unscathed, even if only some of them participated in battles. This youthful trauma was followed by the violent emergence of a new ruling class. The Yugoslav revolution, like all other ones, devoured its children: many of its enthusiastic participants, who later refused to join the post-war “reckoning” with the former elites, were imprisoned or socially marginalized. The Krugovaši were confronted with the perplexing task of finding a way out of the violent destruction of the past for the sake of the future. Inasmuch as they were unwilling to accept this enforced “upward” history as their own, they decided to drop it in favor of what was left below, behind the allegedly “progressive” march of history. Their chosen keyword was, therefore, tradition. However, after the revolutionary devastation left behind the “heaps of ruins” predicted by Walter Benjamin (255) at the dawn of World War II, no immediate access to tradition was available. Tradition became effectively unintelligible since it was now subsumed to a goal-oriented notion of historical progress that limited the past to a necessary presupposition of the future. Through daily repetitive practice, this notion was firmly impressed into human perception, speech, behavior, and interaction. No deviations were allowed along the way to an allegedly common goal and, if they nevertheless occurred, they were publicly denounced as “decadent” and dangerous. The members of the Krugovaši generation had ample opportunities to become familiar with such public denunciations. After all, they were “decadent” by definition insofar as they refused to recognize the past as merely a determinant of the future’s law. Since the nightmare of history entailed an unbearable present, they were seeking a different, not-yet-known past that would legitimate a different, not-yet-known future. Accordingly, they tried incessantly to wrench their individual present from the officially confined past. As the first important theorist of decadence, Paul Bourget, put it, the decadent consistently insists on the importance of individual life at the expense of the “social organism” (24), even if this results in “complete isolation.” When Bourget found a compensation for this extreme isolation in the hope that “those who will join us will be our brothers indeed” (29), he seems to have thought of groups such as the Krugovaši, which establish their community on the idea of a “desperate brotherhood.” Nietzsche’s explanation of decadence in Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner; 1888) emphasizes additionally ressentiment and anarchism as the moving forces of an “antihumanistic strategy” by means of which modernist artists defend the plurality of life against the repressive unity of official morality:

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What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole — the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will. (The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner 170)

Baudelaire, an exemplary modernist artist, illustrates this attitude well. According to Matei Calinescu (Faces of Modernity 48ff), Baudelaire denied any narrative integrity to the past. He disassembled it into a series of unconnected and incommensurable moments underlying a multitude of imaginary combinations that have to be chosen always anew, departing from provisional present circumstances. Despite such emancipation — or precisely because of it — whoever wants to speak in the name of individual life against common history, undertakes a particularly hard, even contradictory task. First, an arduous effort of imaginary self-estrangement is required from her or him. If history is a way of seeing the world with common eyes, then one can get rid of it only by means of defamiliarizing one’s perception and looking at the world that is allegedly ours as actually being theirs, i.e., an alien world. But who are they if not the inhabitants of our everyday surrounding, our “blinded” parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors, and even we ourselves at a former point of our life? Are we not forced to a kind of a tacit treason in relation to all these instances, are we not obliged to destroy the institutionalized social bond, to cut off an important piece of our own life? In the name of what legitimating agency should this treason and destruction take place and how do we know that this imaginary agency to which we have chosen to surrender is more proper than the one we have just abandoned? Furthermore, is any imaginary agency not necessarily going to turn soon into a real one? As Octavio Paz (27–28) has pointed out, we look for ourselves in the other, but as soon as we reach ourselves in this other, it ceases to be the other, forcing us to chase another remote shadow. The desired otherness of the “future past” seems to be incessantly withdrawing into “a ghostly intimation of simultaneity” (Benedict Anderson 132). Yet the trap of history patiently lies in wait making this simultaneity into an “alienating anterior” (Bhabha, Location 159). The Double-Coded Landscape of Intended Identity These painful questions are addressed, some of them for the first time, by Specijalni izaslanici (The Special Deputies; 1959), a novella written by Antun Šoljan, an important member of the Krugovaši group. The novella presents the story of two “deputies” who make an experimental decision to leave the familiar surroundings of a local coffee-house for the benefit of a brief excursion into another, remote one. How would it feel to be a mere visitor in a company without belonging to it? Being under the protection of the laws of one’s own “homeland,” would one not be free of responsibility, independent, and inviolable? Would one, thereby, not secure oneself an observer position that allows a better evaluation of the local circumstances and relationships than the position of the participant? Indeed, the deputies feel comfortable for a while, like spectators in a theater who watch the events on stage closely without becoming involved in anything:

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And as though they were here only to show themselves, to talk to us, everything was now staged only for us while we sat looking at them with expressionless faces, opaque and distant, hiding behind fake smiles, some thoughts and reckonings known only to us […] and that was why we felt superior because we are the ones who recognize the situation from a broader perspective, we are aware of all the facets of the affair which they perceive only from one angle. (Šoljan, Specijalni 265–66)

Important in this experimental act of intentional estrangement is the deputies’ “multiple awareness” that they will never get involved in any actual drama, being participants in a “greater and more comprehensive drama” generated on a remote group of islands placed within the warmer and exotic surrounding of a sea that they have never navigated and “the smell of which has never touched their nostrils” (266). It is this relaxed down-universe that sends its missionaries into a busy up-universe, but on the pledge never to cross the border between an observing deputy and a participant, resist all such temptations, keeping faith with their distant destination! However rigid this mission may seem, it makes one feel “more important, mighty, and upright because it largely transcends our small private world” (274–75). In a word, it makes one feel that one belongs to a utopian homeland that, if represented properly, all real countries sooner or later will be compelled to acknowledge and respect. “I offer this sacrifice to the glory of the alien country that has acknowledged that I posses a homeland, that has demonstrated that I belong to it” (275). In comparison with the countries that acknowledge it, this homeland is consciously chosen, not unconsciously born into. That is why one never belongs to it the way one belongs to a country. Its imagined community is based on an equivalence, making its members similar in a couple of respects and putting in brackets their differences. They build their intrinsic solidarity against a background of bracketed extrinsic identity; their common route, based on a negative decision not to belong, has no natural destination in itself. This seems to be what the two special deputies mean by saying, “we have distanced ourselves from them into our equivalence” (265). The we of this imagined community rests on a violent exteriorization of they: We had to depend on one another. We had to forget all internal quarrels, although this should not imply that there were none. Each one of us was out for himself but we now found ourselves in a foreign land where we got inebriated on nostalgia and we had to stand firmly next to each other, maintaining a façade of harmony and unison, we had to appear as one. (265)

To paraphrase Homi Bhabha: “it is this forgetting — the signification of the minus in the origin” that constitutes “the beginning” of the homeland narrative; it is “through this syntax of forgetting — or being obliged to forget — that the problematic identification of a people [homeland] becomes visible” (Location 160). Though the deputies declare that they have a “multiple awareness” of a common destiny, they appear sometimes bereft of a clear idea as to why they should actually keep on their holy mission. “What for? In whose name? For whom? […] If only something could arise, something could occur, everything would be easier” (268). After cutting themselves off from the familiar social landscape shaped by the inscribed value boundaries, they are thrown into a state of indifference where no single value seems to be worth working for: “Nothing was to be done. All around there was

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nothing. What shall we do? I asked Mili. Mili did not know and shrugged his shoulders. I do not care. Me, neither. Nobody cares for anything” (268). So the “greater and the more comprehensive drama” that the deputies initially joined turns out to be pushing not so much forward, towards the freedom for a future identification, as backwards, towards the freedom of an anterior identification. Inasmuch as the latter freedom would be lost if invested in any kind of actual value, it can be increased only by an incessant backward distantiation, achieved at the cost of the “freedom for.” According to the tacit rule of their holy mission, the deputies are forbidden to acquire any kind of positive identity based on belonging. However, the potential identity, linked to a hollow and unpredictable future, has to be patiently awaited. “Nothing could be done except to stay and wait. […] You have to understand, folks, we can do nothing. We stood in the middle of a mute crowd, raised our hands, and waited” (275). Who among mortals can endure this kind of askesis, affecting one’s entire body? The idyllic Arcadian landscape of promised identity turns, on the way to it, into a dense metropolitan landscape saturated with traces of committed crimes — a Tatort, in Benjamin’s terms. “You live on the graves of strangers. On corpses. The vineyard we would plant, notre jardin, would grow on corpses” (Šoljan, Kratki izlet 92). The freedom of inherent identity is obtained through its betrayal that, while liberating, constantly threatens a return of the repressed. As it grows, this freedom entails an indifference to former differentiations. Baudelaire spoke in this connection of an imagination voyageuse that contests the deep divisions of the present social life in the name of a projected “world of concordances” (Calinescu, Faces of Modernity 165). Indeed, Šoljan frequently depicts his main figures as voyagers, tourists, or passengers, whose urban mobility clashes with the firm spatial rootedness of the domestic people they meet “on the road.” In a collection of interconnected stories, significantly titled Izdajice (The Traitors; 1961), Šoljan retrospectively presents three friends — Ćuk, Beba, and Mogor (the latter incorporating himself at a previous point of time) — who decide to spend a couple of months in a small town on the Adriatic coast, trying to put in order, for the arrival of a much bigger company, a ruined and empty house newly rented by Ćuk. They soon abandon this initial plan and give themselves over to the various joys of a relaxed tourist life, unconcerned with the hindrances and predicaments of their daily intercourse with the reticent local people. Yet this seemingly Arcadian off-duty sojourn, allowing almost everything that the busy metropolitan life prohibits, is constantly in danger of turning into a land of traps. When Ćuk and Mogor arrive in a small Istrian town, they take part in a local festivity: That odor, that fire, roasting-spits, lamb’s meat […] all of it always reminds me of Turkish times. Impalements on poles. Tallow and circumcision. Flesh and blood. Whether it be of the lambs or the janissaries. I looked up at the hill to catch perhaps a glimpse of the cavalry, spears, of turbans with the half-moon. Or with some other ensign. This ceremony is so small, so encompassed by dangerous hills, that an enemy can be expected at any moment. Flying whatever flags. An enemy who will soon demolish this idyll of well-being and peacetime unconcern […]. (Izdajice 123)

After leaving the festive crowd and eventually the town by taking the coastal road toward Rijeka, where Ćuk’s exhibition is scheduled to take place, the two travelers get lost in the maquis and are suddenly seized by the “iron hand” of panic:

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It suddenly dawned upon me that everything here is dead, metallic, and stiff as this leaf — that there was no salvation. We were finished, in the end everything had shown its true face […]. We were encircled by utter, impenetrable darkness […]. We helplessly looked around but were unable to move in any direction because each of them was an equally hopeless choice. (141)

This landscape dominated by apathy seems to encourage the reemergence of all the prenatal horrors and anxieties kept in check by the value structure of civilization: an uninhabited, precise darkness from which we have gradually been wringing life out, through generations, succeeding in the end. The corpse of our own eye, within our own selves. A darkness that is not a darkness but the absence of light. Are we the ones supposed to return to it the life that we haven’t taken from it? (142)

The characters’ axiological indifference brings them in close proximity to chaos and panic. It is this deeply contradictory connection to Benjamin’s metropolitan Tatort that leads the narrator of Kratki izlet (The Brief Excursion; 1965) to the conclusion: “Panic and apathy are the Procrustean bed upon which the spirit of my generation has been crucified” (Kratki 54). Between Arcadia and the Metropolis Kratki izlet narrates, once again retrospectively, the story of a loose company of young archeologists, art historians, copyists, and photographers who join, in the early post-war years, an excursion to an old Croatian monastery in Istria, which is said to contain beautiful wall paintings. Since by this time all “the principles have been destroyed and all values are dead” (31), it becomes necessary to “trace back a part of the road to be able to proceed further” (32). As we know by now, tracing back the road means entering the forbidden Arcadian landscape of the down-universe, which is freed from the obligatory routes of the “philistine life that confines by its norms and its habits” (Donat, “Raport iz Arkadije” 254). No responsibility toward the local people is required, none of the standard reservations and scruples (Kratki 65). Looking through a moving bus window, both literally and figuratively, the narrator declares in the name of the small company: We started to gradually lull ourselves into indifference, that intercellular hibernation of the spirit when man does not establish close contact with anything, when he does not create relationships. […] We will not live here: we have other, more important goals. We have to arrive somewhere […]. Only two points remained alive in our consciousness: whence we had come from and where we will be arriving. Everything else is no more than a long-standing habitual and unchanging system of contingencies into which we better not peer too closely. (47–48)

Thus eased into a comfortable unconcern towards the environment they pass through, they perceive no more differences among the various landscapes, just a repetition of the same, until they finally reach “an utter emptiness that makes us hover instead of walk” (102). Being far removed from a life-giving Arcadia, this horrible waste stirs various anxieties, making the travelers abandon their common undertaking one after another. True, all of them had been fleeing the traced route of their

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lives toward a “shapeless foggy figure of wonder in the remote future” (Izdajice 204), but upon entering the fog they are gradually deprived of the sight of the enemy and, with it, of the security and self-confidence regarding the purpose of their flight. How can one orient oneself in the dense “world full of good and bad signs, for the sick as well as the healthy people,” a world that demands of us “to be cunning and alert enough to recognize them in time? (Kratki 162). Under this uncanny pressure, a suspicion gradually arises that the companions have probably embarked upon a “furious pursuit of something that is actually impossible to find” (38). Have they not been coaxed again into entering a story that is not theirs at all, putting themselves enthusiastically in the service of someone else’s purpose? “You see nobody, but you know you must not trust this (semblance)” (Izdajice 204). Indeed, how can you trust it if the vaguely contoured landscape is saturated with hidden memory traces (Freud’s Erinnerungsspuren), incessantly threatening to re-assimilate your present into a troublesome history? “This is another world […] making other things valid. But the feeling that we were returning somewhere we’d already been was stronger than anything else” (Kratki 105). Or, as the character states elsewhere: “I am reminding myself, as if from an enormous temporal distance, of something that I’ve already seen and partly forgotten” (100–101); “I had the impression that we were incessantly circling” (48). How can we protect our fragile present from being swallowed up by the historical past and violently pressed into its habitual patterns? Or, as Rainer Nägele asks in his essay on “Benjamin’s “Ground”: How to save the unassimilable Ur-sprung of events, their leap out of any narrative stream, their irreducible in-dividual remains (22)? The conclusions Kratki izlet draws are not reassuring: “Is here everything already forgotten, the war, the killing, the blood, the hunger, the horror? Is, indeed, everything vanished, without leaving behind a single trace?” (105); “Then the whole of this route has been nothing but a mighty return” (130). Horrified by the desert of indifference, threatening to draw each of them into an alien story that will victimize their individuality, the travelers bid one-by-one farewell to the company. We are already familiar with this problem from Izdajice, where Beba, after returning to the company of the traitors, explains as follows her “excursion” that destroyed the love between Pierre and Vera: Our isolation is futile because it is such only by agreement and is not founded on blood […] we’ve forgotten, we’ve neglected the soul, our entrails, blood, seriousness. We no longer have confidence in our blood because it has betrayed so many before us […]. Everything we regarded with indifference was good to us […] to me it seemed that there was something more valuable than that agreement, than our nonchalance, than our separateness […]. (Izdajice 113–14)

Paying tribute in this manner to the inherited law of the body, Beba actually redoubles her treason by betraying a company already based on treason. As her companion, Ćuk, reminds the third companion Mogor: “to betray this treason means to be a real traitor. To keep faith indeed with something outside of us, to be really dependent on something, that is treason” (104). This is the only true treason because it leads to a final dissolution of the company that considered itself from the outset as the only “authentic nation, the only kinship in a fragile, transient world” (109). It is hardly an accident that the concept of nation is mentioned twice in close connection with the company, since the nation — a “gathering of the scattered people” (Bhabha, Location 139), filling the void left in the uprooting of local communities — necessarily protects its inner integrity

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by declaring war on an outside enemy. Ćuk rightly claims, therefore, that “treason is contained in our credo. We are together just because we are all traitors to a degree” (Izdajice 104). As Michael Shapiro explains: What the subject/nation represents as a hostile object of an aggressive aim is in part a stand-in for an inward aim; its antagonistic status is produced by the drive for inner coherence, an attempt to assemble harmoniously those elements of the self or the order that defy this coherence. (59)

The episode with Beba seems similar to the way in which the characters in Kratki izlet successively quit the company while on their excursion. We are reminded of Hegel’s argument in The Philosophy of Right (114f) that, as the sense of an outward enemy is lost in the course of the inner individualization of the community, the integrity of the “nation” threatens to fall apart. Indeed, in Kratki izlet the driver forsakes the trip in order to repair the bus, two drunken Slovenes fall asleep, Petar, attracted by three “excessively female” women, jumps out, Vladimir is charmed by a heavy Istrian wine, Ivan buys an old house in the region where he was supposedly born, etc. However, contrary to Beba, these characters do not undertake their own excursion into life in order to return afterwards to the “mainstream” of the collective journey they quit. Rather, they drop from the common excursion in order to return to the abandoned “mainstream” of life. They do so apparently seduced by Roko, becoming entrapped within his story. So if we compare Izdajice with Kratki izlet, the question arises who is actually to be considered an off-the-road-excursionist if every excursion may on given conditions turn into the mainstream and any mainstream into a side trip? It seems that Arcadia and the metropolis are never clearly distinguishable from each other. Don Juan and Sganarelle Since the generation of Krugovaši was determined to enter a world full of “good and bad signs” and since this risky ambiguity characterized each sign of their chosen environment, confronting them with the urgency of interpretation and proper selection, it should not come as a surprise that they desperately sought a reliable guide able to distinguish, making decisions in their place. The company of travelers in Kratki izlet relied, at least at the beginning, almost blindly on Roko. “From the stagnant swamps of their own lives, his life presumably appeared as clear mountaintop ozone” (28). Since “they themselves were not able to see further than their nose […] everything, with the exception of the voyage toward his ostensible oasis on the horizon, appeared like a barren desert” (37). He was necessary “perhaps not so much to them as to some general, unfathomable purpose, to some spirit of the times, to some primary life principle, to some values which transcended human comprehension” (31). He seemed to be “the only one capable of showing us that there was sense in doing exactly what we were about” (41). Nevertheless, after getting lost in a waste inhabited by a couple of vague indices, all but the journalist-narrator leave Roko:

him.

“This way” — said Roko turning — “if I have chosen the right points of orientation.” “If I only knew in relation to what,” I murmured to myself but without hesitating to follow

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After remaining alone with the future narrator — at the time a journalist reporting the trip for a factory journal — Roko uses a significant literary reference to name this desperate manifestation of trust in him — he calls the journalist “my Sganarelle.” This is a clear hint at their mutual relationship: Roko stylizes himself as Don Juan, the exemplary traitor who, as it were, never feels obliged to respect his promises. Shoshana Felman, who has insightfully investigated the wide-ranging implications of this distinctive trait of Don Juan’s character (25–58), points out his rigidly autoreferential concept of language. The promises are exemplary performatives, drawing their force from the pragmatically achieved situational effect and not, like constatives, from an inherent meaning or truth-value. They belong to habitual language games. If an addressee ascribes to them a constative value, this is due to his or her self-recognition in an addressee-mirror, and not to a truthfulness of the utterance itself. The promise maker feels no obligation to take any responsibility for such consequences. The responsibility is upon those who, for whatever reason, decide to trust him, as if his performative had, indeed, a common real purpose, not just a particular linguistic one. This is exactly what Roko points out when the journalist-narrator accuses him not only of having coaxed the company into entering a landscape of ruins but also of giving up now, as though they had really reached their promised goal: “Why did you lead us then?” I suddenly exclaimed in anger, while weakness sputtered in my voice. “Where did you lead these people?” Roko’s shoulders sagged peacefully. “Who me? What people?” he asked with only a bit of irony. “Are you in your right mind? Why would I lead anybody? I was only the organizer, or, better yet, the leader of the excursion. All of you wanted to go. Did you or did you not want to go? I forced no one. All of you traveled forth of your own free will. My dear man, I have only fulfilled your common wish; you chose me to do so […].” “[T]hey had confidence in you. They thought, just as I had thought, that you really knew where you were leading us […] why you were leading us […] they believed in you. Why didn’t you tell us everything?” “What do you mean by everything?” Roko replied arrogantly. “There is nothing to say. Just as there is nothing to find […]. We’ve come all the way up here. As you can see, there is nothing further. We’re going back. And then all over again. From the beginning.” (128–29)

As Felman reminds us, “the breach or break is, in reality, the structuring principle of the Don Juan myth.” Accordingly, in Molière’s play “breaks constitute, paradoxically, the connecting principle itself. […] Don Juan is characterized as the one who, by definition, is always in motion. […] Don Juan is the one who does not stay — both in the spatial sense of remaining in one place, staying at

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home, inhabiting a place, and in the temporal sense of lasting, enduring, staying the course. Structuring the linking of scenes, Don Juan’s discontinuous movement thus defines his double relation to space and to time” (45–46). Hence Don Juan’s life trajectory is a mere addition of routes that he runs through for no other purpose than keeping himself going — much like a machine would do. To stop would be tantamount to dying. Don Juan surges forward while feeling down his neck the cold breath of chasing death. Roko resembles him in being as “mechanical as an ant, blind, shortsighted, obsessed, a machine of God […] not knowing what moves him but helpless to resist it, indifferent towards both the results and the disappointments” (Kratki 131). He cannot be accused of treason because, as opposed to the other companions, he is incapable of making any kind of pledge, or trusting any kind of community. He is without soul, functioning like an impersonal machine. However, he is not alone. No machine could be kept in motion without human aid and such is the case with Don Juan/Roko, too. He desperately needs new clients in order to feed his drive. He cannot keep going without someone trusting him, servicing his passage from one leg of the journey to another — but not further. This is the point of dissension between Don Juan and Sganarelle, as well as between Roko and the journalist-narrator. Sganarelle asks for his wages, whereas the journalist insists upon some sense for the undertaken trip. Neither one of them is ready to accept the “officially” declared end of the route without announcing his own distinctive interests. This marks the passage out of (his)story back to one’s own identity. What is left to the Servant, if not to become the Master himself, after the Master has withdrawn, renouncing any responsibility? Behind the back of the Master’s history, the journalist proceeds with his own search for a past, entering the down-universe of a secret underground corridor that his remote ancestors had supposedly dug in order to flee the potential conquerors of the monastery. This down-universe makes him feel reunited with the fathers and grandfathers, part of the mighty stream of the national tradition: [T]he dead are not dead, enclosed in the niches of the graves, but stream underneath the earth like nutritious juices irrigating the world. And now I know that my journey, my search was not senseless because I am not alone but belong to this river that flows incessantly, and I continue them, I continue their journey, […] their striving for the goal I am not yet permitted to see but which has to exist. They, in me, will come a step nearer to that goal just as I in them have come to where I am now, and just as I perhaps will reach one day the goal itself in my descendants. (136)

However, this imaginary community does not keep its promise of salvation either. Followed by the “terrible, hollow, mechanical laughter of the ancestors,” the journalist faces at the end of the corridor “a boundlessly spreading grey, wavy rocky soil. It was as though I was not walking over rocks but over bundles of wool up to my ankles. It was like some spectral new birth on the deafened earth. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing” (138). After a while, all the imaginary communities of the down-universe disintegrate into mute fragments, pale traces, and vague indices. They turn out to have no historical endurance, but only a provisional, situational existence. As “that special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests” (Benedict Anderson 132), they have an eminently performative character that entices us continually — like a metropolitan landscape or a literary work — to (re)enter the aesthetic bliss of their “unisonance,” but at our own peril. Once we have been introduced to their magical landscape, open to a plurality of possible

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routes, they become simultaneously irresistible and irretrievable. “Because once a man falls in love with the plains or the mountains, with the sea or a river […,] he will never leave them behind […]. They haunt him in his dreams, at the standstill moments of time. They suddenly appear to him in the form of some other object, in the emotion of some other love, in the expression of some other gentleness.” However, the beloved Arcadian landscape can never be fully recalled because the “eerie other” will be “[p]artially that one, partially another. No one” (Izdajice 87). The founding identity of our imaginary community gradually takes the shape of a slippery chain of “alienating anteriors” (Bhabha, Location 159). For this reason, “the other world” shared with the ancestors is forever lost as well. Šoljan seems to have been following Baudelaire’s conception of Modernism in dissolving the past into a succession of singular moments deprived of any natural connection. Since we are primarily cut off from it, our past may never have existed: “Maybe I have never moved from here. Maybe I have never gone on any kind of trip” (Kratki 139). Nothing is certain any more, witnesses and evidence are all gone when the journalist decides to recall the event and tell the story. Not even the name of the monastery, a crucial proof of its real existence, can be retrieved, in spite of the journalist’s repeated efforts through the many years that elapse between the alleged trip and its narrative reconstruction. Thus the story may be understood as simply acting out one of the narrator’s “ugly dreams” and unresolved past promises, chasing him, just like Don Juan and Roko are incessantly chased and pushed into action: “You will recall the desires you could never fulfill, the opportunities you were not ready to use, the freedom you were not ready to enjoy” (Izdajice 179). No wonder the narrator’s solution is, like that of Don Juan’s, a performative story denying any responsibility for its truth-value. The narrator openly acknowledges an allegorical break between his present representation and past reality. The experienced “unisonance” with the ancient fathers is possibly only a fiction that “looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past” (Benedict Anderson 132); this may be the case with the story as well. But if the ruined past has nevertheless managed to find in the narrator a keeper for the future, perhaps the fragmented story will reach its trustee in a reader as well: “I know that in the words that follow I have not succeeded in bringing to life the man all of us knew. Reader, this man and this world is for you” (Kratki 31). A Distinctive Loop: the Intrusion of Life into Art As readers of Kratki izlet, we are positioned like the reader of the Slamnig poem, discussed at the beginning of this article, and the narrator in Izdajice: the expropriated position of Sganarelle. Instead of receiving the promised award for our invested endurance — rescue in a utopian world of possibilities that liberates us from the rigid boundaries of the real world — we arrive at an ambiguous state of “meanwhile” (Benedict Anderson 30) that prompts an uneasy decision: either to drop out or to continue the search for a foggy and risky “homeland.” The narrator, by continuing Roko’s story, is finally able to insert Roko into a literary narrative and shape him into a particular literary type; this can be understood as an invitation to the reader to similarly “historicize” the narrator. However, as was the case with the relationship between Roko and the future narrator, there is no guarantee that the reader addressed in the quotation above is any particular reader at all: by narcissistically recognizing ourselves in this impersonal mirror we are probably repeating the

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mistake committed by all of Don Juan’s and Roko’s victims. We are taking an evasive performative for a firm constative. Hence, the narrator of Izdajice reminds us that we can write a history only for “our own purposes” (92). And this is also what the narrator of Kratki izlet does. But how are we to write “our own” history if all histories in the realm of literature are always already ritualized by a particular mode, genre, style, point of view, repertory of figures, and a type of intended audience? Entering the up-universe of literary communication, our own story inadvertently turns into someone else’s story. To record someone else’s story in a naïve vein, however, means to be perceived as part of the down-universe of the world of literary values, to be embedded into its popular stream relying on stereotypes. From a modernist point of view, this kind of story is emptied of life credibility without which, paradoxically, no proper aesthetic value can be achieved. The “substance” of life is, needless to say, no more available once we enter literature: it lies beyond the threshold of the structures of a particular literary realm. But one is nevertheless obliged to keep faith with this irretrievable down-universe in order to reach the up-universe of the fictional realm s/he has entered. The solution for this predicament proposed by the Krugovaši was to make the subject of narrative utterance vulnerable to some anterior life history that is permanently acted out in the course of a literary story in the form of an incurable pain or frustration. This mood of resentment towards the unresolved past subverts its narrative reproduction into a derivative scene of ambiguous memory traces — an exposition des anderen Schauplatzes, as Freud used to describe the unconscious. To which of the scenes — the down-universe of life or to an up-universe of literature — should we readers-analysts assign these fragments? To an anterior narrated situation or to a posterior situation of narrating? By blurring the boundary between life and literature, by consequently depriving both of them of authenticity, the Krugovaši accepted Nietzsche’s famous lesson from The Case of Wagner, according to which, in the era of leveling mass culture, any kind of authenticity becomes useless and even harmful. The decadent figure, illustrated through Wagner as “incomparable histrio,” is an actor inasmuch as s/he always hypocritically (and dangerously) “mimes the truth” (The Birth of Tragedy 172–73). None of the masks s/he wears are to be identified with his or her own face; each one points “somewhere beyond.” Hence the frequent view that the Krugovaši use literary narratives allegorically in order to point toward an extra-literary (political, historical, philosophical, or psychological) truth (Šoljan, “Kratka povijest” 60; Donat, Bogatstvo vrta 94; Visković 11ff; Milanja 52ff). Hence the obligatory carnival mask of Slamnig’s lyrical subject; hence also, as in the case of Slobodan Novak (see Biti), the recourse to a highly sophisticated quasi-autobiographical fiction, to use Franz Stanzel’s terminology (Theorie 268ff). However, the distinctive loop of the generation remains always the same: hermetically sticking to the down-universe of damaged life with the modernist aim of occupying the up-universe within the hierarchy of literary values. It is a universe that consistently frustrates the habitual reader’s drive toward identification. No agency that could be charged with a final responsibility is available; all agencies point “somewhere beyond” by turning the plot into a chain of transferences that lie in wait for its continuation. Insofar as the plot is no longer holding the novel together, the works of the Krugovaši lack structure in the sense of an organized pattern. They dissolve into a variety of successive episodes characterized by their autonomous “validity claims.” Their unity is, therefore, not to be contemplated after the process of reading is over but concatenated through a persistent transgression. As a “unity of potential unities” (Morson and Emerson 261), the work

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deprives the past of the right to rule over the present in a systematic modernist manner. Baudelaire, as explained by Matei Calinescu, can help here: Baudelaire thinks that what has survived (esthetically) from the past is nothing but the expression of a variety of successive modernities, each one of them being unique […]. There is no link between these individual entities and, therefore, no comparison is actually possible. That is why an artist cannot learn from the past. […] With characteristic logical rigor, Baudelaire means by modernity the present in its “presentness,” in its purely instantaneous quality. […]. Separated from tradition […], artistic creation becomes an adventure and a drama in which the artist has no ally except his imagination. (Faces 49–50)

In structuring their works in a transgressive way, the Krugovaši confronted their readers with the adventurous task of an “artistic creation” to be achieved on their own. A rather challenging demand, to be sure, since readers were neither ready nor able to cut themselves off from past identifying habits. But the latter were now delegated into the realm of low artistic values. Thus the consequent blurring of the distinction between past and present was from the beginning connected to its painstaking redrawing. It was left to the postmodernist descendants of these writers to blur the boundary of the drawn distinction once again.

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Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe Seth L. Wolitz

1.

Ashkenaz: a General Term for the Jewish Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Imaginary

ASHKENAZ is a complex designation for the Jewish “realm” which has existed for a thousand years both in the Jewish psyche and, at times, as a de facto/de jure condition (autonomy). As with any geopolitical reality, the borders of Ashkenaz have changed over time. In the early medieval period, Ashkenaz began as the territory denominated by the Jews long settled in the Rheinphalz and in Northwestern Europe. With migrations steadily moving eastward from the German speaking territories between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the geopolitical term Ashkenaz shifted as well. By 1900, Ashkenaz no longer included Germany and Northwestern Europe but instead incorporated the territories of the Jews living east of the Oder-Neisse, the Respublica Polonicae, the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia (an area consisting of twenty-five provinces that included Ukraine, Lithuania, Belorussia, Crimea, and part of Poland, where Jews were confined to live from 1791 until 1915), and expanded in the old Soviet Union and Romania down to Bucharest. The term does not designate the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, where the Sephardic inheritance dominated.

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Ashkenaz serves today as a topographical cultural and social imaginary in which Central and Eastern European Jewry maintained a sense of its ethnos and ethos that was recognized — often with legal restrictions — as such by the surrounding populations. In addition to common ethnoreligious practices, the spoken language shared by the Ashkenazim was Yiddish (as Ladino was among the Sephardim) that developed in their eastward migration. Hebrew was their religious language and served as a medium for Rabbinical written discourse until the nineteenth-century secularization movements. Ashkenaz as a territorial polity is, therefore, not coextensive with the plural noun Ashkenazim, which designates the descendants of Jews from the expanse of Ashkenaz, as well as those who have emigrated out of the Ashkenazic space but who adhere to or continue its distinctive practices. In spite of their diversity, the Ashkenazim share a psychological, cultural, and theological matrix that distinguishes them from the Sephardim, the Jews descended from Spain and the Mediterranean basin. As a “Jewish realm,” Ashkenaz shares a physical and metaphysical reality that has survived even the destructions of history. The vast space that Ashkenaz occupies can be divided into regions with distinct historical, cultural, and political conditions. The regions of Ashkenaz tend to follow the oldest boundaries of the Gentile geopolitical realms. A Jew who is called a Litvak inhabits the space of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and his cultural-religious practices, Yiddish dialect, as well as dress and food preferences differ from the Polish Jew living on the Vistula; the latter, in speaking Yiddish, changes the accented vowel u>i and palatalizes the consonant [l], wears a biretta type skull cap rather than the high and round one favored by the Litvak style, and sugars his gefilte fish whereas a Litvak peppers his favorite Friday night Sabbath dish. A Galitsianer is a Jew from the old Galicia; a Ukrayner inhabited only the space of the old Polish-occupied Ukraine and was kept there by the Tsarist Pale of Settlement proclamation. A Rumeyner refers to a Jew from Moldavia, Bucovina, and Walachia. Even religious sects developed regional differences. To this day the Polish Hasidim wear flat rounded shtreymls (sable hats) and silk kaftans like the Polish Szlachta (aristocrats) of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whereas the Litvaks wore spodeks, conical shaped hats. The Jews were significantly affected by the regions in which they lived. Consequently, they absorbed Slavic customs that did not contravene to their religious ethical system. In 1900, Ashkenaz existed in the Jewish mind as a metaphysical reality, a territorial worldview in which the Jew functioned in tandem with the political and legal realities of the hegemonic power. 2.

Jewish Autonomy in Eastern Europe

Although Jews were present in Kiev during the great days before the Tatar invasions, only a few of these Eastern Jews trickled westward. They are recorded very early in Halich (Galich). The majority of the Jews, however, began to arrive from the West either at the invitation of the ruling authorities or drawn by trading opportunities. By 1264, Prince Boleslav V presented the Jews with the “statute of Kalisz” (Pol. Statut kaliski), a general charter renewed by each successive Polish king, which provided Jews with legal status and protection. Depending on the mood or politics of the king, Jewish privileges expanded or contracted. In 1389, the Jews of Lithuania received from the Grand Duke the greatest number of privileges, which gave them economic equality with the

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Christian citizens. As essentially “royal chattel,” the Jews helped develop trade, lend money, and settle towns. Their main function was to produce tax revenue. The government of Poland sought to rationalize tax collection, and what developed was the unique Jewish institution called the Council of the Four Lands (Heb. Vaad Arba Artsot), which was granted civil autonomy to assess and collect poll taxes, police the Jewish community, and provide a well-ordered judiciary. This institution began in 1519 in Great Poland and brought together representatives from Little Poland, the Lvov region, and Volhynia; they met twice yearly at the fairs of Lublin and Yaroslav, where the Council’s elected representatives, generally merchants and Rabbis, deliberated. The Jews of Lithuania organized their own Council by 1533. This structure represented the highest level of autonomy ever attained by Jews within a national framework in Europe and functioned effectively until it was abolished by the Polish Sejm in 1764, as part of an attempt to create a modern centralized bureaucracy. The Council served as intercessory between the Crown and the Jews and stood at the head of a chain of community control that began with the kehilla, or elected community body, in the large towns. The Council dealt with all questions of civil Jewish life and served as the highest court of appeal. The Rabbis functioned primarily in the judiciary, and they used Talmudic law and its contemporary interpretations as the basis of their legal code. Scholars were honored by being exempted from taxation. The Shtadlan was the Jewish representative to the Royal Court and Sejm, and he negotiated the tax questions and other Jewish interests of the kingdom. These elected officials to the Councils represented the interests of the “silk Jews,” a patrician democracy. The Councils were legally empowered to affect the social, ethical, economic, and legal aspects of Jewish life. They not only permitted the Jews to exercise internal autonomy — a freedom that reinforced the Jewish polity — but also maintained an effective self-defense, protecting the rights to autonomy the Jews had been granted. The Councils handled all civil disputes, and a Gentile suing a Jew could choose between a Jewish court and his own. All criminal cases, such as murder or treacherous acts, lay outside its competence and fell exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Crown courts. The Jews, in short, obtained the right to function as a distinct ethnic group in the Respublica. This memory haunted East-European Jewry throughout the nineteenth century and served as an ideal for Jewish Autonominism and even Zionism. The “Golden Period” of Polish Jewry is generally regarded as running parallel with Poland’s great days, from 1500 to 1648. This period knew remarkable prosperity and Jewish internal cultural life flourished. Unlike the Golden Era in Spain, the Jewish culture consisted of a distinctly religious lifestyle but did not produce philosophers or great poets. Rather it eschewed such types. Rationalism was certainly part of Polish-Jewish thought, but mysticism entered this life strongly as well. Important Rabbinic figures such as Isaac Ben Solomon Luria, Moses ben Israel Isserles — the great codifier of Ashkenazic religious practices —, and his pupil Abraham ben Shabbetai Horowitz — whose large tome, Shnei Lukhot Ha Brit (Two Tablets of the Law; 1698), captures the rational and mystical trends of the time — illustrate the unique richness of Jewish life inside traditional religious parameters. This was a conservative patriarchal world. The texts it produced were written in Rabbinic Hebrew, which only men could read, for women were rarely instructed in Hebrew. They had to be content with old Yiddish chapbooks and oral tales.

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The three most significant historical events that mark premodern Jewish life in Slavic domains are the Khmelnitski Rebellion (1648–55), the Shavtei Tsvi False Messianic moment (1665– 66), and the collapse and partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. The Khmelnitski era left the deepest scars on the Jewish psyche, for its violence was unprecedented despite — or perhaps directly as a result of — relative Jewish economic and social recovery. The Shavtei Tsvi False Messiah moment, though short, exploded many givens of Jewish religious and ethical life, and opened the doors not only to despair but to new thoughts on the Jewish condition. It also exposed the tensions inherent in the rigid Jewish class distinctions between the learned and unlearned. The dry erudition it favored offered little meaning to the uneducated Jewish masses. Sabbateanism provoked the counter-movement of Jewish “quietism” led by Israel ben Eliezer Ba’al Shem Tov. Chasidism, in its ecstatic emphasis on pure faith and less learning, revived the Jewish masses. This revivalist movement did not eschew the tenets of Judaism but rather emphasized the sacrality of even the most ordinary act as a joyous participation in the great healing (Tikkun) of the universe. Chasidism rekindled Jewish life within its premodern parameters. It also had a profound effect on modern Jewish literary culture through its legitimation and use of Yiddish and through its hagiographic storytelling tradition that provided the basis for artistic development of the language and literature. In opposition to this popular movement, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as the Vilna Gaon (genius), revived a highly rationalist Orthodoxy that continues to this day, particularly among descendants of Greater Lithuanian Jewry. The collapse of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century was as much a calamity for the Jews as it was for the Poles. In the case of the Jews, their legal status and livelihood were threatened. They were attacked for their separateness, by the Left in the spirit of Enlightenment universalism and by the Right with the conviction that the separateness of the Jews was harmful to the prosperity of the Polish people. By 1800, Jewish life, for better or for worse — depending on who ruled what section of the partitioned Respublica — was sundered from its golden days of partial autonomy. 3.

The Jewish Condition from 1800–2000

The nineteenth century represents the encounter of Central and Eastern Jewry with the West, wrenching Jewish life from its moorings and leading to: 1) a Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskalah; 2) accommodation with the hegemonic powers (Prussia, Austro-Hungary, Russia) and/or assimilation; 3) religious retrenchment and ultra-traditionalist attitudes; 4) Jewish nationalism based on absorbed Western models and the development of political movements; and 5) emigration. Above all, the secular Western encounter sparked the development of a new secular Jewish culture that attempted to take a middle position between opposing assimilation into the other cultures and resisting the traditionalist religious scorn. The Jews in Prussian Poland steadily identified with advanced German Jewish life that reduced Jewish ethnic identity to religious identity. The Jews of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire encountered difficulties until the era of Franz Joseph, when, through “joint” accommodation, Jews enjoyed broad tolerance legally as individuals, though their ethnicity was granted no juridical significance.

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The Eastern regions maintained Yiddish, but German and Magyar were making inroads in the rest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tsarist Russia placed the Jews inside the coils of the Pale of Settlement and restricted Jewish legal status and economic life. As a result, although Jews underwent a demographic growth in the Russian Empire throughout the nineteenth century, their existence was fraught with danger and anti-Semitic persecution. In Russia, the Jews encountered pogroms — especially from 1881 onward — and a repeated loss of minor legal and social gains. The Jews of East-Central Europe may have adapted to changing conditions in various manners, but their ethnic communal identity remained intact. The aftermath of World War I brought more misery. In addition to the massive displacements caused by the Great War, the creation of nation-states — with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia — proved calamitous for the Jews, for they became unwanted minorities all over Eastern Europe, and their social and legal status came under threat from rising anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, the cultural achievements just before World War I and in the interwar period represent one of the most important moments of Jewish creativity during its long Diasporic period. Not only did quality writers prosper in various languages, but also Jewish art and music emerged and often worked in tandem, particularly in theaters such as the Moscow Yiddish State Theater and the Moscow Habima. The Holocaust, however, obliterated almost all of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe and their physical monuments, leaving only cultural shards. At the beginning of the Soviet period (1917–22), Jewish culture — encouraged by the new state — seemed to thrive. However, with the rise of Stalin to absolute power, and the new directions in which he turned the communist party, Jewish culture alongside the intelligentsia of all other groups was forced to conform to the dictates of party ideology. The closing down of Jewish publications, and of cultural and educational institutions, which started in 1937, spelled the doom for further Jewish cultural development. The mass murder of the leaders of Yiddish culture on August 12, 1952, put an end to the Jewish hope for national and cultural revival within the ideal of Soviet Socialism. What the Holocaust had so devastatingly initiated, was finally accomplished by Stalin. The post–World War II People’s Republic of Poland supported a Potemkin-Village Yiddish culture for propaganda purposes, but its spurious accomplishments kept Yiddish alive artificially. Romania also supported a relatively vibrant Yiddish State Theater, but Jewish life was all but nonexistent. Efforts since the Communist era to revive Jewish life and culture appear today wishful rather than real throughout East-Central Europe. 4.

The Centrality of the Shtetl in Ashkenaz: the Jewish Motherland

The shtetl (Pol. Miasteczko) can be considered, in the spirit of a British market town, a place where once a week the Gentile peasants came to sell their farm products and buy manufactured goods from Jewish merchants and shopkeepers. The relationship between Jews and peasants was symbiotic. The shtetl depended on this trade for its livelihood. Long-term business relations existed, but the Jewish tavern was not a pub where Jews and Gentiles mingled socially. The size of a shtetl could range from 2,000 to over 10,000 people and even more. But its role as an emporium for the district remained constant. Jews often represented the majority of the population in most

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shtetlekh, particularly as one traveled eastward. The shtetl began in the Polish Respublica as a means of opening crown lands. By the eighteenth century the shtetl became a favored way of the Szlachta (nobility) to develop their domains by inviting Jews to settle, create townships, and exploit the natural resources of their lands. The Jews functioned in the arenda system, a Polish legal structure of leasing land, timber, and liquor rights, or other related rights, to the Jews in return for guaranteed revenues and for serving the Polish landowners as purveyors and often bailiffs of their vast estates. The Jews came as craftsmen, as well as businessmen, so that the shtetl functioned as a viable economic unit. Left to themselves, the Jews of the shtetlekh organized well-structured communities and lived rich lives. Their local political legal structure was the kehile, which was made up of the leading merchants and rabbinic figures who levied the taxes, provided a Rabbinic law court (Bet Din), policed the shtetl, maintained fair business practices, aided the educational institutions, underwrote local charities, supported a hospital and an Old Age home, proffered dowries to orphans, and developed related charitable and communal institutions. The kehile represented the shtetl to the Polish nobleman, who delivered his demands to them often through the main arenda figure. The shtetl was highly stratified. The rabbinic families and rich merchants were known as the silk Jews (zaydene Yidn) who continually intermarried among themselves; the rest of the shtetl’s population comprised ordinary Jews (proste Yidn) who distinguished themselves by trade and craft, and included those who made their livings as woodcutters and unskilled laborers. Religious life dominated the shtetl and traditional Jewish law codes; the Talmud and the Responsa provided guides and precedents for making legal judgments and for structuring the cycle of Jewish life. The Jews rose when the Shammes (beadle) of the synagogue struck a mallet on the shutters of their dwellings to call the males to morning prayers. In winter, breakfast in poor homes consisted of reused tea leaves and crusts of rye bread rubbed with onion. In richer homes milk products, hard-boiled eggs, and herring were consumed. In summertime, tomatoes, cucumbers, sliced peppers, radishes, and greens were eaten by all. The main meal at midday was generally without meat in poor homes. Only a few could afford meat or fish daily. Jews lived by the strict laws of Kashrut that decreed the separation of milk and meat products, and prescribed a careful practice of ritual slaughter of only specific animals. At sunset, the male Jews prayed at the local synagogue before returning home for a light supper. The week concluded with the Sabbath — generally a set piece in Jewish literature in all tongues and from all perspectives, but mainly nostalgic. On Friday afternoon, the boys would return from kheder (elementary religious school) early. The men, too, stopped work early, went to the mikveh (ritual bath) and all members of the community dressed in their best clothes. At sunset, the men went to pray and returned for the ritual Sabbath dinner, the best meal of the week. By nightfall, all labor ceased for 24 hours. In wintertime, the Shabbos Goy, the hired Gentile served the vital function of coming to Jewish homes, throwing logs in the fireplace and attending to the barn animals. The atmosphere of the Sabbath was sacral, a taste of Paradise. Zmires or Sabbath songs were sung well into the night. On Sabbath morning, the men and boys went to the shul (synagogue), sometimes joined by wives and daughters who entered through a separate door and sat upstairs, looking down at the men garbed in their best and covered with large ritual shawls as seen in Chagall paintings. They returned home for a cold meal, often of gefilte fish en gelée, a classic Ashkenazic dish. The very religious went back to the synagogue to study the moral treatise, Pirke Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers), and the less studious took a driml (a good nap). When the sun set,

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the aesthetic rite of Havdalah, a lit braided candle, a goblet of wine, and a spice box redolent with fragrances witnessed the passing of the Sabbath Queen and the return to the “sand days.” Lights would be lit and labor would recommence. The Jewish year in the shtetl followed the Jewish solar/lunar calendar. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, begins in the early fall and Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, comes a week later, soon followed by Sukkot (the Harvest Festival). These holidays allowed the Jews to restore themselves in the divine cosmic order. Rosh Hashana performs the Enthronement Ceremony of God, who orders existence; Yom Kippur permits the communal and personal transgressions to be cleansed through repentance; and Sukkot celebrates divine bounty with a rich harvest, concluding with Simkhat Torah, when the Jews joyously renew their covenantal devotion by recommencing the re-reading of the Torah (the sacred Scroll inscribing the five books of Moses). The next significant holiday, Passover, which encompassed the central myth of the creation of the Jewish People, its escape from slavery and exile in Egypt and restoration in Israel, had powerful resonance in Ashkenaz and permitted parallelisms to the Askhenazim’s own conditions. So did Tish B’Av (the 9th of Av), the day of Lamentations in late summer, when the Jews intone the prayers remembering the destruction of the first and second Temple and the day chosen by Hitler to begin the extermination of the Jews. Thus the shtetl Jews were tied not only to their religious and ethnic identity but also to the rhythms of nature and history. Sholem Aleykhem (Aleichem) [Sholem Rabinovitch], the most popular Yiddish writer of the Ashkenaz, used the shtetl as the locale of all his creations. In “The Town of the Little People” (1901), he depicts the typical shtetl, which fuses the physical with the psychological, in a comicgrotesque way influenced by the Russian skaz (oral folktale) tradition: Shall I call it a beautiful little town? From a distance it looks — how shall I say it? — like a loaf of bread thickly studded with poppy seed. Some of the houses are built on the slope of a hill, and the rest are huddled together at the base, one on top of the other, like the gravestones in an ancient cemetery. There are no streets to speak of because the houses are not built according to any plan, and besides, where is there room for such a thing? Why should there be vacant space when you can build something on it? It is written that the earth is to be inhabited, not merely to be gazed at. Yet, don’t be upset. There are some streets — big streets, little streets, back streets and alleys. What if they happen to twist and turn uphill and downhill and suddenly end up in a house or a cellar or just a hole in the ground? If you are a stranger, never go out at night without a lantern. As for the little people who live there, don’t worry about them. A Kasrilevkite in Kasrilevke, among Kasrilevkites, will never get lost. Each one finds his way to his own house, to his wife and children, like a bird to its own nest. And then in the center of the city there is a wide half-circle, or perhaps it is a square, where you find the stores, shops, market stands, stalls and tables. […] There also stand the synagogues, the meeting houses, the small prayer rooms, and schools of the town where Jewish children study the Holy Writ. The noise they and the rabbis make with their chanting is enough to deafen one. The baths where the women go to bathe are also there, and the poorhouse where the old men die, and other such public institutions. No, the Kasrilevkites have never heard of sanitation canals or water works or electricity or other such luxuries. But what does that matter? Everywhere people die the same death, and they are placed in the same earth, and are beaten down with the same spades. Thus my Rabbi, Reb Israel, used to say, when he was happiest,

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at a wedding or other celebration, after he had had a few glasses of wine and was ready to lift up the skirts of his long coat and dance a kazatsky […]. But the real pride of Kasrilevke is her cemeteries. This lucky town has two rich cemeteries, the old and the new. The new one is old enough and rich enough in graves. Soon there will be no place to put anyone, especially if a pogrom should break out or any of the other misfortunes that befall us in these times. But it is of the old cemetery that the people of Kasrilevke are especially proud. […] For this is not only the place where their ancestors lie, rabbis, men of piety, learned ones, scholars and famous people, including the dead from the ancient massacres of Chmielnicki’s time — but also the only piece of land of which they are the masters, the only bit of earth they own where a blade of grass can sprout and a tree can grow and the air is fresh and one can breathe freely. (Sholem Aleykhem, The Old Country 4–7)

This passage is actually a series of questions that belie the real stress and misery it depicts. Sholem Aleykhem starts cinematically with a distant shot or bird’s eye view of the shtetl. The first-person physical description begins with a comic Gogolian food comparison: the shtetl as bread stuffed with poppy seed, suggesting the shtetl’s ordinariness. Up close, this sweet image decays into disorder and poverty, as the houses become images of gravestones. The absence of ordered streets underscores the disorder that characterizes the shtetl and creates “defamiliarization,” for this implies that there is another model unknown to the readership. But the narrator explains in comic parody, imitating the Jewish talmudic query style: “Why should there be vacant space when you can build on it?” The response provides a comic spoof of the Biblical injunction: “It is written that the earth is to be inhabited, not merely to be gazed upon.” The oral voice directly assures us, “Don’t be upset!” — it seemingly has God’s approval — and leads us on a wild chase through the shtetl, a comic grotesque maze, always ending in a hole, the cemetery image which haunts the text. The multiplicity, accumulation, and commotion of the life in the shtetl belies that this town is constantly threatened with violence and extinction. For Sholem Aleykhem, the shtetl embodies metaphorically the Jewish people of East-Central Europe. He fuses folktale orality with a traditional Jewish learning style to create a national expression: And if you happen to be a man of feeling and imagination then you will look upon this poor town with its rich cemeteries and repeat the old verses: “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob; how good are your resting places, O Israel.” (7)

Laughter is achieved through bitter irony, in an artful inversion of traditional meaning: this is Sholem Aleykhem’s sharpest rhetorical weapon. Dovid Bergelson also depicts a shtetl on a hillside. But Sholem Aleykhem’s 1901 topic takes an entirely new tone and focus in Bergelson’s prose a decade later. We can see how quickly Yiddish literature caught up with Western stylistic and aesthetic standards. The excerpt below provides us with a mediated subjective or character perspective, an interplay of temporal and spatial interfaces, class fragmentation, alienation, and much more: He went along the narrow lane hidden in the lush green grass and from a distance saw all Rakitne sloping away. The two church spires, with the dome of the synagogue like a skullcap between

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Seth L. Wolitz them, rose higher than the rooftops, higher than all other shapes of the town and played with the hazy sunlight of the summer midday. From a distance everything there now seemed like a vision of his childhood years: unceasingly he gazed in that direction and unceasingly the diffident shadows of his childhood twined themselves around his soul. He remembered how in this town he’d once been deeply religious, his heart beat very fast, and his mind reeled drunkenly with the thought that abruptly flashed in upon it. — The oldest liar, his childhood prayer book, was drifting about in a synagogue garret somewhere here among dusty old copies of the Book of Exodus. And he enjoyed a kind of revenge on this great old liar. In town, he felt lighter, as always. There, every time people asked him what he was doing here in Rakitne, he barely hid a smile and answered that he was doing nothing. — He’d come here to wander about a bit. For his own part, he good-naturedly returned people’s glances; it gave him pleasure to answer them in a tone agreeable to them. He couldn’t forget the green poplars that lent a festive air to the grass next to Oyzer Loyber’s house. He was drawn to Hanke over there, to the conciliatory words with which he ought to beg her pardon, yet he still stood around chatting to passers-by about the old impoverished part of town, and noticed that the steps next to Ezriel Poyzner’s big store were deserted; evidently Khave Poyzner was still in the provincial capital. Suddenly he was seized by a strong desire to go down the hill to the old impoverished part of town and to the sunken, unpaved alleys where he’d grown up, long before. Once again, barely hiding a smile, he began inquiring of passers-by: — What’s happening down there, in the sunken alleys? Nothing, he was told. — What could possibly happen there? — Dirty shops. — Paupers, as they always were. (Bergelson, Descent 73)

This passage reflects the language, narratorial perspective and stylistics of the Russian Silver Age, applied to the Jewish shtetl world. We encounter the shtetl through the subjective eyes of the hero as he approaches the town and describes its skyline in an impressionistic scriptural manner. The shtetl of Rakitne is individualized by the Christian presence that symbolically hems in the old Jewish world as synagogue. But it is Bergelson’s use of nature as the objective correlative, so absent in Sholem Aleykhem except as decor, that reveals Bergelson’s full absorption of a Western technique that allows the reader to enter the subjective life of the character through a treatment of time and space. The summer sunlight leads to a subjective association with childhood and the shtetl. The past (the synagogue), which reinforced a God-based system of unity and orderly values, is rejected now by the character-focalizer: “He remembered how in this town he’d once been deeply religious.” The fusion in the free indirect style of an internal monologue with the anonymous narratorial voice permits full access to the hero’s defiant mood against his childhood prayer book: “The oldest liar […] And he enjoyed a kind of revenge on this great liar.” The physical representation of the synagogue via the light sets off memories and reveals the character’s estrangement from his original world. Bergelson interpenetrates memory and the present through a sensitive external and internal consciousness. While Sholem Aleykhem presents national folk types, Bergelson is concerned with individuals who happen to be Jewish. He captures the new age of Jews who have been Westernized but carry a traditional Jewish past. Whereas Sholem Aleykhem makes his oral narrator a friend of the

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community who speaks intimately with them, Bergelson’s novels are reflections of the aesthetic theories of the Russian Silver Age, and they focus on the elite members of the shtetl world who, emancipated from the shtetl values, embrace Russian intellectual and cultural values. Bergelson’s novels display a stylistic virtuosity and full command of a sophisticated Chekhovian and Russian symbolist vision. His moody depictions of the contemporary shtetl underscore the heavy costs of modernization, the Jewish milieu being left with shards of a secular redemption that offered them only sophistication and with a foreign cultural tradition that left little room for them. For Sholem Aleykhem, the shtetl is a unified whole, threatened but still intact. For Bergelson, the shtetl is outdated, a place from which to escape, if only one could! Bergelson’s contribution to Yiddish literature can now be seen as having brought the secularization process to culmination and raised Yiddish literature to the standards of contemporary Slavic and Western fiction at the same time that Chagall brought modern Jewish plastic art to fruition by World War I. The shtetl provided the great subject and theme, but it was moving toward the past tense. The life cycle of the Eastern European Jew is perfectly embedded in shtetl life. The Yiddish poetry of Itzik Manger, Medresh Itzik (Itzik’s Midrash [or Retelling]; 1951), illustrates this by recreating — tongue-in-cheek — the Biblical tales within shtetl settings. By transposing the Bible’s Israelite figures into the shtetlakh set in the Carpathian Mountains, Adam and Eve, Abraham, Lot, and Ruth suddenly appear as contemporary shtetl figures in German-derived ballad forms. The shtetl domesticates and Judeo-Slavicizes the Hebrew Bible: Lot — it’s disgusting — it’s got to be said — You and your nightly carousing — Yesterday, in the “Golden Hart” — What a terrible scandal that was. Manger, the tailor, can do such things, But it simply won’t do for you. You’ve a couple of daughters to raise, knock wood, And besides, you’re a wealthy Jew. […] I know how it is on a Friday night, To drink a cup or so Of wine with fish, while the Sabbath light Sheds a holy glow. But how can one go on drinking Day in, Day out — like you. It’s all right for Havrillah, the Sabbath goy But certainly not for a Jew. (“Abraham Scolds Lot,” trans. Leonard Wolf; Howe and Greenberg, Yiddish Poetry 274).

In the Jewish life cycle, the male had three key moments, his bris (circumcision at birth, the act which makes him a Jew), Bar Mitsvah (the act of becoming a mature member of the community), and the khupa (marriage ceremony). For the Jewish bride, the high moment was the marriage

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ceremony. The marriage was both familial and communal, and Jewish culture intensified this seven-day event. The shtetl in particular enjoyed a wedding where the gvir (the rich man) placed food out for the shtetl poor. This was considered good form, a mitsvah, doing a good deed. Throughout its existence, in good times and bad, right up to its liquidation through the mass execution of its inhabitants, the shtetl was the focal point of Jewish daily identity. Especially in immigration, it was the home shtetl that pulled on the heart’s strings. Jerusalem may be the sacred home and Israel the fatherland; Ashkenaz itself may be an abstraction of East European Jewish reality, but the shtetl was the specific homeland. It is the central image in East-Central European Jewish literature and art, signifying rootedness and legitimacy. The shtetl was Jewish territory, and the Gentile entering it moved in Jewish space and time. The Yizkor Bikher (Memory Books), now in the hundreds, put together through the collaborative efforts of survivors, recapture the complex Eastern European Jewish life in these effaced market towns. Sholem Aleykhem created the quintessential shtetl dubbed Kasrilevke (the town of poor Jews). The excerpt below allows us to enter the mind of a typical shtetl dweller, a melamed (a religious “primary school” teacher, a figure of some ridicule) daydreaming about his shtetl and its worldview. This text is best known outside the Jewish world in its reworking as the song “If I were a rich man!” from the American musical, Fiddler on the Roof: If I were Rothschild, ah, if I were only Rothschild — a Kasrilevke melamed let himself go once upon a Thursday while his wife was demanding money for the Sabbath and he had none to give her. If I were only Rothschild, guess what I would do. First of all I would pass a law that a wife must always have a three-ruble piece on her so that she wouldn’t have to start nagging me when the good Thursday comes and there is nothing in the house for the Sabbath. In the second place I would take my Sabbath gabardine out of pawn — or better still my wife’s squirrel-skin coat. Let her stop whining that she’s cold. Then I would buy the whole house outright, from the foundation to the chimney, all the three rooms, with the alcove and the pantry, the cellar and the attic. Let her stop grumbling that she hasn’t enough room. “Here,” I would say to her, “take two whole rooms for yourself — cook, bake, wash, chop, make, and leave me in peace so that I can teach my pupils with a free mind.” This is the life! No more worries about making a living. No more headaches about where the money for the Sabbath is coming from. My daughters are all married off — a load gone from my shoulders. What more do I need for myself? Now I can begin to look around the town [shtetl] a little. First of all, I am going to provide a new roof for the old synagogue so that the rain won’t drip on the heads of the men who come to pray. After that I shall build a new bathhouse, for if not today, then […] surely soon […] the roof is going to cave in while the women are inside bathing. And while we are putting up a new bathhouse we might as well throw down the old poorhouse too, and put up a hospital in its place, a real hospital such as they have in big towns. […] And I shall build a home for the aged so that old men, scholars who have fallen on hard times, shouldn’t have to spend their last days in the hearth of the synagogue. And I shall establish a Society for Clothing for the Poor so that the poor children won’t have to run around in rags with […] their navels showing. Then I shall institute a Loan society so that any one at all — whether teacher or workman, or even merchant — could get money without having to pay interest and without pawning the shirt off his back. […] But why only here in Kasrilevke? I would organize such societies […] all over the world, wherever our brethren the Sons of Israel are to be found […].

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If I were Rothschild I would do away with war altogether. I would wipe it off completely from the face of the earth. […] And if there are no more weapons and armies […] there will be no more envy, no more hatred, no more Turks, no Englishmen, no Frenchmen, no Gypsies, and no Jews. The face of the earth will be changed. As it is written: “Deliverance will come — ” The Messiah will have arrived. And perhaps, even — if I were Rothschild — I might do away with money altogether. […] But then the problem is, without money how would we Jews be able to provide for the Sabbath? The answer to that is — How will I provide for the Sabbath now? (“If I were Rothschild,” Sholem Aleykhem, Favorite Tales 404–407)

5.

The Jewish Cultural World View in Ashkenaz — a Synthetic Sacral/Secular Perspective

If we were to place Jews in time on a vertical axis from past to future and in space (and place) on a horizontal axis, the crossing point would occur at the shtetl in the “present” (the year 1900). At this point in time and place, the Jew of Eastern and East-Central Europe is centered in his Ashkenazic home, his shtetl. The State may threaten discrimination, the economic situation may be poor or good, the new political and religious attitudes may seem odd to the traditionalist, but the East-Central European Jew does not feel as yet “deterritorialized,” or “decentered,” as Kafka felt later in Prague or Berlin. On the horizontal axis of space, the Jew regarded only certain cities as possible alternative dwelling places, and they were validated for him only because they possessed an Ashkenazic presence. This spatial axis would have had its eastern pole in Kiev, moving then westward through Odessa, Vilna, and Warsaw (see “Cities in Ashkenaz” above). When one reached Berlin, one had begun the migration. Migration would lead to Paris, London, and the New World, particularly New York. In all these cities Jews could speak Yiddish, live in immigrant environments, hold religious services and enjoy their own cultural activities — particularly theater. The Past — Israel or Jerusalem — appeared remote physically but it shone through metaphysically as the omphalos. But unless one was a Zionist, this omphalos had mainly an abstract theological aura. The future was predicated on the arguments offered by the newly emergent political/cultural parties or a traditionalist’s expectation that God would end the Exile by some dramatic return to Israel. The Bundists, for instance, hoped for a socialist government with cultural autonomy for the Jews in situ within the larger polity of the ideal socialist state. For the Zionist, on the other hand, the solution was the abandonment of the Diaspora and the rejection of the shtetl. The religious Jews embraced the Exile until Redemption would bring them to the Temple Mount, their teleological dream; until then they took as a divine sign the Hebrew play of words on Poland — Po-Lan, here to rest. The way the average Ashkenazic Jew identified and located himself in the year 1900 was unmistakably shaped by these poles of space and time. Physical dislocation as a consequence of a Tzarist ukase or of dire economic necessity did not reorient the Ashkenazic Jew’s sense of place. Even a century later, Ashkenazic Jewish descendants of particular shtetlakh are interred in the Landsmanschaft (brotherhood) burial grounds of the old shtetl in North and South America, South Africa, and Australia. Wiped off the European map in the Shoah (Holocaust), shtetlekh exist still in these societies and burial grounds. Ahad Ha’am, the cultural Zionist and creator of

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the modern Hebrew essay, argued that, while the Jew in the Slavic milieu of Ashkenaz was enchained as an individual, his ethnic community remained psychologically intact, whereas in the West where the Jew was individually free, it was his ethnicity that was enchained. If this synthetic model is correct, it explains why Yiddish literature and Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages were oriented toward the shtetlekh and cities, whereas the modern Hebrew Renaissance presented the shtetlekh as sites of decay while it sought to reclaim the past and foreshadow the future in a restored Israel. 6.

Becoming Secular: Language, Ideology, and Kulturkampf

In Czernowitz, a multicultural eastern border city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Kulturkampf was championed on August 30, 1908, among the Jewish linguists and Yiddish authors who assembled there for the First Conference on Yiddish language. They demanded full recognition of Yiddish as a legitimate vehicle of national Jewish expression, not just for Ashkenaz but for world Jewry. Czernowitz was well chosen for the assembly because it was a multilingual city in which a quasi-tolerant Empire permitted limited cultural autonomy and the various ethnicities tolerated each other within an assigned order. Czernowitz was home to Gregor von Rezzori, a German aristocrat, as well as to Paul Celan and Itzik Manger, but differences of class and ethnicity prevented contact between them (see also Amy Colin’s article on Czernowitz in this volume). This Kulturkampf, pursued by Jews clinging to different ideologies, was a microscosmic reflection of what the city and the Empire represented at 1900, when the Jews emerged as a national secular polity. Nathan Birnbaum organized the First Yiddish Language Conference, ostensibly to regularize the grammar, syntax, and orthography of the Yiddish language. But Khayim Zhitlovski, a leading ideologue of Yiddish language and culture, sought to present Yiddish as the sole language of contemporary Jewish expression. As the language of the Ahskenazic masses, Yiddish had traveled an immense distance from 1800 to 1900. Through the nineteenth century, the language had developed from a folk tongue — dismissed as zhargon (jargon) and used only in what might be called “popular culture” — to a resourceful instrument of expression that produced an impressive body of literary works. Yiddish was probably the last Johnny-come-lately of the national tongues that emerged in East-Central Europe as the national consciousness awakened and folk tongues became revamped as treasures of the folk. The leading figure at the conference was Isaac Leyb Peretz, who had established himself in Warsaw as the arbiter of modern Yiddish literature and the icon of a dynamic new Jewish culture. He was at the height of his fame as a bilingual writer of Hebrew and Yiddish, but, ironically, spoke Polish in his own home. He sought to find a compromise between those who defended Hebrew and its modern development, and the Yiddishists who promoted Yiddish as the living language of the Jews. A compromise was reached: Yiddish was finally proclaimed not as the sole language, but one of the national languages of the Jewish people. Ahad Ha’am, on the other hand, considered Hebrew as the sole fit language for modern Jewish culture and he opposed Yiddish utterly, refusing to attend the Conference. His good friend and rival polemicist, the historian Shimon Dubnov, who was the ideologue of cultural autonomy in a multicultural State or Empire, argued for the retention of both Hebrew and Yiddish as legitimate

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expressions of modern-day Jews. Dubnov wrote his works in Russian, as did most of the Petersburg Jewish intelligentsia who supported an accommodationist position, seeking to normalize Jewish life in the Empire in a manner analogous to its normalization in the West. The emergence of Gentile national language options as possibilities of Jewish expression had already been recognized but slowly put into practice. Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, and German could now be considered as linguistic instruments that could serve the needs and ideologies of Jewish artists. Heine, Kafka, and Babel may be claimed as German, Czech, or Russian, respectively, but in terms of historical conditions, biological facts, and cultural realities, they were Jewish writers as well. They are multicultural and multilingual voices of a conflicted hybridity. From our perspective today, modern Ashkenazic culture cannot be restricted to just Yiddish and Hebrew. The Gentile languages bear the Jewish experience as well, revealing the attempt to have a hybrid Jewish culture in a non-Jewish language or to relinquish the negative Jewish condition of the time. When this hybridity of the Jewish experience and condition is factored in, we can better understand the breadth of the cultural explosion that took place among the Ashkenazic Jews of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Those who used Yiddish and Hebrew were generally rooted in a shtetl Jewish identity — a given happily accepted but open to reshaping — but those Ashkenazic Jews who functioned in Gentile tongues were either inventing a new Jewish identity or evading it. Their otherness and desire to pass came into play and affected their moral and aesthetic adventures. Authors like S. An-Ski and Theodore Herzl needed to return to their roots; others, like Julian Tuwim in Polish, or Grigori Bogrov and Ilya Ehrenburg in Russian, found their accommodation acceptable; others still, like Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Miklós Radnóti, Antal Szerb, Mihail Sebastian and Nicu Steinhardt, pressed on toward conversion and assimilation. Manasse (1900), the play written in Romanian by M. Ronetti-Roman, is an early expression of the conflicting approaches within the Jewish community as it moved from the traditionalist, shtetl-centered culture of the older generation to the more adaptive, city-based experience of the younger generations. In this play, the family patriarch Manasse Cohen descends from rural Moldova to Bucharest to prevent the marriage of his granddaughter Lelia to a Romanian magistrate, Matei Frunză. While the play does not openly take sides in the generational dispute between a traditionalist and an assimilationist approach, the title character emerges as a heroic, even if flawed, figure defending Jewish identity. The rich linguistic options pursued by Jewish authors underline the frenzied efforts of an emergent people in the throes of secularization and cultural modernization, as the competing ideologies, refracted in language and literature, attempted to refigure Jewish identity. The artist in East-Central Europe was inevitably both a subversive figure undermining the traditional religious world by his secular aesthetic activities and an unwitting leading voice attempting to define the future. The linguistic choice, then, was fraught with meaning far beyond the personal aesthetic usage in which the artist fought with his own demons, but the linguistic choice outlined a route to the future that would affect an entire population. Yiddish signaled the continuance of a settled EastEuropean Jewry maintaining its unique ethnicity, but secularized and possibly socialistic. Modern Hebrew prescribed a new secular Jewish society and culture in the making, with a restored Israel as its political goal. As Ahad Ha’am argued in 1902 in “The Spiritual Revival”:

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The Gentile languages also provided instruments of accommodation that permitted association with the ideals of the surrounding linguistic majority among whom one wished to live in a modus vivendi ranging from mere linguistic commonality to ultimate assimilation. Jews who sought to escape their “Jewishness” acted like subalterns who wished to alleviate the pain of inferiority and prejudice. Jacques Derrida, a French-speaking Algerian Jew, calls such a condition “mal d’appartenance,” a forced communal association with a sense of yearning for one’s own distinctiveness and separateness (Bennington and Derrida 301). Such a mental condition is specific to the Jews in Ashkenaz — and surely to other subaltern cultures — particularly through the last two centuries of confrontation with Western hegemony. The writer of Jewish origins who eschewed all allusions to anything Jewish performed a ballet act in which the absence became a telltale. Attempting to assimilate into the West meant ingesting a doze of anti-Semitism that metastasized into various degrees of self-loathing, as the extreme case of Otto von Weininger’s suicide illustrates. It was not by accident that an Ashkenazic Jew, Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, born in Bialystok and at first a Yiddishist, invented Esperanto (hope), a synthetic language designed to serve as an international expression of peace and thus to escape the nationalist baggage weighing any national tongue. Language was thus problematized by Jews around 1900, and the chosen medium indicated an ideological, political, and cultural commitment ranging from nationalist/religious/socialist confrontations around Hebrew and Yiddish, to an accommodationist use of the dominant language of the State, and further to the invention of a new tongue with an implied federalist agenda. The explosion of linguistic possibilities and the range of cultural explorations were manifestations of the massive secularization of Ashkenaz beginning in the mid–nineteenth century. The question of language was central to the Enlightenment movement, which began in Berlin. Around 1800, the maskilic (enlightened) Jews of East-Central Europe did not consider zhargon (Yiddish) as adequate for literary use and sought another linguistic medium of expression. German was possible (the Jews who followed Moses Mendelssohn, the leading Enlightenment figure of German Jewry, turned to German rather than Hebrew to participate in the movement) but it was not a Jewish tongue that would carry dreams of emancipation; Polish or Russian held originally little prestige. Hebrew functioned for these Enlighteners as the language of Rabbinic and Chasidic obscurantism. But its prestige as the language of the Bible, Midrashim (early Jewish interpretations/commentaries on the Biblical texts), medieval poetry, and Responsa (the body of written decisions and rulings given by rabbis to questions addressed to them) was so great and their knowledge of it so developed that they determined to restore it to its ‘“pristine beauty” by seeking a purer Biblical Hebrew style. Yosef Perl created in 1815 the first epistolary novel in secular Hebrew, Megalleh Temirin (The Revealer of Secrets), as a satire of Chasidim. By 1859, secular

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Hebrew writing emerged in western novelistic forms and themes but with Biblical language and imagery. With Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsiyon (Love of Zion; 1853), cast as a historical romance, modern Hebrew literature began. As the century progressed, secular Hebrew literature produced two remarkable poets: Chayim Nachman Bialik (see vol. 4 of our History), whose “Be-ir haharega” (“In the City of Slaughter”; 1903) employs the Hebrew lament form to mourn ironically Jewish impotence; and Saul Tschernichowski, who brazenly brought Hellenism into Hebrew and blended ancient Greek myth, French Parnassian form, and Silver Age Russian sensuality. Bialik became the poet of the nation, Tschernichowski the modern voice of the sensitive individual. Bialik captures the traditional life and mental world of the shtetl, whereas Tschernichowski evokes the Jews and Russian peasants living and working together on the steppes. The “Talushim” (Uprooted) prose writers of pre–World War I period (uprooted in the sense that they felt at home neither in the traditional world nor in the modernist milieu) brought modern Hebrew literature up to European standards. Mordecai Ze’ev Feuerberg focused on the “withering” of the old Jewish faith, as the title his novella, “La’an” (Whither; 1899) suggested. Uri Nissan Gnessin wrote short stories of modern alienation (see “Cities in Ashkenaz” in this volume), and Gershon Shofman developed miniature stories of a few paragraphs on similar themes. One of the most innovative Hebrew writers of the early twentieth century was David Vogel. His novel Haye ni´su’im (Married Life; 1929) captures the tortured life of Jewish intellectuals in interwar Vienna. The main character, a young Jewish writer married to a Christian aristocrat, lives a life of humiliations at the hand of his wife and feels uprooted in both his own culture and that of cosmopolitan Vienna. After the outbreak of World War II, Vogel was imprisoned by the French as an Austrian citizen, and later by the Nazis as a Jew, disappearing subsequently in a Nazi concentration camp. Hebrew continued to be used as a literary medium in Poland between the Wars (see article on “Cities in Ashkenaz” pp. 182–212 above), promoted by the religious thinker and literary commentator Hillel Tseytlin and his poet son, Aaron Tseytlin, among others. In early Soviet Russia, Hebrew was tolerated for a few years then denounced and silenced. The outstanding Hebrew poet Khayim Lenski was exiled to Siberia, but his poetry was published in 1939 in Israel. On the whole, Hebrew remained a learned language, limited to the educated class. While the majority of Ashkenaz could mumble prayers in half-comprehended Hebrew, very few had sufficient mastery of it to understand a novel or a poem. It was around this prestigious tongue, nevertheless, that the nationalist movement of Zionism rallied. The linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was so keen on making Hebrew a spoken tongue that he only used Hebrew with his son, Itamar, who became the first native speaker of Hebrew. At his death in 1943 over 500,000 Jews in Israel spoke Hebrew fluently and by 2000, over 5 million. Thus, the idea of fusing language, ideology, and culture into a living reality triumphed by dint of sheer will supported by Jewish memory, Western philosophy, and good luck. The fate of Yiddish has not been as encouraging. If Yiddish seemed to have been the cultural language of over ten million Jews in 1939, by 2000 there were less than 100,000 people who could comfortably read a Yiddish novel. The Shoah accounts for the extermination of several million speakers of Yiddish, and the forced assimilation into Russian in the Soviet Union accounts for many more; the extinction of Yiddish in the United States followed normal immigration patterns. As a result of the Kulturkampf, Yiddish nevertheless held the upper hand in the twentieth century until history sealed its fate. It had lived as the natural language of the Jewish folk of Ashkenaz for over eight centuries, from 1100 to 1939.

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The Chasidim embraced Yiddish to spread their theosophy, and by the end of the eighteenth century they wrote hagiographic tales and wonder stories in Yiddish for their followers, who knew no Hebrew. The Tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, published in Yiddish and Hebrew in 1815, mark for many the emergence of modern Yiddish literature. The Haskala (Enlightenment) writers wrote both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, in order to make their satires of decaying Chasidim reach a wider audience. Perhaps influenced by the popular Purim-shpil (a mummer-style play based on the Esther story) and western classical comedies, Haskala writers wrote the first Yiddish satiric plays. Solomon Ettinger’s Serkele, written in 1826, published in 1861, is a moral comedy, which a leading Haskala writer and educator, Abraham Baer Gottlober, staged in his own home in 1862, with Abraham Goldfaden as the student lead. Goldfaden would become the father of Yiddish theater, making possible the development of all modern Jewish theater. The many chapbooks and the development of a more sophisticated readership vastly improved and expanded the scope of Yiddish cultural expression, so that Yiddish gained momentum as a literary language in the 1870s. By the end of the nineteenth century, journals, newspapers, and a steady stream of published books allowed Yiddish to become the dominant reading language as much as it was the dominant spoken tongue of Ashkenaz. Its three “canonic” figures divided up Ashkenaz into meaningful cultural units. In multilingual and multicultural Odessa, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem-Ya’aqov Abramovitch), the recognized master of modern Hebrew and Yiddish prose style, set a conservative tone and welcomed the Hebraicists. Isaac Leyb Peretz, who held court in Warsaw, desperately sought a modern Jewish identity in Yiddish and Hebrew by attempting to rework Chasidism as a moral aesthetic. And Sholem Aleykhem, who came from the Ukraine but died in New York and who is now considered the most original Yiddish writer, expressed the frustrations and humor of the Jewish masses in a distinct ethnic voice that is quintessentially Ashkenaz. The Yiddish language and its literature flourished between 1870 and 1939. After World War I, it became mainly the language of the believers and of the working classes. The middle class slowly abandoned Yiddish for the dominant language of the state in which they found themselves. Yiddish had no sovereign base in Ashkenaz, and cultural autonomy never returned. Still, a number of proud young writers present in Czernowitz on August 30, 1908 (see above) — among them novelist Sholem Asch, poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and short story master Avrom Reysen — had plenty of time to become canonic members of modern Yiddish literature. By 1900, the Jewish ideologues and literati of Ashkenaz, surrounded by the dominant cultures, sought the most effective means of achieving some kind of cultural fruition and of finding political solutions to their subaltern condition. The Jewish Bundists embraced the Austrian socialist ideas on cultural autonomy, while the Zionists followed the successes of the Czech model of nationalism. The Zionist agenda would lead in time to political sovereignty in Israel. Unlike the other ethnic minorities, the Jews had no tradition of land ownership in East-Central Europe, though they often leased it. As a consequence of being a landless people, those who rejected the Zionist agenda needed to depend on more abstract securities such as an appeal to cultural autonomy and socialist universalism. Recognizing that an ethnic group gains legitimacy in the West through its cultural history, the Jewish intelligentsia in Yiddish and Hebrew rapidly constructed a history with foundational figures and a jerrybuilt literary hierarchy.

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Secular Yiddish theater, a taboo in traditional Judaism, probably created the strongest sense of peoplehood, emphasizing past history and hinting at solutions to contemporary problems. When the Jewish masses entered a theater hall, they were not only breaking a taboo but also accessing a secular institution as private as a synagogue, for inside it the audience experienced a Jewish world brought alive in their folk tongue, dedicated to them, and creating for them a sense of community, history, and identity. Wherever the Yiddish Theater toured, it shared with its audience the unifying quality of Yiddish folk ethnicity. Theater may be the most hybrid form in Jewish culture. Theater historians seek to situate the origins of Yiddish theater in the traditional Purimshpil (see Michael Steinlauf’s article on Yiddish Theater in vol. 3 of our History) that served as a barely tolerated carnivalesque medium for one day a year; its own roots are judaized outgrowths of medieval Christian Bible plays. Goldfaden drew heavily on many sources: Romanian and Ukrainian vaudevilles, knowledge of the western theater classics from Shakespeare and Molière through Goethe and Schiller, the Polish Romantics and Ostrovsky, as well as the music of Meyerbeer, Halévy, Bellini, and Verdi, all performed at the Odessa opera house that he attended. Goldfaden established his own troupe in 1876 in Iaşi, Romania, and toured the Ukraine playing fantasy comedies that featured easily recognizable folk types. He even performed in one of his plays for six weeks in Moscow (1880), where he boasted that more than half of his audience was Gentile, suggesting that the genre he used was most accessible. He soon switched to historical plays, and it was in this genre that he created his Bar Kokhba (1883), which envisions an independent Israel in addition to commenting, in visual and emblematic language, on the recent pogroms. The final tableau shows Romans frozen in the act of slaughtering old men and children. In his multifaceted talents, Goldfaden was the Jewish Molière: playwright, composer, costume designer, and actor. His theater spawned multiple imitators, and his songs and characters are now folklore. His multilingual background and ability to fuse Slavic, Italian, and Jewish musical and theatrical elements together reached all Ashkenazim, aestheticizing them in one generation while at the same time, restoring their sense of history and common destiny. Together with the classic writers Mendele, Peretz, and Sholem Aleykhem, Goldfaden recentered Jewish identity while opening Ashkenaz to modernity. The writing of all these authors reveals that Yiddish culture drew massively on Slavic cultural forms, themes, and poetics, integrating and fusing them in their best works. If the Haskala began in Berlin and followed the trade routes into Russia and the eastern territories of the Austro-Hugarian Empire, by mid–nineteenth century it succeeded in spurring a significant cultural revolution across Ashkenaz. The Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), however, developed their own modes of adaptation to the new ideas of modernity. They sought their own cultural elaborations in relation to the Slavic languages, the rehabilitation of Hebrew, broader educational possibilities in Russian with secular subjects both abstract and practical, and an easing of legal restrictions within the Slavic world that surrounded them. With the massive economic and cultural growth of the Empire and its majority culture, the shtetl world of Jewry, secure in its traditions, centered and conformable within its location, felt the growing forces of modernity impinge on it from within and from without. The shtetlekh on the new railroad tracks were best prepared to absorb the fresh impulses and some prospered, but those which lay on the old routes began to decay economically and culturally. The migration to the city and its fabled opportunities served as a siren call to populations all over Europe and affected the Jews in Ashkenaz as well.

C. Representing Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Regional Spaces

The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness Guido Snel In recent postmodern fiction as well as in literary travelogues from the East-Central European region, the toponym Pannonia frequently appears, for instance, in Mirko Kovač’s Kristalne rešetke (Crystal Bars; 1995) and Péter Esterházy’s Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása: lefelé a Dunán (The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn [Down the Danube]; 1991). A predominantly cultural area that crosses the boundaries set by the various national communities, Pannonia seems to be located in between the political toponyms of Central Europe on one hand, and the Balkans on the other. Where does this toponym come from, and how can a coherent meaning be detected among its isolated instances through the ages? Pannonia: History of a Concept In physical geography, Pannonia designates the plain between the mountainous regions of the Balkans and the Julian Alps, veined by the Danube, Drava, Sava, and Tisa (Tisza) rivers. The toponym, the etymology of which is uncertain, is first mentioned in the classical age. Up to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Pannonia was the name of the northern Roman province of the Balkans. Subsequent migrations of Slavs and Magyars, their Christianization, the schism between the Roman and the Byzantine Church, and the entry of the Turks, created an utterly confusing cultural landscape, in which Pannonia occurs and reoccurs through the ages, seemingly without a coherent meaning. It occurs in the age of Humanism, in the age of rising modern nationalism, and, finally, as a marginal though highly suggestive toponym in twentieth-century Serbian, Croatian, and Hungarian fiction. The notion of decentering was present from the very first mention of Pannonia. The poetry of the Latinist and humanist Iannus Pannonius (Ivan Čezmički) displayed strong nostalgia for ancient Rome, and the poet’s longing for contemporary Renaissance Italy seems inversely proportional to his aversion to Pannonian backwardness. Three years after the Turkish seizure of Buda (1541), at that time Pannonia’s political center, an anthology, Pannoniae Luctus (The Light of Pannonia), was published in Cracow to celebrate Iannus Pannonius as the initiator of Pannonian culture. This time the decentering was a response to changes on the contemporary political scene (see Birnbaum). Three centuries later, Pannonia reemerged, but this time in a landscape dominated by national communities. The Slovene linguist Jernej Kopitar formulated his “Pannonian-Slavonic” theory during the rise of national consciousness among the South-Slavs. The theory had hardly anything to do with the Latinist heritage. It was embedded in a moderately Panslavic, historical linguistic

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discourse, which (wrongly) claimed that Pannonia was the native soil of Church Slavonic, the archaic Slavic vernacular used in the Orthodox Churches. Although the theory was refuted later, it was embedded in a powerful discourse. Kopitar was the official censor of Slovene books in Vienna, as well as custos of the Vienna Court Library. He mediated between South-Slavic philologists and ethnologists, such as Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, and key-figures of German culture, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, and Friedrich Schlegel. Conceived in a wider context of Austro-Slavism, his theory might very well have been the source, through Jacob Grimm’s mediation, of the term “altpannonisch” that Goethe used to refer to Church Slavonic in his well-known review of South-Slav epic poetry (“Serbische Literatur”; “Serbische Lieder”). Simultaneously with Kopitar’s theory, Pannonia occurred in a national Hungarian context. Gábor Kerekes (189) mentions a poem ascribed to the ethnic German poet Karl Anton von Gruber, “Hymnus an Pannonia” (1804), an ode written in German to the Hungarian vernacular and its poets. Pannonia occurs once more in early twentieth-century poetry. The Hungarian poet Mihály Babits described Pannonia as an outpost of Mediterranean culture (“Itália és Pannónia”). The Croat poet Vladimir Vidrić returned in his poem “Ex Pannonia” to the classical age in his use of metaphors such as Charon and the Styx (34–38). Pannonia entered anthropological discourse with Jovan Cvijić’s La Péninsule Balkanique (1918). Cvijić describes Pannonia as a particular “géographie psychique” that constitutes, together with the Dinaric, Central, and Oriental Balkan types, an ethnic South-Slav (“Yougoslave”) identity. This description became part of the Yugoslav nationalist discourse that attempted to unite the South-Slavs on ethnic grounds. Cvijić received an honorary doctorate both from the Charles University in Prague and the Sorbonne. He published his study during the final phase of the South-Slav political unification, which was accomplished in 1918 with the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Cvijić propagated the idea of a South-Slav nation as specialist-delegate in the territorial commission of the Yugoslav delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference. Here, as in the case of Kopitar, a powerful discourse at the intersection of political and academic life was involved. However, whereas Kopitar’s discourse was proto-national, Cvijić’s represented an important contribution to the creation of a national identity in what was in fact a multicultural context, the Yugoslav one. Its various stages were to have a predominant influence on the topography of South Eastern and East-Central Europe in the twentieth century. Pannonia, marginalized as a sub-category of the Yugoslav “géographie humaine,” would probably have disappeared from the short memory of South-Eastern European culture were it not for twentieth-century literary works that were preoccupied with the Pannonian cultural space. Foremost among them are Miroslav Krleža’s work written between the two world wars, and Danilo Kiš’s fictionalized autobiographical trilogy Porodični cirkus (Family Circus). All instances of Pannonia up to and including Cvijić share a search for a center, be it linguistic, literary, ethnic, or ideological. The Croatian and Hungarian humanists from the fifteenth and sixteenth century who called themselves Pannonians, suffered from a double longing southward: they longed for both ancient Rome and contemporary renaissance Italy, where many of them had received their education. The quest for a center turned westward later, turning Vienna and Paris into virtual centers not only of Pannonia but also of whole East-Central Europe. The imaginary center for Pannonians identifying with Secessionist aesthetics and poetics became Vienna; while those late-nineteenth-century poets who turned towards Symbolism in their search for an authentic

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voice looked to Paris. For Miroslav Krleža and Danilo Kiš, Pannonia no longer represents a search for a center, a national language as a home, or a source of authenticity. Pannonia has been studied in two articles by Zoran Konstantinović, who regarded Pannonia as part of a useful “Europäisches Zwischenfeld” (European Interstice), as a cultural space that includes aspects of Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, and Hungarian literature (see Konstantinović, “Die Rűckkehr des Filip Latinovicz”; “Zur Literarischen Umgrenzung”). I will limit myself to Pannonia as a toponym in the work of Krleža and Kiš. Pannonia designated for them a cultural space whose boundaries were more durable than traditional ethnic, national, religious, and ideological ones. Their Pannonia challenged the authority of nationalist and Marxist discourses, proposing in their place an alternative history of continuous cultural destruction, and the homelessness of the individual. Krleža: Constructing Pannonian Space Miroslav Krleža lived in the Habsburg monarchy, the two Yugoslav Kingdoms in between the two world wars, and the Federative Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Pannonia features in his writing mostly in the interwar years, starting with travelogues and essays and then transposed to a novelistic discourse in Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Filip Latinovicz; 1932). Its occurrence seems closely related to Krleža’s attempts to formulate his own aesthetic realm in a culture dominated by various national communities and the Marxist dialectic interpretation of local culture. In his work, this toponym has, therefore, strong political implications. Like Marxist internationalism, it transgresses national borders and, like the national community, it is preoccupied with local and regional culture. Krleža’s Pannonia is distinguished, however, by its emphasis on alienation and homelessness. Interestingly, the toponym (but not the related questions about European peripheral culture) disappears almost entirely from Krleža’s work after the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The founding of the Republic after World War II marked the shift, not only of Marxist ideology to the political center, but, effectively, also of Krleža’s individualist conception of aesthetics to the official center — at the expense of Soviet style Socialist Realism. Krleža’s Pannonia is a dystopian space identified by a number of elements of its geographic reality. The Pannonian sea becomes the swamps of the monotonous plane between the Pannonian rivers. Water is present in the sound of raindrops marking moments of time, in non-mechanic clocks such as clepsydras and hourglasses, and in the fog and birches. Seasons seem an inversion of their cliché beauty: the snow in winter is dirty, the sunlight in summer heavy. A frequent passerby is a blind man, a veteran from the Great War, playing his harmonica. Only dogs respond to the sound of church bells. Time always creeps towards dusk, never towards dawn. Pannonia is a rustic space filled with ruins from the Habsburg era, with ruins of bulwarks against the Turks, with monuments of the counter-reformation, and with objects dating from ancient Roman times. This focus on physical elements in space points to a particular temporal experience. As a transitional zone, Pannonia was often the locus of battles that defined Europe’s political borders. As such, it was always subjected to history, never its subject. Krleža’s Pannonia projects a negative history, a history of ruins that sometimes remind one of past cultures but are mostly remnants of destruction. The first boundary Krleža crossed by resorting to Pannonia was the one set by the so-called

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Illyrian movement, the nineteenth-century Croatian national cultural revival. In “Pjesma iz hrvatske krčme” (Poem from the Croatian Dive; 1921), Krleža used the phrase “Pannonian mud” (Sabrana Djela. Poezija 237), which reoccurs in “Pismo iz Koprivnice” (Letter from Koprivnica; 1925), when Krleža reflects on Croatian-Hungarian relations, and on Croatia as antemurale christianitatis. Instead of upholding Croatia as a victim of history, Krleža denies the rural surroundings their historical uniqueness by comparing them first to Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s depiction of early sixteenth-century Brabant, and then to the former Habsburg province of Galicia. Defining Pannonia as a peripheral space, he even denies the urban character of Koprivnica: “A hospital, a district council, a town hall and a library were built around these stores, and this was then what was called, in our circumstances, restricted by our modest requirements, a Town” (“Pismo” 249). The essay “O pojavi Jana Pannonije” (On the Phenomenon Iannus Pannonius) applied a similar contestatory rhetoric. In this text, written in 1942 and published in 1955, he consistently uses the possessive “our” (naš), as in “our poet” (Sabrana Djela. Eseji III 167) or “our people at the court of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus” (170). The plural first person possessive would normally refer to “Croatian,” or “being part of Croatian culture.” Krleža, however, uses the figure of Iannus to deconstruct the Croatian literary identity as defined by the Illyrian movement. He indicates a sense of belonging to Croatian culture but puts it consistently in negative terms, never affirmatively. Krleža characterizes the Latin poetry of Iannus as “Scythian, Asian” (168), linking these associations usually to the Hungarians, not the Slavic tribes. However, the fragment, written in 1942, makes no allusions to the immediate political and ideological tensions, including the troubled Croatian-Hungarian relations. Instead, it develops a materialistic and sensory aesthetics, said to have been at the core of Iannus’s “inspiration.” While Iannus’s contemporaries merely copied Western poetic models, he himself wrote with a “direct poetic force,” which, according to Krleža, challenged the aesthetic schemes of Central European renaissance poetry: Of course, in this area of continuous explosive dangers where one lives according to the principle of who eats who and big fish devour small fish and vice versa […] in this area poetry becomes a bitter and solipsistic elegy, defiant and sublime towards the question of Europe, permeated with a barbarous, higher irony, sarcasm in fact, which is the main characteristic of folk poetry, of folk sayings and of folk stories, a Proto-Slavic leitmotiv which lasts for centuries as a source of moral and artistic inspiration. (Sabrana Djela. Eseji III 174)

Whether a culture or a nation is part of Europe is an oft-debated question in East-Central Europe that tends to become discriminatory because defining a culture as European often implies excluding the neighbor from Europe. Well aware of this mechanism of exclusion, Krleža addressed the other, the cultures on the border of Europe, frequently by using Pannonia as a signifier of it. In the essay “Madžarski Lirik Andrija Ady” (The Hungarian Poet Endre Ady; 1930), he writes: “All these [Eastern-European] lyricisms only reflect a certain state, a Danubian, Pannonian, Scythian, Hunnish, Balkan, Slavic state, a sad moldering state outside the fortified walls of Europe” (161). Krleža then coins the notion of “Hunya”, a mythical Hungarian realm, which is characterized, according to him, by “the primeval nihilism of Asiatic tribes” (161). Ady’s poetry exemplifies what Krleža considered characteristic of the Pannonian realm: awareness of its geographical and temporal marginality.

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Krleža’s aesthetic and poetic affinities cannot be separated from the political dimensions of his Marxism. First an admirer of Lenin, then increasingly critical of the new Soviet society, he became involved in the sukob na ljevici, the conflict on the left in Yugoslav letters, which involved fierce polemics in the 1930s between the surrealist movement and the advocates of Socialist Realism. Krleža, an active participant, wrote many essays and articles that attempted to define aesthetic principles based on both engagement and individual freedom. At first sight, there seems to be no conflict between the motif of Pannonia and Marxist thought. Both Krleža and the Komintern use Pannonia to reply directly to nationalist cultural-territorial claims. But a conflict reveals itself on the position of the individual within the Pannonian space. Krleža views Pannonia from the alienated perspective of the individual, and does not seem to offer any reconciliation; historical materialism believes it can overcome alienation. How does the alienated self orient itself within Pannonia’s off-centered space? Krleža’s narrators travel, both in factual and in fictional discourse, almost exclusively by train. The latter, and sometimes the fiaker (the traditional horse-drawn carriage), is the preeminent Pannonian chronotope. Let us compare the perspectives on Pannonian space in the 1926 travelogue Izlet u Rusiju (An Excursion to Russia) and in the fictionalized prose “Ljudi putuju” (People Traveling), published in 1935 in Evropa Danas (Europe Today). Their dates mark the beginning and the height of the conflict on the left. The two texts display similar narrative situations. Both narrators travel by train through a culturally amorphous zone. The amorphousness seems due to the indefinable culture of the East-Central European region, which, in the historical context of the twenties and thirties, meant the patchwork of national states created in 1918. The narrators travel with people whose disagreements, quarrels, and anti-Semitism display a state of utter linguistic and ideological confusion. In An Excursion to Russia, Pannonia coincides with the eight states of East-Central Europe established after World War I. Here, the narrator’s internationalist spirit still shows an inclination towards Marxist historical materialism. It rejects the “decadent capitalist culture” and sees the Komintern as an alternative: “One returns from the brothel of Europe into the ‘Pannonian’ zone, from the southern to the northern Balkans […], using eight rolls of barbed wire; the League of Nations has separated the Balkans from Russia” (Izlet 35). These convictions were challenged subsequently by Krleža’s concrete experience of Soviet society. As Walter Benjamin’s Moscow travelogue, Krleža devotes much attention to the narrator’s subjective impressions. The chapter “Ulazak u Moskvu” (Entering Moscow), for instance, does not glorify the revolutionary city but focuses on the narrator’s apparent discontent, which he tries to overcome by reflecting on the decisive role of the senses in his childhood memories. Later on, Krleža does concentrate on the new Soviet society, but by then he already spent considerable time writing about his impressions of Berlin, and of Lithuania. Both the Lithuanian political state of affairs and the Baltic countryside remind him of Croatia, and although he mentions Pannonia in quotation marks, his description of the “Lithuanian Pannonia” contains elements that we have identified as part of the physical landscape in his symbolic Pannonia. In contrast to the factual, autobiographical prose of An Excursion to Russia, “People Traveling” is a semi-autobiographical, fictionalized narrative. The inside of the train, with the narrator and other passengers, is still described in terms of the rules of factual discourse. The anonymous first-person narrator attempts to establish the identity and the thoughts of the other passengers but being a passenger himself he is unable to fathom his fellow travelers. The external landscape,

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referred to as “Pannonian,” is highly suggestive: it is dark and threatening and, more importantly, it is empty: The destination of the train is not revealed. The ideological confusion grows as the train moves eastward, searching its way through Pannonia; it seems adrift, a chronotope connoting historical disorientation instead of historical teleology. Krleža gradually gave up his explicitly Marxist approach to Pannonia, but his dominant rhetoric remained negative. Pannonia now became a locus for his negative aesthetics: he lists ruins where one expects cathedrals, and he praises a sarcastic, self-carnivalizing poetry instead of perfect alexandrines. The result is a history of discontinuity and destruction that focuses on individual homelessness. In his 1933 essay on the painter Hegedušić, “Podravski Motivi Krste Hegedušića” (Introduction to Krsto Hegedušić’s Drava Motives; Sabrana Djela. Eseji III 295–343), Krleža reflected explicitly on his own use of the toponym through the years. He quotes two instances of his previous use of the term, just when he pleads for free individual artistic expression. He quotes at length his own “Letter from Koprivnica,” the passage that recognizes a resemblance between this contemporary rural reality to Galicia and Brueghel’s Brabant. The art of Hegedušić, he concludes, is an authentic Pannonian style, a synthesis of Brueghel’s pictorial language, of Georg Grosz, and of local inspiration. Krleža finds in Hegedušić’s drawings “ljepote” (the grammatical plural of “beauty”). He defines this key concept of his Pannonia, and his sensory aesthetics in general, as imprints of “negativne istine” (negative truths) that are said to be directly related to the human fear of mortality. As an example, Krleža offers Fra Angelico. His paintings, he writes, strike us not because of their “elevated” Christian inspiration (which is ideological and, therefore, ephemeral), but because of “those typical banal characteristics of everyday, profoundly earthly excitements” (Eseji III 300). Two aspects are important here. First, the individuality of the moment of artistic conception and perception: art depends on sensory perception, not on any rational or idealistic perception. Secondly, the ambiguous suggestion of immortality, of art speaking through the ages and resisting history. According to Krleža, Hegedušić has succeeded in his drawings to bridge “the gap between our Croatian reality and its artistic objectivization in our nineteenth-century literature” (328). His art is a synthesis of “negative truths” and local motives. Frustrated national pride is one of these motives, but Krleža carefully avoids identifying with radical Croat nationalism, with somebody like Ante Starčević (a nationalist, anti-Magyar Croat politician from the second half of the nineteenth century), for example. The latter’s political discourse, his outrage with “the poverty, corruption, grief and drunkenness of the Hungarian yoke” (329), is reflected in the work of Hegedušić. But the geographical range of Hegedušić’s motives is restricted to local culture “in between Karlovac and Koprivnica” (330). Opposing Hungarian nationalist politics, it does not resort to a Croatian nationalist antithesis. Krleža also manages to avoid the socialist alternative by emphasizing the painter’s individual talent as well as the impossibility of basing genuine art on political ideas. With its lists of ruins where one expects cathedrals and a sarcastic, self-carnivalizing poetry instead of perfect alexandrines, Pannonia became in Krleža’s post-Marxist vision a locus for the writer’s negative individual aesthetics. It now stood for a history of discontinuity and destruction at the center of which was concern with the individual’s homelessness. In addition to reflecting the author’s growing political discontent, this negative Pannonia also laid bare Krleža’s sense of

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individual alienation, his aesthetic discontent as an artist in a marginal cultural space where aesthetic form evolved somehow differently than in Western Europe. His search for an authentic form led away not only from communist party aesthetics and nineteenth-century nationalism but also from the imitation of Western models The Artist Returns to Pannonia The tension between the artistic subject and the negativity of Pannonian space in Krleža’s work culminates in the novel Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Filip Latinovicz, first published in 1932). The novel is located somewhere between the historical reality of the Great War in Hrvatski bog mars (The Croatian God Mars; 1922), the genealogical space of Zagreb bourgeois society in Glembajevi: proza (The Glembays; 1946), the setting of an anonymous provincial Central-European town in Na rubu pameti (On the Edge of Reason; 1938), and the dystopian space of the fictitious Central European state Blitva in Banket u Blitvi (Banquet in Blitva; 1938). Filip Latinovicz, the protagonist of this Künstlerroman is a painter who returns (by train and fiaker) to his native soil that is identified as Pannonia by the anonymous narrative voice. Pannonia is the dominant political, historical, and genealogical toponym in the novel. Croatia is mentioned only a few times and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia — the political reality at the time — is left out entirely. Filip is not only in search of his descent; as an artist who spent twenty-five years abroad, in a “Western metropolis,” he feels estranged and fosters the illusion of refinding his cultural roots in Pannonia. Two scenes highlight his attempts to overcome his alienation. In the first one, Filip and Bobočka, the central female character, attend the popular feast of Saint Rock. Filip feels separated from the common people and thinks of them as still living in the Middle Ages. It is here, through Filip’s focalization, that the pictorial world of Brueghel and Bosch is verbally represented. Shut off from the wild, carnivalesque feast, but touched by what is described as a barbaric, erotic force, Filip conceives of a painting of Christ as martyr and redeemer. He is convinced that this artistic image has the power to reconcile his alienated self with local reality. What is it exactly that “inspires” him? This clash between the pagan Pannonian environment and that pale Man who was hanged like a thief, but who as such has remained a living symbol to this day — the visionary hatred of that higher Man who realizes from his cross, from that fantastic height from which all the hanged look down upon us, that the dirt under our feet can be defeated only by granite columns — this should be put on canvas for once! (Return 180)

The image evoked here is deeply ironical. The messianic figure Filip imagines is precisely what he himself is not: a revolutionary, a prophet, a subject very much capable of action. The messianic figure recalls heroes from the nineteenth-century reawakening of national consciousness, and revolutionaries from the Russian revolution, embodied in An Excursion to Russia by the figure of Lenin (who reminded Krleža of a prophet, and even of Jesus). No wonder, then, that Filip is unable to paint the image. Towards the end of the novel, in a state of almost complete alienation and

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without grip on his own life and of the life of the people around him, he can paint only his mother, old Liepach, fat Karolina, Miško the cowherd, Bobočka, and Baločanski: [H]e painted them all as they sat drinking tea in the full glare of the sun round a samovar in the summerhouse; old Regina with his Excellency, like two ridiculous parrots, fat Karolina in the center of the composition with her swollen stomach and red butcher’s hands; the deaf and dumb Miško, and the imbecile Baločanski: two epileptic, demoniac, grimacing masks; Bobočka pale, in black silk, was pouring tea for him, Filip, into a bright red cup. He painted himself in front of the circle with his palette and a cigarette in his hand, and on the summerhouse, on the green ivy-tod he set an old, secular raven; everything was oily with the heavy strokes of the brush, too wet and too rich in color, lapidary, ponderous: a shade, possibly, too Nordic, the motif a little too problematic, though not the execution: it had been put on canvas in a single sweep, almost modeled in a single stroke. (Return 190)

Why is Filip capable of painting this self-portrait and incapable of painting his vision of Christ? One answer is revealed in the text: the granite image of Christ triumphs over the Pannonian mud, but Filip can only paint himself as caught in the midst of it, in the company of his mother, who has never revealed to him who his real father is; the man who actually turns out to be his real father (the two described as “two ridiculous parrots”), his adulterous mistress Bobočka, “pale, in black silk”; and a “castaway,” “the imbecile Baločanski” who will finally kill her by biting through her throat. The dirt and ugliness of the scene has such a hold on Filip that he can paint himself into it “in a single sweep.” Yet, the fictional discourse of The Return of Filip Latinovicz, with Pannonia as its locus, opens up a subjectivity more complex than the nonfiction and semifiction of Izlet u Rusiju and “Ljudi Putuju.” In the novel, the distance between the narrator and the protagonist varies, and the narrating instance lacks coherence, because he assumes many voices, including a national Croatian one, a psychoanalytic one, and a Marxist one. Behind affirmative voices that attempt to find a center, there are always second and third ones that disorient. Kiš: Reconstructing the Pannonian Space Pannonia returns after World War II as the setting of Danilo Kiš’s Porodični cirkus (Family Circus), a fictionalized autobiographical trilogy composed of Rani Jadi (Early Sorrows; 1969), Bašta, pepeo (Garden, Ashes; 1965), and Peščanik (Hourglass; 1972). The trilogy deals with the author’s youth just before, during, and right after World War II in South Hungary and the Vojvodina. Prior to it, Kiš wrote two novels: Psalam 44 (Psalm 44; 1962), which takes place during the Holocaust, and the picaresque Mansarda (The Attic; 1962), which is set in an anonymous urban space. The two works that Kiš wrote after the trilogy, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich; 1976) and Enciklopedija mrtvih (The Encyclopedia of the Dead; 1985) widen the fictive space to cover Europe. Pannonia reappears in Kiš’s final works, the unfinished “Život, Literatura” (Life, Literature) and a short prose piece entitled “A i B” (A and B). By then, Kiš was in a “Joycean” exile in Paris, participating in the debate on Central Europe. How could Pannonia, an am-

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biguous space with respect to transcendence, survive and reemerge? And how does it relate to the Mediterranean, Montenegro, and Central Europe spaces that are contiguous to it in Kiš’s work? There is apparently no element or image in Kiš’s Pannonia that is not a quotation, either from documents left behind by the father, the central character in Family Circus, or from a literary intertext. Most intertextual quotations and references seem to relate to works that thematize Jewish identity. For instance, Kiš’s father figure resembles remarkably the father in Bruno Schulz’s Sklepy cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles; 1933) and Sanatorium pod klepsydra (Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass; 1937). Even autobiographical elements in the trilogy are presented, incorporated, and interpreted by the narrator as quotations from a (nonexistent) text. In dialogue with Krleža’s works on remembrance and the genealogical self, Kiš’s Pannonia contains as main organizing images a velvet album with old family photographs and a coffin (metaphorically transformed into a violin case), both of which reveal an obsession with mortality and Jewish culture. Water is omnipresent, transforming every vehicle on wheels into a boat or a ship, and eventually into a lugubrious gondola, another image of death. Pannonia is present in Peščanik (Hourglass) as a chapter title (e.g., “A Pannonian Wintertale”). The predominant chronotope of Kiš’s Pannonia is the train. Following the train from Krleža to Kiš reveals the intertextual mechanism at work in Kiš’s Pannonia. Krleža as narrator of his travelogues, Kiš’s real father, Eduard, as well as the fictional Filip Latinovicz and the (meta)fictional Eduard Sam (E.S.), all travel by train in the Pannonia of the 1930s. Kiš’s real father, as well as his fictional father figure, was author of a Yugoslav “Timetable of Buses, Ships, Trains and Airplanes.” So Kiš’s and Krleža’s Pannonia are geographically and historically identical: both spaces cover, approximately, the Danube, Sava and Drava plain in the 1930s and 40s. But Krleža, concerned with contemporary reality, constructs the Pannonian space, whereas Kiš, concerned with history, retrospectively reconstructs it. E.S.’s train is, historically speaking, a different one from Krleža’s: the latter is afloat in contemporary reality, whereas Kiš’s historically fixed train heads towards its final destination, Auschwitz. The retrospective gaze of the fictional son on the father directs the train in one direction only: there is no escape, no train heading abroad from E.S.’s closed universe. Images of time (clepsydras and hourglasses) are, like trains, indicative of the differences between Krleža’s and Kiš’s Pannonia. Krleža’s clock metaphors are found, so to speak, inductively. They are placed both in The Return of Filip Latinovicz and in “People Traveling” at the end of long descriptions, concluding exhaustive lists of elements belonging to the Pannonian space. Kiš’s clock metaphors involve a deductive method. The hourglass, as both title and as a depicted image at the beginning in the text of the trilogy’s third part, is the premise for the reconstruction of a historical Pannonian space. Fictionalizing Kiš’s real father into the E.S. of his trilogy is the extreme instance of reconstruction. Images of the father’s neurasthenia seem apocalyptic versions of Krleža’s negative truths: distant barking dogs, a frequent image in Krleža’s Pannonian landscapes, haunt E.S. as a mortal threat. The fog, as well as the continuous, gradual movement from light to darkness, echo Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog; 1955), Alain Resnais’s movie. When E.S. is about to relate in Peščanik how he escaped death on the banks of the Danube during the infamous pogrom carried out in 1942 by the Hungarian forces against Jews, Serbs, and Roma, the text breaks off and the narrator remarks in a footnote that “a page is missing” (Hourglass 157). The figure of E.S., it

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seems, is reconstructed entirely from historical documents and the son’s memories. Having lost his sense of time and threatened with destruction, E.S. wanders around forlorn in opposing states of mind. He experiences absolute lucidity as the Messiah, the last link in a long chain of prophets, yet he suffers from neurasthenia, insanity, and his failure as a father and a husband. Most importantly, the father’s messianism fails to rescue him from the historical reality of World War II. Kiš’s reconstruction is based on the Holocaust and the destruction of old Central Europe in the war. Yet Kiš’s trilogy foregrounds not only mortality and decay but also the power of the word, and literature’s ability to remember. E.S.’s conclusion to his “Notes of a Madman” seems to define his son’s historical task: “Perhaps it will be my son who will someday publish my notes and my herbarium of Pannonian plants. But everything that survives death is a paltry, pathetic victory over the eternity of nothingness — a proof of man’s greatness and of Yahweh’s mercy. Non omnis moriar” (Hourglass 285). Indeed, Kiš and his fictional narrator must reconstruct the past from “paltry” documents, for the rest is erased, destroyed. History destroys its markers, as well as Kiš’s real father, who, we know, perished in Auschwitz. What are we to make of this reconstructed Pannonian situation? Does it allow the kind of limited transcendence E.S. hopes for through his son — a transcendence that is clearly illusory in Filip Latinovicz’s never realized Christ painting? To what extent does E.S.’s mad, split identity undermine that hope? Hourglass represents Kiš’s most daring narrative experiment. Like Krleža’s Filip Latinovicz, it lacks a coherent narrative center. The immortality claim of the fictionalized father (allegedly a madman — but who makes that allegation?) is countered by several voices in the text that dispute his authenticity and partly erase him from the text (as the real father was erased in history). Another way to approach the questions of truth and identity is by way of the East-Central European cultural space of the 1980s. If we read the claim to immortality not as a statement, but a question, we can find a further clue in the short pieces Kiš wrote towards the end of his life in 1986. “A and B” is a response to a questionnaire of the French magazine Actuel on where the most beautiful and the ugliest places were. In “B,” Kiš decribes “the worst rat hole,” a small house, a former stable, where he and his family lived 1942–47. We recognize without much difficulty his Pannonian space, since the description is a collage of Kiš’s descriptions in the trilogy. It is basically empty: there are some traces of earlier times, but the place has been deserted. The first-person narrator has trouble entering the place physically, for he has become too tall. The description in “B” ends ironically: “‘Here a monument shall be erected,’ says the man ironically after we left the place. ‘On it shall be written: HERE LIVED THE YUGOSLAV WRITER D.K. FROM 1942 TO 1947’” (302). “A” describes a “Magical Place.” It covers Mediterranean and Montenegrin spaces, the other setting of the author’s youth, where he moved after leaving Pannonia. It describes an itinerary to the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro) on the Montenegrin Adriatic shore, apparently in the style of a Blue Guide. However, the text turns out to be a soliloquy, and the conditions set by the narrator to reach the Bay of Kotor and to “experience the oceanic feeling” are actually determined by the experience of the father, whose traces the narrator follows. The itinerary is directed at a hidden I, the real addressee. In sharp contrast to the Pannonian space in “B,” the Mediterranean space in “A” reveals traces of the past. The narrator reencounters traces not only of his father (in Hourglass, the neurasthenic E.S., stares at a picture, vaguely remembering a visit to the coast), but also those of Arthur Koestler and Sigmund Freud.

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Is homelessness unique to Pannonia? Does the Mediterranean space open up the unexpected possibility of transcendence? The answer will have to take into account Kiš’s main topographical concern during the last decade of his life: the debate over the Central European culture, which was the historical space of Freud, Koestler, and also of Kiš’s father. “Central Europe” became a major discussion topic at the beginning of the 1980s. It challenged the Cold War division of Europe into an eastern and a western realm, embodied in the then official term of Eastern Europe. The advocates of Central Europe were some of the best-known émigrés from the region to the West, Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Zagajewski, but writers like György Konrád, who stayed behind, also participated. The key word of the new powerful discourse was difference, from Western European culture as well as from that of Russia. As an affirmative concept, Central Europe countered nationalism by emphasizing the shared properties of the region’s many cultural traditions, a principle of unity in diversity. The discussion about a specific Central European culture found its most refined and literary expression in essays written in the eighties by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, especially “Central European Attitudes” and The Witness of Poetry. Miłosz limited the discussion to the domain of literature and art. Within this domain, he saw the distinctive feature of Central Europe in the poet’s search for a center. The underlying sense of homelessness and alienation was not predominant in Miłosz’s writing. Miłosz believed that coping with alienation in Central Europe since the interwar years led to the emergence of a truly authentic literary voice: literature offered Central-European writers or poets nothing less than the home that political reality denied them. Kiš, an exile in Paris by the 1980s, took part in two ambitious round-table discussions on Central Europe, and he wrote an influential essay in Cross Currents, entitled “Variations on the Theme of Central Europe.” He found here several common traits among the region’s cultures: first of all a profound sense of inauthenticity, a continuous quest for legitimacy, anti-Semitism in a “vacuum of values” (Hermann Broch), and a strong Jewish tradition of resistance. Other themes he mentioned were the historical traumas of Fascism and Communism, exile (“a collective name for all forms of alienation”), the “inherent presence of culture,” and “the awareness of form” (1–13). Kiš acknowledged that Krleža questioned the validity of Central Europe as a cultural-historical concept, but emphasized their mutual concern: literature could only achieve real meaning in Central Europe by incorporating alienation and homelessness. The aesthetic and historical concerns of the essay reflect concerns that were at the core of Family Circus: hence, the Central-European discourse was, for him, merely an extension of his concern with Pannonia. The concern that the homo poeticus had with Pannonia as fiction translated into a concern of a homo politicus with Central Europe. In terms of Kiš’s “A and B,” the Mediterranean coast shows traces of individuals essential to a Central European culture, but Pannonia is a space only of his former self. Recent wars in the Balkans have violently erased and redefined political borders, which has not spared the concept of Central Europe. In this context of political destruction and of cultural amnesia, the Pannonian space offers an alternative memory and not only of homelessness. It is a graveyard with tombstones that memorialize lives on the margins of history. It is also a storehouse of images and literary forms that express the state of mind of the region’s inhabitants. The image is still vital and capable of renewal — as the return of Pannonia in the 1990s shows.

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Jan Lam and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Galicia in the Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Writers Agnieszka Nance Known as the most significant year in all of Polish history, 1773 marked the so-called First Partition, which broke up the Kingdom of Poland, giving parts of its territory to three great powers: Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire. A second division of Polish territory occurred in 1792, in a scheme finalized after the last elected Polish King, Stanisław August Poniatowski finally abdicated on November 25, 1795. For over 120 years, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe, yet not from the political discussions of the time. The entities that emerged as a result of the three Partitions sought to regain the country’s cultural capital and preserve a distinctive Western identity for the Polish culture, despite the loss of nationhood. The last phase of the revolutionary era played a crucial role in preserving Poland’s legacy in another way, in Galicia, the largest province in the Austrian Empire. After the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Cracow prospered as a Free City (universally known as Rzeczpospolita Krakowska) under the protection of the three powers. In 1846, however, as a result of the Cracow Uprising (the peasant insurrection or Jacquerie), the free city was suppressed, and the Austro-Russian Treaty on November 16 awarded Cracow to Galicia. Because of Cracow’s traditional special status as a Free City and the relative independence of Galicia within the Austrian Empire, this province played a special role in constructing Polish identity and culture in the nineteenth century. Its citizens created their own kind of Polishness and became the dominant “imagined community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s concept) for Polish culture well into the twentieth century. Compared to the Polish regions ceded to Prussia and Russia, Galicia became for many Poles a mythical land of relative independence, where “old” Polish social structures along with Polish habits were maintained. As a relatively autonomous province, Galicia became the hope and center of Polish culture, defined as a nation without a country, a state of mind within Austro-Hungary rather than a political entity. Significantly, this nineteenth-century Galicia existed not only in the minds of Poles but also in various literary representations of the Polish nation-without-a-state. I will discuss two authors that acknowledged Galician Poland, one Germanophone, — Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Austro-Hungary’s most famous female author — and one Polish, Jan Lam, journalist and humorous chronicler of the Galician scene (see also vol. 1:116–125 of our History for a discussion of another writer born and focused on Galicia, Joseph Roth). I will argue that the two authors shared a vision of Galicia’s strengths and weaknesses, despite their distinct ethnic identities and politics. I will also compare their representations of Polish Galicia in terms of class positions, ethnicity, and religion within the Galician community. The images of Galicia provided by the two authors suggest that, in this region, ethnic, religious, and national groups coexisted in relative harmony, in spite of their differences. This Galician myth, as we shall see, is still alive today in Polish social and cultural life.

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Ebner-Eschenbach and the Polish Nation Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was the descendant of an old Austrian aristocratic family — not a “paper” aristocracy (see Strelka). She was born in Moravia, another Austrian border region of small villages and multiethnic populations. One of Ebner-Eschenbach’s stories, “Der Kreisphysikus” (The District Physician; 1883), first published in the collection Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten (Village and Castle Stories), presents several years of a Galician village life told from the perspective of the local physician, Doktor Nathanael Rosenzweig. Interestingly, the narration is not particularly colored by Rosenzweig’s ethnic origin. Although a half-Jew, he is first of all a loyal state employee, then a doctor, and only then a Jew. His status thus represents a certain paradox in the village, yet his position stands in clear, positive relation to others: Rosenzweig is accepted, and even respected, by all groups in the village. For the peasants, he is the “reasonable Mr. Doctor” (“Kreisphysikus” 46); the aristocrats call him an “incomparable physician” (52); local authorities trust him with both their secret missions and health; and for other Jews, he is “Gibor” (the giant, 117). This position allows him access to all the social groups of the village, a microcosm of all rural Galician society. Ebner-Eschenbach bases much of her story on this physician’s perceptions of Galician society in the 1840s. In the house of a rich noblewoman, Polish Countess Aniela, Rosenzweig meets other Polish aristocrats: A large group of castle guests had gathered there; a society known to the doctor to be as objectionable as a group of quacks. Supporters of “King” Adam Czartoryski, conspirators against the good current establishment, dreamers waiting to reintroduce the old Polish economy. The lady of the house, who invited him, still young and beautiful, enthusiastic, absolute ruler of the great estates since the death of her husband, was the soul of the party and its powerful sustainer. She maintained a lively correspondence with the national government in Paris, received and sheltered its emissaries, and gave large yearly sums for revolutionary purposes. (“Kreisphysikus” 66)

One specific factor seems to determine Rosenzweig’s negative perception of this group: their fanatic devotion to the “Cause,” to the lost Kingdom, and to the old Polish tradition. The narrator, however, explains the doctor’s perspective to the reader: These fanatic activities displeased the doctor and distorted his picture of the lady who was in every way worthy of respect: as a good mother, as a clever manager of her fortune, and as a humane mistress of her subordinates. (66)

Such passages pose for readers the fundamental problem of Polish aristocracy: their interest was diverted from their immediate surroundings to vague political schemes. Ebner-Eschenbach had a thorough knowledge of the Polish situation, and she exercised an incipient critique of the Polish aristocracy. Through an ironic narrative perspective, she draws a colorful picture of the Polish aristocracy in Galicia, as well as of their connection to the émigrés in Paris. From his Hotel Lambert in Paris, Adam Czartoryski, the unquestioned leader of the Great Emigration and “uncrowned King of Poland,” presided over independent Polish politics (Davies, God’s Playground 276). This arrangement must have seemed as odd in reality as it did to Ebner-Eschenbach’s characters.

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In Ebner-Eschenbach’s presentation, the political discussions among the Polish nobility in Galicia were almost exclusively focused on the struggle for Polish independence and on the symbols of nationhood: red and white banners, emissaries, sabers, and national anthems. To the Galician present they paid little attention. Although an outsider to Polish politics, Rosenzweig witnesses the conspirators’ plans but remains confused about their engagements. The conspirators want to include him in their plans to “awaken the Polish Reich” (“Kreisphysikus” 66), as Countess Aniela calls it: The time to shake off the foreign yoke has arrived. […]You may know this, as you are a good Pole and we trust you. The signal for the outbreak of the revolution will be given in Lemberg at the first ball of the archduke. (67)

The doctor is treated as part of the conspiracy and exposed to a secret plan that sounds like a comic opera. However, Rosenzweig’s knowledge of the aristocrats’ moral code and their understanding of revolution leads him (even as a sympathetic observer) to question their ability to fulfill their mission: “This plan is marvelously thought out, but you will not carry it out. […] Noble ladies and gentlemen like you can hate, can fight, but cannot betray or murder” (69). Rosenzweig is thus witness to a series of patriotic but utterly ineffectual manifestations of aristocratic Polishness. Even though he shares a sense of belonging to the same community, he sees that their passion for this imagined identity takes on the appearance of a religious cult, and, at least in the case of this group of Poles, seems stronger than their Catholic beliefs: “Everything for Poland! My temporal and eternal salvation!“ (“Kreisphysikus” 70). Although some of their statements seem rather empty, others are presented by the narrator in a different light, as strong and moving manifestations of a Polish spirit unifying them. Rosenzweig understands their spirit even as he rejects their inactivity. The next scene underscores this juxtaposition. One of Countess Aniela’s guests, “a stranger,” joins the Poles in singing a nationalist song: The sound of this beautiful song moved him as well. One feeling connected him with his brothers! A longing, a passionate powerful longing for his lost homeland. From this spring of sorrow, no other people had drunk so fully as these, from whose hearts such a song streamed. (71)

This stranger, young Edward Dembowski, becomes a key figure in Ebner-Eschenbach’s “Kreisphysikus.” Significantly, the author delays the introduction of this emissary. She first presents Rosenzweig and his life in order to offer a better understanding of the evolving relationship between the doctor and Dembowski and to underscore Dembowski’s vision of a reawakened Polish state, in which all people are equal and where the position of peasantry is on a par with that of the nobility. By presenting the political situation through the physician’s eyes, she can contrast Dembowski’s genuine patriotism with the ridiculous one of the aristocrats. Interestingly, Dembowski is the one Pole who seems to be distant and distinct from all the others in this Galician village. He is the only true individual among them, and the one capable of independent action. The “Stranger” initially takes the position of an observer, rather like an outsider, whose only common interest with the aristocracy is love for lost Poland. Finally,

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it becomes evident that he is someone with a mission, one who the community perceives as a spiritual leader. More significantly for the case of Galicia, the appearance of Dembowski (introduced as Cousin Roswadowski) causes a split among the aristocrats, and shifts attention from Poland in general to Galicia: the arrival of a “true” Polish patriot refocuses the story forward to a possible Polish culture rather than back to an outdated myth. As the story progresses, it is clear that Dembowski does not fully belong to this group of Galicians. Although himself an aristocrat, he represents a different set of values not completely understood by the others. For example, he explicitly expresses his humanist-Christian vision of the world, proposing a unified Polish nation with aristocrats and peasantry treated equally. The others do not see this unified state as a prerequisite for Polish freedom: The waves of enthusiasm with which the emissary was welcomed gradually subsided. A muttering of disapproval […] arose now. From the group surrounding the prince arose the admonition: “Let the priest talk about brotherly love, talk about the liberation of the home land!” “The two are united!” the speaker responded […]. The prince’s lips formed a grimacing smile. (108)

To a reader familiar with Polish history, Ebner-Eschenbach’s historical allusions are unmistakable. She refers to the historical events of 1846, when the revolution against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Galicia conflicted with the Peasant Uprising against landowners, to portray for readers current circumstances and possibilities for the reestablishment of a Polish state. The author further confronts the possibility of an aristocratic revolution against the dominance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Dembowski’s desire to incorporate the lower classes into a fight to free the country from all unjust powers, leading to a new and more equitable Polish political and social order: What filled his soul was no longer a simple compassion for the miserable poor but also hatred for the powerful and rich, regardless of whether they were the masters of the Partitioning Powers or the holders of the central government in Paris and usurpers of the kingdom, which they wanted to re-establish. (87)

This almost socialist vision is directed against a traditional stratified Poland that seeks to blame instead of to build. Through Dembowski, the reader is offered a critical analysis of Poland’s past, a realization that more is at stake in the battle for national integrity than what the aristocrats imagined in the past and often still do: You are demanding freedom from foreign tyranny? What else have you imposed upon your lamentable people other than tyranny? You, the nobility, were the State. In Poland, never was any class, other than your own, given a chance to speak. And where have you led the country? […] Your self-interest has exploited the land, your discord has torn it apart, and your betrayal has turned it over to the enemies! (108)

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In Dembowski’s vision, the peasantry emerges as a possibly dominant force in discussions about the future of Poland. Perhaps to underscore this idea, Ebner-Eschenbach chose to end the story by presenting the outcome of the Peasant Uprising in Galicia, the moment when Dembowski becomes a true leader for the masses that fight both the injustice of the aristocratic administration and the Austrian government. Ebner-Eschenbach leaves out significant political details about the Uprising, for instance that more than two thousand Polish noblemen were killed by the peasants — something that her readers would have found to be a rather unpropitious beginning for a political reconstruction. In EbnerEschenbach’s vision, Dembowski is the only nobleman who makes a bold attempt at winning the revolting peasants to the side of the patriotic insurgents, thus becoming a martyr for a just cause. To fulfill his perceived historic destiny, he organizes a large religious procession carrying crosses and church emblems and then marches out of Cracow in the direction of Wieliczka, a nearby salt mine. This procession is attacked by the Austrian Army, and Dembowski dies fighting. After his death, he becomes a legendary hero, and many believe that he went into hiding and would reemerge at some later point to lead the Poles in the fight for independence and human rights. Indeed, Rosenzweig believes he has seen Dembowski after the Uprising, apparently living with the common people, educating them, and helping them find harmony and peace in their lives. Ebner-Eschenbach’s narrative suggests that the peasantry may be the deciding factor in the future of Poland, but this is not necessarily the author’s view. Ebner-Eschenbach writes as a member of the German-Austrian nobility in the region, and (unlike in other of her narratives) she carefully excludes here important peasant characters. In fact, the plot emphasizes the role of the enlightened aristocracy, represented initially only by Dembowski. Ebner-Eschenbach seems to suggest that a new kind of aristocratic leadership must emerge in order to construct a new Polish community that would help the lower classes, avoiding another peasant uprising; only a socially unified Polish community, one that declares a common cause across traditional political lines, would be able to justify its claim to independence. By criticizing the ineffectual aristocracy, the author offers less than a full affirmation of the Polish peasants’ cause, but she does contend that a coherent future is more likely to be found in Polish culture rather than in its politics. Ebner-Eschenbach’s argument in “Der Kreisphysikus” for a unified Galicia is connected to her vision of how religious beliefs can help create a nation. Although no characters or events in the story exemplify religious institutions specifically, Ebner-Eschenbach appears to believe that all religions and people must connect to make a better future. Hence, she idealizes Dembowski and his counterpart, the half-Jew Rosenzweig. By contrast, she portrays a group of devoted Catholics among the Polish aristocrats, whose beliefs are used, unfortunately, to promote the Polish cause — one they associate with their own interests as good Polish Catholics. For this reason, Rosenzweig remains a stranger among them, being treated as a Jew even when he claims allegiance to the new idea of Poland. They cannot dissociate their religion from their politics. Significantly, the only character who sees in this Jew a true Samaritan is Dembowski, the young idealist. Speaking to the nobles gathered in Countess Aniela’s salon, Dembowski contrasts the good deeds of Rosenzweig with the traditional actions of the Poles: “This is what a Jew did,” the speaker addressed his audience, “out of his own free will, for those of a different faith; and what have we ever done out of our own free wills, we of the other faith?

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Read your history and ask yourselves whether a Jew can wish back into existence the days in which Poles rule Poland again?” (75)

Since Jews had generally been excluded from the visions about the future of the Polish nation, this passage raises a serious question about Polish history and most likely also about Polish national consciousness. Ebner-Eschenbach suggests a different solution through the visionary Dembowski and his “Evangelium der Gleichberechtigung” (Gospel of Equal Rights; 86). She is not denying the social function of religion. The emissary, whose mission is to incorporate peasants into the fight for the independence of the Polish state, emerges in the story almost as a priest-like figure, and he is perceived by Rosenzweig as an apostle. Yet Dembowski’s potential power as a spiritual and political leader changes the weight of the relation between the church and the possible state, as exemplified in the episode of the Uprising. This episode starts with a religious procession, with the apostle of political freedom surrounded by priests who carry religious emblems. In spite of this Catholic manifestation, which seems to support Dembowski’s attempt to involve peasants in his cause, Rosenzweig seems to agree with Dembowski’s vision of a socially unified society with equal rights: There is only one Lord, the King of heaven and earth, and only one nation of equally born brothers. Whoever usurps power over his brothers sows and reaps calamity, and spoils the souls of those being enslaved, as well as those already slaves. (108)

The scriptural tone of this passage emphasizes the commonality of religions rather than their divisive dogmas, a vision just as utopian as Ebner-Eschenbach’s political one. In this particular story, Ebner-Eschenbach avoids presenting any specific religious institutions in Galicia, preferring to identify her Galicia with religious sentiment rather than an organized religion. In so doing, the reader’s attention is focused on her ideal of religion and politics alike, wherein people of different origins and social status are unified and equal. Ebner-Eschenbach’s vision of Poland’s independence requires a new Polish society, not only socially unified but also religiously and culturally tolerant. Interestingly, her vision corresponds to the program of the progressive Polish intelligentsia during that time. For instance, Joachim Lelewel — a respected historian and Polish leader — spoke in the 1820s of Poles and Jews as “brothers” walking hand in hand towards a common future, and in 1848 Rabbi Dov Beer Meisels of Cracow asked the Galician Jews to support Polish political demands. Ebner-Eschenbach was attuned to such regional voices, no matter how utopian they may have seemed. She articulated the Polish cause around Galician cultural and social norms, knowing, however, that this would not be achievable in the existing political climate. Jan Lam and Galician Society Ebner-Eschenbach’s evaluation of Polish Galicia is not simply a German-Austrian one. Jan Lam, one of the most famous and controversial of Lemberg’s journalist-writers, addressed a number of the same social and political issues. His novels, feuilletons, and chronicles describe the socio-political, cultural, and daily life of the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Lodomeria. Though himself

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a descendant of a German family and son of an Austrian bureaucrat, Lam appears in his writings as a true and motivated Polish patriot, defending his native country and its beliefs: My German descendants were neither underlings of Brandenburg nor Pomeranian assassins, and they proudly called themselves edele, franke liude. I was born in Poland, among Poles, and I would probably become a renegade, should my nationality depend on genealogy. (Frybes 13)

Lam’s first novel, Wielki świat Capowic (The High Society of Tsapowice, 1869; Dzieła 47–161), presents his vision of Galicia and its society. The events of the novel are set in Tsapowice, a fictitious Galician town, in 1866 (one year before the Austrian compromise with Hungary) when Agenor Gołuchowski became governor and started a campaign for a Polish administration of the district. Like the fictional Dembowski, he looked for a new Polish national culture in an occasionally utopian way. Lam argues for a Galician Polish life in full acknowledgement of its political realities. To supplement the narrative’s main plot, he includes large digressions, in pamphlet-like form, to underscore how the general political situation affects individuals. These digressions encompass the Galician political situation, press polemics, and cultural life, and they build a consistent background for the narration. Because of these interpolations, Lam’s views on the political issues presented and discussed in the novel are quite clear. To draw his readers into them, the author uses the plural form of address in order to create the illusion of a community sharing origins and nationality: “We are a nation of good-hearted people, almost always happy” (Wielki S˙ wiat 61). This may appear ironic at first, but Lam, too, is appealing to a utopian future rather than a nebulous past. Most importantly, the novel starts with the idea that a nation is an amorphous entity, not necessarily a political one. Thus, Lam’s protagonist is chosen carefully: a k-k Beamter (imperial-royal civil servant), Mr. Precliczek acts as a perfect bureaucrat of the Habsburg Monarchy. While his job performance may be praiseworthy, his loss of national identity and blind loyalty to his office makes him problematic in the eyes of the narrator: Mr. Precliczek […] stated that he was ein biederer Deutsche [an honorable German]. The whole district agreed with him regarding the noun; regarding the adjective, however, some had a different opinion. Besides, Mr. Precliczek did not need to prove his nationality; it was generally known that he spoke only German, and some Czech — only as much as a common mortal would need never to learn Polish. (57) Mr. Precliczek was actually a Czech, but a Czech who was a purer German than any immediate descendant of Hermann. (77)

Initially ein biederer Deutsche, Precliczek gradually changes his identity and attitude towards his situation. In responding to another state employee, Johann von Safaranowycz, whose position and affection for Precliczek’s daughter were more than welcome, Precliczek claims: “I’m actually Ruthenian. […] I adore the Ruthenian language and literature” (91). After the nomination of Gołuchowski to the governorship of Galicia, Precliczek underscores his newfound devotion to Poland (“I am actually also a Pole” — 152), later to Galicia (“I am actually a Galician” — 157), until finally he comes to the realization that he is “actually Bohemian, Vaclav Precliček, from

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Jung-Bunclau” (160). Nationality as a mutable and multiple construct is central to all of Lam’s writings. According to him, national identity requires a certain pattern of behavior, a set of beliefs and values, rather than a genealogy. As a consequence, all of the novel’s characters embrace a vision of Polish culture and state that is not determined by ethnic identity in the narrow sense. Through the paradoxical politics of the Precliczek family, Lam models the period’s issues for the Polish literate class, especially since Polish readers may understand what that family may not: that in 1866, the entire political climate of Austria was changing. The “k-k” Beamtentum would legally become, once Hungary became its own administrative unit, the “k.u.k.” (kaiserlich und königlich, i.e. imperial and royal) bureaucracy, split between Austria and Hungary, putting the Slavic cause in a different light. The identity of Lam’s protagonist seems determined by his desire to belong to the important class of people within the state and its politics, rather than by nationality and origin. But Lam is not naïve about the issue of ethnicity. The Precliczek family has a second heritage: the mother and daughter are Polish, devotees of Polish history, literature, and language: No one of Haserle was ever with Bolesław Chrobry at the conquest of Kiev, none died at Varna, none broke the sejms, and none served as a podstarosci [district official in Galicia] in Radziwiłł, Lubomirski, or Rzewuski. […] It is therefore a fact, without much explanation but still a fact, that Mrs. Precliczek née Haserle called her husband “you Swabian,” and that she could speak only Polish and raised her daughter the Polish way. (58)

Therefore, Precliczek’s access to such different identities is cast as a mixed blessing for those more interested in Galicia’s Polish heritage. Language, no doubt, plays a privileged role when an individual acquires a Polish identity. Lam emphasizes the importance of the Polish language — its strength in Galician society. Through language all people express the most important facets of their political ideology. However, Lam also points to the special role that Galician multilingualism plays in everyday lives: Mr. Capowicki, Mr. Papinkowski, Mr. Bykowski, and many other gentlemen whose names end in –icki and –owski let their attorneys write to authorities and courts in German. They think that, just as people can communicate best with God in Latin, it’s better to talk with offices and courts in German. It’ll be a long time before we learn to demand justice in Polish. Some Galician Poles will master this only when the Staatsrat will decree, and his Highness will confirm, that everyone should use the language he knows and understands best. (135)

The practical distinction between using Polish and German thus seems to be clearly political. Whereas Polish is definitely a language spoken at home, the language of the community, German, is associated with the Empire and with the foreign administration in Galicia. Like EbnerEschenbach, then, Lam represents the Polish language as a distinguishing element that separates his nation from the others living in Galicia. But whereas Ebner-Eschenbach points to a kind of stable bilingualism in Galicia, celebrating the traditions of each group, Lam reveals the consequences of the Polish devotion to symbols of Polishness: portrayals of famous Polish heroes such as Kościuszko, the books of Mickiewicz or Słowacki — as Precliczek quips, “those damn Polish books are to blame for everything” (123) —, Polish songs, and even traditional clothes destabilize the utopia of multiculturalism depicted by Ebner-Eschenbach.

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Focusing on the split in his fictional family allows Lam not only to take an ironic position vis-à-vis the Polish value system, but also to suggest that the insider’s view, the view of a “typical” Pole, has German roots. His perspective flags for the reader the paradoxes of Polish mentality: In Poland, a certain collision between feelings and duties, dangerous for the holy reverence that we pay to family relations, can sometimes occur. Although an author of panegyrics and a brilliant critic of Zygmunt Krasiński’s works called this a “doctrine of decomposition/disintegration,” the conviction that one’s duties towards the fatherland come before those towards the family is very common for us. […] Therefore, no Polish child can be expected to respect and obey absolutely parents, whose ideas contrast too sharply with our national dogma. (124)

Lam’s ironic tone draws a fine line between personal and national politics. He criticizes neither the devotion to Poland as a cultural community, nor to Poland’s possible political independence (which must have seemed conceivable in a period of devolution). Instead, he focuses on the progressive Polish middle class to bring to light the many discrepancies that necessarily arise among new adherents of the Polish nation — be that nation a community with a coherent cultural tradition, or a nation-state with political rights. In this particular context, Lam’s critique of the Polish aristocracy parallels, though does not exactly coincide with, that of Ebner-Eschenbach’s. Lam’s nobility is still ethnically Polish, manifesting its Polishness as a claim to political identity, but it is anxious to claim also a social position within the Empire, not necessarily as part of the Galician community or in relation to other Slavs. Its centers of interest are without doubt Vienna and Austria; Galicia is in its view too provincial to play any role in the structure of the Empire. The following passage reflects the aristocrats’ attachment to the Kaiser: Gentlemen! In cities, all feelings are shown in public demonstrations, addresses, and torchlight parades, but we, the nobility/gentry, in not demonstrating, feel a deeper attachment to the throne and the Monarchy. Here, in an intimate domestic circle, where everything is spoken and done heartily, in an old-Polish way, and not for mere show, I propose, therefore, a toast: Long live our most noble and gracious Lord, long live our Emperor and King, Franz Joseph I! (115)

In contrast to the middle class, which in Lam’s text appears as the Polish Umsturzpartei (subversive party), the nobles do not envision a federation of nations under the Habsburgs, wherein Poland/Galicia, like Hungary, would receive equal political rights. Instead, they support the central government and a centralized political and administrative system. The creation of a federation with Galicia/Poland as one of its entities was apparently not as desirable a goal for the nobility, as it had been for Hungarians, and still remained for many of the larger Slavic groups in the Empire. Significantly, Lam positions himself on the side of modern, middle-class Poles who see the necessity of reestablishing a Polish state based on equal political rights. In Wielki świat Capowic, this option is represented by Karol Schreyer, a young patriotic Pole who took part in the Polish Uprising of 1863 against Russia, “a neighboring state, and so friendly with the monarchy of the Kaiser Königliche Apostolische Majestät,” as Mr. Precliczek describes it. Schreyer is an interesting figure in Lam’s set of characters. A “verfluchter Pole” (a damn Pole — 138) for Precliczek, Schreyer seems to find his optimal position in an administrative office governed by the Austrians.

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He is a loyal bureaucrat, knowledgeable and responsible, even worthy of marrying Mr. Precliczek’s daughter, Milcia. Schreyer is for Lam an ideal example of a successful political option, a model of how Poles could exist in an autonomous community, preserving their traditions and cultural roots and yet functioning within the Empire. Not surprisingly, Lam’s narrative ends with the arrival of a “new era” (160), in which Schreyer works quietly as a district judge, managing a stable life with his family, far away from the previous romantic enchantments of radical politics. To assess the changes taking place in the Galicia of 1866 as a result of a “new era,” Lam uses again the figure of Precliczek and his blind servility to the central administration: Had Mr. Precliczek read something more than simply the decrees issued by the k.u.k. board and the “Lemberger Zeitung,” which was still published at that time, he would have known that the Umsturzpartei was planning to re-establish Poland by turning it into a Slav federacy. (115)

This passage reveals clearly Lam’s opinion about a Polish political future. In his vision, the Ruthenians had been excluded from the Polish efforts to create Western Galicia as an autonomous political entity. The long history of conflict between the Poles and the Ruthenians influenced Lam’s view on the possibility of a larger cooperation with the Ukrainians. Before World War I, the Ukrainians wanted to incorporate Galicia into a projected “Western Ukraine,” while the Poles saw Galicia as part of Eastern Malopolska. Lam thus discredits one of the main options for Poland’s political future that emerged after the final Partition of Rzeczpospolita in 1795, that is, the Russian solution with the Ukraine as an affiliate. In Wielki świat Capowic, the Ruthenians are specifically represented as East Slavic, therefore not part of a Western nation as a Galician Polish culture would presumably be. Lam underscores their close connections to Russia and the efforts to incorporate Ruthenia (the Eastern part of Galicia) into the centralized and despotic system of Russian administration: A feast given by such an excellent prowodir [leader], borytel [fighter], pokrowytel [defender], etc., definitely had to have a political character. Discussed were the great power of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, nowadays already k.u.k., its northern neighbor, and the podwyhy narodnosty wsierusskoy [achievements of the Great Russian people] in Halycznia. (81)

In Lam’s narrative, other Ruthenians appear only on the periphery: the k.u.k. employee von Safaranowycz and his uncle, a Greek-catholic priest, Nabuchowycz. Neither was actually a true descendant of a Ruthenian family: “this von meant that until 1848, the Safaranowicz family was gentry in the Uniate Church, receiving later Austrian nationality” (85). Here again, Lam takes a political position. 1848 had generated not only patriotic Polish demonstrations but also awakened the Ruthenian nationalist movements. In this novel, however, instead of embracing his Ruthenian roots, Safaranowycz decides to become Austrian and turns only later into a Ruthenian patriot whose ignorance about his own culture and language is more than obvious. Lam thus believes that the Ruthenians have less of a claim to a natural national status than the Poles. Their heritage seems to him less distinct than that of the Galician Poles. Lam’s biased treatment of the Ruthenians is clear also in the heavy irony with which he rejects their claim that the Poles discriminate against them:

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Agnieszka Nance The Priest Nabuchowycz promised to do everything possible for the supplicants of Malostaw, “after those events which are, in any case, nothing but an outcry of the Ruthenian nationality, enslaved for centuries, subjugated by the Poles, forgotten by the k.u.k. government, the poor, and oppressed Ruthenian nationality.” To put his speech in proper historical perspective, this enslaved nationality killed the forester and fatally wounded a gamekeeper; in Gleboczyska it converged on a tavern, beat up Motio, his wife and their brats, and drank dry a huge reserve of vodka, not just for free, but also taking all of the Motios’ cash. (96)

While Lam avoids an open criticism of the Orthodox and the Uniate Churches, he underscores through his example the danger that the Ruthenian/Ukrainian politics represented in his mind for the Polish cause and for the future of the Polish state. He sees the Church as a tool in the hands of Ukrainian nationalists trying to connect Ruthenia to Russia, based on the recognition of common traditions and religion. Significantly, Wielki świat Capowic has no Catholic priests, while the Ruthenian priest Nabuchowycz plays a special role in the development of the story line. As von Szafaranowycz’s uncle, he has the ability to influence his behavior and political carrier, but not his spiritual life and personal beliefs. The reader’s attention is directed not to the spiritual but to the political role of the Ruthenian Church, which Lam finds questionable. While Lam’s image of Ruthenians remains negative, history reveals that the first Ruthenian/ Ukrainian patriots had actually combined their forces with the Poles in a common struggle for the independence of the two million Ruthenians living in Galicia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the peasantry was emancipated and the Austrian officials became more complacent, these nationalist activists were able to organize Ukrainian movements and education in the eastern part of the partition. The continuation of this cooperation between Poles and Ruthenians did not appear to Lam as a viable option for the future. Lam feared that the incorporation of Galicia into the Ukraine (and hence, indirectly, into the Russian sphere) would lead to the abolishment of the privileges that Poles had under Habsburg Rule, including their linguistic, religious, and legal rights. Lam’s stand on the Ruthenian/Ukrainian issue reinforced a very traditional Polish perspective based on a long history of conflict between the two ethnic groups. The Germanophone writers’ depictions of the Ruthenians differed, however, significantly from it. While the Ukrainian national issues played no part in the two short stories about Galicia written by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (“Der Kreisphysikus” and “Jakob Szela”), they are prominent in Karl Emil Franzos’s sixvolume series of novels and stories entitled Aus Halb-Asien (From Half-Asia; 1876–78). Significantly, while Franzos depicts corrupt, unjust and selfish Polish nobles, he portrays the Ukrainians as a “Naturvolk” — physically strong, close to nature and to life. Franzos admired the vitality of the Carpathian Ruthenians and criticized the Poles for oppressing these “Naturvolk and the Jews throughout their history (the Galician-Polish poet Kornel Ujejski and the Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko also addressed the exploitation of Polish and Ruthenian peasants, though from different perspectives — see vol. 1: 264 of our History). Among the Galician authors writing in German, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch contributed significantly to the description of the region and its local and national conflicts (see Kłańska). Born in Galicia and writing his novels and stories in Austria, Sacher-Masoch’s perspective differs

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from that of Franzos. Although both Sacher-Masoch and Franzos saw the Ruthenian-Ukrainians as loyal servants of the Habsburg State, only Franzos noticed the changes underway and the role of the awakening Ukrainian national movement, for which, in his opinion, the Empire’s faulty national policies were to blame. The solution that stories like “Jüdische Polen” (The Jewish Poles; Aus Halb-Asien 1: 225–42) and “Der Richter von Biala” (The Judge from Biala; Aus Halb-Asien 1: 75–148) suggest is for the Ruthenians and the Jews to free themselves from the oppression of the Poles. By contrast, Sacher-Masoch does not exaggerate national antagonisms in Galicia. In “Damenverschwörung” (Conspiracy of the Ladies; 1873), he admires the Poles and especially the devotion of Polish women to their lost country. In “Sascha und Saschka” (Sasha and Sashka, 1885; Der kleine Adam 49–177), Sacher-Masoch focuses on the history of conflicts between the Poles and the Ukrainians, but not without expressing the hope that a good relationship between the two nationalities is still possible within the universal Habsburg State. Conclusion The goal of my comparison of Lam and Ebner-Eschenbach, as well as of my short remarks on Franzos and Sacher-Masoch, was to suggest that there was a shared literary representation of “Polish culture” in the nineteenth century, but one that emphasized a multiethnic Galician culture rather than simply a Polish national one. Despite the divide between the perspective of GermanAustrian aristocracy (Ebner-Eschenbach’s vision) and that of the more progressive Polish aristocratic and middle classes (Lam’s perspective), these authors shared many views concerning the options available for the future of Polish culture, including their critical assessments of the value of myths and symbols of Polish nationhood, the virtues of its language, and its past traditions. My comparison suggests that the Galician Polish culture was acknowledged in many ways by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and by one strong political faction in the virtual nation-state that Polish Galicia was. These groups saw the future of Galicia as part of a federated Austro-Hungary, if not as an independent nation-state, in no small measure because of the historical failures of the Polish hereditary nobility. Ebner-Eschenbach criticized many aspects of the stratified Galician society of the time in terms that were echoed by theorists arguing the historical legitimacy of Polish culture and the need for its survival. Lam, too, criticized this class stratification, but he was more worried that the Poles would cease to see themselves as Westerners, separating themselves from the Ruthenians whose connection to Tsarist Russia he found problematic. I have argued that Lam may have stood closer to Ebner-Eschenbach than to the other visions of Polish cultural consciousness available at that time, including the nationalist ones (on the latter, see Porter). The case I have made is that these representations of Polish culture depended on a Realpolitik of the situation, reflecting the interests of the great powers that had divided the country almost a century earlier. The other options for the region proposed during that period were exemplified in a Polish-Prussian solution argued initially by Prince Antoni Radziwiłł — a vision of another kind of blended Polish-German culture that seemed viable until Bismarck made Prussia the core of the German Empire. A Russian axis was argued by Aleksander Wielopolski, but failed on the issues of cultural liberty and religion that Lam addresses in his novel. On the other hand, Agenor Gołuchowski’s solution to define Galicia as an autonomous cultural region within

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the political framework of a multiethnic state most closely resembled what both Lam and EbnerEschenbach felt could be the future of Poland. These autonomous and largely multicultural options have disappeared from today’s understanding of nineteenth-century Polish culture. Contemporary Polish historians often prefer to describe the Galicia of the nineteenth century as underdeveloped, privileging what would again emerge in the twentieth century as an independent ethnic nation-state over the multiethnic vision available to Poland’s intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Lam’s Galicia united Poles, Germans, and Jews as part of a European vision; it ultimately perished in two World Wars and the Soviet State. Not surprisingly, this multiethnic image of Galicia was also left out of the histories of Poland written during the communist era, probably because it questioned exclusive Russian hegemony over the Slavic heritage. The situation has not improved with the fall of the Soviet Union. The most objective and complete Polish history to date is Norman Davies’s God’s Playground (1982). Written by a nonPole with help from Polish émigrés, this two-volume work tells the story of Poland from its origins through the years of the People’s Republic. Yet in describing nineteenth-century Poland, Davies largely ignores the Galician cultural vision of a Poland within the Habsburg Empire, so vividly represented by the writers discussed above or in Gołuchowski’s politics. In his focus on the eventual nation-state, Davies leaves out a dimension of Polish cultural history, the argument for a cultured nation without a state that existed in the nineteenth century as an imagined community applicable to the Galician-Polish experience. As a historian of today’s Poland, Davies is, of course, not required to pursue roads not taken. Concentrating on presenting the macro narrative of Poland’s circumstances, Davies rarely explains the micro level dynamics, the dynamics of the separate regions such as Galicia, despite its dominant role in maintaining a Polish identity throughout the nineteenth century. In several chapters of his book, Davies does present the situation in each of the three Polish Partitions, as well as the role of different social/ethnic groups (Jews, émigrés, the army, the common people) and the Catholic Church in all of the Polish lands. Yet Davies, like other current historians (e.g., Zamoyski; by contrast, see Magocsi), prefers to underscore the one-nation idea of Poland, the unified cultural and historical heritage of the Polish nation rather than the local or regional politics and life of the Polish communities. Thus, they elide Galician multiculturalism, the role of class structures and political legitimacy in the cultural politics of the era, and the psychological impact of a possible Slav federation within the Habsburg Empire. The project I have been pursuing here is crucial for retrieving a lost dimension of identity politics in nineteenth-century Polish culture, one in which Galicia and a Western Slavic identity emerged as the potential heart of a new cultural nation, apart from Russia and Pan-Slavist debates. As witnesses to the events occurring in Galicia during the second half of the nineteenth century, Lam and Ebner-Eschenbach presented surprisingly similar reflections and images of Polish culture as a nation-without-a-state. In their literary works, the “Austrian Poland” played a special role in maintaining and reconstructing Polish identity and culture in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, its citizens became in many ways the dominant “imagined community” of a Polish culture-without-a-state well into the twentieth century, until the Cold War division between Eastern and Western cultures put Slavs on a different side of Europe’s map.

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Macedonia in Bulgarian Literature Inna Peleva The Berlin Congress (1878) corrected the map of the Balkans invented by the Treaty of San Stefano and signed by Russia and the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. The will of the powerful participants in Berlin (Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire) returned Macedonia and the city of Edirne to the Sultan’s lands (San Stefano inserted them within the territories of the restored Bulgarian state). The political decisions of 1878 determined many of the developments on the Balkan Peninsula in years to come. Until 1912–13, Macedonia was a region within the Ottoman Empire. The Balkan Wars led to its partition: the White-Sea (or Aegean) part of Macedonia (48.5% of its total territory) went to Greece; the Vardar part of it (38% of the territories of the Turkish district) was annexed by Serbia; the Pirin Mountain portion of Macedonia (13.5% of Ottoman Macedonia) was incorporated within the boundaries of Bulgaria. The newly found Albanian state included separate settlements from the former Turkish estate. During World War I, Macedonia was attached to the Bulgarian lands, but the Treaty of Versailles corrected the boundaries again: Bulgaria lost the Strouma region, incorporated by Serbia. During World War II, parts of Vardar Macedonia became Albanian, the major share of it Bulgarian, while a huge part of Aegean Macedonia was under German governance. The Paris Peace Conference (1946–47) restored the boundaries of the Balkan countries as they were on January 1, 1941. After World War II, a Macedonian State was founded within Federative Yugoslavia. The “Macedonian problem” never left the Bulgarian political and cultural stage after 1878. Macedonia featured prominently in personal and group conceits, ambitions, idealisms, naïveté, and calculations. Macedonia turned out to be an appropriate name, offering perspective and excuse, endowing with meaning emotional and intellectual energies seeking to legitimate being “good” and “noble” in Bulgarian public life. Between the 1878 Liberation and 1934, about ten Bulgarian periodicals with rather dissimilar ideological backgrounds were called “Macedonia.” The topic of Macedonia had always captivated the press — a huge number of local newspapers, brochures, bulletins, and magazines, published mainly in Sofia, constantly dealt with it. At least three publications were called “Autonomous Macedonia,” seven bore the name of “Vardar.” There was also a “Macedonia & Edirne Courier,” a “Macedonia & Edirne Review,” a “Macedonian Struggle” (three different periodicals actually bore that name in 1933), a “Macedonian Star,” “Macedonian Dawn,” “Macedonian Youth,” “Macedonian Justice,” “Macedonian Student Tribune,” “Macedonian Tear,” “Macedonian Voice,” “Macedonian Student Brochure,” “Macedonian Cause,” “Macedonian Unity,” “Macedonian Flag,” “Macedonian Hearth,” and “Independent Macedonia” (five Bulgarian periodicals in the 1920s and 30s adopted this title). Even this incomplete list should give the reader a good idea of the hypnotic fascination that the “Macedonian problem” exercised in the first decades of the twentieth century. The names of these publications reveal the popular canon and the dominant linguistic attitudes underlying the Bulgarian discourse on Macedonia. Many titles emphasize political projects (reform, autonomy, revolution, independence, unity, etc.); others seek communication beyond this or that political program. They outline a clichéd poetics,

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a shared understanding of the “beautiful,” “mournful” or “forward-looking” significance of the Macedonian “dawn,” “star,” “tear,” “justice,” “flag,” and “hearth.” Most of the above-mentioned periodicals had a comparatively short life, and this was not simply due to the peculiarities of the local news market or the economic environment of Bulgarian journalism. The press did not hold a monopoly over the Macedonia discourse, since it had to compete with numerous groups, cliques, factions, secret agreements even within the apparently centralized and disciplined political organizations dealing with the fate of “our brothers who live in slavery.” Programs and writings on Macedonia proliferated; leaders were elected on their strengths and — after generating ideologies and shortage of funds — disappeared before gaining any ground. All these feverish activities came to an end in 1934, when the IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was banned, together with all “national revolutionary organizations” and political and professional associations, after the coup d’état of May 19, carried out by Zveno (a political circle that did not recognize traditional parliamentary democracy) and the Military Union (an organization of army officers). A brief history of the organizations dealing with the Macedonian problem will probably be helpful before considering the larger implications of the Macedonia discourse. In 1893, the Internal Revolutionary Organization of Macedonia and Edirne (IROME) was established in order to promote the struggle for the political autonomy of Macedonia and Edirne through organized operations of the Macedonian population itself. This was followed by the establishment of the Secret Bulgarian Revolutionary Fraternity in the 1890s; though its name suggested a “revolutionary” emphasis, this group considered an evolutionist tactic far more effective. It tried to offer an alternative to IROME, but joined it at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1895, the Supreme Committee of Macedonia and Edirne (SCME) was established in Sofia; in contrast to IROME, it believed that the liberation of Macedonia had to come from the active military involvement of the Bulgarian Principality. The relations between the two organizations were complicated, disagreements worsening after 1900. In 1902, SCME split into two wings: one declared its support for the IROME, the other stood firmly for a line of confrontation with the “internalists.” This confrontation escalated to the point where SCME and IROME detachments started fighting each other in the Macedonian territory. After the defeat of the uprising against the Turks on St. Elijah’s Day (August 2, 1903), a significant rift developed in the IROME as well, leading to the formation of two lines: one headed by Yane Sandanski, the other by Hristo Matov. After the prolonged period of wars (1912–18), IROME ceased to exist, split into an Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and a Thracian Organization (established by IROME activists from the Edirne region). IMRO leaders wanted the incorporation of the Vardar and White-Sea Macedonia within Bulgaria, but since the latter was defeated in World War I, they finally embraced IROME’s idea of autonomy for Macedonia. Their operations were focused in the Vardar region mainly, to which troops were transferred since 1920. This, however, resulted in tensions between IMRO and the government of the Bulgarian People’s Agrarian Union, which tried to normalize relations between Bulgaria and Serbia. Therefore the organization assisted the coup d’état against the government (June 9th, 1923), its activists taking part even in the capture and cruel assassination of ousted Prime Minister Alexander Stamboliski. IMRO supported the new government also against the armed rebellion instigated by the communists in 1923. But once again the relations between Bulgarian authorities and IMRO began to stiffen as Serbia continued to exercise pressure upon Sofia.

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One consequence of this governmental hostility towards IMRO (and of the power struggles inside the organization) was the mysterious assassination in 1924 of Todor Alexandrov, one of the IMRO leaders. Alexandrov’s death triggered new violent retributions. In 1924, a blood bath was carefully engineered in Gorna Djumaya, where some leaders were summoned to a meeting and massacred subsequently. Other assassinations took place in Sofia, Plovdiv, and Svilengrad. Ivan (Vanche) Mikhailov, who took Alexandrov’s place in the Central Committee of the organization, ordered the assassination of Gen. Alexander Protogerov — an eminent activist of the organization, around whom those discontented with Vanche rallied after Alexandrov’s death. This resulted in the final split of IMRO into two different organizations, both of which called themselves IMRO and tried to act as the only “true” successors of the former organization. Among the organizations advocating a new version of the “Macedonian cause” we should mention also the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (United), which was established in 1925 in Vienna and included members of several existing organizations. IMRO (United) had a procommunist orientation and fought for the “differentiation of Macedonia into a separate political unit as a regular member of the future Balkan Federation.” By contrast, the political forces behind the 1934 coup wanted “a strong and uncompromising power” to save Bulgaria from the chaos and terror instigated by the activities of the Macedonian organizations. The Macedonian topos had a different, less divisive or contested role before 1878. At that time people born outside of today’s Bulgaria took part in the formation of the corpus of Bulgarian cultural and literary texts. Born in Veles, Raiko Zhinzifov (who gave up his original Greek name of Xenophanes and chose to be called Raiko in recognition of his “true” ethnic affiliation) was a translator and author of poetry and fiction (see Topalov 332–78). In 1864, when he graduated from the Department of History and Philology at Moscow University, he was close to the Russian Slavophile circles and contributed to their periodicals. He translated into Bulgarian “Slovo o polku Igoreve” (The Lay of Igor’s Host), Václav Hanka’s forged “Kraledvorean Manuscript” (Rukopis Královédvaský; see vols. 1: 9–10, 366–67 and 3 in our History), and several works by Taras Shevchenko. He also published articles and lyrical essays in Bulgarian papers, many with regional subjects and titles such as “Dunavska zora” (Danube Dawn), “Makedoniya” (Macedonia), “Svoboda” (Liberty), and “Bălgarska pchela” (Bulgarian Bee). The leading motives in his poetry are patriotic, illustrated by titles such as “Gousljar v sobor” (A Rebec-Player at the Fair; Topalov 333–44), “Son” (Dream; 344–48), “Pitala e Bălgariya” (Bulgaria is Asking; Topalov 350–52), “Do bălgarskata majka” (To the Bulgarian Mother; Topalov 355), and “Karvava koshoulja” (A Blood-Soaked Shirt; Topalov 357–80). The two brothers Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinov came from Strouga. Dimitar taught in Ohrid, Strouga, and Koukoush, and took part in the struggle for a Bulgarian Church independent of the Greek Patriarchy, and for introducing Bulgarian language in schools and in worship. He worked for the Bulgarian press in Istanbul, and for all those activities he spent time in the Ohrid, Bitolya, Saloniki, and Istanbul prisons. Konstantin studied in the Department of History and Philology at Moscow University, where he befriended other Bulgarian students in Russia and established with them a literary association called Fraternal Labor. In 1861, the two brothers published a collection of Bulgarian Folk Songs. They died a year later in an Istanbul prison (a popular legend suggests that their poisoning was ordered by the Greek Patriarchy). Konstantin Miladinov was a gifted poet. His elegy “Taga za yug” (Grieving for the South; 1860; Topalov 276–77) is an im-

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pressive record of homesickness; poems like “Bisera” (Pearl), “Zhelanie” (Desire), “Kletva” (An Oath), “Dumane” (A Saying), “Na chuzhdina” (Abroad) — Topalov 267–77, 272, 272, 281, 283 and 284–85 respectively — are marked by vivid emotions. Grigor Părlichev was born in Ohrid. At the 1860 annual anonymous poetry contest, organized in the Greek capital, his narrative poem in Greek, “Armatholos” (trans. into Bulgarian as “Serdaryat”/The Commander; Topalov 300–27), brought him the first prize. Părlichev took part in the struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church and made his mark as a journalist and translator (translating, for example, parts of the Iliad). It is a complicated task to reconstruct the identification strategies of people between cultures. The works and biographies of the aforementioned writers reveal their “in-betweenness” in relation to “Slavonic,” “Macedonian,” “Bulgarian,” and “Greek” linguistic realities, cultural environments, political choices, and plots of desire. Such “multiple belonging” was not rare for those living in the empires of the nineteenth century. Modern readings of the writers mentioned, as well as of the poet Nikola Vaptsarov (born the following century in Bansko, in the Pirin Macedonia) ascribed to them “multiple belongings,” and as a result they have become canonized in Bulgarian as well as Macedonian literary history. A whole set of diverse facts in their biographies reveal the compound nature of their identity, which appears to us as a collage of mutually exclusive senses of belonging. At first sight, the Miladinov brothers had a patriotic love for everything Bulgarian — see Konstantin’s “Grak i bălgarin” (A Greek and a Bulgarian; Topalov 279–81). Dimitar had a serious confrontation with the Greek Patriarchy, though the two brothers initially recorded folklore texts in Greek characters. But in Konstantin’s “Taga za yug” (Grieving for the South), the lyrical persona enumerates not only “Kukush,” “Ohrid,” and “Strouga” (traditional topologic symbols of Macedonia) among the places he longs for, but also “Stambul.” The latter occupies the leading position in the list of places he considers as his “own.” Thus, the author is not just formally but also spiritually a subject of the Empire, dwelling in its very heart. Likewise, though Părlichev expelled the Greek language from the schools and churches of Ohrid and introduced Bulgarian in 1868, he was a better poet in Greek and his awareness of this tormented him throughout his life. In his narrative poem “Serdaryat,” borrowings from Homer are accompanied by motifs and techniques from Bulgarian folk songs. In Zhinzifov’s “Gousljar v sobor” (A Rebec-Player at the Fair), Milkana is at once a “Macedonian,” a “young Bulgarian,” and a “pure Slav” (Topalov 341). Zhinzifov wrote impressive lines for “our common Mother Bulgaria” (“Do bălgarskata majka,” Topalov 348–50), but after touring in 1866 the Macedonia he dreamt of during his years in Russia, he returned to Moscow, became a Russian subject and lived there until the end of his life, nevertheless continuing to produce patriotic texts about Bulgaria. Sometimes love for one’s land can exist only in separation from the place one calls home. After 1878, huge masses of people from the “territories remaining under Turkish rule,” describing themselves as Bulgarians, settled in the “free lands.” In fact, many of them were never completely integrated into the local culture; they preserved the myth of their abandoned home, forming a more closely-knit community among their fellow compatriots. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the experience of the “Macedonian Bulgarian” (the Bulgarian of Macedonian origin), is provided by the biography of Dimităr Talev, who was born in Prilep. Talev’s first serious attempt to describe Macedonia, Usilni godini (Hard Times), dates back to the late 1920s. At the

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beginning of the 1940s, he published Gotse Delchev, a biographical study of Delchev, an outstanding leader of the Macedonian Liberation Movement. After the communist assumption of power on September 9, 1944, Talev was sent to a reform camp for his “involvement with Macedonia.” In the early 1950s he was rehabilitated and for a short time published the first three volumes of his tetralogy — Zhelezniyat svetilnik (The Iron Chandelier), Prespanskite kambani (The Bells of Prespa), and Ilinden (St. Ilia’s Day) — narrating the life of Bulgarians in Macedonia between the early nineteenth century and the 1910s. The last volume of the tetralogy, Glasovete vi chuvam (Your Voices I Hear), was published in the mid 1960s. His own experience of Macedonia as a wound, obsession, and unbearable devotion inspired most of his works, including his novel about the medieval Bulgarian (Macedonian according to others) ruler Samuil. Macedonia was not merely the obsession of immigrant writers. A number of Bulgarian authors with no biographical connection to the “lost lands” dealt with it. Ivan Vazov (born in Sopot, i.e., not in Macedonia) often commented on its fate. Vazov’s biographers would periodically dig up some grandfather of his who allegedly came from Macedonia, in an attempt to explain his love for a place he had never seen. Stoyan Mikhailovski (born in Elena, outside Macedonia), chairman of the Supreme Committee of Macedonia and Edirne (SCME) between 1901 and 1903, tried to explain in his journal articles the “Macedonian problem” to the European community. Anton Strashimirov (born in Varna, but with Macedonian connections through his father’s family) was among the editors of the Reformi (Reforms) newspaper, and edited, together with Gyorche Petrov, Kulturno edinstvo (Cultural Unity), a journal in Saloniki. His novel Robi (Slaves; 1929; Săchineniya, vol. 5), recounts the “Miss Stone affair”: in 1901, an IROME detachment kidnapped the American Protestant missionary Ellen Stone and her companion, exacting a ransom to buy arms with; the Turkish authorities paid 14,500 Turkish liras in gold and the two women were released in 1902, which made IROME popular even outside the Empire. The novel included some notable pages about the Saloniki assailants, whom the writer regarded as patriots rather than suicide terrorists (on April 15 and 16, 1903, the French ship Guadalquivir, a branch of the Ottoman Bank, and other targets were blown up in Saloniki; all but one of the assailants died). Peyo Yavorov, too, wanted to fight for Macedonia and wrote about it, though he was not born there but in Chirpan (Thrace). He was one of those Bulgarian intellectuals who experienced their belatedness as a personal tragedy: the great, heroic times were gone forever, History (with capital “H”) could no longer be remade, middleclass Bulgaria left no room for sacrifice and deeds of valor. For such people Macedonia was a last chance: they needed an ideal, an unusual deed and a unique death that could emulate the models of Byron and Botev. Yavorov joined the Macedonian detachments and fought against the Turks. His memories of these events were published in 1908 under the title Khaidushki kopneniya (Yearnings of a Haiduk). The outbreak of the Balkan War (1912–13) found him again in Macedonia, taking part in the liberation of some of the Pirin settlements. Although he had no family connections to Macedonia, he demanded to be buried in his battle garb and called himself “son of Macedonia.” His love for Macedonia did not prevent him from being rather skeptical of the activities of the revolutionaries, judging them immoral by comparison to the acts of ordinary people. He also spoke ironically of his own motivation for joining the Macedonian struggle. He knew that the revolution was animated not only by patriotic ideals but also by the selfish dreams of some of its leaders. He also knew that he himself went to Macedonia to fight the Turks not so much for its well-being and people but to satisfy a special

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kind of egotism that sought a heroic self-realization. “Selfishness,” “a moral lie,” an unscrupulous manipulation of the “simple-minded people” — these are some of the ways in which Yavorov characterizes the “struggle for the liberation of Macedonia” (Khaidushki 60). This cynicism did not protect him, however, from a sense of guilt: after the failure of the Uprising on St. Elijas’s Day (August 2, 1903), he underwent a deep crisis that changed his entire life. Macedonia came to signify for him a painful loss, holiness, and a Bulgarian dislike of the Great Powers: “And if a cross needs a Golgotha, we can say the Golgotha is the entire European land. And if a Golgotha needs a peak, we shall name it Macedonia! At least that’s how it is called today” (Khaidushki 103). Perhaps the most eloquent articulation of the awareness that all Bulgarian laments for Macedonia are as pure as tears comes from Aleko Konstantinov, the author who satirizes the official practices of patriotic discourse. His story, “Razni chora, razni ideali III” (Various People, Various Ideals III) exposes repulsive aspects in the “love” for the “enslaved brother”: “I wish there was someone to liberate Macedonia now, while our party rules — then, I say, only then I’d show you what the real bargain is. If only I could lay a hand on the Saloniki customs! … Come tell me then you’re not a patriot or have no sympathy for the Macedonians” (297). The phrase “Saloniki customs” is still widely used in Bulgaria and stands for a predatory self-enrichment through the exploitation of “national ideals.” Macedonia and the Macedonian problem have been continuously present in Bulgarian literature and culture from the Revival to the present day (see Yanev and Borisova). Even before 1878, “Macedonia” had no uniform semantic meaning in the Bulgarian discourse (Petko Slaveikov had quite diverse incentives when naming his famous Istanbul newspaper of 1866–72 Macedonia). The “Macedonian brothers” were loved, taken care of, and advised by the leaders of the Bulgarian religious and national struggle, though certain writings of the time suggested that they, those “other” Bulgarians, were regarded as underdeveloped, wilder, and definitely poorer. These underlying features of the Macedonian imagery became more significant after 1878: the romantic attitudes of the bored intellectuals, who adored both Nietzsche and the radical nationalists of the last decades, read the “wildness,” “backwardness,” and “primitiveness” of the Macedonian as corresponding to “naturalness,” “authenticity,” and “truth.” Macedonia allowed men to live and die simply, gun in hand — “like men do.” The typology of the Macedonian expanded: he loved drinking, singing, wrestling, showing off, talking (he was a good storyteller and this was regarded as a very important feature of Oriental people). He was hot-tempered, fierce, and quick on the draw; he killed and died with ease. He was a nostalgic epitome of everything that predated modernity. However, that nostalgic yearning brought monstrous fruit: organizations that were sworn to “Macedonia” started destroying each other. Endless violence, assassinations, and public executions started to beleaguer the country. “Macedonia” became a figure of historical and political deadlock, symbolizing the doom of the Balkans. However, the need for a Motherland survived. Prior to 1878, while exiled in Romania, Botev had a hallucinatory vision of Bulgaria as both beautiful and frightful, situated in a perpetual “there,” a place of victory and death, horror and freedom: there my wounded heart is called, where blood is spattered over all […]

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[my heart will fly] to where malignant, terrifying cries and a monstrous litany of death break from the rumbling, shaking earth […] There the storm tears trees aside and a sword enfolds them in a wreath; terrible chasms are gaping wide and through them leaden bullets shriek; and there death comes with smiling face and sweet rest and a chilly grave (“Do moeto părvo libe” 24; trans. Kevin Ireland as “To My First Love” 28).

After 1878, while in Bulgaria (which for him was “here”), Vazov wrote four different poems entitled “Tam” (There), which told of his visionary dream of “our Macedonia.” Here is one example, written in 1915, while the Bulgarian troops were in Vardar, Macedonia: There where the Vardar gently murmurs through dear holy land where our hearts and minds and souls belong brothers in slavery, tears in eyes cheer and welcome their savior brother. What great day! I’ve lived to see you now! […] Liberty rose there! Free Bulgarian speech echoed in the fields and hills and altars, too Oh, in vain you, mountains, woods try to hinder me — there’s no hurdle that can stop my wild rush through the Pirin snow: I am there in my spirit, there I am, I am! (Săbrani săchineniya 4: 101)

Yavorov, too, yearned for a Macedonian “there.” No matter how different the poetic styles of Botev, Vazov, and Yavorov were, their works reveal the same idea: wherever one is, in exile or in one’s native land, one is never really and completely present in one’s most intimate space, for it never covers any actual territory. In post-Liberation Bulgarian culture, “Macedonia” turned from a mere topographic entity into a name that designated the need for an ideal Motherland. The real one is never “here” and “now” but always somewhere “there,” in another time and place. It is this separation of the individual from the perfect worlds of the imagination, from the fulfillment of one’s own projects to be, which has turned Macedonia into a topos of great importance in Bulgarian literary culture.

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Transformations of Imagined Landscapes: Istra and Šavrinija as Intercultural Narratives Sabina Mihelj 1.

Introduction: Literary and Cultural Identities in Istra

In looking for examples of literary texts and traditions that stay outside the canons of nation-centered literary histories, or are kept at their margins, we should not overlook the literary production of Istra (it. Istria). Corresponding roughly to the peninsula in the North Adriatic Sea and including the city of Trieste (sl. Trst) and its surroundings, this region is currently shared by three nationstates: Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. With its long history of migrations, shifting borders, and continuous administrative changes, Istra is often given as an example of a traditionally intercultural region. As a geocultural borderland, it can be expected to support imaginary leaps over or against national(istic) boundaries and open a space for rewriting the national cultural paradigm “from the margin.” Hence, it is not surprising that Istra has a remarkably large literary production that complicates the Slovene, Italian, and Croatian national literary histories. The literary texts produced by writers originating from this region, or living in it, problematize the issue of borders and identities, and some of them have already been analyzed as examples of intercultural and multivocal literature (see Strutz; also Campanile’s article in this volume). Still, writing from or about a borderland does not automatically guarantee a viewpoint that disrupts the customary nation-centered treatments. The margin, as Stuart Hall has argued, can be regarded as a space that challenges the discourses of power in a society (“The Local and the Global,” 185), but this challenge can also be one of negation: for the sake of liberating themselves from one rigid vision of reality, writers may be tempted to substitute for it an equally homogenized regional model, thus consolidating rather than undermining existing polarities. Using a conceptual distinction developed by Taja Kramberger, these kinds of models can be said to be transfirming (affirming under the disguise of transforming) nation-centered narratives (3–7). Paradoxical as this may seem, centralizing attempts at a national level often go hand in hand with homogenizing processes at a local/regional level, even though the latter seem to pull in the opposite direction. That this peculiar interplay of “national” and “regional” or “local” homogenizing attempts can be discovered also in Istra, has become increasingly evident after the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the introduction of a new nation-state border in the region in 1991. Another factor that has affected recent restructurings in Istra is the establishment of the European Union and the reorganization of the imagined map of Europe. The integration of former communist countries into the EU has progressed in parallel with the disintegration of what was known as Eastern Europe and with the extension of Western European borders towards the East and (to a certain extent) towards the Balkans. These changes reinterpret old divisions, opening spaces for new identifications and polarizations. The literary constructions of Istra reflect these processes but they also react to them in order to escape the homogenizing pressures of national cultures. Unlike the Croat and Italian literary

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texts on Istra, the Slovenian ones (which will be my main focus in this article) problematize its boundaries even further, introducing another constructed literary region in it: Šavrinija. The two imagined landscapes (and adjoined identities) of Istra and Šavrinija, as presented in literature, both reflect and undercut the recently introduced new nation-state border between Slovenia and Croatia. Of the Slovenian writers concerned with Istra, the most interesting is, undoubtedly, Marjan Tomšič. He is acknowledged as the crucial figure for the literary construction of Istra in Slovenian literature and for the formation of Istrian cultural identity. Tomšič’s main “Istrian” works were published in the 1980s and 90s: a collection of short stories entitled Olive in sol (Olives and Salt) in 1983, the novel Šavrinke (Šavrinian Costerwomen) in 1986, Kažuni (a local name for the small, round-shaped houses made of stone, typical of Istra) in 1990, and finally Zrno od frmentona (Corn Grain) in 1993. Included in Tomšič’s Istrian opus is also the dramatic monologue “Bužec on, bužca jaz” (Poor Him, Poor Me), first performed in 1998 as a part of the Primorski poletni festival (the regional summer theater manifestation), which has quickly become a landmark piece not only in the Slovenian part of Istra, but all around Slovenia. I will relate these works to other literary texts by Slovene writers, especially to the Šavrinske pesmi (Šavrinian Poems; 1962) and Brumbole (Blackthorn Tree Berries; 1988) by Alojz Kocjančič, Mladi junci v ritmu jeseni (Bullocks in the Rhythm of Autumn; 1986) by Edelman Jurinčič, and Čista voda (Clear Water; 1997) by Alferija Bržan. Furthermore, I will offer brief comparisons with works by the Croatian writer from Istra, Milan Rakovac, and by Fulvio Tomizza, who was also born in Croatia but lived in Trieste and wrote in Italian (on the latter see Campanile’s article, pp. 145–46 above). Many literary historians continue to regard cultures and identities as formations that influence each other only after they have been already established as coherent entities with defined borders. Their works follow the same reasoning as national narratives: they construct histories that are composed only of national or regional continuities, of parallel “organic” histories or cultures. I will attempt to conceptualize comparative literary history differently, recognizing that the literary constructions emerging at the border between cultures do not simply “reflect” an exchange between the given cultures, conceived as preexisting homogeneous entities, but also shape them. Whose Construction? Whose Identity? In trying to uncover the different layers of meaning attached to the imagined lands of Istra and Šavrinija and to the respective cultural identities located in these two regions, several methodological questions arise: whose identity is being defined, in which way and by whom? Or, to ask a more practical question, what readings of these texts should we adopt and whose constructions and interpretations can be discerned in them? The answers to these questions depend on how we conceptualize the relation between the literary text and its readers, and between the represented (fictional) world and the actual world outside the text. My article deals mainly with the literary construction of two imagined landscapes and the respective (collective) identities associated with them. I treat these constructions as partially open structures that allow for different readings. To show the range of possible readings, I will consider a variety of texts such as literary works, journalistic reports in print media, interpretations by literary critics, and the authors’ own com-

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ments on their work. The construction of Istra and Šavrinija is an on-going process that is only partly initiated and supported by the literary texts. The imagined landscape offered in literary texts should be treated as a referential framework from which individuals or collectives draw symbols and meanings, attaching them to other symbols and experiences, thereby redefining the imagined landscapes and their inhabitants. 2.

The Politics of Everyday Life against Nation-State Politics

For the purpose of this analysis, Istra and Šavrinija should be regarded as distinct signifiers, denoting two different imagined lands populated by two imagined communities (in the sense defined by Benedict Anderson). The actual “meaning” of these two signifiers changed over time. In recent years both signifiers have superscribed new meanings to familiar symbols and identities, redefining the past and memories thereof. Not being nation-states, both Istra and Šavrinija are fuzzy geographical areas, although their level of “fuzziness” differs. In addition, literary texts construct these two imagined lands and their boundaries differently. Kocjančič’s poems do not address explicitly the borders of Istra and Šavrinija, but both regions are consistently mentioned in relation to one nation, Slovenia. This is clear in poems like “Ob Rižani in Rokavi” (By Rižana and Rokava; Šavrinske pesmi 42) and “Slovenska Istra” (Slovenian Istra; Šavrinske pesmi 43). Instead of mentioning other national or ethnic groups living in this region, these poems name only nonspecific “foreigners” as enemies who bring suffering to Istrian people (“Slovenska Istra”). By contrast, the Istra featured in the works of Tomšič, Rakovac, and Tomizza is intercultural, not limited to the point of view of a single nation. This is especially true in the case of Tomizza and Rakovac, who explicitly deal with political issues such as international conflicts in the nineteenth century, irredentism, and fascism, or the Glagolian tradition of the Middle Ages. Compared to the representations offered by Tomizza and Rakovac, Tomšič’s Istra (and Šavrinija) is devoid of explicit political concerns. Instead of addressing political issues in the language employed by nation-centered politics, Tomšič’s main characters approach political issues from the point of view of everyday lives. The short stories collected under the title Kažuni take place after World War II, when the border between Italy and Yugoslavia kept changing until the conflict was finally resolved through the London memorandum of 1954. This was also a period of confrontation between two opposing political systems. Some of the stories explicitly refer to the violence perpetrated in Istrian villages by the communists: the destruction of the statue of a saint in “Glava” (Head), the expulsion of a priest from the village in “Proklet ta svet” (Damn This World), and the murder of an Istrian woman of Slovene nationality who married an Italian and moved to Trieste in “Aníta.” Yet violence is not seen in these cases as directly motivated by politics or ideology. Rather, it is explained as a result of rejected love or emotional and personal disappointments. Being marginalized and unable to influence decisions at the level of nation-states, Tomšič’s characters regard negatively “big” politics. This attitude is often associated with a silent rebellion against national(istic) divisions. The characters who identify with national politics or those who work for governmental structures are regularly regarded with suspicion. As we are told by

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the narrator of the short story “Aníta” (Kažuni 42–58), the title character was never attracted to either “il Duce” in Italy or the communist partisans in Yugoslavia. Her feelings towards both were similar: neither enthusiasm nor hatred towards them overwhelmed her. A similar attitude towards nation-centered politics is reflected in the novel Šavrinke. The immediate focus of this novel is the interwar period, when the whole of Istra, including Trieste, became part of Italy and the local Slavic cultures were gradually marginalized. Historically, a lively exchange had existed between the villages of Istra and Trieste, especially in the eighteenth century (Darovec 61). The economic crisis of the 1920s forced the Istrian people to find new strategies of survival. One such strategy was trading between Istrian villages and Trieste, carried out mainly by the Istrian women living in villages halfway between Trieste and the central parts of Istra. The label “Šavrinian” acquired a strong vocational connotation during that period, being applied to women traders who were not necessarily from the section of Istra nowadays identified as Šavrinija. The “Šavrinke” in the title of Tomšič’s novel are women of various backgrounds, traveling between Trieste and Istrian villages to exchange goods. Otherwise, Šavrinija as a region is rarely mentioned in the novel. In order to control this trade, the Italian authorities introduced special licenses that were too expensive for Istrian villagers to obtain, but the villagers nevertheless went on trading without them. They also resorted to resourceful strategies when trying to negotiate constantly changing borders; hence, their suspicious attitude towards state and governmental structures (Šavrinke 161–63 and 239–44). 3.

Literature as a Means of Reshuffling Social Hierarchies between Languages

Language can also help a literary construction to function as an alternative to nation-centered politics. By employing the local language, literary texts can challenge the supremacy of standardized national language(s). Most of Tomšič’s Istrian works are written in the local idiom — either in their entirety or in their dialogues. Tomšič’s language is a mix of words and expressions that can be recognized as “Slovene,” “Croat,” or “Italian.” Attempts to separate them, relating them to the three official national languages in Istria, fail to recognize that national languages came after such local “mixes” and were only a posteriori imposed as “pure” and more valuable. Paradoxically, such historically recent national languages as the Croat and the Slovene are today regarded as the source of, and yardsticks for, local languages that have preceded them. Following Tomšič’s example, a number of books have been published in the local Istrian dialect. For example, Marija Franca printed a collection of short stories on Istra, while students from the elementary school in the same village collected local legends and fairy-tales that were included in various collections. While Kocjančič and Jurinčič still wrote their poems mostly in Slovenian, employing some local expressions from time to time, Alferija Bržan wrote a large part of her collection, Čista voda, in the local dialect. Her poems are transcribed with special phonetic symbols that represent those dialectal features that cannot be rendered through the alphabetic signs of the official Slovene language. Aware of the difficulties readers might encounter in understanding the local dialect, Bržan provided a parallel Slovene translation. Furthermore, she thematized the issue of language explicitly in “Domače besede” (Local Words; Čista voda 66) by presenting the local

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language as a privileged means of getting closer to one’s home or inner “essence.” The unequal relationship between the local idiom and the official (Slovene) language is reflected also in the graphic appearance of her poems: while those composed in dialect appear in handwriting (which makes them seem more “personal” or “intimate”), the parallel translation in Slovene is given in print. We should also note that the local language employed by Bržan is idealized and “pure” in the sense that — unlike Tomšič’s texts — it never mixes dialectal words with modern slang or expletives. Her idealized idiom differs sharply from the mixture of levels and registers in the everyday conversation among locals. Both Italian and Croatian literatures have a longer tradition of writing in local Istrian idioms. Milan Rakovac’s work, especially his poetry, is written in a local language characteristic of the western part of Istra. In contrast to earlier works written in the same dialect, Rakovac employs the local language not only to redirect attention to the past or to reflect on disappearing Istrian traditions, but also to connect these traditions to contemporary concerns (Strčić 8). Tomizza’s texts, on the other hand, are written in standard Italian and thus do not support shifts in sociocultural registers of language, but they address the issue thematically. After his family moved from Croatia to Italy at the end of World War II, Tomizza chose Italian as a means of describing his native Istra. From this point of view, he belongs to those authors from Istra who adopted Italian as a more “refined” medium. Structuring Time and Reality: the Question of Magic Realism in Tomšič’s Istrian Opus Compared to the literature of other authors discussed, Tomšič’s work has a distinctive trait. Two layers of reality can be identified in it: one is the reality we recognize as “ours,” since it functions according to rational expectations. This level of reality is mixed with another that subverts expectations, confronting the reader with events that have no rational explanation. Since Tomšič’s Istrian texts display a specific combination of realism and fantasy, it is not surprising that they have been regarded as examples of “magic realism” and compared to the fiction of Latin America writers. Tomšič’s works provide a blend of reality and “magic” but, even more importantly, they explicitly embed it in local mythologies and traditions. Just as Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel Ángel Asturias regularly employ Indian legends and local beliefs, Tomšič links the fictional reality in his works to Istrian legends, myths, and superstitions. In both cases, the magical layer of reality is closely related to the mythical structuring of time and space, and is synchronized with the rhythms of nature. Most of the narrative metaphors associate nature with human beings. In Tomšič’s works, people are said to literally “melt” in the soil: their blood and sweat is transformed into the wine they produce, their bodies are indistinguishable from their natural environment, and they have close relationships with animals (especially donkeys) and plants. Many elements in the literary world created by Tomšič function as links between “actual” reality and the reality “beyond.” Characters are continually confronted with mysterious premonitory “signs”: sudden rushes of birds in “Irmin beg” (Irmin’s Escape; Olive in sol 64), disoriented pigeons in Zrno od frmentona (Corn Grain 14), or strangely behaving donkeys in “Marancin se je obesil” (Maracin Hanged Himself; Olive in sol 54). Other links to the mythical order of things are provided by dreams and sometimes even by people, especially those closely connected to nature, such as the “old man” in “Na perili” (On the River Bank Where Clothes Are Washed; Olive in

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sol 111) or Katina in Šavrinke. Katina enjoys a wholesome relationship with Istra. Her blood and sweat, that this land has taken from her over the years, is returned to her in spring, as the energy of the land seeps through the soles of her feet into her entire body (Šavrinke 307). At the level of form, Tomšič’s two-layered reality is supported by a similarly layered timestructure. This structure can be represented as a succession of circles: most stories are placed in a circular structure of time (e.g., the repeated journeys of Šavrinian women). At the same time, these stories are located in a specific, recognizable historical moment. The balance between the two time-levels can vary: in short stories like “Oštrigeca” (Damned Witch; Olive in sol 214–376) linear time and thus the historical layer of reality fades away. Tomšič’s nonlinear conception of time resembles the approach of Latin American magic realism, but while in the latter the two parallel realities (magic and realistic, archaic and contemporary, local and global) melt into a single whole, with the supernatural presented as an integral part of the natural (Virk 206), in Tomšič the two different realities and hierarchies of values maintain a tense relationship, never fully merging. Another specific formal feature in Tomšič’s Istrian texts is the presence of a personal narrator who remains close to the perspectives of individual characters and only rarely adopts a narrative distance. The reader is thus confronted with different character angles, without being necessarily guided by the perspective of the narrator or of the implied author. Although the author’s perspective usually filters through the narrator’s voice, Tomšič’s approach allows the reader more opportunity for interpretative variation. Tomo Virk claims in his introduction that the sociocultural contexts of Latin America and East-Central Europe are too different to allow for comparable literary productions. Still, while it is true that the situation of Slovenia and Croatia differs from that of former Third World colonies, one can recognize a number of features that are similar in the cultural and political position of these East-Central European countries. Slovenia and Croatia are newly established nation-states that have had to invent their traditions, their histories, and their national consciousness (not from scratch, because national narratives existed in these areas, but they had been subsumed to Yugoslavian narratives and remained underdeveloped). We can further argue that Croatia and Slovenia have had at times half-colonial cultural positions in relation to Western Europe (and more fully colonial in relation to the Ottoman Empire), which makes some aspects of their sociocultural context similar to that in formerly colonized countries. We should not be surprised, therefore, by the intercultural parallels we can draw between Tomšič and the Latin American magic realists. In both cases, the presence of magic realism can be explained as the result of a search for identity on a margin: “Through ‘marginal’ modes of expression, writers are rediscovering those myths which might help them transcend their marginal position” (Durix 148). This holds true also for those sociohistorical constellations in which the center’s own identity is endangered by new integrations and homogenizations, such as the recently established European Union. In such cases, the nation-centered identity goes through an even more defensive phase of self-definition, provoking reactions that pull its margins in conflicting directions. Istrian Fiction between Escapism and a Forward-Looking Vision As Gayatri Chakratvorty Spivak has argued, part of the interest in magic realism stems from a taste for exoticism on the part of “Western” readers (791), thus perpetuating a kind of “Oriental-

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ism” under new disguises. Following this line of thought, we can recognize an escapist, politically conservative facet in Tomšič’s literary constructs of Istra and Šavrinija that offer us the nostalgic vision of lost paradise. Tomšič’s fiction has been praised by some critics precisely because it reveals the “archaic,” “primordial” roots of the Istrian people. According to the jury that awarded Tomšič the 1991 Prešern Award, the author brought Slovenian readers “to the sources of [Istra],” revealing “a mysterious world of magic” in its people. His humble heroes are described as rooted in a “primordial rurality” and their mysterious world is said to strongly influence thinking and behavior in this “distinctive land.” Tomšič, the award citation concludes, has contributed significantly to the formation of Slovenian Istra’s cultural identity, bringing the “remote, closed and unknown Šavrinian world” to the fore (qtd. in Lovec 229). Tomšič himself has described his imaginative journey through Istra as “an escape into places where the archaic magical world is still preserved, where people are still trusting and believing,” content to be “an inseparable part of nature” (Prologue to Šavrinke). In an interview, Tomšič mentions industry as damaging for Istra, regards television as the cause of deteriorating values, and is suspicious of (urban) civilization as a whole (“Umetnik deluje kot kristal” 47). Still, we must be careful not to equate the worldview Tomšič expressed in interviews and essays with the perspectives emerging from his literary texts. The latter are more complex, involving often opposing judgments filtered through a narrator who is more personal than auctorial. While it is true that the mythical structure is easily recognizable in most of Tomšič’s narratives, this mythical layer of reality is almost never pure. His narratives are located also in a specific socio-historical environment and in a recognizable geographical space. This makes them forward- rather than backwardlooking, acts of modern reconstruction. By linking myth and history, Tomšič’s narratives offer the historical dimension necessary to legitimize the new Šavrinian/Istrian identity. In addition, the plurivocality of Tomšič’s texts allows for very different readings. In contrast to Tomšič’s fiction, the Istrian works of other authors are more monologic. In the poetry of Bržan, Kocjančič, and, especially, Jurinčič, the nostalgia for past times is very strong, while modernity is regarded as destructive for Istra. While Tomšič’s narratorial perspective, which allows contradictory points of view to filter through, complicates the nostalgic approach to Istra, the poetry of Bržan, Kocjančič, and Jurinčič maintains fairly consistent points of view that are not confronted usually with other voices. The narrator in Tomizza’s Istrian work guides the perspective of the reader and suggests a view with traces of nostalgia, longing for an idealized past and for traditions that are now merely remembered. Tomšič’s Female Characters as Embodiments of the Paradox of Modern Nations Tomšič’s multilayered perspectives have led to conflicting readings. Some have attempted to “resolve” the contradictions in his Istrian work by simply stressing one possibility among others. Such an interpretive reduction can be found in readings that claim that Tomšič’s female characters reproduce the typical Slovenian mothers in canonic Slovene literature. These women usually suffer and sacrifice themselves for their families (Brumen 400). According to the citation of Tomšič’s Prešern Award, “The central literary figure of Tomšič’s works is most often a woman — a Šavrinian woman, who, day after day, year after year […] holds three corners of the Istrian house” (qtd. in Lovec 229). Zdenka Lovec argues that Tomšič talks to the reader through the con-

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sciousness of women, since women are “more connected to the nature, to the soul of the world, to everything that is primordial” (229). However, many of Tomšič’s female characters, most clearly those in Šavrinke and the main character of the play “Bužec on, bužca jaz” differ significantly from this stereotype. The contradictory, nonconventional female figures in Tomšič’s novel Šavrinke (Mara, Urša, Bepina, and especially the protagonist Katina) have parallels in the interwar historical accounts of Šavrinian costerwomen. Being economically self-sufficient, able to provide an important part of their family’s income, and often absent from home, these women acquired then a peculiar social status. Contrary to traditional gender roles, they were much more active in the public space and constituted the crucial link between the rural environment of Istrian villages and the urban space of Trieste (Rogelja and Ledinek 90). This controversial position provoked equally controversial reactions from the home environment: Šavrinian women were both admired and treated with suspicion (Rogelja and Ledinek 90), and their Šavrinian identity acquired both positive and negative connotations (Brumen 399). Tomšič also endows the historical Šavrinian women with an ambivalent role, but he usually omits the negative perceptions of these women, portraying them as strong and self-confident, in tune with nature, but also progressive. Tomšič fails to take into account the fact that, according to historical evidence, most women involved in trading were either young (not yet married) or widows; once a woman got married and had children, she would usually stay at home (Ravnik 82–83). Some of Tomšič’s women go on trading even after they marry. Able to juggle both motherhood and trading (Katina gives birth to her baby on the way to Trieste (Šavrinke 56–63), Tomšič’s women are closer to the “liberal” ideal of contemporary womanhood. They are expected by their community to excel as mothers and wives (retaining thus traditional roles), but are able to contribute to their family’s income. A similar combination of traditional and modern roles can be found in Luča, the protagonist of “Bužec on, bužca jaz.” Although she catches her husband with a mistress, she regards this discovery with wise irony, acknowledging that she is not guiltless (having a lover herself). Her “guiding light” is love; she does not conform to the traditional ideal of a fragile, suffering wife, and she is in constant conflict with the roles she is expected to play. Most of the readings published in the print media have stressed the “progressive” traits of Luča’s character (see Lipovec Čebron 5; Zorman 11). The literary depictions of women, and their critical reception, are not important solely as examples of the intricacies in Tomšič’s works. These female characters also play a crucial role in the literary construction of Istra and Šavrinija, and in the public representations of these two imaginary landscapes. The tourist materials about Istra and most of its cultural events frequently center on female characters. Yet even today, the women of this region rarely appear in the public space or hold important positions. The role of Šavrinian/Istrian women resembles the one attributed by Luisa Accati to Italian women: they are heavily burdened with symbolic connotations and they play an important role as a collective subject, but they have almost no historical importance as individual persons (Accati 134–35). The imbalance between the symbolic presence and political absence of Šavrinian women can be understood in light of the role gender plays in constituting imagined communities, especially those of nations. As Anne McClintock argues, no nation in the world grants women

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and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state: “Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politics as its boundary and metaphoric limit” (“No Longer in a Future Heaven” 89). There is a paradox at the heart of most national narratives: the family as metaphor offers a single genesis narrative for national history, while the family as an institution is emptied of historical significance and excluded from national power. The family becomes simultaneously both the organizing figure for national history and its antithesis (“No Longer” 91). This is precisely how Šavrinian women are featured in Kocjančič’ poetry: they are depicted mainly as mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children, as in “Kubejskim Šavrinkam” (To Šavrinian Women from Kubed; Šavrinske pesmi). The mother figure is used as an organizing metaphor and directly equated with Istra (Istra- mati, Istramother), while the poet is her “son.” By contrast, the Šavrinke portrayed by Tomšič are mothers and wives, but also autonomous persons, active in the public sphere. They figure both as actors in history and static reference points in mythical time, establishing the link between history and tradition, linear progression and archaic, circular time. As such, they remain ambivalent, which makes Tomšič’s literary world a potential alternative to nation-centered constructions. As McClintock argues, the paradox inherent in most national narratives is usually resolved by employing a “natural” division of gender: women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of a national tradition; inert, backwardlooking, and natural, they embody nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity; forward-thrusting, potent, and historic, they embody nationalism’s revolutionary principle of discontinuity (“No Longer” 89ff). Tomšič’s literature does not resolve this paradox along such simple gender lines. He retains, magnifies, and embodies it in female figures, while male characters (especially in Šavrinke) tend to stay outside history and the public spaces. Enforcing and Challenging Identity Constructions Finally, I want to address the relationship between the literary representations of Istria and Šavrinija, and identity-construction. Although the perceptions of “ordinary” people participated in the identity formation of Istra and Šavrinija, it was novelists like Tomšič who created and disseminated a certain understanding of these topographic constructs. These constructs underwent a process of naturalization, acquired political value, and finally became powerful tools for legitimizing new identities. This is quite evident in the case of Istra and Šavrinija, where the most vocal champions of the so-called cultural revival were the educated elites, while the most traditional and often physically isolated members of the collective were often least concerned with self-conscious identity and self-defined ethnicity. As anthropological evidence shows, the women trading between Trieste and the Istrian villages during the interwar period did not label themselves as Šavrinian (Rogelja and Ledinek 94). It was only in the 1980s and, especially, the 90s that Šavrinian identity acquired a more distinct shape, becoming also an internal rather than externally-imposed identificatory element. At the same time this label underwent a transformation: it lost its vocation-specific meaning, becoming an ethnic identity. Among the main elements that supported this transformation was the positive image of Šavrinija — and especially of Šavrinian women — developed in literature, most

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notably in the novels and short stories of Marjan Tomšič. This image was employed by intellectuals and other public figures to reinforce the local identity and encourage its “preservation.” However, the same literature that helped construct new local identities also resisted other identitarian distinctions, particularly those along national lines. In reaction to the nation-centered mapping introduced after 1991, Šavrinan identity has emphasized that Istrians from Slovenia are different from those in Croatia, that they have a distinct history which should be acknowledged as such and not dissolved in nation-centered narratives. Some of the texts I have considered in this article are border-transgressing: they resist readings that reinforce conventional identities especially of a national kind.

3. The Literary Reconstruction of East-Central Europe’s Imagined Communities: Native to Diasporic

Introduction: Crossing Geographic and Cultural Boundaries, Reinventing Literary Identities Marcel Cornis-Pope The last section of this volume is focused on the dynamic (particularly complex in the case of East-Central Europe) that has continually redefined/repositioned/expanded the boundaries of the region’s literary cultures, moving them into diasporic spaces. The literatures of East-Central Europe have had in this sense a major role in (re)inventing the region, retracing its boundaries and reimagining its identity. In addition to delimiting their topographic space, the literary productions of this area have also had to construct the imagined communities (in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the phrase, 15) of East-Central Europe, giving it the cohesion and continuity that it lacked historically. The whole of Central or East-Central Europe appears to Nikola Petković as an imaginary topos that is continually reconstructed/remapped by political and literary interests promoted by both the metropolitan centers and the local cultures. This remapping, he argues, has become even more complicated after 1989, as “postcommunist” and “postcolonial” cultural perspectives animate the writers of the reemerging nation states. Like his other comments on the Danube literary “hinterland” (see the above article “Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic”), this essay problematizes the issue of “origin” and “identity,” demonstrating that they are largely dependent on a process of incessant rewriting. The literary cultures of East-Central Europe also need their diasporic expansions to continually reaffirm themselves. For example, Monica Spiridon, Agnieszka Gutthy, and Katarzyna Jerzak describe “Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos” that grounds, expands, and redefines the aspirations of these literatures, helping them pursue, but at the same time problematize, their modern national agenda. Especially during the Soviet domination of East-Central Europe, the exile to Paris and other Western cities confirmed the national paradigm (see also George Grabowicz’s article on “Paradoxical Renascence Abroad: Ukrainian Émigré Literature, 1945–1950”). But there were also significant exceptions: Witold Gombrowicz and Emil Cioran’s transplantation to Paris (see Jerzak’s discussion) involved a proud yet not entirely unquestioned surrender of one’s national identity and even language. In the case of Benjamin Fundoianu (discussed by Florin Berindeanu in “A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality: Bucharest — Paris — Auschwitz”), the diasporic reconstruction of one’s literary identity took an infinitely more dramatic turn, with the writer both sustained and tragically betrayed by his European aspirations. Other diasporic cities functioned in similarly conflicted ways: Istanbul/Tsarigrad/Constantinople allowed the “spatial construction” of Bulgarian national identity in the nineteenth century (see Boyko Penchev’s article); while Berlin, London, Stockholm, New York, Toronto, and Los

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Angeles both challenged and expanded the pursuits of writers such as Vasyl’ Barka, Vintilă Horia, Iurii Klen, Jerzy Kosinski, Petru Popescu, Karl Ristikivi, Josef Škvoreký, Maria Under, and Henric Visnapuu — to name only a few. Through traumatic, their transplantation had certain oposite effects, allowing them to tackle taboo subjects in their national literatures or to expand their cultural horizons, even though few of them went as far as Todor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski, who reinvented himself as the English author Joseph Conrad. Like the articles in the previous two sections, with which they overlap partly and which they complete, these final articles treat literature both as as an emanation from, and an invention of a place. Their focus on “topo-graphy” becomes in a very literal sense an art of writing place and identity; but a writing that seldom settles on definitive meanings or boundaries, preferring to shift definitions, intersect spaces, and pluralize identities.

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Kafka, Švejk, and the Butcher’s Wife, or Postcommunism/Postcolonialism and Central Europe Nikola Petković

1.

Identity Search: Central Europe, “Bad Authenticity,” and the Limits of Essentialism

In their introduction to the thematic issue of Critical Inquiry dedicated to “Identities,” Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasize that “the calls for a ‘post-essentialist’ reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common”; at the same time they find troublesome “the resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe” (625–29). Though largely correct, their observation is too general to be useful in addressing the post–1989 realities of the region’s diverse cultures because it reduces their identities to a single category, “Eastern” Europe. What is the real signifier of Eastern Europe for them? One essay in their collection, Katie Trumpener’s “The Time of the Gypsies,” deals with the position of the “people without History” in Central Europe. Clearly, some of the countries that Trumpener and the volume’s editors had in mind (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland), which had been officially part of the “Eastern Block,” saw themselves at one time or another belonging to a geopolitical “Central” rather than “Eastern Europe.” While the decolonizing discourse of Appiah and Gates Jr. promises to foreground a more diverse European geography of margins and dominant cultures, their labeling collapses Eastern and Central Europe. In so doing, they unilaterally decide that the newly emergent (or reemerging) countries located between Russia and Western Europe belong to the Eastern Block. Shortly after World War II, as a result of the artificial division of Europe introduced at the Crimean Conference, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, did indeed belong to the Eastern Block, which had inaccurately become identified with Eastern Europe. How-

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ever, this fact should not overshadow the truth about the political construct imposed by the “Great Powers, a construct specifically opposed to the historic and cultural context of the region” (Kundera, “Interview” 19). While the leaders of the Great Powers had a legitimate mission to stop the war and ensure conditions for a permanent peace in post-Hitler Europe, their decision reflected an older colonialist discourse that had used division in order to control and rule. Although the Big Three set themselves the mission at Yalta to provide Europe and the World with a stable and clear-cut peace settlement, they never reached an agreement on the subject. Moreover, although they endorsed free elections and proclaimed the political independence of the “liberated” nations of Europe, they did not establish an effective plan to ensure that goal. The injustice was done not only to the so-called Eastern Europe, but also to countries like Austria, which stayed under occupation until 1955, and the German Democratic Republic, which remained under Soviet occupation until 1989. This incomplete mission allowed space for all kinds of superpower interventions in the region, and consequently left the borders of Central or East-Central Europe (to use the more accurate term we have adopted in this History; see vol. 1: 6–7) once again undefined, fluid, and utopian. These inconsistencies tacitly endorsed and facilitated Stalin’s postwar colonization of East-Central Europe. In a case of classic imperialist substitution, an imposed geopolitical narrative annihilated the rich cultures of the independent countries in East-Central Europe and prescribed their future as Western colonies of the new Russian empire. As the region was subordinated to the Soviet Union and labeled Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe lost its independent historical and geopolitical narrative. Even now, at the beginning of a new millennium, after the Russian decolonization has taken place, these countries’ narratives have not yet been reclaimed as part of the successful attention paid by theorists to other postcolonial regions and their historical narratives. The plural identities of this transnational region with actual borders and intersections of different traditions and cultures were effectively erased at Yalta. Without questioning the geopolitical merit of the Yalta agreement, many intellectuals de facto accepted this hegemonic substitution whereby the politics imposed by the superpowers erased other possible realities of East-Central Europe. As the unnatural construct of the Eastern Block was imposed, East-Central Europe was translocated from the realm of historical reality to the realm of fiction. It took almost half a century for the region to reemerge in discussions. Yet in spite of its comeback, the existence of “Central” or “East-Central Europe” is still being questioned on many levels, remaining utopian (an imaginary topos) in many senses. The mistake of dislocating the region in question and removing it to the realm of fiction appears even greater as we consider the fate of the former Eastern Block countries during what has been called their postcommunist/postcolonial transition, after the withdrawal of the superpowers from this area. This period, which has witnessed dramatic events such as the Czecho-Slovakian divorce, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Moldova, can actually benefit from the anti-essentialist analysis of Appiah and Gates Jr. In spite of their misuse of the term Eastern Europe for a broad region that includes also the non-Germanic East-Central Europe, they provide a methodology for the successful understanding and possible overcoming of the current identity crises in this area. The dramatic experience of the former Yugoslavia, for example, speaks in favor of an antiessentialist approach to national cultural identity. In ascribing a singular identity to a nation, essentialism presupposes a shared quality that defines who we are. To understand the identity of

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any particular group in essentialist terms, we must argue that we are able to understand who we are only if we evaluate ourselves as fixed and stable entities. Moreover, this evaluation is never conducted in and of itself, but always in comparison with others. This type of evaluation that predicates the national essence on the group’s possession of values essentially linked to the soil or the soul is currently occurring in parts of the former Yugoslavia, and in the so-called successor states of the former Soviet Union. The essentialist self-recognition always occurs at the expense of others — others who must be available to the “historically” self-proclaimed majority in search of its own identity. The closer the chosen enemy is, the more convincing and thus real the construed danger becomes, and the lack of a group’s own identity, before it is even addressed by its members, projects itself onto the unknown but threatening “other.” Once singled out, recognized and defined, the “others” are viewed as obstacles in the imagined development of a national “self” and, as such, have to be neutralized for that imagined “self” to become real. Civil wars become, unfortunately, the most suitable vehicles for the elimination of such identity dilemmas. In East-Central Europe, the identification or evaluation of us automatically also isolates and evaluates as positive everything that we claim to be ours, an act which is impossible to perform without simultaneously fencing in the space of our selves. Identity searches seek support in geographical maps, which are no longer mere schemes for geopolitical and cultural location, but rather major tools in taking away territories that a group “needs” in order to adjust them according to “its own” deeds. This contested political space is defined not only in terms of our “original” or “natural” environment, but also in terms of the objects that must be adjusted to our needs in our process of self-definition. The new us emerges not so much through positive self-recognition, but rather through the negation of not-us — entities singled out and labeled as the annihilating energy which constantly endangers our invented us. The “nation” is called into existence by our convincing ourselves that we can and ought to become masters of all the objects in our newly-created geo-historical space — a space to which we are “naturally” (essentially) entitled. In this process, to be (a Croatian, for instance) theoretically equals to have (things the Croatian way). Practically, this also means that the survival of one group, regardless of its ethnic, racial, or social background, directly depends on the demise of another group or groups. The colonial narratives that dominated the representation of the region until recently generally regarded this psychological strategy for self-description as a distinctive feature of the inhabitants of the region, usually depicted by the Great Powers as communities immersed in incurable forms of hatred. This perspective has hardly been modified since the last three great seizures of East-Central Europe — the centuries-long occupation of the Habsburgs, followed in the twentiethcentury by Hitler’s and Stalin’s military and ideological colonizations of the region. Appiah and Gates Jr.’s call for a post-essentialist reconceptualization of identity is thus of great importance for remapping the vanishing parts of East-Central Europe, and for representing the under- or misrepresented ethnicities that make up the region. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, their method provides us with the tools to comprehend the Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar wars as manifestations of identity politics and fiscal conflict, and also to understand the newly-emerging identity constructs in the region and other so-called democratic changes in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The rediscovered identity of East-Central Europe is particularly complex and unstable, refusing the traditional “Eastern European” label

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without entirely subscribing to an undifferentiated “European identity.” It is, therefore, particularly regrettable that the perspective proposed by post-essentialist theorists like Appiah and Gates Jr. has simply overlooked East-Central Europe, depriving it of the benefit of their analysis. 2.

History Came to Them: György Konrád and the Poet-Historians

Since many theorists from outside the region believe that the region no longer exists, the task of exploring the identities of (East-)Central Europe must be picked up by others, primarily insiders and quite often fiction makers or “poet-historians” who can offer new historiographies of subjectivity and place based on their lived experience within the region. It is significant that some of the most fruitful contributions to the search for “Central Europe” are being proposed by hybrid voices of fiction writers and poet-historians, themselves witnesses and/or victims of the unpredictable regional changes (see also vol. 1: 4–6 of our History). In his “Letter from Budapest,” for instance, the Hungarian author György (George) Konrád offers an exemplary personal account of his sense of the plural and peculiar identities of Central Europe. Aware of his region’s subordinate position within the global context, squeezed between “Sovietstyle state socialism” and “North Atlantic liberalism,” Konrád writes: We [Central Europeans] have been argued over, agreed upon, traded, sold, dismembered; we have been the subject of peace conferences and settlements. The First World War started in Sarajevo, the Second in Gdańsk, the world better pay attention. (12)

It is easy to recognize the voice of the colonized in Konrád’s summary of the historical subaltern position of Central Europe’s peoples. It is especially interesting to compare a competent insider’s own representation of the colonial struggle historically imposed on Central Europeans with their depiction in some of the Western media as in-fighting, savage tribes. To overcome the familiar feelings of uneasiness and boredom that confront authors writing on topics familiar to them and yet new to their audience, Konrád employs a straightforward confessional narrative to address a variety of readers whose knowledge of Central Europe is uncertain. At the 1990 Lisbon Conference on Literature sponsored by the Wheatland Foundation of New York, which recognized the importance of Central Europe as a contemporary cultural problem, Konrád spoke about the problems of locating Central Europe. Repeating his well-known belief that the reality of the region transcends and questions the boundaries of political blocks by surviving the superficial changes on maps, Konrád offered a historical analysis of the locus: I guess that the only wealth that people in our part of Europe have is history and memory. We share a common history with people with similar ethnic and national backgrounds. It’s really astonishing how often small historical details come up in conversation among people in our countries. In Hungary, for example, people date their own biography according to some important dates of our century — such as 1946 or 1956 — but I’m sure that they are ready for some new dates! A long time ago I lived in a village and in this village there was a butcher. His house was on a street corner and the street was on an incline. In the proximity of this village there was a military base. Once, while the butcher’s wife was in the bedroom changing sheets, a tank came through the wall

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into the room because the road was icy, slippery, and the front of the house was destroyed […]. The next time I saw the butcher, I asked him what happened. “History came in,” he said. Probably that’s a typical relationship of people with history: they don’t jump in but history jumps in. For instance, you may find yourself in this comical Kafkaesque situation where somebody comes for you […]. Many, in the older generations in these countries — those who are more than 50, 60 or even older — are sure to have, in an otherwise banal and normal life-history, some quite colorful personal anecdote, in which they were heroes in spite of themselves, heroes in the Švejkian sense of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel. They didn’t want the war but the war came to them. It means that it’s hard to avoid the intrusion of historical events, events which otherwise would be outside the context of their personal lives. (Roundtable 92–93)

The example of the butcher’s wife epitomizes the intersections of the local regional dynamics and a variety of colonial concepts in which a superimposed narrative of history visits individuals, intruding into their most private spaces in a world where the difference between public and private sphere is all but nonexistent. Another example, taken from the deontic world of literature — to borrow Ljubomir Doležel’s concept, which defines the modality of world building under the constraints of permission, prohibition, and obligation (266) — speaks of another individual to whom history came unexpectedly. This less-private intrusion of history into the life of a person has been canonized in Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Writing about the roots of Central European ambivalence, and commenting on the most prominent symbols of Mitteleuropa, Paul Hoffman remarks that the book shows how a sly dealer in stolen dogs, who had been redrafted into his regiment after being medically discharged on account of “chronic feeblemindedness,” manages to fool the bureaucracy and survive World War I (34). In spite of some conceptual problems present in Hoffman’s idea of “fooling the bureaucracy,” which I will address later, this may well be the book’s brief plot summary. Before we examine Švejk’s famous defensive strategies in response to the official history imposed on Central European citizens, we should remember that (East-)Central Europe is an alien theme not only for outsiders like Appiah and Gates Jr., who unavoidably ignore or oversimplify it; insiders do it, too. In the early 1980s, a group of writers that included most prominently Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky, disputed the definition and significance of “Central Europe.” In this ongoing controversy, all parties oversimplified their political narratives in order to establish “their own” Central Europe (or to deny its existence) as part of a Europe and World after the fall of the political blocks. 3.

The Tragedy of Kundera’s “Central Europe”

The beginning of this debate was marked rather dramatically by Kundera’s essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” first published in the New York Review of Books (1984): It is November 1956. The director of the Hungarian press agency, just a couple of seconds before the fire from the Russian tanks will destroy his office in Budapest, using telex, sent the message to the world. It ended with these words: We are dying for Hungary and for Europe. (35)

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Important in this testimony of a dying insider is the fact that Hungary now belonged to civilized “Europe” as against an oppressive “Eastern Europe.” Later in the text, Kundera offers his vision of the tragedy of “Central Europe.” To begin with, Central Europe in his view is not the same as Eastern Europe: Central Europe is the most European part of Europe made up of families of small peoples not determined by geography, but by culture and destiny. Kundera’s Eastern Europe is Russia, a Russia that is not really European because, according to the Czech writer, modern European culture found its origins in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment — two cultural periods that never took root in Russia. Kundera explicitly states that Orthodox Russian civilization finds itself in contradiction with, and works against, the (transnational) idea of Europe — especially against the idea of an independent Central Europe. As part of Russian Orthodoxy’s imperialistic game, Slavism — the ideology of the Slavic world — is for Kundera a political mystification that emerged in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Pan-Slavic monolithic culture that victimized the countries of the Eastern block after World War II, Central Europe’s cultural identity is cosmopolitan and it includes the Jews as its constitutive element in the twentieth century. The tragedy of Central Europe, Kundera believes, is tied to the post-war barbarization of Western European civilization, most probably as the effect of American political and cultural domination. This led to the decline of European self-recognition and the loss of the European powers’ sense of responsibility for the destiny of Central Europe. Kundera’s ideas were challenged especially by his Soviet colleagues. Brodsky went so far in negating the existence of Central Europe as to call the region Western Asia (“Why Milan Kundera…” 31). But even without these partisan retorts, Kundera’s position obviously presents problems. In his contradictory Slavic anti-Slavism, Kundera created a new conservative utopia out of his “Central Europe.” In Kundera’s own words, the cultural space of Central Europe can be circumscribed as follows: Gustav Mahler wrote a farewell song to a world that was disappearing. Musil, in The Man without Qualities, speaks of a society that, without knowing it, has no future. Hermann Broch understood contemporary history in terms of a breakdown of values. Kafka conceived of the world as an infinite bureaucratic labyrinth, in which man is hopelessly lost. Jaroslav Hašek’s brave soldier Švejk imitates the ceremonies of the surrounding world with such zeal that he transforms them into an enormous joke. In this activity, which could hardly be less heroic, Hašek finds a last trace of freedom. It is from Central Europe that a lucid form of skepticism has arisen in the midst of our era of illusions. It is a skepticism that is attributable to the experience of an extremely concentrated history: we have seen the collapse of a great empire in the course of our century, the awakening of nations, democracy, fascism, we have seen the Nazi occupation, the glimmer of Socialism, massive deportations, the Stalinist reign of terror and its downfall, and finally, we have seen the most essential thing of all-the death throes of the West within our own countries and before our own eyes. (“Interview” 18–19)

This passage suggests again that Central Europe, in Kundera’s sense, or East-Central Europe in the broader sense employed in our History, still lacks a clear historical narrative, and whenever it tries to grasp its cultural identity through personal histories such as Kundera’s, that cultural identity becomes evanescent. The reality of Central Europe is thus caught in the paradoxes of its

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historical time that never allows the present to speak for itself. Whenever authors like Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, Václav Havel, and others attempted to hold up an accurate picture of Central Europe through personal narratives against the image promoted by the occupying power their voices were silenced by censorship. The repressive measures introduced by the occupying Soviet forces produced a delay between the events and the stories about these events that was peculiar for the sense of time in East-Central Europe. As a result of these temporal delays, East-Central European intellectuals strongly believe that the repressed past, as well as the present and the future, must be (re)gained in the search for identity. Unlike Kafka, whose idea of the past I will examine later, Kundera regards with suspicion the possibility of recovering “the lost cultural identity” of Central Europe. Kundera’s pessimistic account of the region suggests that Central Europe is dead, killed by “the three wise men of Yalta” who separated it from the Western World without any interest in its culture. Yet paradoxically, Kundera also accuses the West of colonizing Central Europe in its own way. According to him, the West has undergone a process of self-colonization, carried out through the oversimplified marketoriented logic of late capitalism. Against a traditional view that has identified the West with power and imperialism, Kundera promotes the paradoxical idea of a West that has been itself colonized by the economic narratives of global capitalism: My country is not capitalist, nor do I think it wants to become so again. And yet, it is an old Western European country and it wishes to retain this identity. The West continues a common history, a common culture. But the cultural dimension has dropped out of the contemporary vision of the world. In the ridiculous theater of allegory that today’s political thinking represents, it is the West that plays the role of the colonialist. That is why the idea of a colonized West does not enter into the current system of symbols, and why this idea is poorly grasped today and refused. Not only is my country a colonized form of Western Europe, but it is even a colonized West that has in turn never colonized anyone else. (“The Tragedy” 35)

Kundera’s Central Europe is part of a Europe that has not yet succumbed to the international homogenizing action that the “real” West has undergone, a Europe with identity narratives written in other than economic terms. If we accept Kundera’s evaluation, postcolonial criticism can help us reinterpret the narratives of East-Central Europe. At least initially, the region has to undergo an emancipatory process. Sufficient historical grounds must be established in order to widen the already-existing horizons of expectation not only about what the West is, but also about how East-Central Europe relates to the West and the East. Such a broadening has been taking place in explaining Anglo- and Francophone colonial models. In order to represent adequately the colonization mechanism of East-Central Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, we should use a spatial rather than a temporal model. Though the colonization of East-Central Europe differs in dynamics and strategies from those of Africa and India, the consequences are comparable: dominant historical narratives have been imposed on a region at the expense of the region’s own histories. In this respect, it is also significant that the twentieth-century colonization of East-Central Europe, whose blueprint was the Yalta Agreement, took place after a significant part of the world had already undergone a process of decolonization. Furthermore, this twentieth-century colonization was initially predominantly political, while the nineteenth-century’s colonization was primarily economical.

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The centralized colonial structure of the Habsburg Monarchy can help us, in the first instance, to illuminate this different, less conventional, model of colonization in Europe. Kundera’s notion of a “colonized west” sounds puzzling initially. In today’s symbolic order, the West itself is equated with Imperialism, Power, and Colonization. Kundera’s concept of a colonized West within the Western cultural block calls for a reconceptualization of the existing notions of power that have been generated in the West and distributed worldwide. In order to avoid further terminological confusions as we differentiate East-Central Europe’s political and cultural existences, we must take a closer look at Kundera’s idea that his “essentially Western country” has actually been colonized by both Greater Russia’s imperial aspirations cross-dressed in the red garments of global communism and the self-colonized West. Later, in his interview with Alain Finkielkraut, Kundera states: The big Western countries identify themselves too easily with the values belonging to the entire West, and they also attribute their own sins too easily to the entire West. But the West is also made up of little nations who have no reason to feel guilty for the crimes of the larger countries and who have the right to defend their western culture without remorse. (19)

According to Kundera, the West’s historical narratives are not sensitive enough to the complex problems of Central Europe. Due to its historical course, the West has abandoned the cultural particularities of its nation-states and entered yet another, more global phase of economic Westernization, in which the individual values of Italy, Spain, and France, for instance, have been blended into a new hybrid entity heavily influenced by the US, called the “West.” Kundera’s nostalgic longing for the times when “our” Western civilization, committed to the spiritual values of a nonalienated individuality, could still resist this type of objectivization, has its theoretical parallel in Max Horkheimer’s, Theodor Adorno’s, or Herbert Marcuse’s lament for the disappearance of individual values as the West becomes a victim of mass media, economic reductionism, and other unifying manifestations of the market-oriented Occident. Yet Kundera’s nostalgia for a moment before the West turned into a block should be taken with caution, because it assumes a linear idea of progress in the West (and East), which is contradicted by a history that acknowledges repeated struggles at Europe’s center. Kundera’s example of the director of the Hungarian news agency who announces to the world the Russian military offensive and the resolve of Hungarians to die for Hungary and for Europe is a bitter critique of Western Europe’s historical amnesia. Kundera is convinced that “no one grasped this pronouncement less well than Europe itself” because “in the non-occupied West, it is not understood that Europe is capable of standing for values that one can still die for” (“The Tragedy” 35). Denouncing the new Western identity as an economic block, Kundera makes almost the same cognitive mistake as the historical colonizers, by taking a part for the whole. Not all of Hungary or Czechoslovakia died for Europe when the Soviet tanks occupied the streets of Budapest and Prague. There were, probably, individuals who did die for these ideals, such as, that brave director of the national news agency, or Jan Palach, the Czech student who publicly set himself on fire to protest the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968. Other citizens of Prague protested the occupation by lying on the streets to block the incoming Soviet tanks. Such acts can be taken as representative for a nation and its story, but they belong to individuals. Kundera’s narrative about the tragedy of Central Europe is seductive,

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but it creates generalizations that smack of yet another polarizing gaze, now critically aimed at the United States as the economic colonizer of the West. 4.

Time Lost, Time Regained: Franz Kafka and the Historical Present of East-Central Europe

Living in the gap between East and West has been a problem for many other writers who, like Kundera, struggled to produce significant literature outside the dominant imperial powers and in less-circulated languages. Franz Kafka’s paradoxical career is paradigmatic for the work of a writer who manages to surpass the provisory boundaries of his marginal status, undermining the reductionist divisions of literature into “minor” and “major,” central and marginal. A “minor literature,” as redefined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is not a literature of secondary importance, but one whose performance is based on a notion of “deterritorialization,” a term that names the individuals’ desire to move away from the fixed categories of perception, representation, and meaning that limit their lives. Deterritorialization refers to the wandering, nomadic quality of a self that is constantly redefined or redefines itself, subverting traditional hegemonies based on the firmly-centered authority of historical tradition. This understanding of the term fits Kafka very well. As a Jew whose generation had experienced the failure of a cultural, economic, and religious transition in East-Central Europe, finding itself in between Western and Eastern Jewry, Kafka was well aware of the complexities of his identity. In a 1920 letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka sees himself as a Western Jew from Prague, disconnected from the communal and religious traditions of Eastern-European Jews, living in a world fragmented between small nation-states with various languages, a world where, as he puts it, “everything has to be earned”: I have one peculiarity which in essence doesn’t distinguish me much from my acquaintances, but in degree a great deal. We both know, after all, enough typical examples of Western Jews, I am as far as I know the most typical Western Jew among them. This means, expressed with exaggeration, that not one calm second is granted me, nothing is granted me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too — something after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work. (Letters to Milena 218–19)

Kafka targets here the absence of cultural and political continuity (a situation further complicated by the geo-cultural division between two types of Jewry) that, according to him, underlies western civilization. However, unlike Kundera, who believes that the spiritual past was better than the material present, Kafka rejects such a deterministic interpretation. Cosmopolitan in the sense of belonging to an eminently deterritoralized ethnocultural group, Kafka believes that inheritance is made rather than natural. Accordingly, everything has to be earned — the past, too. In such a transnational/transcultural framing of what history means, the individual must adjust to the constantly changing circumstances in the peculiar cultural space of (East-)Central Europe, a space in which even the past looks alien to its inhabitants. Kafka’s past is not lost, as Kundera’s seems to be. It is rather “under construction.” However, Kundera and Kafka agree on

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one thing: there is an unusual and complex relation between universal and particular categories in Central Europe, because it seems all too easy to believe that, by searching for one identity (of a Western Jew living on the outskirts of the West and yet far enough from the East and from the colonized West), one has addressed the identity of all Central Europe. In this colonial situation, all Central Europeans are “other” not only as a collective entity but also as individuals. Oppressed by the superpowers of history and at times oppressing one another, the Central European peoples have seldom had a chance to examine the constituents of their lives under normal conditions. Over the centuries, they have accumulated many problematic identity narratives that are now ready to generate wars instead of submitting to dispassionate analyses. Although Kafka’s letter to Milena considers the possibility of rebuilding his own symbolic order and understanding himself, the past that Kafka needs to earn cannot be separated from the paradoxical and fragmented structure of (East-)Central European reality. Kafka is not simply an Eastern or Western Jew, he is a Western Jew living in Prague, speaking and writing in the German language in a Czech country, controlled politically by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Kafka, Švejk, and the butcher’s wife with a tank in her bedroom share the consequences of the heterogeneous cultural layers that constitute the reality of (East-)Central Europe, whatever the simple economic or political narratives. History came to Švejk in the form of Austro-Hungary. His alleged feeblemindedness enabled him, through imitation of the system, to become a metonymy for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In Kafka’s Der Prozeß (The Trial; 1925) history shapes individual identity even more violently: it enters Josef K’s private apartment making him painfully aware of his uncertain socio-ethnic and political status. The events can be interpreted in infinitely many ways, yet from the perspective of East-Central Europe, they are very realistic and specific. Unlike George Orwell, Kafka did not need to write an anti-utopia. He just reflected the familiar situation of an oppressive regime that curtails historical and individual space. Josef Švejk, Josef K, and the butcher’s wife share similar experiences of historical and political intrusion. Each time East-Central European individuals confront a dominant narrative of history, they experience the dissolution of either their sense of themselves or their sense of historical truth. In such a dynamics between historical narratives and narratives about individual lives, things seemingly unreal, phantasmal, and tragi-comic become real. As a consequence, traditional genres compete with one another as individuals try to understand and explain the complexity of their lives by reference to a patchwork of traditions, all of which apply sometimes. In Hašek’s case, East-Central Europe is seen as an epic but also as a comedy (see also Veronika Ambros, “The Great War as a Monstrous Carnival: Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk,” in vol. 1: 228–36 of our History). By contrast, Kundera likes to call it “the tragedy of Central Europe.” Konrád’s butcher was satisfied with his contribution to oral literature. 5.

Performing Central Europe: Josef Švejk and the Loss of Historical Narratives

The evanescent reality of East-Central Europe, which individual historical narratives document, thwarts verbalizations of the region’s identity crisis, whether in the language of intellectual description enriched by new theoretical concepts (e.g., those of Appiah and Gates Jr.) or in the nostalgic lament of exiled Kundera, whose country remained, once again, unprotected. To avoid

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verbalizing the crisis this way, we must bring our subject closer to literary studies and exemplify it with a fictional representation. The puzzle called “Central European identity” can be more accurately addressed perhaps through the singular deontic of Josef Švejk, whose life story explicitly questions the story of his “country.” Like the butcher’s wife, Švejk is visited by history. Examining his representative acts may enable us to locate “Central Europe” from within, from the perspective of the soldier and the man whose Švejkism — or defensive use of mental dimness — has since been practiced in East-Central Europe under Nazi and Communist domination as a form of a passive resistance. Paul Hoffman argues in The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile (1988) that Švejk’s ludic acts were facilitated by “Emperor Franz Joseph’s system of government.” According to Viktor Adler, one of the founders of the Austrian Social Democratic movement (and to many others who experienced the real consequences of that world of comradery, tortes, and farce, in which Švejk lived) the best description of this system was “absolutism mitigated by Schlamperei,” the latter connoting messiness, inefficiency, and inexactitude. Even nowadays, the Viennese are accused of Schlamperei by North Germans and the Swiss. But in Vienna, Schlamperei sounds appealing and has the “amiable overtones of humane laxity” (Hoffman 34). If it were not for Schlamperei (a diagnosis of “chronic feeble-mindedness” by the army officials in the Habsburg Empire is not a disqualifier for those who want to avoid the senseless duties imposed on them), Švejk would not have been able to “fool the bureaucracy and survive.” After all, as a demented private of the glorious imperial soldiery, Švejk had to live in a world much like the one Hoffman describes: The proverbial virtues of the Viennese bureaucrats were urbanity, frugality, moderation, and punctuality — no Schlamperei in reporting for work on time! Franz Josef had been an admired model: his iron bed was legendary, as was the meticulousness with which he invariably appeared at the exact moment scheduled for an official function, not a second early, not a second late. His stock response to every opening of an art show, agricultural fair, or new building was to say, “It was very nice, I was very pleased.” On the last day of his life, on November 20, 1916, the eighty-six-yearold emperor went to bed earlier than usual, telling his attendant to wake him at 3:30 A.M. because “there is so much to be done.” He died in his sleep. (35)

To preserve the humanity of the Empire centered in Vienna, the city that epitomized the values and limitations of officialdom in its strong sense of hierarchy, title, and authority, many other historical “facts” had to be overlooked. Mocking the Viennese syndrome of verboten that helped elide truths that did not fit this hierarchy, Robert Musil quipped: “If for some reason crime were allowed in Austria, it would be committed by officially authorized criminals only” (Hoffman 35). Švejk was not from Vienna, but from Prague, a power center on Franz Joseph’s centralized map but also a provincial city of subversions. The call up from Vienna finds Švejk sitting in a tavern, drinking beer and telling stories from his never-ending repertoire. Though officially “feebleminded,” Švejk cannot avoid history’s call and he is drafted as a foot soldier in Franz Joseph’s army. After all of his fictional escapades during World War I, Švejk becomes a hero. However, his personality remains intact and unassuming, just as it was at the beginning of the novel. On a broader, geopolitical plane, he is a provincial Czech who behaves, for a while, like an AustroHungarian. As Hašek introduces him in his Preface, not without amused irony:

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GREAT times call for great men. There are unknown heroes who are modest, with none of the historical glamour of a Napoleon. If you analyzed their character you would find that it eclipsed even the glory of Alexander the Great. Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the great new era. He goes modestly on his way, without bothering anyone. Nor is he bothered by journalists asking for an interview. If you asked him his name, he would answer you simply and unassumingly: “I am Švejk …” (The Good Soldier Švejk i)

This quiet, unassuming, shabbily dressed man is, indeed, that valiant “good soldier” Švejk. In Austrian times his name was on the lips of all the citizens of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and his glory, the author promises, will not fade in the Republic: I am very fond of the good soldier Švejk and in relating his adventures during the World War I am convinced that this modest, anonymous hero will win the sympathy of all of you. Unlike that stupid fellow Herostrates he did not set fire to the temple of the Goddess in Ephesus just to get himself into the newspapers and school books. And that is enough. (i)

Regardless of its museal reality even before World War I, Habsburg history remained the obligatory narrative for Švejk and all the inhabitants of East-Central Europe. Neither Švejk nor any other “great everyman” could circumvent this obligatory history. In the novel, he is drafted and redrafted ad absurdum, no matter how often he is “officially” discharged. And this repetitive enactment of absurd sameness is an effective realistic way of depicting the fantastic boredom and predictability of the Monarchy. To avoid succumbing to such a history, Švejk had to take an active role in perpetuating its absurdities. His “humble reports” addressed to his superiors drove everybody crazy, but they basically exaggerated the absurd communication between the army bureaucracy and individuals. Paul Hoffman believes that Švejk managed to “fool” the bureaucracy; yet folly works much better if it has an agency of reason against which it can perform. Švejk did not fool the Habsburgs, but rather mirrored them and their bureaucracy. He simply did “his” duty, just as those powers-that-be expected him to, and in so doing, he showed the absurdity of those expectations. If he fooled the system, he did it in this circuitous way. Švejk’s amazing work-avoidance was not based on disagreements and refusals. On the contrary, Švejk performed according to the letter of the law. Švejk did not so much fool the system, as he was the system to the point of parody. He did not live in the world of rational standard roles, he lived in the world whose reality (at least for the last hundred years) was based on an imitation of reality, derived from someone else’s story. Franz Joseph’s own declining empire was in some ways an imitation/appropriation/of his ancestors’ legacy. Therefore, the Emperor himself was not really able to perform his official duties. The framework of his actions was as dislocated temporally as the personal historical narratives of the East-Central European writers. On the eve of World War I, the reality of the Dual Monarchy was based upon an archaic, historically displaced symbolic order. As such, it was imposed on East-Central Europeans as yet another colonial narrative of greatness that they had to live up to. In this context, one strategy an individual had available in order to expose the falsities of that narrative was to adopt an attitude

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of exaggerated obedience that pursued compliance in every detail. As a product of the Empire’s bureaucratic machinery, Švejk decided to blend into the system, seemingly excluding realities outside of it. His parroting of the army lingo and servile attitude in front of authority creates deliciously absurd situations, in which the bureaucratic obedience becomes its own parody, denouncing the system’s estrangement from life (on Švejk’s comic-parodic techniques, see also Ambros in vol. 1: 232–3 of our History). Consider the following dialogue between Švejk and Lieutenant Lukáš in the closing scene of the first part of the novel: “Do you know Švejk what a march battalion is?” “Humbly report sir, a march battalion is maršbatˇak and a march company is a marškumpačka. We always use abbreviations.” “Very well then, Švejk,” said the lieutenant in a solemn voice. “I wish to tell you that you are going with me on the maršbatˇak, if you like such abbreviations. But don’t think that at the front you’ll be able to drop such bloody awful clangers as you’ve done here. Are you happy?” “Humbly report sir, I’m awfully happy,” replied the good soldier Švejk. “It’ll be really marvelous when we both fall dead together for His Imperial Majesty and the Royal Family…” (213)

In the deontic conditions of Hašek’s fictional world, Švejk’s ludic space is circumscribed by the time and space of an absurd binarism, the binarism of a world in which nothing is permitted and everything is obligatory. Since there is no space for public disagreement with this historical power, Švejk’s devoted imitation of absurdity enables him to take numerous detours from obligatory history, both through his actions and through his stories (on the latter, see Ambros 232). Consequently, his detours are not escapes from history, but playful and adventurous escapades that point to an unexpressed reality beyond that history. One of Švejk’s greatest escapades takes place during his transit from Prague to Galicia. After missing his train, he decides to continue walking toward the front lines on foot, which produces an intolerable delay. Upon his arrival, after he is warned by his superiors that, in addition to his lateness, only half of the soldiers from his transport successfully made it to Česke Budějovice, a destination assigned by the army, and that his long absence may be considered desertion, Švejk replies innocently that “every train which leaves for the front thinks twice before bringing only half a trainful to its destination” (511). However absurd, this reply fits Švejk’s dehumanized position, trapped between the domains of obligatory history and prohibited freedom. In choosing to embrace a mighty engine as his equal, Švejk comes closer to the core of the problem of his dehumanized and alienated self. Talking to the train is an applied introspection of sorts, a self-analysis in which the good soldier, through an absolute acceptance of the terms of existence imposed upon him, once again ridicules the Habsburg universe. In the context of the late Habsburg Empire, Švejk’s imitations of actions make him, through his total obedience and unity with the Empire, permanently unable to accept his obligations without undermining the effects of his deeds. History is imposed upon him, absolutely and repeatedly. Therefore, he has no opportunity to adapt his actions to its requirements, voluntarily or intentionally — he has become the nameless and faceless object of these requirements. Confronted with a powerful historical absurdity, Švejk simply mirrors it back through his imitative gestures, as part of an on-going “dumb-show” that allows the reader to see how silly the values of an enslaved

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world can get. By mirroring this kind of reality, Švejk can confront it indirectly by playing games. Though his mirroring strategy is insufficient to influence history, it has serious consequences for its authority. In his deontic performance, Švejk does what the other aforementioned East-Central European writers have not been able to do with their essays: he points to the absences at the very center of their fictional duality East-West. Moving along with our soldier, and escaping further away from the centers under Franz Joseph’s control, Josef Švejk’s East-Central Europe resembles his voiceless being — it is either different like a folly, or a permanent historical draftee of Austrian politics. 6.

The Hinternational Worlds of East-Central Europe

Given the persuasive voicelessness of East-Central European Švejks, and the nostalgia of the intellectuals in addressing “Central Europe,” it is not surprising that confusion persists regarding the real and imagined maps of the region. Its cartography has been informed by divergent narratives that have emphasized the role of environment, culture, history, or religion, a plurality of values, the myth of the Habsburg social harmony, the mystic of borderlands, and different political unions. As a consequence, the imagined locations of Central Europe range from pure intellectual constructs to some historical embodiments that suggest a trans-national entity built or rebuilt on the known model of the Habsburg Monarchy. Central Europe can be defined as a cultural attitude rather than as a political, economic, or social entity. Czesław Miłosz represents the first extreme when he states that Central Europe “seems to exist only in the minds of some of its intellectuals (“Central European Attitudes” 101). In his account, Central Europe has a strong awareness of history, and although it is regarded as an “act of faith, a project, a utopia,” it still seems to be a realistic project to many. Its grounds are to be found through a substitution in which the transcultural reality of Central Europe takes the place of its political divisions. In this approach, the transcultural energy has to feed on the power of its locality, on its cultural details that, once put together, transcend the politically-introduced diversity of borders. Like Miłosz, Josef Škvorecký sees Central Europe as a purely emotional and spiritual issue deeply grounded in its rich history and in the awareness of its distinctive cultural historicity, rather than a real site on a geographical map. The bases for such distinctive spiritual existence of the region are to be found within its cultural history. According to both writers, then, Central Europe is not necessarily a geographical concept. However, it is still part of Europe but maintaining its uniqueness that refuses to be identified with either the West or the East. Other writers (including most of the contributors to our History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe) give the region a more concrete reality organized around recognizable features. Claudio Magris, for instance, believes that the distinctive qualities of Central-European civilization can be found in its tendency to analyze and to defend the individual against the totality. This notion of a spiritual community is probably the most important development in rethinking the identity of what we call East-Central Europe, since it merges nations transculturally. Such an approach opens a theoretical space for a geopolitical fluidity able to accommodate many facets of East-Central Europe, from the colonial and imperial narratives which organized a “hinternational” world (to use the word made famous by Johannes

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Urzidil and Magris) — a world simultaneously beyond and behind the nations — to its more recent postcolonial situation after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the newest reunification of Germany. Although Magris recognizes a “flirtatious fashion” behind the widespread intellectual desire to locate and remodel Central Europe, he still sees it as a real entity based upon a strong and clearly-articulated expression of the region’s “unease toward history and of resistance against that unease” (“The Budapest Roundtable” 30). In many of his writings and interviews, Magris has defined Central Europe as a metaphor of protest, against the Soviet’s occupation of the East and the American way of life in the West. These two seemingly contradictory approaches exemplify Magris’s method in transcending the limitations of binary oppositions, a strategy he widely used also in Danubio, his travelogue that celebrates the fluidity of the multicultural Danubian lands. Since for many Central Europe is both a real geographical entity and a fictional, nostalgic world of transnational and timeless spiritual narratives, the difficulties of grasping the region in fixed and positive terms should come as no surprise. More recently, this toponym has had to confront alternative, and perhaps less loaded, concepts that define the area more inclusively (such as the term East-Central Europe used in this History) or foreground subareas within it (the Baltic countries, the Balkans, etc.). The ongoing conversation concerning the boundaries — especially the eastern limits — and definitions of this region (see the Introduction to vol. 1 of our History) has allowed a number of alternative mappings to emerge, mappings that try to do justice to its multiple and shifting identities.

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Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Spatial Construction of Bulgarian National Identity in the Nineteenth Century Boyko Penchev 1.

Tsarigrad — “The World Upside-Down“

In the seventh and eighth decade of the nineteenth century, Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople was the city with the biggest Bulgarian urban population. According to different accounts, during that time around 30,000–40,000 Bulgarians lived — on a temporary or permanent basis — in the capital of Ottoman Turkey. The importance of Tsarigrad in the decades preceding the establishment of an independent Bulgarian state was more than economical and social; both before and after the Sultan’s 1870 Firman, which proclaimed the separation of the Bulgarian Church (called “Exarchate”) from the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople, Tsarigrad was the center of the movement for ecclesiastical independence. The struggle for an independent church proved vital for the formation of a new collective identity, providing a sense of common belonging both at an abstract level (a brotherhood of all Bulgarians) and in a most concrete way (the practices of everyday life). It could be argued that the independent ecclesiastical organization of the Bulgarian population

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produced the first detailed mapping of the Bulgarian lands, providing Bulgarians with a nation space. I conceive of “nation space” as a discursively produced entity that combines two spatial frames — the territory (bounded by clear, institutionalized borders) and the Homeland (the spatial framework within which the sense of belonging to “our” space and “our” lands developed). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Istanbul was practically a center for the Bulgarian national movement, much as it had become for the Albanian national awakening (see Robert Elsie’s article in this section). Yet, paradoxically, the city was represented in the Bulgarian public space in primarily negative ways. Depictions of Tsarigrad in the writings of the leading figures of the late Bulgarian Revival such as Khristo [Hristo] Botev, Lyuben Karavelov, and Petko Slaveikov are characterized by two main figurative strategies: a) Tsarigrad is an unhomely place, with inhabitants not dwelling but wandering, hiding, shouting, quarreling, displaying riches or poverty, but generally lacking the quality of being proper human beings. This “inhuman” aspect of the inhabitants of the Ottoman capital allegedly issues from their belonging to different ethnic groups and from their broken ties with the “fatherly hearth.” b) Tsarigrad is a heterogeneous space, full of “dark places” haunted by shameful and perverted deeds, and of dangerous obstacles to the all-penetrating gaze of ideological discourse. These figurative strategies bring us closer to the implicit spatial framework of the national ideology. Within them, we can distinguish the following basic correlative oppositions that effectively construct the positive image of “Us” as different from the “Others” during the late Bulgarian Revival: Productive labor Honesty Village Monogamy Order Home

vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs.

Non productive labor and idleness Dishonesty and Hypocrisy City Polygamy or promiscuity Chaos non-Home

It should be noted, however, that this type of “divergent” national identity is not reducible to the simple “we vs. they” relation, drawn on purely ethnic grounds. Botev and Karavelov inscribed within the negative half of the paradigm not only the Greeks and Turks — who were represented as idle, dishonest, and promiscuous city tricksters — but also the leaders of the Bulgarian national movement. The master signifier of this spatial framework was the Home. It could be argued that the operation of national ideology requires a transition from Home to Homeland as spatial frame of identity. I would like to go further and question the happy picture of innocent peasants, loving their native place, upon which Bulgarian ideologues have imposed the artificial map or image of the Homeland. To stipulate that national ideology uses and transforms the natural feelings towards the Home and the native place, projecting them onto the abstract idea of Homeland, is only half of the truth. My hypothesis is that national ideology, especially in the case of the Bulgarian Revival, invents not only the Homeland, but the Home as well, understood as an identity pattern knitting together man and the space in which he dwells. As evidence of this I can cite a much earlier writing like the “Life and Sufferings of Sofronii the Sinful” (written allegedly in 1802), where we

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can find no trace of these tender feelings toward home, family, native town, etc, which we could expect from an educated man, still living in pre-national times. Thus, in the transition Home-Homeland we have a discursive technology of double invention, posing the essence of the Bulgarianness (or of any other national identity constructed under similar conditions) as intrinsically connected with the Home (or “hearth”) and the Homeland (Fatherland) — two figures which mutually enforce and condition each other. This is the framework that persistently represents Tsarigrad as a foreign, unhomely place, the negative other of the true Homeland. Tsarigrad was forced from the beginning to participate in the articulation of a normative standard of what Bulgarian(s) should be. The general claim was that the essence of “Bulgarianness” is the opposite of that “upside down world” — Tsarigrad. In the Bulgarian prose of the 1860s and 1870s, Tsarigrad was represented as a space of structural homelessness — a space of houses that do not provide a Home for the “true Bulgarian.” The impossibility of living a normal life outside the “Bulgarian lands” is thematized in one of Karavelov’s early short novels, Turski pasha (Turkish Pasha; 1866). This story focuses on the fate of two Bulgarian children, a boy and a girl, kidnapped and sold as slaves in Tsarigrad. Karavelov tries to persuade his readers that entering Turkish social and family life is devastating for Bulgarians. Once separated from their home, the heroes are doomed: marriage in the foreign environment is no real marriage, the home is a place of estrangement and vices, and even the food is different: “The Turkish dinner is comprised of sweat things only, of herbs, pilafs — there is nothing spicy, or salty, or bitter. It is not for us, this Turkish oily meal” (68). For anyone at least partially familiar with the mixed Balkan cuisine, this statement sounds absurd. The “unhomely” foreignness of Tsarigrad for Bulgarians is exemplified in a magazine piece entitled “Pisma na edno desetgodishno dete, koeto sega prăv păt e doshlo v Tsarigrad” (Letters of a Ten-Year-Old Boy Who Comes to Tsarigrad for the First Time), published by Petko Slaveikov in 1864, at the time of a fierce Bulgarian-Greek dispute. Using an elaborate narrative technique, this text presents Tsarigrad as a strange place with unintelligible, non-natural rules. The strangeness is addressed by the narrator at the very beginning of the text. The first houses described are Greek, inhabited by creatures that Slaveikov associates systematically with animalistic imagery: [T]he mothers are real dried mackerels, while the kids are like thread worms. You can see them in the morning, craning their heads forward from their windows, like thread worms before rain; lanky, disheveled, thin-necked like hounds, if one of these children happened to shout “simitsi,” the sound would remind you of a sizzling snail when you roast it in the heath. (126)

The main argument in the alleged “unhomeliness” of Tsarigrad is that it deprives Bulgarians of family life. No Bulgarian women could be seen in the city, proving that the houses in which Bulgarian men lived were not real homes. In the story, the young boy asks his father if there were any Bulgarians who owned houses in Tsarigrad. The answer is “Yes.” “But where are their wives?” insists the boy. “Most of them are married to Greek women, that’s why no Bulgarian women can be seen there” (131). The father’s answer elicits again an amazed response from the boy: “Strange thing,” the boy mutters to himself, “very strange.” Marrying a Greek woman is seen as strange, similar to the other oddities of metropolitan life. We are told that in Tsarigrad fishmongers offer stinking fish while shouting taze baluk! (fresh

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fish!), that flatterers are your worst enemies, and so on. The disagreement between words and things makes the young boy exclaim: I’m sure you’ve heard in some fairy tales of an upside-down world, where everything goes topsyturvy. As for Tsarigrad, it may not yet belong in that upside-down world, but it is on its way to it. […M]ost, if not all the things here, are upside down. (Slaveikov, “Pisma” 134)

The Romantic “Nature vs. Society” and “City vs. Countryside” oppositions were common place in nineteenth-century popular literature. Sentimentalized Romanticism was well known to Petko Slaveikov. But our concern here is with the way in which the city of Tsarigrad was employed as a repository of images for the negative construction of collective identity; negative in the same way that a photograph is a negative. Tsarigrad was forced to participate in the formation of a normative standard of what Bulgarian(s) should be. The essence of “Bulgarianness,” Slaveikov claims, is the negative of that “upside down world” — Tsarigrad. For Petko Slaveikov, and even more so for Botev and Karavelov, life in the capital city is defined by a most dangerous feature: heterogeneity, “the mixture” of different ethnic groups, of rulers and subjects, of “us” and “them.” If we were to sum up the main strategy of Bulgarian literature at that period, an apt definition could be “Sentimental Separatism.” Before we proceed further, we need to comment on the genre of this text and others dealing with Tsarigrad. Satire had been an extremely popular genre in the Bulgarian Revival and Slaveikov’s feuilleton is a typical example. Satire was especially useful in the formation of a national identity because it presupposed a “common sense” shared by the implied author and the implied reader. This “common sense,” consisting usually of prejudices and stereotypes, provided a suitable starting point for the establishment of a sense of belonging to the community of “all (reasonable) Bulgarians.” The imaginary “We” of national ideology was constituted to a great extent as the “We” of the irreverent Bulgarians, collectively mocking (helped by their ideologues, of course) the ladies’ fashions, the chorbadzhii’s greed and corpulence, the monks’ lasciviousness, and so on. A pet subject for this derisive national identity were those miserable Bulgarians who had married Greek women. According to the literary and journalistic discourse of the time, to have a Greek wife ultimately proved to be an effective means of losing either your property and family honor, or your national identity — sometimes both. In the nationalistic historical dramas of the period up to the first decade of the twentieth century, the decline of the medieval Bulgarian state was attributed to kings and nobles who happened to have Greek wives. The moderate position adopted by Gavril Krastevich (leader of the Bulgarian struggle for ecclesiastical independence) after the Sultan’s Firman of 1870, was likewise explained — and mocked — as the result of his Greek-born wife’s influence. A poetic emanation of this “Sentimental Separatism” is the famous Petko Slaveikov’s poem “Izvorăt na Belonogata” (The Spring of the White-legged; 1873). In the main section of the poem, the young and beautiful Bulgarian girl Gergana encounters the vizier (the highest Ottoman official), who tries to seduce her with promises of a luxurious life in Tsarigrad. Of course, Gergana politely declines, claiming that she prefers the modest beauties of her small rustic world — her family, garden, her beloved Nikola, etc. The poem has a much richer texture than this retelling

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conveys, but it could be said that in it Slaveikov succeeds in representing the perfect division between Tsarigrad and the Bulgarian countryside, between palace and home, Civilization and patriarchal idyllism. Gergana’s words reinforce this figurative contrast: Stambul, my Lord, for me is there, where I was born, and the most beautiful palace is my paternal roof. (“Izvorăt” 138)

This passage reverses the figuration of the “upside down world” of Tsarigrad. Stambul is here — the true, authentic center for Bulgarians should be their native place. It would not be fair to suggest that Petko Slaveikov emphasized only the negative aspects of life in Tsarigrad. In the dispute on the question of the Seat of the Bulgarian Exarchate, he insisted on Tsarigrad as the only appropriate place for it. In 1869, he published the first Bulgarian cookbook, full of recipes but also of practical advice on how to tell a good veal from a bad one and on many other subtleties of domestic life, of which Gergana’s compatriots were obviously ignorant. Slaveikov did not conceal the source of his knowledge; the subtitle of the cookbook was “Instructions for All Meals as They are Prepared in Tsarigrad, and Other Useful Advice.” Interestingly, the implications of the Bulgarian nationalistic discourse, positing Tsarigrad as a place of bachelors, were reinforced by the historians of the twentieth century. In his detailed study, Tsarigrad kato kulturen tsentăr na Bălgarite do 1877 (Tsarigrad as a Cultural Center of Bulgarians Until 1877; 1925), Nikola Nachov makes clear that the Bulgarian colony in nineteenth-century Tsarigrad was predominantly male, consisting of bachelors and gurbetchii (men who work in a foreign place for months or even years) who had left their families behind in the countryside. At the end of the same book, Nachov mentions that some Bulgarians did have their families in Tsarigrad, but this mention is missed by Toncho Zhechev who starts his essayistic masterpiece, Bălgarskiyat Velikden (The Bulgarian Easter; 1985), quoting Nachov’s assertion about the Bulgarian bachelor life-style in Tsarigrad. Zhechev goes even further, regarding this social practice as evidence of a specific psychological disposition and a “national life-philosophy.” In the final chapter of his book, Zhechev provides an extended, emotionally-colored interpretation of Slaveikov’s “The Spring of the White-legged,” stating that the choice of the heroine to stay in her small village and humble garden rather than go to the vizier’s palace in “Stambul” represents the wisdom of the late Slaveikov, whose life experience in Tsarigrad had led him to a reevaluation of patriarchal country life, conceived now as an alternative to the noisy cosmopolitan City of the Kings: He had been striving for this city […] but disappointed with the outcomes of his arduous public activities, now he could only see its ugly, dirty face, and the idealized comparison with the neatness and the order of his native land prevailed in his imagination. Faced with Tsarigrad, the rustic and the patriarchal got the better of him. (Zhechev 360)

This conversion of Slaveikov into a connoisseur of idyllic chastity and patriarchal values would have made his contemporaries raise an eyebrow or two, for Slaveikov was known as more of a hedonist in his time. Svetoslav Milarov, who lived in Tsarigrad in the early 1870s and who had

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befriended Slaveikov, offered later an extensive portrait of Slaveikov in an unpublished foreword to his own Spomeni ot Tsarigradskite tămnitsi (Memoirs from the Tsarigrad Prisons; 1881): From a moral standpoint, Mr. Slaveikov, as I know him, is not to be recommended; indeed, if he has not become a drunkard yet, it cannot be denied that he is moving steadily towards that blessed condition. As for his family life, there is no need to inform anybody about it — everyone is familiar with that ugly, that historical scandal that will not escape the vigilant eyes of future scholars who will study and judge the spiritual and moral strength of the Bulgarian nation in our time. (Milarov, Fund 112, archive item 163, page 3)

The “historical scandal” about which everybody allegedly knew, according to Milarov, was the fact that in the early 1870s Slaveikov, a married man, dared live in Tsarigrad with a concubine, Ekaterina Stoyoglou — behavior that was considered by the Bulgarian community as a flagrant violation of good manners. Ekaterina happened to be also a former mistress of Rakovski, the father figure of the Revolutionist wing in the Bulgarian Revival. So in 1872, when Slaveikov was arrested because of the article “Dvete kasti i vlasti” (The Two Castes and Two Powers), written by Milarov and published in Slaveikov’s newspaper Macedonia, the police arrested Ekaterina as well, considering her as a living proof of the connections between Slaveikov and the emigrants’ revolutionary circles. Slaveikov was later released but he was no longer allowed to publish his newspaper. Things went even worse for him when his refusal to give up Ekaterina forced the influential members of the Bulgarian community to fire him as headmaster of the Bulgarian school in Tsarigrad. Deprived of his means of living, Slaveikov was forced to leave Tsarigrad and tried to settle in Odrin, where he was rejected for the same reasons. We present these details not for the sake of sensationalizing Slaveikov’s biography but rather to point out the realities behind his later canonization as a Bulgarian icon. As an eminent figure of the Bulgarian Revival, his biography has been carefully modeled in accordance with the master narrative of Bulgarian national ideology. (One of the first “modelers” was his own son, the first modernist Bulgarian writer, Pencho Slaveikov). In the discursive articulation of Petko Slaveikov’s public image, the “historical scandal” was erased. “Future scholars” paid no attention to this episode of his life; furthermore, the whole story of Slaveikov’s last years in Tsarigrad was totally reshaped. It was not until the middle of the 1990s that Madlen Danova exposed, in her comparative work on the biographical modeling of the Jameses and Slaveikovs, the ways in which “the national narrative” had erased parts of the writers’ life histories in order to refashion them in an ideologically effective way. The “patriarchalization” of Petko Slaveikov, which reached its climax in Zhechev’s “The Bulgarian Easter,” is an emblematic case of the “domestication” of the Bulgarian Revival. By “domestication,” I mean the taming of the processes of social modernization, by keeping them within the framework of patriarchal values. Paraphrasing Ernest Gellner, Steven Kemper argues that “nationalism creates the common culture and social homogeneity needed for the complex and constantly changing division of labor in modern societies” (4). Thus, industrialism begets nationalism, and nationalism begets nations, while pretending that nations are old entities, with roots in ancient times. Nationalism conceals not only the newness of the nations but also the emergence of mobile individuals within the framework of the homogeneous “high culture.” The na-

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tional ideology presents the nation as “old” and in a similar way insists on the “constancy” of the individual member, while in fact creating conditions for his/her social mobility and flexibility. Where does the need for such dissimulation come from? My hypothesis, based on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (see Bourdieu and Passeron), is that Modernity changes habituses while suggesting (via the ideological implications of different discourses) that it actually preserves them. The Home becomes master-figure of that dissimulation. The Bulgarian literature of the nineteenth century presents many examples of this specific “economy of images,” associating the idealized patriarchal Home with qualities like modesty, moral strength, natural simplicity, tender feelings towards the other members of this intimate social circle, etc. Very popular in Bulgarian culture was the theme of “Misunderstood Civilization,” and it was exactly the Home that was depicted as devastated by false Westernization. And this concern was not limited to Bulgarian society. Serif Mardin has noted similar concerns within dominant culture in the Ottoman Empire: the disapproving attitude of much of the Ottoman middle- and lower-class population towards the behavior of westernized Tanzimat statesmen. Ottoman grandees who had borne the responsibility and the risk of initiating new policies had also developed Western European consumption patterns. Crinolines, pianos, dining tables and living-room furniture were new ideas that the official class soon adopted, and these were often seen as foolish luxuries by the section of the population that had lived on the modest standards imposed by traditional values. (18)

I would like to make a distinction here between the social inequities, which the new capitalistic economy brought in, and the ideological use of the experience of these inequities. It was the intelligentsia that made use of the nonarticulated discontents of the lower classes towards Modernity, translating them into the Romantic discourse of the Folk as an antithesis to corrupt civilization. This type of discourse had many artistic, philosophical, and political usages, but suffices here to say that one of its effects was to deprive Tsarigrad of its privileged position. 2.

Tsarigrad — City of Secrets

If the figure of the idyllic Home is the cornerstone of the symbolical interpretation of the Bulgarian lands as Homeland, then Tsarigrad — the site of homelessness — stands as the Homeland’s symbolical Other. If Petko Slaveikov, a leading figure of the Bulgarian community in Tsarigrad, considered the capital as an “upside-down world,” for Botev and Karavelov, who at the time resided in Romania, Tsarigrad was at the center of a map of dark, “perverted places.” This map in effect comprised the entire imaginary territory of Ottoman Turkey. As part of the topoi of sexual excess and perversion, Bulgarian writers depicted not only harems and coffeehouses, but also monasteries, brothels (brought to life with the progress of the railroads), and even factories. Tsarigrad, with the Sublime Porte, its palaces, and the Phanar quarter (which became metonymically synonymous with the Holy Synod and the Constantinople Patriarch, which were located there), epitomized the world of human vices. This conceptualization of Tsarigrad resembles the Enlightenment fears described by Michel Foucault in “The Eye of Power”:

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One fear has been tormenting the second half of XVIII century: the gloomy space, the dark barrier that poses an obstacle to the perfect observability of things, men, truths. It sought to break up the patches of darkness that blocked the light, eliminate the shadowy areas of society, demolish the unlit chambers where arbitrary political acts, monarchical caprice, religious superstitions, tyrannical and priestly plots, epidemics and the illusions of ignorance were fomented. (Foucault 153)

The spatial modeling of the vices of Tsarigrad relied upon two main figures — the Harem and the Palace. The harem was an emblematic counterpart to the patriarchal Home in the Bulgarian writings of the period. What was perceived as wrong with the harem was not polygamy and lust as such, but its concealed nature. A representative figure of the Bulgarian Revival, Khristo Stambolski, explained that what was unacceptable for the “enlightened mind” in the harem was the separation between the male and female inhabitants of the home (Stambolski 2: 635–6) According to Stambolski, such a separation was unknown in the Christian houses and remained purely symbolical, almost invisible in the poorest Muslim houses, because the lack of resources made the physical division impossible. (The implication was that poor Muslims came closer to Christians or to the normative idea for humanity). The richer the household, the more objectified the separation became, so that the wealthiest of Muslims kept women in a separate house. The most extreme case was, of course, the Palace of the Sultan, where the harem took the form of an architectural labyrinth, full of hidden entrances and secret rooms. The main point of Stambolski’s complaint is that the separation of the house into a female (harem) and male (selyamluk) part makes the home uncontrollable. The bigger and more convoluted the harem, the less control the head of the family can exercise over it. Instead of being a mini-Panopticon, where the gaze of the father is internalized by the other members of the family and thus full mastery over the household is being achieved, the harem is a “Pandemonium” of obscure, dark places where adultery and other illicit behavior flourishes. As a physician, Stambolski was allowed to enter harems; but if the harem is semi-penetrable, that does not make it transparent. The opaqueness conceals excessive sexuality, idleness, and the “non-legitimate” pleasures of eating (too much), watching (dance performances), listening (gossips and fairy tales), and even reading (adventure novels and romances). The most extended depiction of harem life in Bulgarian fiction can be found in Karavelov’s short novel The Turkish Pasha. The chapter that depicts harem life starts with a didactic assertion of the moral acceptability of hatred and thirst for revenge. In a sentence immediately preceding the harem scenes, the heroine tells us that “In Turkey you cannot think in a French manner” (67). Harem life itself is characterized, according to the narrator, by idleness, gluttony, lust, and maliciousness. The harem depicted in The Turkish Pasha is located, of course, in Tsarigrad. The harems that Stambolski refers to are also the Tsarigrad harems of his medical practice. The relation between Tsarigrad and the image of the harem is far from arbitrary. In the Bulgarian writings from the third quarter of the nineteenth century we find a figurative strategy that we can call “condensation”: the features, identifiable as “Turkish,” “Ottoman,” or “Greek” are condensed into a topographic figure connected with Tsarigrad — be it the Sultan’s palaces and harem, the residence of the Greek Patriarchate, and so on. Thus, if the most characteristic harems were those of the richest Muslims, then it was obvious that the literature would represent them emblematically as located in Tsarigrad. Similarly, if the Greek clergy was viewed as corrupted, the highest level of corrup-

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tion would be associated with the Holy Synod and the Patriarch himself, condensed in the figure of “Phanar,” which became one of the most important negative words in the Bulgarian political dictionary of the 1840s to 1870s. The same strategy of condensation can be observed with another theme, quite popular in the radical Bulgarian press published outside the Empire — that of sexual perversion (sodomy and prostituting of one’s own wife). In the journalistic pieces of Botev and Karavelov this theme was a powerful rhetorical weapon. Three important attributes underlie it: firstly, sexual deviation is regarded as an intrinsic ethnic quality. Secondly, this behavior is attributed to the “non-circumcised Turks” — i.e., the wealthy Bulgarians, treated as traitors and parasites by the revolutionary ideologues. Thirdly and most importantly, perversion becomes a marker for “progress” and “reforms” — notions always put in quotes by Botev and Karavelov. This represents a significant recoding of premodern, archaic prejudices concerning the religious Other. In the extremist nationalist writings, bestiality becomes a characteristic of reforming Turks. The prototype for this attitude can be found in Georgi Rakovski’s feuilleton, “Pirshestvo na turski velmozhi” (The Feast of Turkish Nobles), published in the brochure Predvestnik Gorskago pătnika (Forerunner of the Highlander; 1856). Since this model would be widely used by Botev and Karavelov — the “geniuses of the Bulgarian revolution” — a more extensive quotation is appropriate: In recent times a new belief has appeared among the enlightened Turks, called by these clever enlighteners “dini-dzhedie,” or the new creed. This new creed of theirs has the following principles: the new enlighteners no longer have to believe in Mohamed the Prophet, no longer have to wash themselves (to perform abdes), no longer have to bow, and no longer have to fast during the Ramadan. In a word, they no longer have to believe in anything they have believed until now, but are free to perform unscrupulously everything that brings pleasure and carnal satisfaction. Whatever reasonable men would consider shameful and forbidden, for them is French, à la franca as they say; in other words, [their new creed encourages them]: to feast and get drunk all the time, to indulge passionately in disgusting sodomy, and so on. This new creed is most strong in Tsarigrad, in the palaces of the Ottoman ministers, statesmen, and great councilors, and is spreading also to the lower strata of society. (Rakovski 22)

Rakovski depicts a vivid scene of these “clever enlighteners,” placing their feast somewhere in the Tsarigrad palaces. The festive imagery includes “young Ganimeds” pouring out wine, accompanied by handsome pals, named “kyochetsi,” dressed in women’s clothes, who perform shameful dances in front of their Highnesses and indulge in sodomy with their male masters (23). The feast ends in a carnivalesque Exodus, with the masters going drunk to bed while the servants are left to satisfy the “natural needs” of the harem women. The negative depictions of Tsarigrad were part of a discursive practice that applied to all the big cities in Ottoman Turkey. Karavelov treated Plovdiv and the lewdness of its non-Bulgarian locals in similar ways in his “Zapiski za Bălgaria i za bălgarete” (Notes on Bulgaria and on Bulgarians). He is not satisfied with merely depicting scenes of lewdness and sodomy (in this case in the coffeehouses); he asserts that the entire Ottoman administration was recruited through sodomitical “initiation.” The center of this social prostitution is, of course, Tsarigrad with the Sultan’s palace as a prime place of initiation, but perversion in Karavelov’s view spreads out concentrically over the entire Empire:

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I don’t know if there is anything more abominable and disgusting in the whole world than these lewd idiots who sell their bodies to the influential Asian lechers and in this way try to get appointed to high office, while entertaining themselves with olani and sodomy in their turn. (Karavelov, “Zapiski” 287)

In his paper, “Plovdiv i dalechnoto. Kăm otnoshenieto mezhdu kulturna urbanistika i imaginerna geographiya” (Plovdiv and the Distant. On the Relation between Urban Studies and Imaginary Geography), Alexander Kiossev writes: The Bulgarian literature of the Revival period generally fails to “grasp” within its imaginary geographies the large multicultural centers of the Ottoman Empire. […] The city is inside the territory and at the same time outside it, because it is foreign, mixed, unclean, threatening to “disgrace” the ideal center of the territory: in short, the city is a scandal at the very heart of the ideal territorialization. Where do this fear and disgust come from? (160–61)

It could be argued that a crucial feature of such “dark” places as the harem and the palace was their presumed resistance to the gaze of the normative public discourse. Everything that happens “secretly” cannot be legitimized as long as the modern legitimation of power is founded in public opinion. Legitimation is a crucial issue within the political field — and the political field is the space wherein the forging of national identity takes place. If we accept Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an imagined political community, then national identity would consist of a sense of belonging to this imagined community, a belonging performed as an involvement in the political field. The struggles within the political field are closely connected with the “right to represent,” to speak in the name of something. As Bourdieu points out, however, there is a “circular relation” between the “representatives” and “the represented.” The discourse of the “delegate” actually creates the group it claims to represent: A whole series of symbolic effects that are exercised every day in politics rest on this sort of usurpatory ventriloquism, which consists in giving voice to those in whose name one is authorized to speak […]. (Bourdieu 211–12)

In a self-legitimizing gesture, “the right to represent” was appropriated by the Bulgarian intelligentsia of the Revival period in the name of Knowledge and Progress. Knowledge and Progress in Modern times require, however, observability and transparency as conditions of their unfolding: This reign of “Opinion” so often invoked at that time, represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze. A form of power whose main instance is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of darkness. (Foucault 154)

The partitioning of the world into “light” and “dark” zones, “developed” and “underdeveloped” regions, predictable and contingent social orderings, is a product of the normative grid of Modernity, organized around the notion of homogeneous, fully observable and controllable space. Quite revealingly, Karavelov equates ignorance (not knowing who you are and what you should do)

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with sexual promiscuity and dubious liaisons between ethnically different subjects. At the same time the presence of “dark places” serves as a positive feedback for the Enlightenment discourse — these discreditable spots, which are a product of the normalizing discourse of power/knowledge, confirm with their presence the legitimacy of that very power/knowledge. Returning to Bourdieu’s notion of the “circular relation” upon which the political field, or the field of representation, is built, we can stipulate that ideal transparency — the goal of the Enlightenment discourse — actually has to conceal the usurpatory character of the symbolic power, making it natural and self-evident. The ultimate naturalization of the normalizing power leads to the annihilation of representatives or intermediaries. It is not surprising, then, to find radicals like Karavelov and Botev show a passionate dislike for “intermediaries” — all those “learned men” performing a mediating function between “poor people” and the authorities, or between the uneducated and the academically-trained people. Neither Karavelov nor especially Botev thought of themselves as “representatives.” At the center of Botev’s poetry is a heroic, self-sacrificing figure, whose tragic vision transcends the representational relation between people and hero. In that context, homogeneity and observability proved to be a necessary framework for the nationalist discourse. The City is a “scandal” because its ethnic heterogeneity threatens the legitimating basis pursued by the Bulgarian intelligentsia. The national ideology is a distinctly modern phenomenon for this very reason: it involves the imposition of Enlightenment techniques for the creation of homogeneous spaces of perfect ordering onto geographical space. Of course, the “ideal” and “real” spaces will never fully coincide, because it is exactly their discrepancy that legitimizes the ideology and makes it work. It is the presence of such an “ideal,” “imagined” space as a normative horizon that is most important here. The national identity itself is nothing more than the recognition of that normative horizon. The writings of Botev and Karavelov do not constitute that national ideology per se. With the limited distribution of their newspapers, their influence on the formation of national self-consciousness in the 1870s should not be exaggerated. The importance of Botev and Karavelov is premised on the fact that the discourse of the national ideology used them in effective ways after 1878. The “real” national ideology is the discursive production of national identity in multilevel institutional frameworks that only the national state can provide. From the rich texture of the public discourses of the Revival, the national ideology chose to make use of the “revolutionary” doctrine of Botev and Karavelov. A brief example: the writings of Botev and Karavelov were first collected in different editions of “Selected Works” and “Complete Works” beginning in the 1880s, when the two writers were recognized as the major figures of the Bulgarian literature of the Revival. Their “classical” position within the cultural field brought new significance to their journalistic writings, which were now read independently of their initial context, as texts that transcend their historical time. The essays of Botev and Karavelov were reissued many times, and studied in the classrooms as canonic works. To a lesser degree, the same happened with Petko Slaveikov’s writings, but not with, say, those of Marko Balabanov, Nikola Genovich, or Ivan Naidenov. Their journalism had no posthumous life. These publishing and educational processes directly influenced the significance of Tsarigrad after 1878.

Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Construction of Bulgarian National Identity 3.

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Tsarigrad — the Political City

In his feuilleton “Nie sme si nie” (We Are Ourselves) from 1872, referring to the so-called “Epiphany liturgy” performed by the Bulgarian high clergy in Tsarigrad, at one of the crucial moments in the long struggle for ecclesiastical independence, Lyuben Karavelov scornfully called Tsarigrad a “diplomatic Kingdom” and “philosophic-rhetorical city” (Karavelov, Săbrani săchineniya 5 [1966]:61). Why did learning and politics turn into an occasion for mockery? In the 1860s and the 1870s, Tsarigrad was the battleground for the Bulgarian-Greek church dispute. In their struggle for an autonomous Church, Bulgarians had only one ally — the Ottoman Government, which from the beginning performed a mediating function between Bulgarians and the Ecumenical (Constantinople) Patriarchate. The Bulgarian movement for ecclesiastical independence was closely connected to the reformist, modernizing policy of the Sublime Porte. As a legal basis for their demands, Bulgarians used the imperial rescript (hatt-i-humayun) of 1839 and especially the decree of 1856, which guaranteed freedom of religion and participation in civil society to the non-Muslims. Pursuing the implementation of the 1856 decree, the Ottoman government required all the ecclesiastical communities of the Empire to reform their legal and administrative structure in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The Bulgarian struggle for an autonomous church hierarchy, separated administratively from the Constantinople Patriarchate, grew stronger. In response to the governmental decree, a Great Church Assembly was held in the Phanar quarter between 1858 and 1860, where all the dioceses of the Constantinople Patriarchate were represented. The claims of the few Bulgarian representatives were discarded as noncanonical and illegitimate. After that last Assembly where Greeks and Bulgarians met as members of one church, the Bulgarians resorted to a radical action. During the 1860 Easter Liturgy in the Bulgarian church in Tsarigrad, the Bulgarian bishop Ilarion Makariopolski dared omit the name of the Patriarch. In canonical terms that was scandalous. In political terms, this “Easter Action” indicated that as a religious community Bulgarians considered themselves separated from the Constantinople Patriarchate. On a practical level, this separation was fact. Ten years after the “Easter Action,” the Sultan’s Firman of 27 February 1870 established a relatively autonomous Bulgarian Exarchate, legalizing the factual separation of the Bulgarians. For centuries, the religious communities in Pax Ottomana benefited of a relative autonomy, a kind of self-government not only in regard to ecclesiastical matters, but also to civic affairs. The Bulgarian historiographic literature on this question claims that Bulgarians had considered the Orthodox Church, dominated by Greek-born clergy, as an oppressor because of its abusive taxes and arbitrary legal judgments. Such policies and reactions were possible in the decentralized Ottoman Empire of the pre-Tanzimat period. The Tanzimat reforms, initiated with the rescript of 1839, significantly changed the power structure at a local level. What I want to argue is that the “national feeling,” objectified in the striving for church autonomy, was born within these changed conditions of government in the Tanzimat era. The development of a strong central government and elective city councils facilitated the weakening of the economical and political power of the big landowners and of the corporate religious bodies, bringing to life a new type of Bulgarian political intelligentsia. Of course, that process did not move ahead smoothly, the wealthy citizens continuing to have strong influence in public matters. Still, with the development of modern civic institutions a new symbolic field appeared — the question of representativeness (or who should

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represent the “people”) became central to political discourse, and that fact would be crucial in the formation of national identity. Thus, the Bulgarian movement for ecclesiastical independence was born in the context of the modernization reforms and was doomed to rely on the cooperation with the Sublime Porte, which gave it a strange “double legitimation.” On the one hand, the Bulgarian activists were endlessly referring to the “rights of the Bulgarian people”; on the other, however, these “Bulgarian rights” were supposed to be issuing from the sovereign power of the Sultan, who alone could guarantee them. The historical accounts of the Bulgarian “Church question” unambiguously recognize the first legitimation as “true,” while they consider the second as “false,” nothing more than a tactical maneuver nobody sincerely believed in. Zina Markova, for example, describes the Bulgarian church movement as ecclesiastical in form but national in substance (58). This view accepts the terms “national” and “national consciousness” as signifying something “ready at hand,” buried in the individuals and just waiting to be “awakened.” It can be argued that the historians’ discourse has internalized uncritically the assumptions of one of the sides in the Bulgarian national movement — that of the “revolutionaries.” With regard to the strivings for ecclesiastical independence, Tsarigrad definitely represented the space of negotiations — and that determined its main significance on the symbolic map of Bulgarian public discourses during the period of the “national awakening.” To negotiate (and live) or to fight (and die) — this was the crucial question dividing the projects and the rhetorics of “the evolutionists” and “the revolutionaries.” It is not surprising, therefore, that involvement in the complexities of the “Church question” appeared to be mere folly for the emigrant circle of Botev and Karavelov. In his 1872 essay, “Nie sme si nie,” Karavelov proudly declares that, having avoided the “diplomatic Kingdom” or “philosophic-rhetorical city,” he is able to speak in his own voice and think with his own mind. The implication is quite clear — the “diplomats” in Tsarigrad are inauthentic, all their efforts are distortions and deviations from the “correct” Bulgarian political attitude. One of the aims of my article, however, is to show that there was a genuine Turkophile project going on in Bulgarian literature, based not on some personal folly but deeply embedded in the social and political infrastructure of the Ottoman Empire. I will start with the question of the Bulgarian community in Tsarigrad and its organization as a political entity. There was a complex interplay between the local and the national in the history of the Bulgarian church movement. At its inception, it represented a clear case of local struggle against centralized church authority. During the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not difficult for the local notables to expel a corrupted bishop or even a representative of the Ottoman authorities from their city, with a simple petition to the central government. The main task of the rising nationalistic movement was to translate these local struggles in “national” terms and to present the removal of Greek priests as a necessity not just because they were deficient, but because they were Greek. For the implementation of that task, at least two things were required. The first was the presence of a public space that would enable the vision of a homogeneous “Bulgarian nation.” The second was the existence of a political center that would function as a mediator between the local demands and the Ottoman government. For centuries, such a mediator had been the Patriarchate, designated as the “Phanar.” Now the Phanar was to be replaced by a center of “our own.” It was not an accident that the Bulgarian municipality in Tsarigrad started to function as such a center; and it was not accidental that most of the Bulgarian newspapers and magazines during the Revival period were published there.

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“Municipality” is perhaps an improper translation for obshtina, insofar as the Ottoman laws allowed only religious city “councils” (obshtini) to exist. The formation of such a council in Tsarigrad was closely connected with the striving of the Bulgarian colony in Tsarigrad for its own church during the 1840s. Finally, the efforts proved successful, and in 1847, a Sultan Firman was issued, in which the name Bulgarian millet appeared for the first time. The established Bulgarian council was engaged with more than church matters: [The council] held its sessions every Friday, presided over by Ilarion Makariopolski, and had assumed the rights, tacitly of course, of managing not only the usual church and school matters, but also some legal disputes like those between Mr. Puroglu and Mr. Petrov concerning certain commercial claims, and the claim of an Armenian woman, holding one Bulgarian responsible for her pregnancy. (Stambolski 1: 393)

The Bulgarian council in Tsarigrad was in charge not only of the love affairs of the Armenian women, but of the establishment and management of Bulgarian church buildings, schools, cultural clubs (chitalishte), as well as different Bulgarian associations in Tsarigrad. All these activities are fully documented in Nachov’s mentioned book, Tsarigrad kato kulturen tsentăr na Bălgarite do 1877 (Tsarigrad as a Cultural Center of the Bulgarians until the Year 1877). As far as the consolidation of a national consciousness is concerned, however, it is important to stress the transformation of the Bulgarian community in Tsarigrad into a representative of the Bulgarian nation as a whole: With its bold appeals to the authorities, civic or spiritual, [the Bulgarian obshtina] became a mediator between Bulgarians and the Government, to satisfy their ecclesiastical or other needs. (Stambolski 1: 396)

Even more enthusiastic about the role of this council was Marko Balabanov at the beginning of his memoir book, Stranitsa ot politicheskoto ni Văzrazhdane (A Page from Our Political Revival; 1904), where he calls the Bulgarian community in Tsarigrad and its Council a “legitimate intermediary,” “emanation of the whole Bulgarian people.” One reason for this centrality was the fact that Tsarigrad gathered Bulgarians from different regions. The main advantage of the Tsarigrad local council, however, was its spatial and political proximity to the Sublime Porte and the Phanar, with many Bulgarians holding positions in the high Ottoman administration. If the political field is indispensable for the elevation of local and personal strategies to a “national” level, then the political engagement of the Tsarigrad Bulgarians with the Ottoman Government was the proper ground for the formation of a national identity. The “national self-consciousness” was born in endless negotiations rather than in the legends and folk songs about famous haiduti; its birth was marked more with councils’ seals than with the blood of the “fighters” and “martyrs.” Of course, this was the kind of “politics” that was unacceptable to the revolutionaries Karavelov and Botev, who vehemently contested the centrality of Tsarigrad as the battleground of national consciousness. Characteristically, Karavelov lamented this false “politization” of the Bulgarians that threatens to make Tsarigrad the symbolical center of Bulgarian public affairs: “Our [national] self-consciousness had left Phanar, moving however not to the Bulgarian hearth,

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but to the Babaalie [The Sublime Porte]” (Karavelov, Săbrani Săchineniya 5:179). According to Karavelov, the genuine center of the national self-consciousness should have been neither the Seat of the Patriarchate, nor the residence of the Ottoman Government, but the “hearth,” the intimate place of “Bulgarianness” — naturally born, not begotten in political negotiations and compromises. The above-quoted sentence is part of a passage that describes Bulgarians as actually deprived of any identity. In his satirical vein, Karavelov depicts Bulgarians as creatures consisting of hands and legs only — no head and stomach were needed because Bulgarians had nothing to eat and obviously were unable to think. To have nothing (“Bulgarians have nothing of their own, except some graves, covered with grass”) and to be nowhere (“Bulgarians exist and work everywhere except in their fatherland”) were the two interrelated conditions that defined the Bulgarian (lack of) identity. Similar passages that present the Bulgarian as a dislocated and dismembered creature appear in other writings of Karavelov and Botev. A strikingly different attitude can be found in one of the petitions presented to the Sultan by the Bulgarian representatives in the 1860s: In the present spiritual state of our country, it is important that public life should not add to the darkness of ignorance, temptations, and contradictions to which our people are already prey, but rather descend upon people from the luminous heights of government. To put it in a nutshell, it is necessary that the government create Bulgaria and not Bulgaria create itself on its own. (Shopov 57)

This statement by Stoyan Chomakov can easily win the title of the most incorrect pronouncement in the whole history of the Bulgarian Revival. It is erroneous because it denies the core value of national ideology — the self-begetting nature of the national consciousness. This core value, however, was articulated in the public discourses much later, and Chomakov could not know about it. It was the young Bulgarian state and its intelligentsia that created in the 1880s and the 1890s the myth of the Bulgarian Revival as a heroic movement, rising from the depth of the “Bulgarian people.” This Hegelian ideology became the legitimation of the new State, supporting its claim to be the defender of the ideals that the Bulgarian people should embrace — with or without knowing. As already noted, the Bulgarian “Church question” unfolded in a context of indisputable loyalty to the Ottoman government. An interesting split occurred, however, inside the movement for ecclesiastical independence. Historians distinguish the parties of “Liberal-Democrats” and “Conservatives” during the proceedings of the First National Church Assembly in 1871. The focus of the dispute between them seemed to concern the election principle and its application in a traditional institution like the Orthodox Church. The Statute of the Exarchate reflects the victory of the “Liberals” over the “Conservatives” — even the Exarch was to be elected with a mandate of four years. Zina Markova points out that the Liberal-Conservative dispute in the National Church Assembly would be repeated in similar format during the Foundational Assembly of 1879, in the debates over the first constitution of the Bulgarian state. The split between the Liberals and the Conservatives had an even more important aspect, however. Most of the Liberals, led by Chomakov, were Turkophiles and this was not a secondary element of their political project. According to them, the legitimacy of the Bulgarian Exarchate should come from the Ottoman government entirely, while

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the recognition from the Patriarchate was viewed as irrelevant. From a tactical standpoint, they considered the cooperation with the secular authorities as far more efficient than the negotiations with the Phanar. Strategically, the liberals posited the “Church question” in the Tanzimat context of reforms and modernization. While the “moderates” were trying to legitimize the Bulgarian Exarchate on traditional, historical, and canonical grounds, the Liberals argued that legitimacy could only be based on the notion of “progress.” The liberal platform was defended most coherently in the newspaper of Nicola Genovich, Turkey. Genovich was perhaps the figure most hated by the revolutionary press; Bulgarian journalists and historians adopted too easily Botev’s verdict on him and his newspaper as “an organ of spies.” Ironically, Turkey was suspended by the Ottoman government because of a critical article on the Ottoman legal system and practice. Genovich possessed a clever mind, capable of defining his newspaper as “preserving conservative” and “liberal” ideas at the same time. However, he made clear that his sympathies were not with the Turks as such, but with their government’s Westernizing reformist efforts. It should be pointed out that during the nineteenth century spatial divisions were loaded with powerful temporal implications. The term “Ottoman Orientalism,” coined by Ussama Makdisi, internalized the Western “norm,” regarding the Orient as a “belated” and “uncivilized” space. In an editorial article of Turkey, we read: “Civilization is located nowhere else but in Western Europe”; the author, (most probably the editor-in-chief Nikola Genovich) even advised Turks to give up their practice of polygamy in the name of progress (Genovich 1). Turkophiles like him regarded the Ottoman Empire as a mixture of Oriental and Western elements, positioning themselves on the side of Western “progress” and “development,” much like Turkey’s reformist Government. The Muslim and non-Muslim elites thought in modified spatial terms, regarding the province-center relation as a relation between “belated” and “advanced.” This spatial model of Modern Center vs. Pre-modern Periphery was adopted by all the national elites within the Empire. The big question, causing fierce debates, was where the modernizing center lay and who controlled it. As Makdisi wrote, Istanbul was conceived not only as the modern political center of the empire but also as the highest temporal point from which one could look down and back in time at the provinces of the empire. (768)

A similar view was adopted by most Bulgarians in Tsarigrad, connected with the striving for ecclesiastical independence. For them, Tsarigrad had central significance not only in political, but in temporal terms as well: it was the locus of the Government, the place from where progress and modernization radiated. Genovich even considered the “Church question” as a matter of secondary importance. A similar position can be found in Ivan Bogorov’s travel notes that regarded the political activities of the Tsarigrad craftsmen as useless, a manifestation of vanity. The prime concern for Genovich and Bogorov was the education and improvement of the material conditions of the population. The progressivist discourse of the Turkophiles assumed the political framework of the Ottoman Empire as an indispensable condition for the implementation of their goals. The opposite attitude was taken by the revolutionary movement. We can quote Botev as an emblematic representative of that attitude, which became the dominant one after the outcome of the Russian-Turkish war in 1877–78:

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Turkey has no life, no future, it is nothing but a corpse on its death bed. […] For us the reforms in Turkey, the promises of cultural dualism, are meaningless words, ghosts and utopias that could be implemented somewhere in China or Japan, but not in the Balkan Peninsula between Bulgarians and Turks — two tribes with opposite characters, mores and customs, with opposite outlooks. (Botev, Săbrani Săchineniya 2 [1958]: 38)

This quote mentions China and Japan as terms of comparison, while in an article published in Pravo (Justice) from 1873 (probably written by Ivan Naidenov) the belatedness of the Bulgarians is compared to that of “the Patagonians from South America” (“Vikăt na otchayanieto” 157). What is significant in Botev and other protagonists of the radical nationalist ideology is the naturalization of the Oriental features, incessantly represented as immanent qualities of the Turks. There is something more at stake here. By naturalizing belatedness, Botev reverted to an archaic, purely spatial strategy of identification. According to his argument, to the extent the Turks have an unchanging character, marked by cruelty and parasitism, and the Bulgarians also have a “national character” that stayed unchanged for centuries, these two ethnic groups should be thoroughly divided. In similar manner Karavelov’s historical novels about the fall of the Medieval Bulgarian state have their soldier and peasant characters repeat incessantly the slogan “Let’s purge our land of Greeks!” In this regressive operation that purges the spatial markers of their temporal dimension, the Homeland becomes eternal. Botev and Karavelov were alleged progressivists, but their writings revealed a rather conservative streak. The strategy of spatialization, with its implied ahistoricism, provided a rich store of images that presented the national identity and culture as eternal and nonoverlapping with other identities or cultures. Emphasizing the Turkophile discourse in the Bulgarian public space of the 1860s and the 1870s is germane to our main focus on Tsarigrad and its relevance for national identity-building. The emphasis on the importance of Tsarigrad as a center of Bulgarian ecclesiastical, civil, and political activities was an integral part of the Turkophile doctrine. Tsarigrad stood as the symbolic capital of the Liberals, as an examination of the debate on where the Seat of the newly established Exarchate should be can prove. 4.

The Question of the Exarchate Seat — Tsarigrad as the City of Liberals

Since 1871, the Seat of the Exarchate had periodically arisen as a highly controversial issue in Bulgarian ecclesiastic history. From the very beginning, two solutions were suggested. The Seat could be either in Tsarigrad or in Turnovo, the last capital of the Medieval Bulgarian state. To locate the Seat in Tsarigrad meant schism — Bulgarians were aware that due to canonical and political reasons the Constantinople Patriarchate would never allow the Exarch to have his Seat in the same city with the Patriarch. Therefore, any possible reconciliation between the Patriarchate and the Exarchate would require as a sine qua non the consent of the Bulgarian side to move the Seat out of Tsarigrad. It is well known that the strategic aim of the Russian policy toward the Greek-Bulgarian church question was the unity of Orthodoxy, so for decades Ignatiev and the following Russian ambassadors in Tsarigrad insisted on the relocation of the Seat of the Exarchate to Turnovo.

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The issue was addressed publicly for the first time in 1871, during the general discussion on the Statute of the Exarchate. The newspaper Pravo published articles by Petar Odzhakov and the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Ivan Naidenov, which argued that the Seat of the Exarchate should be in Turnovo. Their reasoning was based primarily on the canonical and historical law, but behind the arguments lay the presumption that the newly established Bulgarian Exarchate would be stable and long-lasting on two conditions: first, if it was recognized by the Patriarchate and the rest of the Orthodox churches, and second, if it stuck to tradition, considering itself an heir of the medieval autocephalous Bulgarian church. Naidenov attacked the purposeful omission of the issue of the Seat in the Statute of the Exarchate; for him this omission was a consequence of the new liberal elements, introduced in the Statute. As Naidenov argued, The best guarantee of the stability and safety of the one independent and autonomous church is its canonical church seat, and, because of that, the appointment for life of the Exarch… (“Razsăzhdenia vărkhu” 49)

Naidenov suggested the separation between the Seat and the residence of the Exarch — in order to perform his duties as representative of the Bulgarians before the Sublime Port, he could reside in Tsarigrad, but the canonical Seat of the Exarchate should be in Turnovo. Naidenov was ready to consider another solution as well: the Seat could be in Tsarigrad but that would inevitably provoke schism. He doubted that the Bulgarian Synod would be brave enough to go that way. Naidenov was unhappy not so much with the notion of Tsarigrad as the Seat of the Exarchate, but with the shortsighted policy of deception, reflected in the Statute itself, which did not mention at all the question of the Seat. For him this was a cheap attempt to outsmart Phanar. Furthermore, Naidenov found the idea of “moving the church seat,” proposed in the newspaper Macedonia, as ridiculous. With regard to this particular issue, Naidenov represented the conservative, traditionalist side in the Bulgarian movement for ecclesiastical independence. The legitimacy of the Exarchate — and of the Bulgarian public life as well — should stem from tradition: We are not some new people, nor can we decide to transform at once and thoroughly the conditions of our life. We have historical life, we are based upon a tradition, so it is impossible for us to break the ties with the past; people re-arrange, rather than destroy societies, so as not to be obliged to rebuild them on bare ground. Such attempts were always devastating for all nations. (“Razsăzhdenia vărkhu” 49)

The liberal contingent did not hesitate to respond. In the newspaper Turkey, Genovich described Odzhakov’s thesis about the “historical law” as the writing of a “sick mind” and further argued that the Exarchate was established with a Firman of the “Honest Government”; the questions of its arrangement had nothing to do with historical precedents and canonical rules. Another determined defender of Tsarigrad was Petko Slaveikov, who in his influential newspaper Macedonia wrote two articles opposing the views expressed in Naidenov’s Pravo: “Po razsăzhdeniata na v. Pravo vărhu ustavăt” (On the Contentions of the Newspaper Pravo about the Statute”) and “Po vaprosăt za sedalishteto” (On the Question of the Seat”). There was a significant shift in his argumentation, however, by comparison with the reasoning of the explicitly Turkophile

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Turkey. Slaveikov also discarded any reference to the “historical rights” and the “canons.” However, in his secular defense of Tsarigrad he managed somehow to avoid the unambiguous reference to the Emperor’s sovereignty: Today every Bulgarian knows that neither the other glorious nations, nor the Ecumenical Patriarch will grant us autonomous church administration. We shall obtain our ecclesiastical independence not relying on some ancient historical rights, but by on the holy (sic!) base of the Orthodox Church, according to which every orthodox nation, if it is willing and capable to, has the right to administer its church independently from another church […]. Every Bulgarian knows that beyond that base the liberty of conscience and the laws of the Empire do not allow the Emperor’s Government to keep one nation under the spiritual yoke of another nation, because they both are its subjects. (Slaveikov, “Po razsăzhdeniata” 44)

Slaveikov took for granted, perhaps without knowing it, the famous dictum of the French Revolutionary Constitution that “the nation/people” are the only source of sovereignty. The Government’s ordering “comes after” — thus the legitimacy of the Exarchate is to be based not on canons and historical rights, nor on the Sultan’s benevolence, but on the “people” and their will. This line of reasoning modified the significance of Tsarigrad for Bulgarians. According to Slaveikov, “The center of European Turkey is Tsarigrad, consequently the center of the people that is the most widespread and numerous in it [in European Turkey], should be Tsarigrad” (“Po vaprosăt” 66). In his second article, Slaveikov strongly opposed the view, expressed by Odzhakov in Pravo, that Tsarigrad is “not a Bulgarian city”: [E]ven if it is not a Bulgarian city, there is no other city where so many Bulgarians are living — and those who live here are the most awakened, the most educated and enlightened among the Bulgarians. (“Po vaprosăt” 66)

According to Slaveikov, there were about 30,000–40,000 Bulgarians residing in Tsarigrad, plus another 100,000 seasonal workers, 100–200 of which “get married and stay in Tsarigrad forever every year.” To this statistical data, Slaveikov added an emotional description of the May 11 celebration in the Bulgarian colony in Tsarigrad. The image of Bulgarians “from all Bulgarian regions,” representing “the best we have either among the young, or among the old,” provokes — we are informed — “tears of sympathy” in the narrator who dismisses Odzhakov’s claim that Turnovo was the true center of the Bulgarian intelligentsia and public life as the “mutterings of an insane old woman” (“Po vaprosăt” 68–69). It was a common place in the argumentation of the “Tsarigradophiles” that as long as the Exarch was a representative of the Bulgarian people before the Sublime Porte, his activities required his stay in the capital. Slaveikov initiated another important line of reasoning, however. The question of the dioceses in Thrace and Macedonia was mentioned as one of the reasons why the Seat should not be somewhere in “Tuna vilaeti” (the Ottoman province, including the lands North of the Balkans). Until 1913, keeping the Exarch in Tsarigrad meant for Bulgarian national activists that the struggle for the annexation of the Macedonian and Thracian dioceses was still part of the political agenda. Thus the notions of “moving the Seat from Tsarigrad to Turnovo,” “reaching reconciliation with the Patriarchate” and “giving up Macedonia” were related and con-

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sidered as one option. The laity, especially “the Liberals,” were very suspicious that a secret agreement between the Bulgarian high clergy and the Patriarchate could be achieved. In a private letter from 1873, Stoyan Chomakov expressed his fear in the following exaggerated terms: The (building of) of the Exarchate is the haven of conspiracy against the people; Hadzi Ivancho, the Exarch, and Turnovo-men are pacing up and down there, plotting to create the Turnovo Exarchate with pure Bulgarian dioceses around it, blessed by the Patriarch, while the others… the hell with them. (qtd. in Shopov 170)

Chomakov’s suspicions proved to be at least partly true in 1876, when a new Russian diplomatic initiative toward reconciliation was attempted, triggering some activity on the side of the “Turnovo party.” The plan was to make the Exarch Antim also Archbishop of Turnovo (after the death of the former Turnovo Archbishop in 1875), which would provide the pretext for moving his seat to Turnovo. Spokesperson for that plot became Marko Balabanov, who in the pages of his newspaper Vek (Century) reactivated the idea of having Turnovo as the canonical Seat of the Exarchate. According to Balabanov, Bulgarians could have only a “sectarian office” in Tsarigrad, not a true canonical Seat. His great concern was that, being deprived of its canonical seat, the Bulgarian Exarchate would stay schismatic forever, separated from the rest of the Orthodox Church. After depicting the destructive effect of liberalism upon the Exarchate, Balabanov envisioned an idyllic picture of the Bulgarian people, united around its Church at her legitimate canonical Seat. He argued that, since the ecclesiastical organization is created for the people, its center should be amidst these people — there where the people live, where people work and suffer, where people have joy or pain, where their temples are, in which they address their warmest prayers to God, where their schools are, where their history and their hopes are — the only place where they can manifest thoroughly their religious life. (“Deistvitelnii svetilnik” 1)

For Balabanov, Tsarigrad was a “foreign place” and the Bulgarian high clergy had nothing in common with Orta-keui (the quarter where the residence of the Exarchate was located). He was eager to promise his readers that the future canonical center of the Exarchate would soon become the spiritual capital of the Bulgarian people — universities, seminaries, printing houses would rise, so that the Seat would become the “bright and consoling candle of the Bulgarian church and the Bulgarian people in the Ottoman state” (“Deistvitelnii svetilnik” 1). Balabanov’s words strangely resembled Karavelov’s statement that the center of national consciousness should not be the Sublime Porte, but the “fatherly hearth.” This is ironic since both Karavelov and Botev showed a certain scorn towards Balabanov, whom they called “father” because of his theological education. Nevertheless, all three of them tried to move the symbolic center of Bulgarian identity from the foreign Tsarigrad to the heart of the people’s land. It should not be “outside” but “inside,” inscribed into the “Landschaft” (landscape), as the philosophers of the “conservative revolution” would argue in the 1920s and the ’30s. The only difference is that in Karavelov’s vision the center was the “hearth,” “the heroic patriotic tradition,” while in Balabanov’s people were united by another tradition — that of the Orthodoxy and the patriarchal values.

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What lay behind the rhetoric that claimed that the Seat of the Exarchate should be “in the living middle of the nation”? The revealing fact was Balabanov’s concern with the alleged “isolation of the Bulgarian church” from the rest of the East Orthodoxy if the anti-canonical, “liberal,” and “Protestant” tendencies in her government happened to prevail. Separation from Orthodoxy meant losing the Russian support — a major factor in the political context of the period. National identity was built not only through the reencoding of everyday personal strategies, but also in relation to international politics. The formation of an educated citizen’s identity was inseparable from his attitude toward the big players in the political field. That political field contained Turkophiles and Russophiles, but neither group could be regarded as “traditional” or “natural.” Turkophilia and Russophilia (or more abstractly, “Slavophilia”) had to be constructed out of the unarticulated predispositions of the ordinary men. The Bulgarian “Church question” provided a fertile soil for the cultivation of such filiations. There were periods (such as that from 1908 and 1912) when the Turkophile project was reactivated. The knowledge of the economic importance of the Ottoman Empire for Bulgarian goods, accompanied by the intuition that the other Balkan states and the Great Powers could not be relied upon for the accomplishment of the Bulgarian national aspirations, led politicians and intellectuals back to the Turkophile doctrine of Chomakov. However, this reactivation of Turkophilia was no longer connected to Tsarigrad. The Balkan wars (especially the Second Balkan War, which had catastrophic effects upon the young Bulgarian state) put an end to all projects of the nineteenth century. The Exarch was forced to move from Tsarigrad to Sofia and the Exarchate lost forever jurisdiction over the “disputed” dioceses. Fifty years of efforts went to waste. 5.

Tsarigrad — the Lived Space

Tsarigrad always lay outside the Bulgarian church diocese, and the capital of Ottoman Turkey was never part of the political borders of the Bulgarian state. What followed from this extraterritoriality was the constant need of the Bulgarian community in Tsarigrad to belong to a “homeland” defined in symbolic terms. Before the proclamation of the Sultan’s Firman of 1870 and its subsequent putting into effect, the notion of the “Bulgarian lands” was vague and hardly separable from the territory of the Ottoman Empire. With the institutionalization of the new ecclesiastical map, the “foreignness” of Tsarigrad became more and more evident. While winning their “territory,” Bulgarians lost the possibility of calling Tsarigrad their own. The most common response on the part of the Tsarigrad Bulgarians was to consider their colony (and its communal council) as representative of the Bulgarian people before the Sublime Porte. This position was based on a long tradition of petitions, negotiations, and intercessions from the 1840s to the 1860s. The legitimacy of the Bulgarian colony in Tsarigrad as representative of the nation was challenged soon after 1872. In accordance with the Statute of the Exarchate, the Tsarigrad communal council had to relegate its prerogatives to the newly elected “mixed council,” namely the civic administrative body whose duty was to deal with civic matters. At least theoretically, the civic quota on the “mixed council” had to be elected by the dioceses — there would be no more “natural rights,” ensuing from personal social position, as had been the case with the Tsarigrad intercessors. In reality, however, the

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functioning of this new Council was hindered by many obstacles and internal tensions, relying again predominantly on the Tsarigrad notables. We have so far considered Tsarigrad from the outside, as a topographic figure employed in the radical nationalistic discourse or as an abstract notion of “Seat” or “Center.” Could the City of Kings be approached from “within,” through the eyes of its Bulgarian inhabitants? Did the Bulgarian colony in Tsarigrad manage to create an alternative narrative, establishing the city as a concrete, emotive space, positively involved in the identity-building discourses? Regrettably, the spatial experience of the Bulgarians living in Tsarigrad was immediately translated into “national” terms. We can notice a “leap” from the spatial practices of everyday life to the plane of “big history.” The memories of the Tsarigrad Bulgarians (at least the published ones) perceived the city space only insofar as a given location was related to the ecclesiastical struggle for independence or to other political issues. Within the framework of political discourses, the ex-territoriality of Tsarigrad was lost. In their memoirs, Stambolski and Balabanov, for example, approached the past from the position of public figures and their identity as “true Bulgarians,” solidified over the years, commanded the selection and narrativization of the remembrances of the things past. (Stambolski left interesting remarks on the nonpolitical aspects of everyday life in the Ottoman Empire, but they take the form of “endnotes” accompanying the “master narrative” of his public activities). The memoirs reveal a preexisting “knowledge” of what is important and what is not, mapping places that are predominantly connected with political activities. These places are the first Bulgarian church (built in 1849) and the Metoch, both in the Phanar, the Exarchate residence at Orta-keui, the Balkapan, a huge building with merchant stores and offices where the most concentrated Bulgarian population lived, and the Hambar, where the abadzhii (homespun tailors) worked. There was no distinct “Bulgarian” quarter in Tsarigrad, so it could be said that the spatially scattered presence of the Bulgarians, combined with the discontinuous character of their life-style (the majority of them did not consider Tsarigrad their permanent place of residence) were the main factors that hindered the formation of a community with a relatively autonomous cultural memory. The only relatively stable micro-community consisted of rich merchants and politicians — notable figures like the Tăpchileshta brothers, Geshoglu, Krăstevich, Hadzhi Nikoli Minchoglu, Balabanov (son-in-law of Geshoglu), Stambolski, and others. Most of them had their summer residences on the Isle of Halki, or the “Island of the Muses,” as Balabanov called it in his memoir about the upper-bourgeois lifestyle of the Halki colony. We meet dignified gentlemen and maidens of noble descent whose piano playing is constantly interrupted by debates over the “Church Question.” Balabanov and his circle were conservative in their political outlook. Their political and cultural filiations were based on the idea of the unity of the Orthodox world and of the Slavic nations. Most of them kept good relations with the Greek population in Tsarigrad and the idea of a total break between the two churches was not regarded too favorably by them or by their Greekborn wives. Having accumulated a lot of economical and social capital, they were not very concerned with its conversion into a symbolical capital, regarding with contempt the “demagogues” that promoted various cultural and political projects. The Conservative Party, formed after 1878 in the Bulgarian Principality and East Rumelia, included people with similar views, sometimes closely connected with the Tsarigrad circle (Grigor Nachovich was an example), but in the 1880s this party was practically swept off the political scene by the Liberals of Petko Karavelov, Petko

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Slaveikov, and Stambolov. The zeal with which Lyuben Karavelov and Khristo Botev reviled the wealthy Tsarigrad Bulgarians (Karavelov wrote an article about Marko Balabanov and his refusal to leave his home without putting on white gloves) was resumed in the 1880s by the Liberals who had on their side one of the best Bulgarian writers of the nineteenth century — Zakhari Stoianov. Thus, the Bulgarian colony in Tsarigrad failed to produce a sustainable project of its own. 6.

Coda. Tsarigrad — the City of Tricksters

The political discourse erased the heterotopic character of Tsarigrad; the struggles and filiations in the political field failed to acknowledge the “other space” of the City of Kings. The total subordination of local identities to the national one, which accompanied the subordination of different places to the homogeneous territory of the imaginary “Homeland,” proved inauspicious to Tsarigrad. The reformist, liberal, and Turkophile project centered around Tsarigrad failed for other reasons. There was another Tsarigrad, however, not that of Phanar, the Sublime Porte and Orta-keui, but that of labyrinthine lanes, secret entrances, and underground hiding places. That city has been used as setting for adventure narratives like those in the popular novel Mysteries of Constantinople by Clavdius Monten (more probably by Chistophoros Samartsidis), translated by Petko Slaveikov in 1869, or Svetoslav Milarov’s Spomeni ot Tsarigradskite tămnitsi (Memoirs from the Tsarigrad Prisons; 1881). Tsarigrad features in these fictional works as a place symbolizing mobility, in the sense of sudden changes and unpredictable switches between success and failure, freedom and imprisonment, love and death. In contrast to the pastoral-patriarchal images of the “Homeland” in the literature of that period, this textual Tsarigrad could be called the “City of Tricksters.” There were two attitudes toward this “City of Tricksters.” The moralistic stance scorned Tsarigrad, and the whole set of images and values connected with it, regarding them as a deviation from common sense and reason. There was another “romantic” position, however, which sought the extraordinary and sublime as an alternative to daily routine. The heroes of Milarov’s book (which is called a “memoir” but consists mainly of adventure novellas) are driven by passions, exceeding the framework of everyday life. This ambiguous position, mixing moral disgust and aesthetic fascination, would mark the Bulgarian attitude to urban life for decades. Tsarigrad was the first “real” city to which these representational strategies were applied. It should be noted that in Bulgarian literature the tricksters inhabiting Tsarigrad are usually those that received the “wrong” education. The theme of “misunderstood civilization” had an interesting offshoot dealing with those young people who educated themselves in a way that made them “inadequate” for Bulgarian conditions. “Inadequate” here meant not fitting the agrarian mode of life and its pastoral fictional representation. An exemplary application of this plot can be found in Karavelov’s piece, “Otivat pateta, a se vrăshtat kato găski” (They Leave as Ducklings, but Return as Geese). The main protagonist, a father who complains about the “educated ones,” including his sons, tells us why he expelled his offsprings after they had proven totally inadequate and disrespectful:

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[T]hen my flower-of-a son went to Tsarigrad to saunter around the streets and castrate dogs […] As for the younger one, he wasted some two hundred thousand grosha and went to Tsarigrad, too, to write some books. Be damned with their books and their Europe, hell fall on their heads! (Karavelov, Săbrani săchineniya 5 [1966]: 335)

“To castrate dogs” is not just a figure of speech, but an idiom still used in some Bulgarian villages, meaning “to do nothing, to indulge in idleness.” Quite possibly this idiom originates from the times when the reformist Ottoman government was trying to get rid of the Tsarigrad dogs — a theme that inspired one of Botev’s most caustic anti-Turkish articles. Not the history of the idiom, but the history of the equation between “castrating dogs” (i.e., doing nothing) and “writing books” is important here. This is the story of the cultural appropriation of Bulgaria’s modernization. The nineteenth century was the century of progress, during which Bulgaria’s young national was obsessed with the idea of change. At the same time, however, progress almost always turned out to be “wrong,’ ‘misunderstood,” “false,” etc. This paradox can be explained with the fact that the public discourses of the late Revival period tried to reconcile progress (i.e., the changes) with the habitus (i.e., constancy). The discursive treatment of Tsarigrad was an important part of that story.

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Paradoxical Renaissance Abroad: Ukrainian Émigré Literature, 1945–1950 George G. Grabowicz The history of Ukrainian émigré literature has only been partially charted and there is still no final consensus as to when it began (see Sherekh, “Ukrains’ka emihraciina literatura” and “MUR i ia v MURi”; Grabowicz; Pavlychko). To date it to the period immediately following the Revolution and the civil war in Ukraine (1917–20) is problematic, since many writers fleeing from what had become Soviet Ukraine settled in Galicia, in western Ukraine, which — while under Poland — was hardly a foreign land. Even those settling in Poland proper, or in Czechoslovakia (mainly in Prague), maintained close contacts with their compatriots in Galicia, and were hardly émigrés in the sense we are speaking of here. There is no doubt, however, that the DP (displaced person) phase of émigré literature — roughly the latter half of the 1940s — is a special and distinct period (see also vol 1: 161–62 of our History). Whether one accepts it as the first true phase of Ukrainian émigré literature, or as a continuation of a process begun earlier, it surely constitutes a watershed in twentieth-century non-Soviet Ukrainian literary culture. Its intrinsic interest is augmented by its unique ability to serve as a vantage point for surveying the preceding and following half-centuries. Given the scarcity of narrative histories on it, there is paradoxically a superabundance of sources and commentaries with the DP period: the émigré writers had a heightened sense of

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mission to bear witness to calamitous and traumatic events and an intense literary self-consciousness. Their accounts — most often simply eyewitness chronicles, end-of-year reviews, and polemics — have, to this day, constituted the historiography of this literature. The first to speak have remained the authorities, and seem to have preempted revision or, indeed, clear vision. Their biases, limitations, and partisan loyalties continued to provide the conceptual matrix for later, purportedly more historical accounts (see Sherekh, “Ukrains’ka emihraciina literatura”; Kostyuk; Boshyk and Balan). At the end of World War II, millions of refugees or DPs from areas that had been the Soviet Union or were now occupied by Soviet forces found themselves in Allied occupied Germany and Austria. For a number of years the vast majority of them lived in DP camps set up and run by the occupying powers. A great number soon emigrated to other western European countries (primarily Great Britain and Belgium), to the U.S., Canada, and Australia; many, however, ended up staying in Germany. A smaller, but still sizeable number, the unlucky ones, were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union in 1945–46, when the Allies cooperated with the Soviets in these matters. For Ukrainians, more perhaps than for any other group from Eastern Europe, this period also marked an intense literary renascence. In the short span of five or six years, the three most intense years being 1946–48, an impressive quantity of literary and related critical, scholarly, and journalistic activity came about. Over 1,200 books and pamphlets were published in various fields, from art to religion and youth culture. Some 250 of these were publications of original poetry, prose, and drama; to these one must add dozens of reprints, translations, works of criticism, and children’s literature. Scores of magazines, journals, and newspapers appeared, with every camp and organization having at least one and often more. Some were exclusively devoted to literature; many others dealt extensively with literary matters (see Kravtsiv; Kostiuk; Boshyk and Balan). The life span of all but a handful of these periodicals was very short: they appeared and disappeared like mushrooms after rain. The monthly journal Zahrava (Sunset), published by the Literary Section of the Union of Ukrainian Writers in Augsburg, had only four issues, all in 1946. Vezhi (Towers), a cultural monthly devoted almost exclusively to literature and published in Munich, appeared in only two issues (1947 and 1948). The Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk or LNV (Literary-Scholarly Herald; 1948–49) from Regensburg claimed to revive the traditions of both the longest running and most authoritative Ukrainian literary journal of that title (published in Kyiv and Lviv, 1898–19 and 1922–33) and the militantly right-wing and nationalist Visnyk (1933–39) of Dmytro Dontsov. The new LNV continued the legacy of the latter only, the major change being that the general editorial line shifted from the openly pro-fascist stance of Dontsov’s prototype to merely authoritarian prescriptions for Ukrainian society and literature. It also managed to bring out only two issues, as did the lavishly illustrated, well-written, and carefully edited Ukraiinskii almanakh (Ukrainian Almanac), published in Munich in 1947. Some major and very interesting periodicals managed only one issue. Such was the case with the Stuttgart “almanac” MUR (1946) that, along with the collected papers (Zbirnyky) of MUR, was the official house organ of the Mystetskyi Ukrainskyi Rukh (Ukrainian Artistic Movement), the most influential literary organization of the time. In Ukrainian mur means “wall,” “boundary,” and “foundation,” and all three meanings played a role in the group’s thinking and the polemics surrounding it. The single most exciting periodical of all, the avant-garde literary quarterly Khors, also appeared in only one issue in Regens-

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burg (1946). Even the most well-established literary journals, such as Arka in Munich (1947–49) and Orlyk in Berchtesgaden (1946–48) lasted only two to three years. The brevity of these publication efforts should not suggest that they were all straw fires, although a pattern of quick enthusiasm and quick disillusionment can certainly be discerned. Nor should we take as a single explanation the obvious fact that by 1947–48 further emigration west — primarily to the United States and Canada — had grown from a trickle to a surge, removing ultimately the majority of writers and readers to another hemisphere. Thus, when the right-wing ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov, published in the September 1947 issue of Orlyk an open letter attacking MUR and its conception of Ukrainian literature, he was already writing from Canada. When Arka published in its January 1948 issue Sviatoslav Hordynsky’s “Eleven Days on the Open Ocean,” the author of these diary entries was already a newly arrived immigrant in the United States. The short-lived existence of these journals points to something more fundamental than the effects of mass migration and the general transitoriness of DP existence: it illustrates the remarkable extent to which emigration literature is bound to and defined by its social and cultural roots, and its audience. The tightness of these bonds, the reciprocity and resonance between the values of the group and those of its writers can vary greatly. In the case of twentieth-century Ukrainian émigré literature, these bonds were often quite loose; but in the DP years, they were strong and close, so that when the audience began to disappear this type of literature did too. The writing of the DP period was defined not only by the intense reciprocity between writer and reader, but also by shared experiences. After the ordeal of World War II scores of Ukrainian writers and thousands of readers found themselves in the West, in a situation of political freedom and relative security (see Kravtsiv; Boychuk and Rubchak). Without discounting the various privations of DP life, the general anxiety about the future, the fear of forceful repatriation to the Soviet Union, and the often-violent internal “political” or sectarian conflicts, the DP camps were a welcome relief and a first step in the direction of normalcy. In the literary realm, this was signaled by virtually unimpeded access to publishing. The result was an all too obvious absence of quality control — a small price to pay for variety and effervescence. For this was a new and heady freedom not only for refugees from Soviet Ukraine, but also for those coming from Galicia, for whom life under Polish rule had been not entirely repressive, but not entirely free either. The German occupation, of course, had also been a period of repression and restriction — although during that period some writers proscribed in the Soviet Union were republished by the Ukrainian Publishing House in Lviv and Cracow, and some literary activities (particularly anti-Soviet publications) were tolerated. The very size of the DP population contributed to making its literary life a qualitatively new phenomenon. This afforded not only a large and concentrated readership (the total number of Ukrainian displaced persons has been estimated at over 200,000; see Markus), but also a broad range of genres and literary activities, even if some of this breadth proved to be illusory, most clearly in literary criticism and “theory.” Also contributing to the vitality of this literary life was the distribution of writers and their audience: in the microcosm of the DP camps, where all the regions of Ukraine were represented, the long-hoped-for goal of the ingathering of Ukrainian lands East and West, was briefly (if only symbolically) achieved. Finally, the economy of this life conditioned the literary climate. Thanks to international (largely American-funded) relief efforts,

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the basic needs of the refugees were adequately provided for: with no obligation to work for a living, there was ample time for literary pursuits. However important these historical and social parameters, the spiritual and psychological determinants were probably more significant. The most central by far was that set of feelings — troublesome and partially repressed or disguised — that is generally called the survivor complex. The horrors of the recent past, the unavoidable sense of guilt for having survived and fled to safety while so many stayed behind or perished, with the resultant need — not so much intellectual or even moral, as profoundly personal — to bear witness, to tell the world what had happened, dominated the imagination of the émigrés. There were various modalities for articulating this need. At one end were the consciously moralizing and “historiosophic” meditations on the apocalyptic past and uncertain future. A similar evocation of the cataclysm just experienced and the invocation of divine or transcendent retribution can be found in otherwise very disparate poets and works: in the long epic poem Popil imperii (Ashes of Empires; 1946) of the first generation neo-classicist Iurii Klen; in the poem “Povstannia mertvykh” (The Resurrection of the Dead; 1944) of the second-generation neo-classicist Mykhailo Orest; in “Prokliattia imperatorovi krainy Soniachnoho Skhodu” (A Curse for the Emperor of the Country of the Rising Sun; 1945) of the neo-symbolist Vasyl’ Barka; and in “Huliai-pole” (1944; see Z kamery smertnykiv) of the expressionist Ivan Bahrianyi. The various homages to and remembrances of fellow writers who had recently fallen victim to either Nazi or Stalinist terror were a more focused and effective literary expression of these same feelings. The memory of those who died at the hands of the Nazis — especially the poets Oleh Ol’zhych and Olena Teliha (see our History, 1: 147, 161) — was particularly vivid in the minds of their contemporaries. The cult of these writers, expressed in numerous articles, pamphlets, and convocations, especially on the anniversary of their deaths, was magnified by the fact that both were members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which de facto canonized them as secular saints of the movement. The more numerous victims of Stalinist terror were not forgotten either. In both cases, the most valuable and lasting products of this threnodic mode were editions of some of their works. This fusion of scholarship and commemoration became a major genre in Ukrainian émigré literature and in some instances (such as the full edition of the works of Mykola Khvyl’ovyi) contributed significantly to documenting Ukrainian literary history. The theme of martyrology was most directly expressed in works dealing with first-hand experiences of concentration camps, prisons, forced labor, and the rest of the gamut of totalitarian oppression (see also vol. 1: 160–61 of this History). Most were unadorned memoirs, their testimony all the more powerful for their formal simplicity, as in the case of O. Dans’kyi’s Khochu zhyty! (I Want to Live; 1946) subtitled “Pictures of German Concentration Camps”; Oleksa Stepovyi’s Iasyr (Captivity; 1947), a collection of letters, notes, and even versified accounts of various Ukrainians taken to Germany as forced laborers; Volodymyr Martynets’s Bratz; and Vasyl Koval’s My–Ukraintsi (We Are Ukrainians; 1948). Some memoirs, like Mykhailo Bazhans’ky’s Mozaika kvadriv viaznychykh (A Mosaic of Prison Quadrangles; 1946), attempted a more belletristic approach, even while keeping the historical and memoiristic core intact. A few writers, most notably Bahrianyi in his Sad Hetsymans’kyi (The Garden of Gethsemane; 1950), sought not only to turn autobiography into fiction, but also to write an inspired form of “national” literature, wherein

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the personal ordeal would programmatically recapitulate the collective one, and individual survival prophesy a common salvation. This correspondence between the personal and the national constitutes a fundamental, but only partially conscious structure in the poetics of the period. Clearly, not all the writers felt called upon to write of or for the whole nation, but the autobiographic principle received a special thematic validation. Whether in the lightweight lyrical effusions of Mykhailo Sytnyk and Leonid Poltava or in the more substantial epic efforts of Todos’ Os’machka’s autobiographical Poet (The Poet; 1947) and Iurii Klen’s Ashes of Empires, whether in the roman fleuve of Dokiya Humenna (Dity chumats’koho shlyakhu, The Children of the Milky Way; 1948–1951) or in the short experimental prose pieces of Zinovii Berezhan, collected and published only in the late 1970s, the process of depicting and deliberating on personal experience became more widespread than in any previous period of Ukrainian literature. In effect, this personal-reflective theme and mode assumed unprecedented legitimacy. In short, in the implicit poetics of this period the genre whose principles and parameters sets the tone for the literary system as a whole, and which projects the period’s search for “organicity,” is the memoir with its conjunction of personal and collective history. And yet, a most curious reversal occurs here: for the very drive to bear witness to the age and all its suffering, a drive which underlies the group’s sense of self, is also inextricably linked with an explicit poetics or programmatic value that basically denies this genre or modality. This programmatic value was the notion of a “Great Literature,” more specifically the need to forge one in the face of the historical threat confronting the Ukrainian nation. The goal embodied a profound paradox. While animated by, and intellectually crowning, the multiple and often diffuse sense of mission that these émigrés created for themselves, the only function this goal could ever have — apart from simply existing as an unattainable ideal — was to dam up the wellsprings of creativity precisely by delegitimizing the personal and canonizing the national. In terms of its literary activity, the period 1945–50 is also a continuation of the war years in that certain crucial conditions remained prominent: the broad and historically unprecedented contacts of Western Ukrainian authors with those Soviet Ukrainian writers who fled to the West; the intense scrutiny and exposure of Stalinist devastation in general and in literature in particular; the publishing of previously suppressed Soviet writers like Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and Mykola Kulish, and of accounts of Stalinist prisons and concentration camps. All of this constituted a generic continuum between 1941–45 and 1945–50. The continuity was ensured also by the fact that various writers who later became quite prominent in the DP period — Klen, Bahrianyi, Kravtsiv, Hordynsky, Jevhen Malaniuk, and Oksana Liaturyn’ska — did succeed in publishing their work under the German occupation. Most generally, the sense of personal uncertainty and upheaval, of the transitory nature of literary enterprises and institutions, remained constant throughout the decade of the forties and differed markedly from the stabilization — for good or bad — of the fifties and beyond. The continuities between the period 1945–50 and the years following are even more striking. While some prominent writers, such as Klen, Leonid Mosendz, and Katria Hrynevycheva, and some lesser ones did die during the period 1945–1950, the vast majority lived and wrote well into the next two decades, and in varying degrees their work continued to turn to the themes and concerns first raised in the DP setting. Just as significant are the examples of continuity in institutions, the most programmatic of which was the decision of the Ukrainian Writers’ Association in Exile,

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“Slovo,” formed in New York in the early 1950s, to cast itself as the heir of MUR, taking advantage of the fact that the two organizations shared some of their key members. More important, perhaps, is the continuity of various publications, especially journals. The longest continuous émigré journal, the monthly Novi Dni (New Days), published in Toronto, began its North-American incarnation in February 1950, with an editorial linking it to the recent DP past. The most substantial Ukrainian émigré journal of the second half of the twentieth century, Suchasnist’ (Contemporary Times) — which had its editorial offices in New York but was formally published in Munich until its translocation to independent Ukraine in 1991 — also traced its lineage back to the DP period. Examples of this type of continuity can be multiplied at will. But the real issue, of course, was not the individuals as such, or even the actual institutions, organizations, or periodicals. The real heart of the matter was the literary climate — its emotional and intellectual parameters, its themes, concerns, and values. And here the continuity appears to be absolutely seamless. The examples of writers newly arrived in North America, writing for DP publications, are only the tip of the iceberg. It seemed at times that the entire literary marketplace had been relocated to the New World. Articles written at the height of the DP period, such as Ulas Samchuk’s “ideological report” delivered at the Third General Congress of MUR (April 1948), or Iurii Sherekh’s overview of DP literature for 1947, were published a few years later in Novi dni (see Sherekh, “Roku Bozhoho 1947”). There and in various other North American publications, one finds reviews of émigré books printed in Germany. The same themes and topics continued to exercise the literary community. In fact the sense that there was one literary community that stretched from the camps in Germany and Austria to North and South America and even to Australia was strongly reinforced by ongoing polemics. Positions were attacked and opponents vilified with a fervor that belied distance in time and space. In some instances the continuation of these DP conflicts was merely a function of personal rancor; in other cases, polemical exchanges continued because ideological and “political” positions were for all purposes cast in concrete. However, while this type of “dialogue” died down in the course of the next fifteen years as the dispersed émigrés became atomized — due not so much to their settling in different countries but to political sectarianisms — some intrinsically literary phenomena, first engendered on a substantial scale in the DP setting, did continue. Their proportion in the overall Ukrainian literature actually increased. Such was the case with political polemic and irrationalist, hyper-patriotic historiography. In spite of these threads of continuity, there is little doubt that, as a literary period, the DP years are quite distinct from what preceded and what followed them. The basis for this distinctness is not to be found in the circumstances discussed earlier (political freedom, the imperative to bear witness, and so on), but in two phenomena that are, indeed, unique to this period. These are the social-cum-organizational setting and the overarching notion of a “Great Literature.” The two were intertwined and they fed off each other, which involved not only the preeminent literary organization, MUR, and the drive to create large, all-encompassing cultural entities, but also the concrete societal setting that made them possible. In effect, even though many never joined MUR or quickly left it, later denouncing its premises, the DP period of Ukrainian émigré literature can rightly be called the MUR period — not only because that organization dominated the period, but also because the thinking and the values from which it sprang did. In a word, this was a period of theorizing (and fantasizing) about a “Great Literature.” Like MUR itself, this generally acknowl-

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edged goal and battle cry of MUR was the unique product of the social and cultural totality of the period. The great bulk of commentary on “Velyka literatura” (A Great Literature) consisted of injunctions and exhortations, pious or grandiose desiderata, and polemics. The occasional, more strictly theoretical contributions, like Iurii Sherekh’s idea of an “organic national” style, were elaborated mostly after the fact. In spite of that, the discussions around this term and its attendant issues cast an extremely interesting light on mid-twentieth century Ukrainian literature as a whole, and on Ukrainian intellectual history. In terms of its illumination of the literary process, if not in terms of its political and historical resonance, this debate is of the same order of importance as the “Literary Discussion” in the latter half of the 1920s, which posed the question whether Ukrainian literature in Soviet Ukraine should choose its own path or develop in the shadow of Russian literature (for a broader discussion of the Russian-Ukrainian Literary Relations, see Grabowicz’s article “Subversion and Self-Assertion” in vol. 1: 401–8 of our History). Since modern Ukrainian literary history has known few broad-ranging historiosophic debates on the general direction and the goals of Ukrainian literature (the very tentative debate about Modernism, for example, was basically sidetracked by the populist and civic-duty arguments of such traditional-minded personalities as Ivan Franko and Serhii Jefremov), this discussion assumed an even greater importance. In one sense, it constituted the culminating phase of the century-old debate about narodnytstvo, the alleged populist essence of Ukrainian literature, destined to be a literature “of and for the people.” The watchword of “A Great Literature” was articulated, with solemn injunction, in the program presented at the first MUR congress held on December 21–22, 1945 in Aschaffenburg, in the American zone of occupied Germany: The times have set and continue to set before Ukrainian art the tasks that it now faces: to serve the nation in highly artistic form and in so doing to gain a voice and authority in world art. Rejecting an art that is weak and in its ideas alien to the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian artists unite so that in comradely collaboration they may strive for the heights of true and serious art. This union of Ukrainian artists in the emigration is open to all practitioners of letters, of the brush, and the stage who inscribe on their banner the watchword of an art that strives for perfection, that is mature in ideas and form, and eternally searching. […] Not the poster, the memorandum, or the exhortation, but great art — full, manly, all encompassing — will be our irrevocable mandate for the right to exist on the land of our ancestors as an eternal, creative, and historically conditioned necessity. (MUR. Almanakh 1 [1946]: 123–25)

The fundamental premises are clear: Ukrainian artists, specifically writers, have a moral duty to their nation, an obligation to subordinate all their efforts to the overarching national cause of Ukrainian independence. Moreover, though the program emphasized artistic excellence and openness to different styles and ideas, denying the right of any political party to enforce its line, there is little doubt that the search for artistic excellence was subordinate to the national task. There was, to be sure, a tension between the stated end and the means of achieving it: the commitment to artistic excellence was made forcefully (“We will be merciless towards those who by cheap tricks would try to gain the label of artists”). But the very fact that a final imperative of art was at all postulated (let alone explicitly stated as transcendent to and determining the artistic means), placed the whole program, and the theory of literature that stood behind it, uncomfortably close

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to the literary theory of the state, of the evil empire that was its declared mortal enemy. In effect, in its stated openness regarding form and style, in its theoretical validation of a teleology of literature, its belief in a guiding principle and a managing approach to literature, this theory was remarkably close to Socialist Realism; it functioned as a distorted (or humanistically ameliorated) version of it. The parallel phenomenon of a “National Realism” emerged in the DP period, and as a “theory” — if not as an easily defined praxis — it continued to flourish in the emigration. Its roots are clearly traceable to the Visnyk writings and doctrines of the interwar years — augmented by the deeply ingrained habits of thought of various authors from Soviet Ukraine. The spokespersons of MUR certainly did not consciously see themselves as proclaiming or demanding adherence to a “National Realism.” In fact, MUR was soon violently attacked precisely for not doing so. The issue is rather that in its deep and, in all probability, quite unrecognized structures, the program of MUR paralleled to some degree the abhorred Socialist Realism. On the functional level, the deep contradictions in the program — its espousal of a goal-oriented literature, one that derives its essential raison d’être from the specific extra-literary goal of the political and cultural independence of the fatherland, against the full artistic freedom and the search for artistic excellence — became the fatal flaw that made the collapse of MUR inevitable. Another way of describing the imminent tension in the MUR program is to see the abovecited expression of faith and hope as a document consciously (and in retrospect, desperately) mediating between two irreconcilable polarities. One of these — the militant doctrine that the future of Ukrainian émigré literature lies in the total commitment to the political struggle — is fully conveyed in Ivan Bahrianyi’s “Dumky pro literature” (Thoughts on Literature; 1946), which was included as a programmatic article in the first MUR collection (Zbirnyk), though it was apparently not read at the MUR congress. Bahrianyi’s reductive thoughts on what literature can or should be are matched by the fervent tone and demagogic style of his argument: literature that is not a “weapon” or a “path of struggle” is either poison in the body politic, or the aberration of “art for art’s sake,” a form of desertion. In short, if Ukrainian literature is to be great, it must not only be militant, but entirely subordinate to the overall strategy of the (incipient cold) war effort. The point is clear: at least at this initial juncture, MUR felt obligated to reflect this radically political and functionalist, not to say anti-humanistic, version of a Ukrainian literary program. Fortunately, the opposed — enlightened and intrinsically more literary (and literate) — views of writers like Ihor Kostets’ky and Iurii Kosach would soon be expressed as well. At its most sweeping (in the articles of Bahrianyi and Samchuk), Ukrainian literature was simply defined as an ideological and nation-building instrument. This was, for example, the argument put forth by Volodymyr Derzhavyn’s paper, “Natsionalna literatura iak mystetstvo” (National Literature as Art; 1947), presented at the Conference of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences (UVAN) in Mittenwald, June 22–23, 1947. According to this norm, a work is not part of Ukranian literature just because it is written in Ukrainian: it must also form (and presumably conform with) the national consciousness. A militant and aggressive version of this argument, one that specifically ties the notion of “Great Literature” to the national mission, is found in the pronouncements of the resurrected Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk and of various political commissars for literature. The argument is most striking, however, when asserted by writers speaking as writers, professing their artistic faith, rather than by critics (or writers speaking as critics, such as Bahrianyi and Samchuk) and by ideological watch-dogs. We hear it from various ends of the literary spectrum,

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from traditional realists like Vasyl Chaplenko but also from the erudite and highly esteemed “neoclassicist” Iurii Klen, whose introduction to Ashes of Empires uses virtually the same argument to explain his choice of the epic mode. The intellectual and political origins of the concept of “mission” are manifold. Two possible antecedents, however, should be noted. One, obviously, is the Soviet model — with its doctrine of literature as the handmaiden of political progress, and the quasi-religious sense of proselytizing, of the duty of believers to enlighten and save the world. The other, arguably more germane, is that of Polish messianic thinking, whose premises and especially its rhetoric, left a deep imprint on Galician Ukrainians, especially since in some of its aspects it was directed against their very political existence. Rhetoric about a historic mission (and rhetoric it could only be — there was hardly any means for implementing this notion) became part of the general nationalist credo, and it influenced not just the thinking of the interwar period but also of the war years and, as we have seen, of the immediate postwar period as well. Arguments like those of Iuliian Bachyns’kyi in Bol’shevytska revoliutsia i Ukraintsi, which denounced this rhetoric two decades earlier as megalomania borrowed from Polish nationalism, fell on deaf ears. The “times demanded” (as the formula used by ideologues and non-ideologues alike would have it) “faith, will, and heroism,” not reasoned analysis and sober assessments of means and ends. While the sense of a sublime, national mission clearly animated much of the rhetoric and thinking of this period, establishing the general ambience or horizon of velyka literatura, we have to call attention to one particular aspect: the extraordinary drive to create organizations. As with the periodicals already noted, groups and associations sprang up seemingly everywhere, but dissolved just as quickly. Quantity, however, is not the issue here, but rather the drive to create overarching “superorganizations,” presumably to guide and manage the whole sociocultural process. There were superorganizations for political activity, for student affairs, for art, for literature, and for scholarship. Some of these all-encompassing organizations were never fully realized: a congress of the umbrella organizations for literature (MUR), for the performing arts (OMUS), for painting (USOM), and for music (OUM) was held, but the resulting United Arts (Obiednani Mystetstva) never really got off the ground, even after electing a president (Samchuk) and drawing up a constitution. Similarly, an all-encompassing organization for scholars, “Spilka ukrainskykh naukovykh robitnykiv,” managed only a constitutional convention. But the intent to form these entities is itself revealing. Even if the Union of Ukrainian Scholars and Researchers was never activated, the fact that a congress was held and that its resolutions called for the establishment of an umbrella organization for all scholars and researchers, having one, unified scholarly publishing house, speaks volumes for the mind-set of the period. In short, one can recognize again the residue of the Soviet experience, and that system’s insatiable appetite for centralized control. The etiology of this mind-set is, however, far less interesting than the function it ultimately performed. Taking MUR as a paradigm, such an organization constituted a revolutionary attempt to supplant an organic and necessarily slow process with an act of will, a quasi-political fait accompli. Whereas literature, as a body of work, a set of attitudes and values, and modes of discourse, must develop gradually, a literary organization can spring up virtually overnight. While allowances must be made for the difficult circumstances under which it operated, one cannot help noticing that, as an organization, MUR seems to have been primarily

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concerned with its large “national role,” its symbolic and “political” functions (congresses, elections, position papers, and resolutions — the pattern is depressingly familiar for émigré organizations) rather than with grassroots efforts to actually establish a literary market-place. Iurii Sherekh (who as founding member and chief spokesperson for the organization was certainly competent to judge) ascribed in “Ukrains’ka emihraciina literatura” MUR’s failing to its inability to secure independent means for publication or to set up a genuine organizational network. However, this was not simply a failing in performance. That an organization, which was supposed to nurture literature and assure its high standards, was unable to provide for these functions suggests that its very purpose was different from what it claimed to be. The argument can be made that the basic “flaw” of the organization — its lack of actual (as opposed to symbolic) organizational features, its inability to find publishing resources, and so on — was not the reason for its decline, but simply its defining feature. The difference between the stated and the actual goals and priorities is more than apparent. In summary, the issue was not how well the literary process was managed — the evidence shows that it was not managed well at all, and that this was all to the good — but the very fact that managing and controlling the literary process was enthusiastically accepted by both the literary establishment and most of the rank and file. The proximity of this understanding of literature to the Soviet and other totalitarian models is as evident as it is deplorable. Two further aspects must be noted here. The first is Europeanism, the sense that (Western) Europe had much to offer in experience as well as cultural and literary models, and that Ukrainian literature and culture should actively strive to absorb these. MUR clearly associated the goal of “A Great Literature” with an orientation towards the West. As a concern with contemporary and avant-garde artistic developments, Europeanism was evident in the work of individual writers (Kosach and Kostets’kyi) and various collective efforts, most notably the journal Khors. As an intellectual and theoretical subset of the imperative of “A Great Literature,” Europeanism was not without its complications. In effect, while the striving for “A Great Literature” was a platform accepted virtually by all, Europeanism was a plank in that platform that many took issue with. One reason for opposition was ideological. If Europeanism was to be understood (as it largely was at the time) as the orientation toward the Western intellectual and artistic Avantgarde, it was certainly not favored by the various brands of militant nationalism. For Dontsov’s Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, as well as for the more moderate nationalist Oleh Zhdanovych or for the leader of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP), Ivan Bahrianyi, Surrealism, Existentialism, Joyce, Kafka, and Sartre were basically incomprehensible and dangerous. In the case of Dontsov and the right-wing nationalists, this hostile stance was rooted in their contempt, well documented already in the interwar period, for Western democracy. Now they expressed this attitude more circumspectly. In their first issue, the editors of the new Literaturnonaukovyi vistnyk (LVN) tied the meaning of Great Literature to its national character, which was to be contrasted with Europe: In artistic creativity the path to the universal passes through the national. None of the truly great writers of the world set for themselves the prior goal of creating a great literature for the world as a whole: every single great work is, first of all, intended for that environment from which the writer took at least the bases of his characters, his local color, and all that which inspires him to write.

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The writer creates, above all, for himself, for his milieu, for his nation and its feelings, its goals, its ideas and aspirations. And if such a work is written with talent, with love for those about whom it is written, it is transformed into Great Literature and becomes a work not only for the nation, or for any one people, but for the entire world. (LNV 1[1948]: 1)

It is somewhat ironic that the questioning of Europe was present both in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk and in the writings of Iurii Sherekh, the leading critic of this period, one who in all other respects could be relied on to take positions diametrically opposed to those of this journal. Sherekh’s position, however, was considerably more reasoned and sophisticated. The real irony lies not so much in the superficial typological similarity of the two stances as in the fact that Sherekh — the theoretician and main spokesperson for MUR — was more than any one else in this group acquainted with and attuned to Western values, to “Europe.” It is true that in one of his earlier articles, “Styli suchasnoi ukrains’koi literatury na emihracii” (Styles of Contemporary Ukrainian Émigré Literature), Sherekh gratuitously maligned the real Europe and found positive value only in its abstract idea. While not atypical for Sherekh’s opinionated style, this essay did not really reflect the crux of the argument. The point of the discussion was Sherekh’s principled opposition to those like Volodymyr Derzhavyn, who would claim that one style — for this critic neo-classicism — constituted the only legitimate option and path to excellence for Ukrainian literature. For Sherekh, the validation of only one style and its attendant exclusive orientation toward Europe’s “classics” led to epigonism and ultimately to sterility. In the spirit of the Soviet Ukrainian literature of the 1920s, Sherekh countered this approach by postulating a “national” or “national-organic” style that was attuned to and expressed the uniquely Ukrainian experience and spirit. Harkening back to Mykola Zerov, the outstanding Ukrainian poet and critic who perished in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, and his injunction to return to the sources of western civilization — ad fontes — Sherekh argued that the “watchword for today should be: to the sources of Ukrainian national culture.” He continued: [L]et us not think about the world and about representing Ukraine when we create. Let us try to express ourselves, our truth, more deeply, more fully, more essentially. Let us think more deeply, let us breathe more broadly, let us reflect and feel with the categories of the Ukrainian empire of spirit and not with those of a Little Russian or Little Polish province: let us think through our concepts and let us find for them the best form of expression. And when we attain this, when we create a great Ukrainian literature, then “by this very fact” we will win for ourselves “a voice and an authority in world art.” Our literature that wants to be great can only be a great Ukrainian literature — otherwise it will not be great. Let us ponder this. […] Does this mean that we do not need to know other literatures and other languages, that we have to give up enlightening foreigners about our literature? No, a thousand times no. We do not preach obscurantism or self-isolation. The person who does not know world literature does not have the right to write — for he or she will discover what has long ago been discovered, he or she will be a spreader of provincialism, and a general laughing-stock. […] A national style […] cannot be created if one has not experienced and absorbed the achievements of world literature. It is a shame to have to repeat these simple ABC’s. (“Styli” 4)

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For all their moderation, these lines raise as many questions as they provide answers. The notion of a “national” or a “national-organic” style, further developed by Sherekh in the later article, “Etiudy pro natsionalne,” is highly problematical: the root of the problem lies in the amorphous and multi-sided idea of “style.” To the extent it exists, a unique, national character in a particular literature rests on a range of components: traditions, themes, values, modes of perception. It is a totality, not a style. It is to Sherekh’s credit that he subsequently disavowed this claim. The second, rather more important issue is the rhetorical tenor and the implicit social function of this passage and the whole article from which it is taken. As the final image of the ABC’s suggests, this paragraph illustrates the critic’s didactic role. While this teacherly role and robe would have seemed natural for many, for Sherekh it became the tunic of Nessus that led to his temporary abandonment of the role of critic (signing with his pseudonym Sherekh) and focus on his role as scholar (signing with his real name Shevelov). There were, to be sure, various other articulations of the connection between Europeanism and Great Literature, as in Kosach’s impassioned denunciation of the obscurantist and anti-humanist Vistnyk legacy and his identification of greatness in literature with openness to ideas, with pluralism and tolerance, and — above all — with “the sovereignty of the writer” (“Vilna ukrains’ka literatura” 55). In retrospect, the latter is by far the most fruitful and prescient idea raised in these debates. What deserves further examination is the yoking of the idea of a “Great Literature” to that of Europeanism. Clearly, if one looks not to the flowery rhetoric but to the underlying values and premises, the pairing is artificial. There is little doubt that the majority of those who propounded velyka literatura believed in a mission for Ukrainian literature as a whole and the various writers individually. And this is quite different from a “Europe” that was then, just as it is now, determined by cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and the predominance of the Avant-garde. Even in terms of their belief in openness of culture, pluralism, tolerance of heterodoxy, flexibility of values and secularism, the two mentalities — the émigré Ukrainian and the “European” — were rather far apart. As Sherekh and Kosach seem to be suggesting in different ways, the very fact of striving to validate velyka literatura by way of “Europe” indicates the great distance between the two. During that period, and for some time to come, the émigrés were in Europe, but not of it. If Europeanism constituted, at least formally, a program and thus a link to the future, the link to the past, to the historical roots that constituted the goal and value of “A Great Literature,” was focused above all on the figure and legacy of Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, the pre-eminent prose writer and essayist of interwar Soviet Ukraine, an avowed national communist and a writer whose defiant suicide in 1933 to protest the crimes of Stalinism immediately confirmed him as the icon of the literary revival of the 1920s. While Dontsov’s legacy of nationalism and voluntarism lingered on in the postwar period, it was already on the defensive, in part because it had been only recently and enthusiastically supportive of Fascism and National Socialism. In contrast, Khvyl’ovyi exemplified, not only for those like Sherekh, Hryhorii Kostyuk, or Iurii Lavrinenko who had come from Soviet Ukraine, but also for many other intellectuals from various regions and backgrounds, an intellectual and emotional openness, an assertiveness of will, an optimism and commitment to quality, and a disdain of provincialism that seemed far superior to the irrationalist doctrines of Dontsov. The controversy over Khvyl’ovyi was fierce even by the prevailing standards in the DP camps. For many, his only redeeming feature was his suicide; some vilified him not only as a

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communist, but also as a Chekist and a matricide (the latter identities inferred from a literal reading of his own fiction). And yet, clearly, the central stated issues of velyka literatura (“Europe” vs. provincialism, quality vs. populism, a sense of “mission” and of optimism for the future of Ukrainian literature) and the more thoughtful programmatic statements of MUR had Khvyl’ovy as their touchstone or godfather. As a figure overlaid with the secondary elaboration afforded to culture heroes, Khvyl’ovyi became for some a paradigm of the writer hounded but not vanquished by bureaucrats and gendarmes, the shaper of literary opinion living out his convictions not only in words but also in deeds. It is hardly a coincidence that Sherekh, the prime shaper of literary opinion at the time, entitled his first collection of essays, Dumky proty techiï (Thoughts against the Current; 1949), after a collection by Khvyl’ovy, and that he later orchestrated his symbolic demise in a manner similar to that of the author he admired so much. The truest sense of “A Great Literature” can only be found in what must always be the literary critic’s ultimate evidence — the texts themselves. It can thus be shown that the idea of “A Great Literature” informs the very fabric, tone, intellectual horizon, and various compositional and rhetorical devices of individual literary works. In short, velyka literatura is by no means merely the property of those talking about literature — critics, impresarios, and commissars. And while every literary work is always a nexus of various external and internal “causes,” so that singling any one out could distort the whole, there are dominant features that can be identified. One dominant feature of the velyka literatura debate was the special legitimation of some genres and the delegitimation of others. An implicit poetics took hold, conditioned in large measure by various critics’ distinctions between “great” and “small” literature, in which “large” genres like the epic and the long novel were seen as intrinsically better and aesthetically more valid than “small” genres like satire, parody, depictions of daily life (pobut) and, indeed, the lyric. The latter genres tended to be regarded as “literature for home use,” to use a discredited nineteenth-century term, for an archetypical East European kitchen, where dirty dishes and drying socks vie for space and family members gather to eat and fight. The salon — with the noble genres — is reserved for people on their best behavior and for guests, especially foreigners, who need to be impressed. An important result of this hierarchy was a distortion of voice and composition. While it is impossible to prove that the dullness of the novels of Samchuk and Humenna was an instance of this, there is little doubt that Klen purposefully chose the epic mode in Popil imperii to gain the hierarchical value in question, and that it is precisely this extrinsically and artificially imposed modality that is the very source of the work’s weakness. The poem is a monumental failure, for its intended “epic” effects invariably break down into unpersuasive, often shrill posturing as a consequence of an emotional tone and a narrative stance that have nothing in common with epos or history, though they are genuine and hence cannot be willed away. Its strongest moments are invariably personal recollections (especially of childhood), where the need to judge empires and reflect on universal history has not yet emerged. It is instructive to compare Popil imperii with Klen’s Prokliati roky (The Accursed Years; 1937) to see how much more effective the earlier and much shorter poem is in harmonizing feeling, experience, voice, and form. Its concluding dirge for Stalinism’s dead and persecuted is truly moving, and it conveys more wisdom and compassion with a greater sense of that tragic period than any self-consciously historiosophic passage in the later work. Another prevalent tendency generated by the goal of a national “Great Literature” was to overload art with a didactic message of basically unassimilated political content. Bahrianyi’s work

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in general, and his drama (or dramatic novella as he styled it) Morituri, in particular, stand as a good example of this artistic self-betrayal, or simply falseness. Precisely as in the literature written according to the recipes of Socialist Realism, here it is never enough to depict experience: the writer feels obligated to augment it with exhortation and heavy-handed symbolism. The personal experience in NKVD prisons cannot be allowed to speak for itself. The hero must become an eloquent spokesperson for the entire suffering nation and a direct descendant of Khvyl’ovyi. Marx must be one of the prisoners so that through his humiliation and terror the bankruptcy of his theory-made-flesh is revealed to everybody. The self-destructiveness of this goal of “greatness” is apparent even in innovative and sophisticated works like Kosach’s Enei i zhyttia inshykh (Aeneas and the Life of Others; 1947). The debilitating feature that this short novel shares with Klen’s poem and Bahrianyi’s drama is an intense literary self-consciousness that undermines its broader potential. This self-consciousness is perhaps the most poisoned fruit of velyka literatura. A didactic rhetoric pervaded the criticism of this period, and many writers compensated by emphasizing their own literariness. Kosach’s Enei exemplifies this defensive mechanism. The work is not only loaded with literary allusions and quotations from Shakespeare, Schiller, Baudelaire, Dante, Gogol, Cervantes, and others, but it also seems incapable of finding its own voice on the basic levels of narrative and character development, self-consciously trying on one generic mask after another: family history, “gentry novel,” adventure thriller. While ambivalence towards literary models need not be an aesthetic failing, it is so here, not only because it is so pervasive, but because it tends to paralyze both the voice and the dynamism of the novel. At its worst, the novel’s metathematics suspend it in a declarative and poeticizing fog and the props overwhelm the players. These were not all conscious positions, let alone programmatic stances, but they were obvious enough. At their worst, writers found themselves, as Ihor Kostets’kyi observed, assuming entirely false roles, like tenors straining to sing basso profundo — all because “the times demand it” (35). At best, the falseness was more subtle, when the writer, in order to satisfy some abstract norm of greatness, betrayed his artistry by gilding the lily (see Sherekh, “Pokolinia”). Underlying both the conscious and the unconscious needs and desires was a structure that provided a unified definition of the role of velyka literatura. This was the deceptively simple fact that the literary activity of this period, in all its ramifications, was to an unprecedented extent oriented towards the reader. The reader is, of course, always a factor in the literary equation, but the emphasis may vary, and during this exilic period the bond between writer and audience — the validation of the audience at the expense of the writer and his text — was inordinately strong. This makes the DP period rather exceptional in the history of Ukrainian literature. Seldom were the writers and their works more subject to the implicit demands and the explicit claims of actual readers or their various spokespersons. Ukrainian literature written under the aegis of Socialist Realism provides close parallel to this. Its readership, however, was entirely mediated by official strictures and censorship. At the same time, writers who were part of the establishment attained privileges and status never afforded to émigré writers. References to readers, a concern for their comprehension and involvement, and the more or less explicit belief that collective consensus signifies new strength, dominates the theoreticalprogrammatic articles, reviews, and polemics. Readers do not appear only as the confused, duped, or outraged objects of the author’s wiles. They are not, in other words, only construed in terms of

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extrinsic, political, or ideological considerations. They are also the undisguised addressee, which is most apparent in the didactic tone so often assumed by critics of this period. It seemed at times that all of literary criticism was reduced to the function of primers and lessons of bon ton. The flowering, one might even say hypertrophy, of criticism in the DP period also reflects a reader orientation, for the bulk of criticism understandably dealt not with formal analysis but with thematic and social moments, and with ideology. In the purely functional sense, the criticism of this period performed the natural role of talking about literature to a real audience. At the later stages of émigré literature, the critic talked only to a handful of other critics. Ultimately, the question of the readers and how to deal with them, how and what to write for them, provided the quicksand on which the notion of a “Great Literature” foundered and this phase of Ukrainian émigré writing was brought to a close. The principal saboteurs, as everyone had long suspected, were Kostets’kyi and Kosach, both founding members of MUR. Their heresy was not their apolitical stance (or even Kosach’s impassioned attack on the right-wing legacy of visnykism), nor their “Europeanism,” “left-wing” experimentation, avant-garde poetics, or purported eroticism. The heresy was simply that they denied the primacy of readers, indeed reduced them to the least important factor in their model of literary communication. Kosach did this polemically in the course of arguing for liberal, humanist values. His call “for the sovereignty of the writer” in “Vilna ukrains’ka literatura” was the heading only of one section of his paper, but was in fact its central issue. Kostets’kyi’s argument was more subtle and oblique and ultimately more seminal. He proposed to reformulate the question: “not WHAT but WHO and HOW.” The issue for him was to find one’s own individuality, and for this, in principle, there could be no ready-made formulas. The writer and the critic should both pose questions and not preach answers (“Ukrainskyi realizm XX storichchia”). Nothing could have so undercut the project of “A Great Literature,” which, by its very nature — as a program with a designated set of goals — postulated answers. And it is not really surprising that while Kostets’kyi was attacked for many, often trivial things, this heresy was never mentioned. It was never noticed by those who emphasized the didactic and ideological purpose of literature. The aesthetic program of sovereign individualism, genuine openness to new ideas and models, intuitive rejection of missions and organizational control that was present in embryo in Kostets’kyi’s oblique ruminations was given a rich articulation by the next generation of Ukrainian émigré poets, the so-called New York Group that began to flourish in the late 1950s and early 60s. Paradoxically, MUR’s most lasting achievement was to shelter such subversives, whereas that of the “Great Literature” project was to generate too quickly its own antithesis.

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Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos: The Case of Polish and Romanian Literatures Monica Spiridon, Agnieszka Gutthy, and Katarzyna Jerzak I.

The Manifold Faces of Romanian Paris (Monica Spiridon)

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the endless debates concerning national identity focused periodically on the cultural legacy of the Roman Empire and the Romance origin of the Romanian language. Membership of the national idiom in the club of Romance languages was viewed as an irrefutable proof of a Western European connection and allegiance. Eventually, for the majority of Romanians, Romance came to mean French. Modern France came to be regarded as the most dignified heir of the Roman world, not only economically and politically, but also culturally. As a consequence, France and its capital city became a Mecca for young Romanian intellectuals seeking a Western-European education. The fascination with Paris and French models, as well as the effort to transplant French culture to Bucharest and Romanian culture to Paris, took many different forms over the past two centuries. In this section, we will explore the various “Parises” that Romanians discovered and reinvented in the course of their modernization. 1.

A “Real” Paris: the 1848 Model

We will begin with the real Paris, to which Romanian intellectuals traveled on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, seeking higher education and professional training. As explained below, the early Romanian Francophilia was an elitist, anti-Russian, and political option. Paris was an elitist option insofar as only the social and economic elites could afford initiatory journeys and studies in mid-nineteenth-century Paris (Roman 76). The Romanian youth enrolled in universities, kept abreast of the political life, was regularly seen in literary salons and even built family alliances (Edgar Quinet’s second wife was Romanian). French-Romanian relations often took an unmediated, personalized, and even affectionate form. Thus, C. A. Rosetti and Ion C. Brătianu urged Edgar Quinet in a letter published by the Courrier Français: “Help France remember that we are her sons and that we have fought for her in the streets. Add to this that everything we did, we did following her example” (Anghelescu 49). The French orientation had to be essentially anti-Russian since Romania had been placed under the double authority of Turkey and Russia after the treaty of Andrianople. The control of Russia was at the time more aggressive, its power on the rise. About the same time, France experienced Marquis de Custine’s revelations about Russia, passing through an anti-Russian romanticism that opposed the religiousness and communitarian spirit of Russia. For the Romanians, France was, therefore, an alternative to the encroaching political and cultural power of Russia. On a political level, the French Revolution of 1848 was perceived in Bucharest as the starting point of a mythical process that built an imaginary France, a Jerusalem of liberty and eternal revolution. While lecturing at Collège de France, Jules Michelet chose “revolution” as the defining feature of French identity, the very name of France (Roman 76–79). Paris, the capital city of this

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mythical realm, also seemed to be “such stuff as dreams are made of.” It emerged as an atemporal icon of western culture and mentality. From all points of view, France and Paris were overrated as ideal models. Culturally savvy, the Romanian travelers of the period tried to assimilate and adjust the romantic Herderian ideas that were fashionable then in Paris, which emphasized the revival of the vernacular and of oral culture, as well as valorization of national history, local color, and the rural tradition. Later writers like Mihai Eminescu viewed this period somewhat more critically, detecting a certain naiveté in the ideological discourse of the 1848 generation that placed the radical French revolutionary rhetoric in more traditionalist contexts. 2.

The Post–1848 Model

After the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions in the Romanian Principalities, many liberal “westernizers” were forced into exile, the majority to Paris. Among the exiled were important political leaders and writers like C. A. Rosetti, Ion C. Brătianu, Vasile Alecsandri, Alecu Russo, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Cezar Bolliac, Ion Ghica, and Ion Heliade Rădulescu. The latter, whose exile lasted the longest — nine whole years — underwent a significant evolution that was revealing for the 1848 Romanian intellectuals, whose rhetoric was Messianic and who were fascinated with the Christian-socialist models offered by Felicité Robert de Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, François Marie Charles Fourier, and others (Zamfir 84–85, 110–11). There was an abundant production of Romanian literature in the French language, pioneered by the 1848 generation, especially in the epistolary genre. During his exile in Paris, Heliade Rădulescu wrote Souvenirs et impressions d’un proscrit (Recollections and Impressions of an Outcast; 1850) and Mémoires sur l’histoire de la régéneration roumaine (Memoirs concerning the History of Romanian Regeneration; 1851). Simultaneously, Alecu Russo wrote in French the first version of his prose poem, Cântarea României (Song of Romania; 1855), whose manuscript was found in Jules Michelet’s archives. It described a mythic rather than a real homeland. French language was important also in certain circles back in Bucharest, playing the role of a cultural koine (common language). After his educational journey to Paris, Alexandru Macedonski, founder of the Romanian symbolist movement, published poetic prose in Paris and poetry in Romanian and French in Bucharest. His poetic production in French was occasionally reviewed in French literary journals. In the early twentieth century, Romanian symbolist poets were quite familiar with the Parisian world of bohemia. Overall, this stimulated the modernization of poetic expression and enhanced Romanian national self-awareness. 3.

The First Half of the Twentieth Century: “Bucharest on the Seine”

There are two distinct faces of the Romanian Paris or of what we could call the “Bucharest on the Seine” in the twentieth century: an aulic (princely or courtly) face and an insurgent one. Several Romanian aristocratic families had settled on the Seine and entered mixed marriages. Among them, the princely families Brancovan-Bibesco deserve special attention. Ana-Elisabeta Brâncoveanu, married Countess de Noailles, ended up totally assimilated into French literature. A fascinating figure was also the princess Martha Bibescu (Marthe Bibesco), wife of Anne de

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Noailles’s cousin. By the end of her life she had published, both in Paris and in Bucharest, more than 30 volumes, some of them prize-winners of the French Academy. In an insightful essay, published in Paris, Mircea Eliade made some important points concerning Martha Bibescu’s cultural position, insisting on her role as a cultural mediator: Just before her death, the princess Marthe Bibesco was being perceived as the last witness of an earlier Europe. The fact of the matter was that she had been an acquaintance of the last Tsar and of all the European sovereigns; among her closest friends she could count King Ferdinand and Queen Maria of Romania, as well as Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and Father Mugnier. She frequented not only the Parisian literary salons and writers, but also politicians, military leaders, artists, scientists, and priests, from all over Europe. (Eliade, “Marthe Bibesco” 67)

As a written testimony of Marthe Bibesco’s distinguished Parisian friendships, we can mention her epistolary exchange with Paul Claudel (Éxchange …) and her well-known book Au bal avec Marcel Proust (In the Ballroom with Marcel Proust; 1928). Another family member, Antoine Bibesco, wrote a play performed in Paris, “Le Jaloux” (The Jealous Man), which Proust himself reviewed in Le Figaro. For these Romanian aristocrats, who had integrated themselves easily and without traumas into French culture, Paris was a second Bucharest: “Rien ne pourra faire de moi une exilée en France!” (Nothing could make me feel exiled in France), Martha Bibescu used to say (qtd. in Eliade, “Marthe Bibesco” 76). The continuity between the Romanian “Little Paris” (Bucharest) and the French capital-city was for them almost seamless. Eliade reports that Bibesco’s close friends saw her as another goddess Proserpine, living six month of the year above the earth and the other six underground, which meant that she usually spent half of her life in Paris and the other, mysterious half, on her estate in Romania (“Marthe Bibesco” 72). All of these princely Romanian intellectuals were bilingual and bicultural (even trilingual, as was the case of I. A. Cantacuzin who provided the first translation of Schopenhauer into French, 1880–1885), perceiving their mother culture as a derivative of their adopted one. The other, rebellious facet of the “Romanian Paris” was associated with the historical Avantgarde. Avant-garde Romanian writers saw Paris as a stage upon which they could present their programs regardless of whether they settled there or continued to commute between Paris and Bucharest. According to Marcel Cornis-Pope (97), the Romanian Avant-garde tried to engage dialogically the Western artistic scene, combating thereby a Romanian complex of belatedness and cultural marginality. Gherasim Luca, founder of the Romanian surrealist group, sent the French surrealists an uplifting manifesto, Dialectique de la dialectique, trying to revitalize a movement on the wane. In 1952, after the communist takeover, Luca went into exile to Paris and became part of a later wave of post-war anticommunist Romanian diaspora. Some Romanian writers managed not only to enroll in, but also to anticipate, some of the West European avant-garde movements. Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), for example, left Romania in 1915, after publishing Primele poeme, a collection of “first poems” that mocked both traditional and symbolist poetry. His presence in Zurich and later in Paris managed to stir up Western poetry as well, launching Dadaist and Surrealist experiments. Ilarie Voronca had a similarly interesting career. After participating in the 1920s in the modernist circles in Bucharest,

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he left for Paris to study for a doctoral degree in law. Contaminated with the experimental germ he picked up in the artistic quarters of Paris he made frequent trips back to Bucharest to act as a catalyst for a new wave of experimentation. Together with painter Victor Brauner, he founded 75HP, a dadaist-constructivist literary magazine (1926). After migrating from one editorial board to another, either as editor or as a contributor, he finally settled in Paris in 1933, producing more than a dozen volumes, and some short stories that Eugène Ionesco (Eugen Ionescu) introduced to the public. The most remarkable and at the same time dramatic career was that of Benjamin Fundoianu, who after publishing the controversial Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa (Images and Books from France; 1911), which described Romanian literature as a poor imitation of the French, settled in Paris, where he became a fine interpreter of Rimbaud and of Baudelaire, and a collaborator of Les Cahiers du Sud and Les Nouvelles Littéraires. His accomplishments in Paris, like those of Voronca, Bibescu, Anne de Noailles, Ionesco, or Emil Cioran, showed that a Romanian author could integrate himself in the European circuit, not in spite of — but because of — his unique origins. However, Fundoianu paid with his life for his dream of European integration (see Berindeanu’s article below, pp. 443–51). Next to these writers, several visual artists emigrated to Paris and other Western European cities. Chief among them was Constantin Brâncuşi. His position within the Western avant-garde is a matter of debate. While some interpreters have emphasized the dependence of Brâncuşi’s production upon French modernist models, Mircea Eliade argued in his last collection of essays published in France that, in pursuing African models, Brâncuşi actually recuperated his own archaic Romanian roots (“Brancusi et les mythologies”). In a nutshell, the most impressive characteristic of this early-twentieth-century “Bucharest on the Seine” was this two-way traffic of values and the reciprocal exchange of cultural artifacts. Some Romanians started by writing in French while still in Romania. Others left for Paris to produce literature in French. On their return to Romania, they did or did not keep up the French writing. Some of them shuttled between the two cities, like Ilarie Voronca and Martha Bibescu. All of them mediated the dialogue between French cultural models and the Romanian forms of Modernism. Paris in the interwar years also encouraged interartistic cross-fertilizations. The experiments of writers were followed or inspired by visual artists, some of whom, such as Brâncuşi, Victor Brauner, Marcel Iancu, Natalia Dumitrescu, Horia Damian, and George Apostu, were of Romanian origin. Benjamin Fundoianu/Fondane, for example, worked for the Paramount movie studios and published a volume of scripts, called Trois scénarios. Ciné-Poèmes (Three Scripts: Cine-Poems; 1928). 4.

The Second Half of the Twentieth Century: The Anticommunist Diaspora

In the second half of the twentieth century, during the Soviet occupation of Romania, the imposition of a communist ideology by tanks forced many Romanian intellectuals into exile. Paris became the center of the Romanian diaspora, organized around a nucleus of distinguished writers and symbolic leaders like Eugen Ionescu, Emil Cioran, and Mircea Eliade. The Parisian diaspora included also Horia Stamatu, Gherasim Luca, Virgil Gheorghiu, and several other writers who founded publishing houses, literary magazines, and cultural societies such as the “Leonard Arcade

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Mamaliga” circle. Instead of an inventory of names, I will give a brief analysis of the roles Paris played for the Romanian émigrés, and the ways they perceived and imagined it. Although Ionescu, Eliade, and Cioran have often been perceived as a team, in reality they followed rather divergent paths. Ionescu integrated himself completely in his adopted culture, becoming a member of the French Academy and a recognized founder of Absurd Theater. Since culture is a matter of self-estrangement, he writes in one of his ironic diary entries, Romanians must become French in order “to do literary criticism” (Present Past, Past Present 150). Cioran was also totally assimilated as a French philosopher and essayist, and acclaimed as one the most accomplished postwar stylists in the French language. This kind of “over-integration” can be regarded as a response to the perceived marginality of his native culture. As Matei Calinescu points out in his article “How Can One Be a Romanian?,” this question was obsessively raised in Cioran’s essays. His career suggests that one can be a Romanian by choosing self-exile in Paris. Mircea Eliade chose a peculiar type of exile. After crossing the Atlantic to found in Chicago a department concerned with the History of Religions, he regularly returned to Paris, lived in Place Charles Dulin, published his memoirs and his essays in French, shared the life of the Romanian diaspora, and frequented the fashionable intellectual circles of Paris. All this time, he kept writing novels and short stories in Romanian, which could be published in his homeland only after 1989. The political diaspora in Paris rallied around the Romanian Department of Radio Free Europe. This is where, for more than forty years, Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca promoted the principles of intellectual and political freedom. Since the early 1950s, their radio essays presented under the title Teze şi antiteze la Paris (Theses and Antitheses in Paris) engaged both Romanian and French cultural phenomena, validating nonconformist aesthetic experiences. Their talk shows managed to radicalize and solidify the Romanian community; they also integrated it into the French cultural life. Paris represented for them a political and cultural alternative to totalitarianism, an option for intellectual survival. During the last and most oppressive years of Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, a different sort of exiles started arriving in Paris. These “undesirables,” expelled by Ceauşescu’s regime, included the dissident novelist Paul Goma, a signatory of the Czech Charta 77, and Dumitru Ţepeneag, director for a while of the publication Cahiers de L’Est. They were followed by a wave of intellectual and political refugees, including writers such as Al. Papillian, Ilie Constantin, and Bujor Nedelcovici, who wrote both in Romanian and in French, contributed to literary periodicals, or studied for PhDs. Their Paris was one of political refuge and resistance. 5.

Paris as an Imaginary East-Central European Topos

Imaginary cities are built by means of most sophisticated symbolic devices. In certain contexts, the mental resonances associated by individuals and groups with real and imaginary cities are relatively stable. The authenticity of these symbolic models has been rhetorically validated by education and by travel writings. Nowadays, mass media also plays an important part in this process of validation. The equation Bucharest = Little Paris, and the representations of Paris subsequently generated by it, were started by French travelers like Raymond Poincaré, Jules Michelet, Lucien Romier, and Paul Morand. This identification produced a fascinating mixture of stereotypes and some purely fictitious projections.

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In Romania, the intertwining of the two cities was purely literary. The imaginary Paris was built out of the bricks of French prose and poetry. In semiotic terms, the cultural signified of Le Petit Paris, is a mere construct, bearing the stamp of Baudelaire and the tradition of symbolist flânneurs, of Nerval, of Barbey d’Aurevilly, and even more so, of Balzac, Proust, and Gide. In the fashionable circles of Bucharest, French literature and culture were approached in their original forms and transplanted directly into the street, leaving an unmistakable trace in the poems of the coffee shops, in the cuisine and haute couture, but also in the casual fashion and style of frivolous chat. The lower middle-class living on the outskirts, but aspiring to a better social condition, read Notre Dame de Paris and Les Mystères de Paris, featured in Romanian translation in women’s magazines. In both cases, the impact of Westernization à la parisienne on culture, daily life, and the literary imaginary was unparalleled by other influences. This brings us back to a double question: How real was to Romanians the so-called “real Paris”? Was there a significant difference between this version of Paris and any fictitious representation built from it? Even the Paris of the 1848 generation — the Paris of the bonjouristes (named so after their habit of greeting people in French) — was to a great extent a political and cultural fiction, dominated by the myth of the Great Revolution and built out of biblical and messianic materials. This was only the starting point of a long process of imaginative construction of Paris as a hybrid city, carrying at once the marks of a Western and East-Central European topos. In practical terms, as our discussion has suggested, there was no noticeable difference between the “real” and the “imaginary” Paris. II. Paris and the Polish Emigration (Agnieszka Gutthy) Since the time of the Great Romantic Emigration, France has always been an important center of the Polish diaspora. Like the rest of eighteenth-century Europe, Poland came under the strong cultural influence of France: most educated Poles spoke French fluently and were familiar with French literature and culture. In the Revolutionary Era, the conservative monarchies that were to partition Poland consistently opposed the new ideas emanating from France, so when the rise of Napoleon coincided with the fall of the Polish state, it was only natural that the hopes of the Poles went out toward this incendiary figure (Davies, Heart of Europe 159–60). Polish volunteers rallied to the French colors in the thousands, believing that by serving Napoleon they were also fighting for the reestablishment of an independent Polish state. And though Napoleon never revealed his ultimate intentions as to Poland, his legend grew in the romantic decades that followed his death. As Czesław Miłosz has suggested, perhaps the most important single phenomenon for Romanticism in Poland was “the Napoleonic legend, releasing as it did new forces of feeling and imagination” (History 207). Most Polish writings of the period abound in symbolic appeals to the Napoleonic myth as a force that would free Poland. The Napoleonic campaigns inspired hopes even after Napoleon’s defeat, and it was only after the 1863 insurrection that the prevailing optimism gave way to disillusionment. In 1831, after the fall of the November Insurrection against Russian domination, several thousand officers, soldiers, and the most active intellectuals emigrated to France in the hope that they soon would be able to return to free Poland. For forty years after the Insurrection, Paris was

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a more significant center of Polish culture than Warsaw or Cracow. Hotel Lambert, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski’s residence, became the center of the Great Emigration, the focus of intense diplomatic activity, and the symbol of Polish aspirations. The Bibliothéque Polonaise, established in Paris in 1838, and the Société Littéraire (active between 1832 and 1893) were also institutions of major importance for the emigration. Polish philosophers, historians, journalists, and especially the four poets of genius — Adam Mickiewicz, the first holder of a Chair de langue et littérature slave at the Collège de France, Sigismund Krasiński, Juliusz Słowacki, and Cyprian Norwid — carried on a surprisingly active intellectual life. Polish Romantic literature was a literature of emigration: with the exception of Aleksander Fredro, all of the great writers were émigrés. The Polish cultural canon was articulated in Paris by Mickiewicz, Krasiński, Chopin, and others, and it was the poets who took over the spiritual leadership of the émigrés. The ideas of Andrzej Towiański, founder of a mystical Adventist sect among the Polish émigrés in Paris in the 1840s, attracted the support of both Mickiewicz and Słowacki. In their hands, the concept of nation was sublimated and projected into the realm of religious mysticism. The Poet was regarded as a national prophet, and Polish literature became intensely national in spirit. According to Wiktor Weintraub, nowhere else was the idea of the poet as the leader of a nation taken so literally as among the Poles; there it occupied a central position in the spiritual experience of the writers (578–79). Poland, razed from the map of Europe, survived as a spiritual kingdom waiting to be reborn as a political reality; and it was Polish romantic poetry that created a whole array of myths, styles, and themes that provided the point of reference for every successive wave of émigrés. Exile and pilgrimage, which was elsewhere a purely literary topos, became an inherited Polish fate (Taylor 190). After the fall of the January Insurrection against Russian control (1863–64), the Romantic patriotic exaltation dissipated, giving way to disillusionment. However, the Polish presence in Paris did not come to an end. Polish cultural life in Paris continued during the rest of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of the more than sixty different Polish institutions, associations, clubs, and societies active in Paris, most did not want to deal with political and religious issues, concentrating instead on translating Polish literature, organizing concerts, staging theatrical performances, studying the Polish language, and doing charity work. Among them were L’Association Polonaise des Imposés Volontaires, La Société Polonaise de Gymnastique “Sokół,” Le Cercle Polonaise Artistique-Littéraire, Polish Philharmonic Society, the Association of Polish Artists in Paris, La Société des Etudiants Polonais “Spójnia.” Chopin’s polonaises accompanied the recitations of Mickiewicz’s poetry, Władysław Reymont read fragments of his novel Chłopi (The Peasants; 1902–09), Leopold Staff gave talks about poetry, and Aleksander Fredro’s comedies were put on stage. A benefit performance for the victims of the 1905 Revolution in Poland was organized and sponsored, among others, by Maria Curie-Skłodowska. During the time of Mickiewicz, Paris was virtually the only cultural and intellectual center of the Polish emigration. After September 1939 and during World War II, Poles were forced to seek shelter all over the world. The Carpathian Brigade and the Polish army in its march from Russia through Asia and Africa to Italy kept forming new centers, not only in Paris and London, but also in Edinburgh, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Naples, and Rome, as well as in the countries of the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, even Uruguay and Guatemala.

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The fall of France was a traumatic event for Francophile Poland: the French army was knocked out by the Nazi Wehrmacht in less time than Germany and Russia needed to knock out Poland. Whereas Poland refused to deal with the invaders, the French leaders proposed a settlement. Andrzej Bobkowski reacted angrily. In his day-by-day diary account of life in Nazi-occupied France, Szkice piórkiem (Sketched with a Quill; 1957), France is judged by a writer both enamored with the country and repulsed by the undignified behavior of its people. Focusing on the German officers on their way to inspect Toulon, Bobkowski writes: the French “will salute them, merci, pardon”; and further: “I see France naked, lying in Toulon like a whore. She is waiting and smiling with resignation, opens her legs. […] Betrays me” (Szkice 11.9.1940). Gustaw Herling-Grudziński called Paris a “tired city,” beautiful but poor after the war (Gorczyńska 201). Yet, on another occasion, he also admitted that the city was his “Polish artificial lung” (Gorczyńska 7). Olga Scherer recalled that all those coming to Paris in the thirties knew that they were coming to the capital of the world, but the war had dethroned the city (Gorczyńska 97). Czesław Miłosz’s poem, “Bypassing Rue Descartes” comes to mind: “Bypassing Rue Descartes / I descend toward the Seine, shy, a traveler, / A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world” (Collected Poems 382). The immigrants come from all over the world, trying to mingle and adapt, surviving the horrors of history in an indifferent city: “Meanwhile the city behaved in accordance with its nature, / Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark / Baking long breads and pouring the wine into clay pitchers, / Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets, / Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and greatness and glory” (382). Only Tymon Terlecki defended France in his short essay, “Mimo wszystko jestem frankofilem” (In Spite of Everything, I am Still a Francophile), arguing that the road to a free Poland leads through a free France. Yet, he too had to recognize that Paris, which used to be the “city of lights,” was now surrounded by darkness while the aureole shone over Warsaw (Szukanie równowagi 174). The Polish painter Jan Lebenstein saw in Paris echoes of the biblical Babylon. In low-grade bars and brothels, provocative prostitutes seduce frightened males, as in the series of paintings Sweet Bar and Café Vanitas. At the subway station Strasburg-Saint-Denis, beastly men seated on a bench are ogling a naked woman, bones sticking through her skin. The Polish emigration after 1945 split into two major orientations. In England, it was connected with the Polish government in London, the center of political, social, and literary traditionalism. Its publications were conservative, both in their political outlook and their choice of literary material. In Paris, in Maisons-Laffitte, Jerzy Giedroyć launched in 1947 a much more dynamic monthly, Kultura, under the patronage of the Instytut Literacki. According to Miłosz, the Literary Institute has been one of the most adventurous postwar Polish publishing houses (History 523). The Instytut Literacki, Kultura, and a book series published since 1953, Biblioteka Kultury, served in Paris for decades as unofficial beacons of independence. Once again, Paris became a capital of Polish culture. The unofficial ambassador and intermediary between French and Polish literatures for many years was Constantin Jeleński. He edited in 1965 an Anthologie de la poésie polonaise, which contained French translations of Polish poetry since the Middle Ages. He himself translated Miłosz, Karol Wojtyła, and Gombrowicz into French in order to bring their works to the attention of the French reading public.

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It would be very hard to overestimate Kultura; unlike some other émigré journals, it was open to the world and receptive to the events and changes going on in Poland. It reacted strongly against the 1947 declaration of the Polish Association of Writers in Exile, which prohibited publishing in Poland. Kultura opened its pages not only to Polish writers but also to those from other countries, Russians included. It was smuggled to Poland and read there and even found contributors among Cracow and Warsaw writers. By the end of the 1980s, Biblioteka Kultury had published over five hundred books, among them the complete works of Miłosz and Gombrowicz, texts of nearly all of the émigré writers and of many writers living in Poland whose works had been prohibited from publication there by the censorship. After 1981, a new group of Polish emigrants arrived in Paris. They founded a quarterly journal, Zeszyty Literackie (Literary Notebooks) in 1983, edited among others by Stanisław Barańczak and Adam Zagajewski, and including on the editorial board writers from other East-Central European countries such as the Lithuanian Tomas Venclova, the Czech Petr Král, and the Russian Joseph Brodsky. The history of Polish émigré literature stretched almost over two centuries. It began with the partitions of Poland at the end of eighteenth century and lasted until 1989 and the arrival of democracy and political freedom in Poland. 1989–1990 brought political changes that, though peaceful in character, triggered a profound mutation in Polish thinking. With the abolishment of censorship in 1990, the underground editorial activity ceased to exist. The works of émigré writers have become widely available in bookstores. Polish writers and artists no longer have to leave the country in search of freedom of expression. The Parisian Kultura began to appear in Poland, but with the death of Jerzy Giedroyć in 2000, the Fall issue of Kultura turned out to be the last. Polish novelist, Kazimierz Brandys died in Paris in 2000 and Jan Lebenstein in 1999. The Polish bookstore Libella, founded in 1946, ended its activities on December 31, 1993. Today over a million and a half Poles live in France. Andrzej Wajda makes his films in Paris; other film directors and actors such as Andrzej Żulawski, Walerian Borowczyk, Wojciech Pszoniak, and Andrzej Seweryn of the Comédie Française, reside there as well. Zofia Hertz, who was with Kultura from the very beginning, lived in Maisons-Laffitte until her recent death in 2003. Among Paris’s residents are poet Adam Zagajewski and a world-famous geneticist and member of the French Académie des Sciences, Piotr Słonimski. Paris will always be an important center of Polish emigration, just like London, Chicago, and Toronto, but the center of intellectual creativity has moved back to Poland. III. Syllogisms of Exile: Cioran and Gombrowicz in Paris (Katarzyna Jerzak) The drive to live is hurry and pursuit. Drive to have life, at once, whole, in an hour. Of that Paris is so full and therefore so near to death. It is an alien, alien city. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Clara Rilke, August 31, 1902; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge 23) Lack of air. Everything is intensified, nothing relaxes. That fascinates me in France today. That stifling quality. That threat. That’s exciting. (Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 152)

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Ciel de Paris, c’est sous toi que je voudrais mourir! [Parisian sky, it is under you that I would want to die!] (E. M. Cioran, Bréviaire des vaincus 92)

Paris has a peculiar place in East-Central European literary topography: for almost two hundred years, it has been the European capital of exiles. It is only fitting then that the city where Adam Mickiewicz wrote his Pan Tadeusz (1834) should be the place of an encounter between Witold Gombrowicz and E[mil]. M. Cioran. The two met on the pages of the Parisian Kultura in 1952: Cioran’s short text entitled “Avantages de l’exil” appeared there in Gombrowicz’s translation into Polish and with his acerbic commentary (Cioran’s essay was then published in English in 1968 as part of The Temptation to Exist 74–78). Gombrowicz visited Paris in 1927 and then came back as a true exile in 1963; but throughout his Argentine years Paris retained for him its centripetal force, in part because this is where the Polish émigré publishes his Diary in installments (1953–69), and in part because Buenos Aires also looks up to Paris. Cioran arrived in Paris in 1937 to write a thesis on Bergson — and never left. Gombrowicz’s Wspomnienia polskie (Polish Recollections), as well as his Diary, and Cioran’s works written after 1939, both in Romanian and in French, show how the two authors enact their Parisian exile as both an honor and a betrayal. Gombrowicz and Cioran were drawn to Paris as a cultural center but were also loath to admit any kind of superiority of the French culture. In fact, coming from the provinces of Europe both authors saw fit to unmask the actual provinciality of Paris, using their outside perspective to deflate what they perceived as a Western cultural pretense. The fates of these two exiles, who both died in France — the former compared to Valéry and hailed by St. John Perse as the supreme stylist in the French language, the latter now recognized in France as one of the greatest modern writers — throw light on the important and often paradoxical relationship between the representatives of the “other” Europe and French culture. “Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France,” writes Julia Kristeva in Étrangers à nousmêmes (Strangers to Ourselves; 1988). “Having neither the tolerance of Anglo-American Protestants, nor the absorbent ease of Latin Americans, nor the rejecting as well as assimilating curiosity of the Germans or Slavs, the French set a compact social texture as an unbeatable national pride against foreigners” (Strangers to Ourselves 38). Much before Kristeva, Cioran affirmed his choice of Paris as the locus of exile with characteristic hubris: “Paris, remotest point from Paradise, remains nonetheless the only site where it feels good to despair” (All Gall is Divided 146). The distinction of being in exile in the very city of Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” (The Swan) — the poem that strips the condition of exile of its halo of exclusivity, recognizing the frightful numbers of individuals displaced in the Ville Lumière — motivated Cioran to pronounce his solidarity with the city’s marginal elements: “Was there, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, a foreigner more foreign than me, regaling a whore or a clochard with his vulgar scent?” (Bréviaire 70). Cioran’s clochard is the urban equivalent of the nomad, an idealized figure whose homelessness renders him impervious to the fear of death: Beggars don’t pass away in their beds and that is why they don’t die. One dies only horizontally, through lengthy preparation by means of which death slowly infiltrates life. What regrets could

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This somewhat naive vision contains an early formulation of what will become Cioran’s credo: belief in the value of detachment by choice. In a eulogy of the sky above Paris, Cioran admits to having chosen it for its ability to extinguish his origins: I did not insult you by thinking of other homelands, I did not abase myself by seeking ecstasy in my roots or in the nostalgias of blood. I silenced in my blood the rumblings of generations of plowmen bent over the stilt and no lament of a Danube peasant comes to trouble the minuet of doubt that your clouds are dancing. I folded the pride of my wanderings into your absence of homeland, and my despair — hymn against time — adorns itself with a bloodied halo. (Bréviaire 93)

This poetic apostrophe to the Parisian sky is a decisive, irreverent proclamation of detachment from homeland, a severance of loyalty to one’s birthplace, and an announcement of a new loyalty of choice to the ever-changing space of the sky. The passage is saturated with irony: a romantic identification with nature and its states is undermined by the speaker’s conscious and disillusioned isolation from things natural. Cioran feels obliged to give the indifferent sky an account of his loyalties, as if he were addressing God in an echo of Baudelaire’s swan’s mute cry to the Parisian “ironic sky.” Just like the swan, “mythe étrange et fatal” (Oevres complètes 97), who yearns after the waters of his native lake, Cioran renders his Romanian past in terms of bodily fluids (“the nostalgias of blood”) while comparing his French present to a stylized dance (“the minuet”) — a contrast upheld whenever he compares his native and adopted tongues. Paris, with its clochards and flânneurs, is the exilic city par excellence. As Cioran writes: “Nobody here has roots. In the weary eyes of the passers by, their native countries extinguish themselves. No one belongs to a country any longer and no faith pushes him toward the future” (Bréviaire 70–71). In this phantom-filled city that seems to be its own ghost, the young exile claims to find no human relief in his solitude. His sole salvation, or at least consolation, comes from music: “Nothing came to my aid, nothing. Except — how many times? — the largo of Bach’s Double violin concerto. I owe it my life” (Bréviaire 71). If Baudelaire’s Paris was allegorical, Cioran’s personified one becomes the exile’s loving other: “This city understands you. She bandages your wounds. You think yourself lost — you find yourself in her. […] I was so much in her that I would become separated from myself if I were to leave her” (Bréviaire 39–40). Claiming identification with Paris, Cioran betrays an utter loss not only of his homeland or even of his true attachment, but also of any ability to become meaningfully attached, which manifests itself in a blind drive to become one with the least likely, the impossible object — a foreign city. A most tenuous connection is enough to ward off non-being, and vice-versa; the void can slip in through the tiniest crack: “The unkempt ivy, there where Notre Dame contemplates itself in the Seine, will we ever know how far it is reflected in us? I often descended along with the ivy’s melancholy penchant all the way down” (Bréviaire 39). The Parisian houses proclaim their ostensible solidarity with the exile, as if knighting him into the order of the homeless: “I turn toward the houses and I look at them. Each turns towards me. ‘Come closer, you are not any lonelier than we are,’ whisper these companions of excessively long nights and empty days” (Bréviaire 39). Even the

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native houses are exiled or abandoned in Paris, because the exile’s optics here, as in Baudelaire’s “Le cygne” and in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, project the inner predicament onto the outer world. Malte, much like Cioran’s lyrical persona, finds his reflection in every clochard’s eyes. Cioran, who ate daily at the student cafeteria for many years as if that had been his home, seems to have taken lessons in exile from Malte, who makes his home in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the only place where he feels safe from the complicitous gestures with which the clochards approach him in the streets. The excess of the unfamiliar brings about its opposite, an illusory reversal of the exile’s fortune: “I recognize everything here, and that is why it goes right into me: it is at home in me,” says Rilke’s Malte of Paris (Notebooks 48). “One may fall under the charm of Italian cities, but nowhere is one as close to that which becomes part of oneself as here” (Bréviaire 39), confirms Cioran in yet another avowal of the exile’s handicap, the implacable desire to be one with something. That attribute of missing a limb, of being maimed, is defined by Theodor Adorno as the hallmark of emigration: “Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors to his self-esteem” (33). André Aciman’s False Papers defines this condition even more acutely when he, just like Cioran before him, mixes love and exile in the double metaphor of loss and attachment in a foreign city: “On those evenings, as in those moments in life when our hull is cracked and we’re forced to molt everything we’ve got till we’re as naked as a newborn […] I felt so exposed that, like the isolated baby monkey in the experiment, I found that I could get attached to anything — a thought, a habit, a song” (127). Cioran’s declaration of love for the abstraction of a city that is not his own only betrays the acuity of his loss of home. Alone, Cioran can ask without hubris: “Where should I drown myself? In the Seine or in Music?” (Bréviaire 95). If later Cioran comes to practice the concept of austerity, as if following Adorno’s precept for émigré intellectuals, in the 1940s he still allows for the expression of the tragic sense of being suspended between the literary legend of Paris as a lethal city, une ville fatale, and the pure abstraction of music. The restrained pathos of Bréviaire des vaincus — written originally in Romanian in the years 1940–44, under the title Îndreptar pătimaş (Impassioned Guide) — gives way to the understated cynicism in Cioran’s later French works. That Cioran found his private equivalent of monastic isolation in one of the busiest capitals of the world is a testimony to his deeply pessimistic vision of human sociability. His advice to a fellow exile — “I assure this foreign poet, who after hesitating among several capitals has decided on ours, that he has chosen well, that here he will find, among other advantages, that of starving to death without troubling a single soul” (Anathemas 110) — resounds like a voice in the desert of the modern metropolis. Thus, for Cioran, the internal desert or exile comes to mirror his external exilic condition, and both serve as a metaphor for the metaphysical predicament of the human being. Eventually Cioran’s quarrel with the idea of domestication makes him a proponent of nonadherence, nonattachment. Therefore, he eulogizes the diasporic predicament of the Jews in “Un peuple de solitaires” (La Tentation 64–97), and finds fault with the comfortable ease with which the French inhabit their country and language: “That the French should have refused to feel and above all to cultivate the imperfection of the indefinite is certainly suggestive. In a collective form, this disease does not exist in France: what the French call cafard has no metaphysical quality and ennui is managed singularly […]. Is there any other nation which finds itself more at ease in the

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world, for which being chez soi has more meaning and more weight, for which immanence offers more attractions?” (A Short History of Decay 31). Elsewhere Cioran ridicules the French as crusaders who have become gardeners; he enacts a radical exilic perspective, in which being at home is suspect both ethically and aesthetically. The sense of heroic betrayal — the abandonment of his native tongue — is evident in Cioran’s writings and compensates for the loss inherent in such detachment. This betrayal is heroic because it concerns the very essence of the writer’s craft. To be a traitor to one’s native language signifies simultaneously conquest of a new territory, a self-construction and an escape, a feat dangerous and rare. That is why Cioran takes pride in his exilic trajectory: “To break with one’s gods, with one’s ancestors, with one’s language and one’s country, to break tout court, is a terrible ordeal, that is certain; but it is also an exalting one, avidly sought by the defector and, even more, by the traitor” (Anathemas 126). The figure of the renegade, the deserter is emblematic of Cioran’s more broadly understood enterprise of distantiation: “The man who respects himself has no homeland. The homeland is like bird lime” (Drawn and Quartered 93). In this perspective, to repudiate one’s mother tongue is but a means of achieving distance not only from one’s origins, but above all from oneself, by undermining the natural process of expression: “In a borrowed language, you are conscious of words; they exist not in you but outside of you. This interval between yourself and your means of expression explains why it is difficult, even impossible, to be a poet in another language besides your own” (Anathemas 204). This distance acquired by migration into another language also explains why, as it were, Cioran can say more in French than in his native Romanian tongue. As he remarks, the French words are on the outside, and as such in some sense disconnected from his emotive sensibility. The “heroic betrayal,” of abandoning one’s native tongue, which became Cioran’s exercise of choice, remained foreign to Gombrowicz. Cioran not only migrated into the French language, but also chose prose — albeit a poetic one — to perfect the process of linguistic crystallization, so alien to his disowned native idiom, that embodiment of barbarous genius lacking in form, “that mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, its splendid squalor” (History and Utopia 2). French to him is devoid of life; there is “no longer a trace of earth, of blood, of soul in such words” (History and Utopia 2). Nevertheless, the choice of a form of expression alien to himself fits well with Cioran’s ascetic practices. Furthermore, to opt for writing in French is to distance oneself even further from the motherland, to repudiate it: And there is also this: I should have chosen any other language than French, for I have little in common with its distinguished vaunt; it is at the antipodes of my nature, of my outbursts, of my true self and my kind of wretchedness. In its rigidity, in the quantity of elegant constraints that it represents, French seems to me an exercise in ascesis or, rather, a combination of a straitjacket and a salon. Yet it is precisely on account of this incompatibility that I have attached myself to this language. (Anathemas 255–56)

Gombrowicz shared Cioran’s feelings towards the French language. According to Rita Gombrowicz, the writer “felt ill at ease in this language, the French cramped him like a corset. ‘I feel

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that I’m becoming Marquise de Sévigné!’ He was angry that while writing in French he could not find in it ‘the juiciness, the taste, the concreteness, the brutality, and the infinite sweetness’ of Polish” (Gombrowicz w Europie 339). In his Diary, Gombrowicz traces his distaste for the French language back to his French governesses in Maloszyce, contrasting their exotic presence with the earthy Polish countryside: “Plumped down into the fresh and roughhewn landscape of a Polish hamlet, [they were] like parrots.” In light of this particular memory, Paris in 1963 becomes “one gigantic French governess” (Diary 3: 85). If the Paris of 1927 gave Gombrowicz a foretaste of true exile, albeit mitigated by his direct contact with “Europeanness,” his eventual exile, too, is radical. From Argentina, Gombrowicz admits that his first arrival in Paris was a “pilgrimage to the heart of Europe […]. I, on the surface a peasant, a greenhorn student, a provincial buff, but underneath all this closely connected to Europe” (Wspomnienia 53). For Gombrowicz — the specialist in antagonistic, confrontational tactics — his first sojourn in the West was an occasion “to take the bull of western superiority by the horns”; as a Pole, as a representative of a “weaker culture,” he had to defend his sovereignty (56–57). Upon his return to Poland the opposite analytical operation occurred: “For a long time after Paris I sniffed in Poland a non-Europeanness, I tried to discover the essence of the Polish marginality in relation to Europe” (65). After twenty-four years in South America, Gombrowicz returned to Europe in 1963, but this return, instead of being a homecoming, was rather a new kind of exile: “So that when Argentina recedes behind me, dissolves, the Europe rising before me is like a pyramid, Sphinx, and an alien planet, like a fata morgana, no longer mine, I do not recognize it, I do not recover it in time and space” (Diary 3: 143). Hesitant to come back all the way, that is to close the cycle by returning to Poland, Gombrowicz tarried first in Berlin and then lived out his life in France. Gombrowicz’s attitude towards Western Europe was a corollary of his theory of Form. The European cultural centers in general, and Paris in particular, represented for him the outgrowth of form, of tradition, of “repulsive aesthetics,” to which he opposed the historically determined formal looseness of the world’s provinces (in his case, Poland and Argentina, the Sarmatian East and the immature South). As a representative of the “second” Europe, returning after the Argentinean intermezzo, he confronted the intellectuals of Berlin and Paris with his favorite mixture of haughtiness and laughter, pretension and deflation, seduction and rebuttal. Gombrowicz summed up his Argentinean exile as a period during which he was “liberated from history.” His arrival in Berlin was necessarily a confrontation with Europe’s most recent history: he found himself as if on an island of historical and political tension. As for France, it embodied another principle — the “majestic, Cartesian, Racinean, Voltairean” spirit that provoked the enfant terrible in the author, who always strives to elude form. Thus Gombrowicz’s encounter with Western Europe, mediated by his status as a “newcomer, an Argentinean, a returning Pole” (Diary 3: 151), allowed a revelatory reassessment of the European intellectual vigor, or lack thereof, and spurred the writer’s own vitality: “Paris maddens me and nothing is healthier, especially for people of a certain age. Just as French artists and writers of yesterday and the day before yesterday seem to me incredibly stimulating, so, as far as I’m concerned, recent French literature might just as well not exist” (Testament 148). Almost forty years after his original discovery of Polish “marginality in relation to Europe,” Gombrowicz drew on the barbarous character of the setting of his Polish childhood to deflate the

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cultural pretense of Paris. To the excessively manicured French culture, he opposed the nakedness of the Polish country bumpkin, reinforced with the South American raw youth: “In Paris, still blindly in love with Argentina, I felt Younger […]. I also felt Younger as a Pole, I, an ambassador of younger cultures. Thus was I fortified in my diatribe against the old age of Paris and pushed into nakedness” (Diary 3: 96). With his characteristic dramatic flair, Gombrowicz staged a confrontation with the Parisian intellectuals in which he “undressed” himself. This hilarious exhibitionism was a performative tactic meant to unsettle the smugness, the facile comfort, and the dishonesty that Gombrowicz detected in the Parisian intelligentsia: Dressed from head to foot, wrapped up, even though it was May, with faces fashioned by hairdressers. […] Culture and civilization. Imprisoned in clothes, they can barely move, similar to insects smeared with something sticky; when I began to remove my pants there arose such consternation, they bolted for the doors and windows. I remained alone. (Diary 3: 97)

Gombrowicz’s boastful act came as a revenge of sorts for the years of Paris worship that he had witnessed both in Warsaw and in Buenos Aires. The greatness of Paris and also its nemesis is Form, and it is the stifling effect of this form that Gombrowicz bared, as it were, in his showdown with the city’s intellectual lions. Instead of cloaking himself into a suitable coat — “a romancier, historien d’art, a Catholic, or a pataphysicien” (Diary 3: 96), he insisted on his nakedness: “I shouted that I was neither a writer nor a member of anything, neither a metaphysician nor an essayist. I was me — free, unencumbered, living […]. Ah, yes, they said, so you are an existentialist” (Diary 3: 97). In the culture of culinary refinement, the raw was not to be touched, it had to be cooked, prepared, and named. Unclothed, Gombrowicz was unpalatable to the French: “But when I just dropped my pants in no special way, they were ready to throw up, and mainly because I did not do it à la Proust or Rousseau or Montaigne or existential psychoanalysis but just for the heck of it, to take them off” (Diary 3: 98). Gombrowicz fortified his exile, he doubled and tripled it at will: he came to Paris not only as a Pole: he was now also a South American Indian. Cioran, who did not have recourse to such exotic otherness, nonetheless stylized himself as a Scythian, just as Gombrowicz dusted off the legendary Polish link to the Sarmatian. Both anachronistic figures were used as barbarous foils to the excessively civilized Western culture: “But I do see something of my historical role in this: oh, oh, oh, to enter Paris with innocent nonchalance, as a conservative seditionist, provincial avant-gardist, rightist leftist, leftist rightist, Argentine Sarmatian, aristocratic plebeian, antiartistic artist, immature adult, disciplined anarchist, and a person who is artificially candid and candidly artificial” (Diary 3: 154–55). What was the purpose of this? To unmask the “crisis of Form” that Gombrowicz diagnosed as the modern French ailment par excellence. Once Charles Baudelaire had proclaimed the era of modern exile in “Le cygne,” the nimbus of exile was thrown down onto the Parisian cobblestones. In his poetic largesse Baudelaire opened the exilic condition to all rejects, especially those who knew how to milk their suffering. “The Swan” speaks of whoever has lost what cannot be found again, Ever, ever; of those who lap up the tears

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And nurse at the teats of that motherly she-wolf, Sorrow; […] Of prisoners, the conquered, and more, so many more […] (Flowers of Evil 111)

If Cioran and Gombrowicz never came to feel at home in Paris or in Vence and yet chose to remain there rather than to return to their homelands, it was because, beginning with Baudelaire, exile as well as home took up new meanings. In his “Shadow Cities,” haunted by Baudelaire’s “Le cygne” as much as Cioran’s Bréviaire des vaincus is, André Aciman redefined exile yet again by specifying that an exile is someone who no longer knows what home is: “An exile is not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can’t find another, who can’t think of another. Some no longer even know what home means. They reinvent the concept with what they’ve got, the way they reinvent love with what’s left of it each time. Some people bring exile with them the way they bring it upon themselves wherever they go” (False Papers 39). For Gombrowicz, return — to Poland, to the home that is not — signified death. By staying in France, he embodied his own ideal of the “naked” man — this time in the sense of being willingly deprived of props of culture, religion, and patriotism. Cioran, too, in his last years became the figure he so idealized: the clochard. In L’Elan vers le pire (Impulse towards the Worst) it is no longer through words but rather through images of his old body under Parisian bridges that he spoke. This album of black and white photographs of Cioran taken by Irmeli Jung, accompanied only by sparse fragments from the author’s earlier works, appeared in 1988, effectively marking the end of Cioran’s willingness to write. Perhaps Cioran’s dictum about Parisian clochards can serve as an epitaph — yet another syllogism of exile — for both Gombrowicz and Cioran: “Vagrants on the surface of life, they still wander on the surface of death” (Tears 16).

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A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality: Bucharest–Paris–Auschwitz, or the Case of Benjamin Fundoianu Florin Berindeanu Benjamin Fundoianu and Benjamin Fondane are two facets of the same writer that represent the beginning and the middle stage of an aesthetic metamorphosis. And there is also Benjamin Wexler, the tragic epitome of the Wandering Jew. Though he gradually distanced himself from the aesthetic imperative, as a result of his affinities with Lev Shestov, Benjamin Fundoianu never abandoned his aesthetic pursuits. He appears today, fifty-nine years after his death, as what he actually dreamed of being: one of the most tragic figures of universality in the twentieth century. Benjamin Fundoianu’s yearning for universality was concrete and non-metaphorical; his life seemed to be a direct echo of the Viennese fin-de-siècle, haunted by the search for identity. However, while for Freud and Schnitzler, Kafka or Rilke, the consequences of the political dismem-

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berment of early-twentieth-century Europe finally led to an identity crisis, the case of Fundoianu was somewhat atypical. His biographical itinerary shows that his main obsession was rather a bureaucratic one — a question of intellectual bureaucracy, it is true. Instead or in addition to an identity crisis, Fundoianu was concerned with the reiteration of an obsession, that of acquiring the aesthetic legitimacy of Western culture. Born in Romania in 1898, where he wrote his first poems and essays, Barbu Fundoianu later became Benjamin Fundoianu. A change of name had already occurred in his family when the overly “Jewish” surname Wexler was changed to Fundoianu. The writer continued the onomastic transformation after moving to France, adapting Fundoianu to the French Fondane. The sense of tragic loss derived from these onomastic substitutions points to an obsessive drive towards the reinvention of identity. Benjamin Fundoianu is a palimpsestic name evocative of the analogic journey undertaken by the writer in pursuit of universality. The timeless sagesse (wisdom) congenial to Fundoianu — as E. M. Cioran recalls it in Anathemas and Admirations — was not contaminated by the overtones of detachment typical of Western culture. For him, the understanding or rather foretelling of history remained marginal in the confrontation with his fervor for breaking all boundaries that imprison life: “It would be too emphatic to speak of unhappiness, but he was a man of anxiety. Nevertheless, we cannot speak of happiness in him. He was, however, too wise to be unhappy” (Kluback xiii). The Biblical wandering, the Homeric journey, or the Joycean recasting of it underlie Fundoianu’s search for an identity that includes everything in the name of literature. Fundoianu was indeed haunted by the need to become a member of the high society of literati that mattered, that is, of Western letters. The relentlessness with which he moved towards his goal motivated Fundoianu’s bureaucratic mission. To change his passport and citizenship became as vital for him as his frequent onomastic changes. He felt stifled and unfulfilled both in the patriarchal Iaşi and in the more cosmopolitan Bucharest. Somewhat surprisingly, the older and the new capitals of Romania could not satisfy Fundoianu’s desire for intellectual expansion. Strongly influenced, especially during the nineteenth century, by French ideas and customs, both Iaşi, whose cultural heritage includes Greek and Russian elements, and Bucharest, the capital city located on the spiritual border between the Orient and Western Europe, must have appeared as intellectually artificial to the young writer. Fundoianu’s articles and reviews, scattered in the popular literary journals of the time, reveal his unquenched desire not to fall behind the latest European ideas. France, especially, was for him the privileged space where his search for a spiritual home could gain universal dimensions. Pascal and Baudelaire conveyed a similar two-fold feeling of anxious fascination with the infinity of possibilities, with the gulf separating the physical from the metaphysical. The latter, with his poem “Le Gouffre” (The Abyss), was certainly a model for Fundoianu, who perceived exile and relocation as ontological necessities. Wherever he lived, he contemplated, like Baudelaire, the “infini par toutes les fenêtres” (infinite through all windows). The vision of infinity might give one insomnia, as it happened with Pascal and Cioran; Fundoianu, however, rejoiced at the idea that there is always more to come, that life is endless and the voyage eternal. Nothing short of that would have made him express the prophetic belief that the traveler has not yet completed the journey (“le voyageur n’a pas fini de voyager”; Carassou and Mougel 13). Before Fondoranu set out for France, the Romanian-born poets Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara became essential for his apprenticeship in Symbolism and the Avant-garde, the sources of his

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two Romanian books, Privelişti (Landscapes; 1930) and Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa (Images and Books from France; 1911). However, that was not enough to make Fundoianu feel closer to Western ideas. It was not the provincial aspect of Romanian life alone that frightened him into frantically seeking relocation. His objection, formulated primarily as a linguistic imperative, evolved around the thesis that the Romanian language could not command a place among the elite Western discourses. French was much better suited for that, since the idiom of the Lumières designated for him the ideal center in the early twentieth century. From a purely literary standpoint, the postromantic tradition embodied by the symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century had reinforced the idea of poetry’s centrality for the first generations of the following century. For Mallarmé or Verlaine, the universality of poetry stemmed from its soteriological (redemptive) function. Apart from any metaphorical implications, it appeared increasingly clear after Romanticism that literature gradually took over the prerogatives of religion. When Baudelaire spoke of ennui and mal de siècle, he had a good reason for it; the answer to the mal de siècle was provided by the dawn of experimentalism that took European literature by storm at the turn of the century. Recent criticism has emphasized the key position that Baudelaire holds for our understanding of modernity. By dedicating an intriguing essay, Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss; published posthumously in 1972), to the French poet, Fondane/Fundoianu showed that he had a clear intuition of where his aesthetic sources were to be found. When his writings intersected later existentialism — mainly in La conscience malheureuse — Fundoianu’s ideas entered the phenomenological domain of Jean Wahl, Emanuel Lévinas, or Maurice Blanchot (for Fundoianu’s French titles, see Fondane). Yet the dismemberment of spaces and identities at the turn of the nineteenth century undermined the illusion of unity in individual identity. In Romania, Fundoianu knew all too well that he was wearing a borrowed identity: his first book, Imagini şi cărţi din Franţa, suggests that the Romanian language was for him a vehicle to show persuasively that his spiritual ties lay elsewhere. But his desire to become integrated into Western Europe was not necessarily more productive. The essay “L’homme devant l’histoire ou le bruit et la fureur” (Man in Front of History, or the Noise and the Passion; 1939) is a meditation on the origins of evil. Evil does not exist, says Fundoianu, since its primitive essence reduces it to an absence. What was happening just then in Germany, he argues, might be an accident that should not destroy the long heritage of Western European culture. In order to integrate fully in that tradition, Fundoianu desired to replace his consciousness of being a Jew with that of being a European. This did not mean denying his Jewishness, only treating it as a given that impeded his aesthetic consciousness from transcending his “marginal” status. In Faux traité d’esthétique (False Treatise of Aesthetics; 1938), Fondane/Fundoianu sees Plato’s Republic as the historical landmark that initiated the “long intellectual process of art.” He regards here evil again as the result of individual actions while the divine has always been concerned with universality, from the very moment life was conceived. Fundoianu’s refusal to wear the yellow star and his move to France represented for him more than a form of individual protest. To attain universality one had to transcend the limits of individual and ethnic identity. That his ticket to France led to a tragic denouement, Fundoianu could not have predicted and, in any case, it would not have deterred him from believing that he could become universal through selfrenunciation. In order to be able to ask questions, one has to be able to travel unhindered through intellectual or ideological borders.

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The Preface to La conscience malheureuse speaks of a “permanent mobility,” an intellectual resilience that the philosopher should strive to attain: “There will thus always be a place, on the borders of all future societies, for a permanent mobilization against a reality that is hostile, inexplicable, and absurd, a tenacious double will to render it ‘rational’ or ‘chaotic,’ to negate it or make it auspicious, to trim it to fit us or bend ourselves to its shape” (xvi). Fundoianu eagerly abandoned his fresh literary reputation in Romania to embark upon an arduous search that would take him to his final identity. Leaving Romania in 1923, Fundoianu believed he had left behind two identities that were of little use in his permanent integration into Europe’s cultural center. In addition to his poetry and essays on French literary life gathered in Imagini, he founded, shortly before his departure, the experimental theater Insula (The Island). Meant more as a syncretic happening, to which his sister brought her acting talents, Insula announced Fundoianu’s entering the “stage” of self-imposed cultural exile. He wrote two plays in French that were never published, Le Festin de Balthazar (The Feast of Balthazar) and Philoctète, and tightened even more his aesthetic ties with France. His literary mentors were almost exclusively French now, and French language was his near-native way of expression. Fundoianu never thought of France as a place of exile but rather as a point of return after a regrettably long detour. Undoubtedly, he never considered his ticket from Bucharest to Paris a round-trip one. At the same time, his intellectual reinvention promised to hide his Jewish roots, which were increasingly targeted in Romania. Once he overcame his Romanian phase both geographically and artistically, Fondane/Fundoianu was finally free to explore various forms of aesthetic experimentation, while shedding off the tight garments of cultural marginality he was forced to wear in his native country. His naive abandon to the search for universality — and it should be noted that Fundoianu was more interested in experiencing the universal than in seeking individual recognition — could not escape his contemporaries. Boris de Schloezer, friend of the “new” Fondane and translator of Shestov, noted Fundoianu’s tendency toward “an aestheticism with a touch of dilettantism and a strong attraction toward Nietzsche, the rationalist and immoral Nietzsche of the Gay Science” (180). The desire to assume as many aesthetic identities as possible drove Fundoianu to Argentina, where he tried to promote his short documentary films that could not get enough financial support in France. There he was acquainted with Victoria Ocampo and Luis Buñuel, and traded the traditionalism of his Privelişti for poetic Surrealism, psychological criticism, and Existentialism. As a new form of aesthetic expression, film symbolized for him the unrestricted freedom of belonging to the community of modern artists who were not bound to observe any rules but their own. Representing two poles of human expression, film and philosophy were areas in which Fundoianu’s experimental bent could find better outlets. The new expression required a new aesthetic identity, which, in the spirit of the Avant-garde, he reinvented as a figure of the existential absurd. Faithful to this creed, Fundoianu decided to make “an absurd film about an absurd thing in order to please his own absurd taste for freedom” (Carassou and Mougel 10). Such was the genesis of Tararira, a film never released by the displeased producers, despite Ocampo’s support and Fundoianu’s enthusiasm for the new art. It was somehow more important for him to bask in the intellectual partnership with Ocampo and note the presence of Giuseppe Ungaretti on their ship; Fundoianu’s belief in the universality of ideas echoed Dante’s “boat of friendship” in the Canzoniere. For

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Dante, the metaphor was a real event; for Fundoianu, who traveled by sea from Brazil, the “boat” was concomitantly a concrete image for his yearning for universal humanity. Romania, France, and Argentina were all just signifiers of what could be traded and translated (like Fundoianu’s own names) as the idea of perpetual and universal voyage. When Fundoianu arrived in France, he found his apprehensions of belonging to a marginal culture confirmed. Practically nobody held a Symbolist aesthetic in 1923, which literally took the newly emigrated writer to the brink of an existential crisis. Fundoianu wanted to draw a self-portrait in his book on Rimbaud. Both fail in their project of becoming a voyant (seer) and turn instead into tireless voyous (bums). They share the fate of all prophets who have to wander because nobody listens to them. Tiresiases of modern times, Rimbaud and Fundoianu sing of a departure that will never lead to a celebration of return. Rimbaud undoubtedly appeared to Fundoianu as a tragic poet, whose contradictions — and implicitly Fundoianu’s as well — could be explained only partly by his quest for adventure and the unknown. For Fundoianu, life converted to the universality of poetry explained the rest. Claiming that “a poem was only an organ” (Rimbaud 75), Fundoianu confessed indirectly his own final disguise, the desired metamorphosis that transcended his ethnic or cultural past: the materiality of life has no national origins, only its protean and nameless physicality passes into the poem. Then the poem, and along with it its author, becomes universal. In 1933, Fundoianu published the first of his two complete volumes of poetry in French under the title Ulysse. The collection translates the mythical wandering of the Greek hero into a personal experience that confirms the parallelism between individual and collective history. There is truth in tales, argues Fundoianu’s poetry, and one may find new meaning in the age-old myth of the Wandering Jew. The parallelism becomes explicit from the outset when narratives that define local topographies meet in one universal identity: “juif naturellement et cependant Ulysse” (a genuine Jew and yet Ulysses; Ulysse 88). Despite his ethnic anxieties and a definite sense of the tragic perfected under the influence of Lev Shestov, Fundoianu was spiritually rescued by his passion for ideas and a remarkable aesthetic flexibility. Ilarie Voronca, one of Romania’s leading Avant-garde writers, introduced him to the Dada movement and, beyond it, to Surrealism. Fundoianu immediately realized that, though he shared with most of his contemporary Romanian intellectuals a French literary background, he still had a handicap to overcome. Therefore, he immersed himself in a voracious recherche du temps perdu that quickly familiarized him with the most recent aesthetic ideas in the West. By the end of the thirties, Fundoianu acquired an identity that would not be modified substantially until his death in 1944. Upon examining his work, the critic cannot fail to recognize the consistency with which Fundoianu pursued his literary goals. These boiled down to one fundamental aim: to accomplish through his work not so much the destiny of the individual writer but the utopia of the universal idea. Well aware that Romanian literature would synchronize itself only slowly with the major aesthetic trends of the Continent, Fundoianu drew the broad lines of an intellectual itinerary designed to take him to the center of European letters. Though spaces and identities had been dismembered in the wake of World War I, Fondane/ Fundoianu believed in recuperating their integrity as he moved from the periphery to the center of world culture. Unlike Ovid, who wrote two lost books in the Getic language of the inhabitants of his exile at the Black Sea, Fundoianu left his native Romania with the declared desire to conquer

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a linguistic space that would push him beyond the margins of Europe. In Romania he felt the Baudelairian ennui he later analyzed in his essay Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre. Moldavia, with its capital city Iaşi, offered him a glimpse into the “transcendence” of boredom he always celebrated: “And if the boredom caused by things does not confirm their value, even less then is the pleasure they procure us a proof of their non-value!” (Baudelaire 145). For Fundoianu, translocation was a necessary correction to the arbitrariness of fate, but it did not change the essential coordinates of his ideas. He came from Eastern Europe (which included his Jewish heritage) with the intent of assimilating the “universality” of the West. But in fact, he never rejected the fundamental coordinates of a region whose thinking was linked to the anguish derived from the complex of marginality. Cioran has summed up eloquently the coordinates of Fundoianu’s intellectual condition at the crossroads of two worlds: A paradise of neurasthenia, Moldavia is a province of an unendurable dreary charm; in 1936, I spent two weeks in Jassy, the capital, where if it had not been for alcohol I would have foundered in the most dissolving of depressions. Fundoianu loved to quote lines by Bacovia, the laureate of Moldavian ennui, a boredom less refined but much more corrosive than Baudelaire’s “spleen.” It is an enigma to me that so many people manage not to die of it. The experience of the “abyss” has, as we see, remote sources. (Anathemas 219)

The “remote sources,” which signify the otherness that the writer relentlessly tried to disguise through a change of topography, would dramatically haunt his destiny. While it would be perhaps exaggerated to speak of kindred spirits, Cioran and Fundoianu evinced striking similarities in their desire to conceal a never-forgotten beginning. Once in Paris, both declared their rootlessness and their lack of a single identity. They considered themselves citizens of the world, an identity that offered them the advantage of an involuntary aesthetic mediation between Eastern and Western Europe. The difference, though, is that while Cioran had no illusions about the Western powers of remedy against his ontological pessimism, Fundoianu continued to live in an incurable aporia: he would take seriously literature but seldom his own identity. The encounters with Lev Shestov and Martin Buber intensified his belief in an escape beyond the borders of identity or race. This is, perhaps, the meaning of Cioran’s description of Fundoianu’s understanding of literature as a discovery of the “concealed” and a “peregrination through souls much more than through doctrines” (Anathemas 220). What the Romanian-born French philosopher recognized in his ex-compatriot was the dynamic of the unhappy conscience of a modern spirit. Fundoianu was definitely “too wise to be unhappy,” but for the author of the La conscience malheureuse anxiety was a continuous form of existence. It was the anxiety of knowing that borders could always be crossed geographically but only at an exorbitant price. And Fundoianu did, indeed, undertake many crossings/transgressions that involved his whole existence in a complex and direct way. He was an existentialist in philosophy, but one for whom method mattered too little, if at all. His friendship with Shestov developed out of his philosophical apprenticeship with the Russian, and it had nothing to do with the systematic relationship between master and disciple. Fundoianu was eager to learn, but mainly by allowing himself to be permeated by mutual elective affinities. There were also ideological differences between the two, which were due, more than anything, to Fundoianu’s inclination to adapt

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Shestov’s Slavophile thinking and spiritualism to Western rational discourse. At the same time, Fundoianu dissociated the poetic act from systematic thinking. When he exploded poetic images in the manner of the Avant-garde and Surrealism, this reflected Shestov’s belief in the immanent transcendence of being rather than Fundoianu’s own theories. For Fundoianu, poetry embodied the practical side of philosophy, turning the idea of the transcendent into its manifestation. As stated by Aristotle and rephrased by Fundoianu, we are “citizens of social unhappiness” (zoon politikon) as much as of “human [existential] unhappiness.” Yet, according to Fundoianu, neither condition was to be rejected. There is a strong positive aspect to our existence that, despite adversities, should not be denied: beingness. Casting off the “evil” influence of ethics on philosophy, Fundoianu showed intellectual courage. He was not interested in “predicting” anything that was not related to the seriousness of being in its basic expression as existence. We can now better understand why Fundoianu’s “identities” relied heavily on poetry and philosophy as remedies transcending the empirical disorder of history. Poetry, as a pure linguistic manifestation, and philosophy as its rational extension, transform — and therefore perform — what history denies to life. Fundoianu’s entire life unfolded under the semantics of hostis, double signifier of the simultaneous condition of guest and enemy (see Derrida, Of Hospitability). From Romania to France, the two topographic poles of his existence, Fundoianu carried with him as a perpetual baggage the condition of a not-too-welcome guest. A stranger in Romania and a foreigner in France, a Jew in his native country and a concealed foreigner in the adopted one, he undertook a string of pilgrimages and experienced coincidences that would result in the final betrayal of hospitability that cut his life short. Although his hosts repeatedly broke the laws of hospitality, Fundoianu continued to expand the physical and spiritual boundaries of his life. Worries about the marginality of an East-European cultural identity, which pushed Fundoianu, Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Eugen Ionescu to seek a new linguistic territory, were compounded for Fundoianu by the need to conceal his other (Jewish) identity that made him unwelcome in the prejudiced Europe of the 1930s. Fundoianu nourished the illusion that his spiritual ethos could cancel his discriminated identity, but he was forced to accept the condition of hostility as befitting his obsession with regional transgressions. Ethos and pathos played an important role in his existence, which was dominated by significant events. And yet, as an existentialist philosopher he discarded the importance of facts and their positivistic implications. The philosopher seeks passions, not explanations to what happens around him. All forms of knowledge are valid for him as long as they are the outcome of a search; he does not accept the precise boundaries drawn by systems. The imperative of crossing boundaries is an existential choice since it stems from the mystical pulsations of life itself. No path should remain untrodden, no form of knowledge, including the nonknowing, should be banned from the philosopher’s “method.” Fundoianu rarely contradicted what he regarded as the inseparable experimentalism of his life and philosophy. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he was ready to incorporate in his attempts at a comprehensive universality even the mystical rhetoric of apophasis: “the nonknowing of the mystic is not ignorance, but a mode of knowing,” so that becoming “stupid” is also an “intellectual act” (Kluback 25). The freedom to live in despair is far from being a stylistic ruse for Fundoianu; it represents an ironic synthesis of his own existential search.

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As we have seen, the author of La conscience malheureuse did not believe that thinking — either in its “systematic” form or as the assumed anxiety of existence — should deal with the individual. Instead, it should strive for the universal understanding of what we really are, for a heroic nature that reaffirms Nietzsche’s claim: whatever does not kill us, makes us stronger. As a Jew, Fundoianu was justified to think that for him exile was the historic form of universality. His determination to overcome the accident of being born in a “marginal” space was exceeded only by his conviction that history cannot be corrected but only contemplated. In the light of these considerations, his writings appear to be attempting a synthesis of the main critical and philosophical contributions that undermine rational thinking. The work that defines this effort is without doubt La conscience malheureuse. Fundoianu’s essays on Nietzsche, Gide, Bergson, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Shestov explore the modern philosophical debate around the question summed up in his suggestively entitled “Préface pour l’Aujourd’hui” (Preface for Today): “What kind of philosopher is he who does not accept that freedom begins where knowledge ends?” (La conscience xxiv). Philosophy, according to Fundoianu, originated in an error: instead of prevailing, the ontological desire was stifled by the epistemological desire. The fear of being mise à nu (laid bare) as lacking knowledge overshadowed the organic necessity of living. Reminding his readers the axiomatic validity of primum vivere deinde philosophari (first live, then philosophize), Fundoianu emphasizes the wholeness (“totalité”) of both the biological and the metaphysical side of humanity. Since philosophy started with a fundamental mistake, we should not be surprised that modernity has become increasingly unhappy. However, La conscience malheureuse does not argue for the superiority of modern philosophy, nor does it imply that any philosopher will be able to mend philosophy’s persistent error. Nietzsche is the example of the philosopher who, unlike Heidegger, managed an important breakthrough beyond the bleak rationality of the previous philosophical ages. The merit of Nietzsche, according to Fundoianu, is to have espoused all ideas, not a single idea. My use of the verb “espouse” reflects Fundoianu’s analogy between the author of Zarathustra and Don Giovanni. Understanding philosophy as pursuit (“poursuite”), Nietzsche anticipated Cioran, for whom the major virtue of thinking is the failure of reaching a definite conclusion. Love and negation of love is the sign of the living philosopher, who knows that thinking begins with him and not abstract ideas. However, Nietzsche’s contribution was just one step toward the awareness of philosophy’s crisis embodied in the work of Shestov. Shestov’s position on the “margins” of traditional philosophy allowed Fundoianu to call into question traditional categories and hierarchies. The capital sin of philosophy, says Fundoianu in the wake of Shestov, is to replace life with discursive logic. Fundoianu would not have undertaken the role of the philosopher had he not been certain that the history of philosophy was fatally flawed. But it is not the historical failure of philosophy to prove unequivocal truths about life that eventually explains our tragic destiny. It is rather life itself or its absence that makes philosophy a simple exercise in sterile logic. For Fundoianu, the task of humanism, of any philosophy or discipline of thought worthy of such name, is the abolishment of the constraints that close off life. The task of philosophy, then, is to remove the obstacles erected in the name of morality. There is no morality, Fundoianu cries, other than the morality of life. Philosophy can become the highest form of political activity because it protests rather than dem-

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onstrate ex cathedra: “The sole goal of a genuine humanism will be to protest against constraint, against any kind of constraint” (La conscience 280). Fundoianu’s life is a proof and embodiment of this goal: protesting against the limitations of geography, ethnicity, and cultural and ideological frames that prevented free access to the universality of aesthetics. It was under the generous umbrella of aesthetics that Fundoianu sought to find a shelter from East-European nationalism. Instead of the local he pursued the universal in France. In Fundoianu’s view, France and the West represented the universality of the aesthetic that would eventually inspire also the East. He could not foresee, though, that another “universal” was looming on the horizon of both Western and Eastern Europe. His final betrayal by the French concierge at 6 rue Rollin and his deportation to Auschwitz brought to a dramatic end his idealistic project. Auschwitz enacted the last irony of Fundoianu’s life; it was to remind him that his marginality was proscribed. From different perspectives, the two halves of Europe redefined universality as “suffering.”

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Index of East-Central European Names Volume 2, Topographies

The following List includes only names from East-Central Europe. Contemporary scholars, unless discussed in the volume, are not included. A Abyzov, Yurii (b. 1921) 54 Aciman, André (b. 1950) 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88, 439, 443 Adalbert, Archbishop (939–997) 78 Adler, Viktor (1852–1918) 386 Adler, Yankl (1895–1949) 206, 208 Adson, Artur (1889–1977) 28, 34, Ady, Endre (1877–1919) 113, 170, 172, 173–174, 213, 232, 240, 242, 265, 266, 277, 336 Agârbiceanu, Ion (1882–1963) 265, 272 Agolli, Dritëro (b. 1931) 297, 298 Ágoston, Vilmos (b. 1947) 279 Ahad Ha’am [Asher Ginzberg] (1856–1927) 194, 195, 325, 326, 327 Ahmeti, Mimoza (b. 1963) 298 Aichelburg, Wolf von (1912–1994) 277 Aistis, Jonas (1904–1973) 25 Aizman, David Iakovlevich (1869–1922) 198 Albert, Michael (1836–1893) 250 Alecsandri, Vasile (1818/1821– 1890) 71, 429 Aleykhem, Sholem. See Sholem Alexandru cel Bun [Alexander the Good] (r. 1400–1432) 61 Alexandru, Ioan (1941–2000) 280 Alexandrov, Todor (1881–1924) 359 Alexis, Willibald (1798–1871) 156 Altman, Moshe (1890–1981) 77

Altman, Natan Isaevich (1889– 1970) 198 Alver, Betti [Elisabet Alver/Talvik] (1906–1989) 34 Amster, Moritz (1831–1903) 65 Ancelāne, Alma (1910–1991) 40 Andreyanov, Viktor von (1857– 1895) 44 Andrić, Ivo (1892–1975) 3, 219, 237 Annist, August (1899–1972) 31 An-Ski, Semen [Solomon Akimovitch Rappaport] (1863– 1920) 24, 187, 198, 206, 327 Antokolski, Mark (1843–1902) 24, 187, 198 Antonescu, Ion (1882–1946) 74, 215, 276 Apafi, Mihály (1632–1690) 251 258 Appelfeld, Aharon (b. 1932) 72 Apostu, George (1934–1980) 431 Áprily, Lajos [Jékely] (1887– 1967) 267, 271, 272 Arany, János (1817–1882) 170, 173, 247–248, 251 Arany, László (1844–1898) 171 Arapi, Fatos (b. 1930) 297, 298 Arapi, Lindita (b. 1972) 298 Aronson, Boris (1898–1980) 191 Asachi, Gheorghe (1788–1869) 248 Asch, Sholem (1880–1957) 184, 186, 198, 200, 202, 204–205, 330 Aspazija [Elza Rosenberga] (1868–1943) 53

Ausländer, Rose (1901–1988) 57, 58, 59, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76 Azarova, Lyudmila (b. 1922) 53 B Ba’al Shem Tov, Israel ben Eliezer (1700–1760) 317 Babel, Isaac Emmanuelovich (1894–1941) 198, 327 Babeş, Victor (1854–1926) 277, 282 Babeţi, Adriana (b. 1949) 4, 10, 118, 124 Babits, Mihály (1883–1941) 172, 173, 232, 240, 266, 271, 274, 275, 334 Babljak, Volodymyr (1916–1970) 75 Bachyns’kyi, Iuliian (1870–1940) 421 Baconsky, A[natol] E[milian] (1925–1977) 279 Bacovia, George (1881–1957) 106, 448 Bădescu, Horia (b. 1943) 279 Bagritsky [Dzubin], Eduard Georgiyevich (1895–1934) 198 Bahrianyi, Ivan [Ivan Lozoviahyn] (1907–1963) 416, 417, 420, 421, 423, 425–426 Bajza, József (1804–1858) 163, 164 Balabanov, Marko Dimitrov (1837–1921) 400, 403, 409, 410, 411, 412 Balázs, Béla (1884–1949) 169, 172, 174

496 Bălcescu, Nicolae (1819–1852) 242, 252, 259 Bálint, Tibor (1932–2002) 281 Bal’mont, Konstantin Dmitrevich (1867–1942) 50 Balotă, Nicolae (b. 1925) 277, 278 Bánffy, György (1660–1708) 257 Bánffy, Miklós (1873–1950) 253, 265, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272 Bănulescu, Ştefan (b. 1929) 101–102, 116, 223, 237, 239 Barac, Ioan Popovici (1776–1848) 257–258 Barańczak, Stanisław (b. 1946) 436 Baratov, Paul (?–?) 66 Barbu, Ion [Dan Barbilian] (1895–1961) 444 Bardhi, Pashko (1870–1948) 296 Bariţiu, Gheorghe (1812–1893) 258, 260, 262 Barka, Vasyl’ Kostyantynovych (1908–2003) 376, 416 Bărnuţiu, Simion (1808–1864) 256 Bart, Jean [Eugeniu P. Botez] (1874–1933) 223–224 Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) 5, 172, 173, 242, 275, 279 Basanavičius, Jonas (1851–1927) 22, 23 Basha, Eqrem (b. 1948) 300 Báthori [Báthory], Gábor (1589– 1613) 251, 252 Báthori [Báthory], István (1533– 1586) 252 Báthori [Báthory], Zsgmond (1572–1613) 252 Bazhans’kyi, Mykhailo (b. 1910) 416–417 Bazlen, Robert [Bobi] (1900– 1965) 154, 156 Beckermann, Ruth (b. 1952) 58 Bellu, Pavel (1920–1988) 260 Belotsvetov, Sergei (1873–1938) 49–50 Belšēvitsa, Vizma (b. 1931) 53 Bem, Józef Zachariasz [Bem József] (1794–1850) 226, 259

Index of East-Central European Names Benco, Silvio (1874–1949) 148 Benedek, Marcell (1885–1969) 275, 276 Beniuc, Mihai (1907–1988) 277 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer (1858–1922) 329 Berde, Mária (1889–1949) 259, 274, 275 Berdichewski, M[icah] J[oseph] (1865–1921) 195 Berezhan, Zinovii [Zinovii Shtokalko] (1920–1968) 417 Berdyaev, Nikolai (1874–1948) 50 Berg, Lotte (1907–1981) 72 Bergelson, Dovid (1884–1952) 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, 193, 205, 321–323 Berkowitz, Yitzhak Dov (1885– 1967) 203, 205 Berlewi, Henryk (1894–1967) 207, 208 Berner, Felix (b. 1918) 155 Berzsenyi, Dániel (1776–1836) 173 Bethlen, Gábor (1580–1629) 250, 251 Bialik, Chayim Nachman (1873–1934) 187, 194, 195, 203, 206, 329 Bibesco, Antoine [Anton Bibescu] (1878–1951) 430 Bibesco, Princess Marthe Lucie Lahovary [Martha Bibescu] (1889–1973) 429, 430 Bibó, István (1911–1979) 175 Birnbaum, Nathan (1864–1937) 65, 326 Birou, Virgil (1903–1968) 113 Biržiška, Mykolas [Michał Birżyszka] (1882–1962) 23 Blaga, Lucian (1895–1961) 106, 113, 249–250, 260, 267–268, 269, 272, 274, 276–277, 279, 270, 280, 282 Blandiana, Ana [Otilia ComanRusan] (b. 1942) 280 Blaskov, Iliya (1839–1913) 139

Blaumanis, Rūdolfs (1863–1908) 44, 45 Bleyer, Jakob (1874–1933) 226 Blum, Clara [Dshu Bail-lan] (1904–1971) 72, 76 Bobchev, Stefan (1853–1940) 141 Bobkowski, Andrzej (1913–1961) 435 Boborykin, Petr Dmitrievich (1836–1921) 50 Bocskai, István (1557–1606) 252 Bogatyrev, Petr (1893–1971) 177, 178 Bogdani, Archbishop Pjetër (c. 1630–1689) 284 Bogorov, Ivan (1820–1892) 132, 133, 134, 405 Bogrov, Grigorii Isaakovitch (1825–1885) 327 Bolesław I Chrobry [the Brave] (966/967–1025) 351 Boleslav V, Prince (1243–1279) 315 Bolintineanu, D[imitrie] (c. 1825–1872) 248 Bolliac, Cezar (1813–1881) 429 Bölöni Farkas, Sándor (1795– 1842) 259 Bolyai, János (1802–1860) 277, 282 Borowczyk, Walerian (b. 1923) 436 Bossert, Rolf (1952–1986) 115, 121 Bostan, Grigore (b. 1940) 75 Botev, Khristo [Hristo] (1848– 1876) 95, 141, 142, 238, 361, 362–363, 391, 393, 396, 398, 400, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 409, 412, 413 Brad, Ion (b. 1929) 253 Brăiloiu, Constantin (1893–1958) 275 Brancato, Nicolò (1675–1741) 284 Brâncoveanu, Constantin, Prince of Walachia (1654–1714) 238, 429

Index of East-Central European Names Brâncuşi, Constantin [Brancusi] (1876–1957) 106, 431 Brandys, Kazimierz (1916–2000) 436 Brătianu, Dumitru [Dimitrie] (1817–1892) 242 Brătianu, Ion C. (1821–1891) 428, 429 Brauner, Victor (1903–1966) 431 Brazdžionis, Bernardas (1907– 2002) 26 Breban, Nicolae (b. 1934) 115 Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956) 35, 121 Bretter, György (1932–1977) 279 Broderzon, Moshe (1890–1956) 206, 207, 208 Brodsky, Joseph (1940–1996) 2, 27, 85, 199, 380, 381, 436 Bruckenthal, Samuel von (1721– 1803) 258 Brunner, Constantin (1862–1937) 66 Brušák, Karel (b. 1913) 177 Bržan, Alferija (b. 1947) 365, 367–368, 370 Budai-Deleanu, Ioan (c. 1760– 1820) 60, 252, 255, 259, 260 Budberg, baron (?–1945) 46 Bulfinski, Ronald (?–?) 66 Bulgarin, Faddei (1789–1859) 22 Bułhak, Jan (1876–1950) 22 Bulhardt, Franz Johannes (1914– 1998) 276 Bunczuk, Borys (b. 1955) 75 Burg, Joseph (b. 1912) 72 Burian E[mil] F[rantišek] (1904– 1959) 177, 178, 180, 182 Burian, Jarka (b. 1927) 177 Buzura, Augustin (b. 1938) 280 C Cahan, Abraham (1860–1951) 186 Čaks, Aleksandrs [Aleksandrs Čadarainis] (1901–1950) 48–49, 52 Călinescu, George (1899–1965) 98, 99, 238, 239

Calinescu [Călinescu], Matei (b. 1934) 304, 314, 432 Canetti, Elias (1905–1994) 66, 78, 237, 238 Cankar, Ivan (1876–1918) 159 Cantoni, Ettore (1888–1927) 151 Čapek, Karel (1890–1938) 176, 180 Caragiale, Ion Luca (1852–1912) 99, 100, 238, 262 Caragiale, Mateiu I. (1885–1936) 100–101, 239 Čarnojević, Arsenije III (1633– 1706) 228 Carol I, King of Romania (1839–1914) 217 Cărtărescu, Mircea (b. 1956) 102 Casimir IV, King of Poland (1447–1492) Catherine II or Catherine the Great [Sophie Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst] (1729–1796) 21 Ceauşescu, Nicolae (1918–1989) 102, 103, 106, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 223, 227, 250, 253, 278, 280, 281, 432 Celan, Paul (1920–1970) 57, 58, 60, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 282, 326 Chernov, Igor (b. 1943) 38 Chagall, Marc (1887–1985) 198, 319, 323 Chaplenko, Vasyl (1900–1990) 421 Chatzopoulos, Kōnstantinos (1868–1920) 130 Chelariu, Traian (1906–1966) 67 Chelaru, Ion (1937–1994) 72 Chernyi, Aleksandr (1880–1932) 50 Cheshikhin [Vertinskii], Vsevolod Evgrafovich (1865–1934) 44–45, 46 Chetta, Nicola (1740–1803) 284 Chilaru, Ion (?–?) 75 Chinezu, Ion (1894–1966) 273

497 Chinezul, Pavel, Count of Timişoara (r. 1478–1494) 108 Chinnov, Igor (1909–1996) 50 Chintulov, Dobri (1822–1886) 141 Chodowiecki, Daniel (1726–1801) 81 Chomakov, Stoyan (1819–1893) 404, 405, 409, 410 Chopin, Frédéric [Fryderyk] (1810–1849) 434 Chvatík, Květoslav (b. 1930) 179 Chwin, Stefan (b. 1949) 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88–91, 92 Cialente, Fausta (1898–1994) 161 Ciobanu, Radu (b. 1935) 253 Ciocârlie, Livius (b. 1935) 115, 116–118, 124 Cioran, E[mil] M. (1911–1995) 78, 93, 241, 375, 431, 432, 436–440, 442, 443, 444, 448, 449, 450 Cipariu, Timotei (1805–1887) 260 Cisek, Oskar Walter (1897–1966) 276 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas (1875–1911) 22, 23 Codrescu, Andrei [Perlmutter] (b. 1946) 282 Codru-Drăguşanu, Ion (1818– 1884) 261 Conrad, Joseph [Teodor Josef Konrad Watęcz Korzeniowski] (1857–1924) 376 Constantin, Ilie (b. 1939) 432 Constantine of Berat (c. 1745–c. 1825) 289 Constantinescu, Pompiliu (1901–1946) 275 Coresi, Deacon (1510–1581) 258 Coşbuc, George (1866–1918) 249, 263, 264, 272, 280 Cotruş, Aron (1891–1957) 264–265 Cotruş, Ovidiu (1926–1977) 277 Craigher, Jacob Nikolaus (1797– 1855) 156 Crainic, Nichifor (1889–1972) 266, 271, 272

498 Crnjanski, Miloš (1893–1977) 112, 214, 219–220, 227, 228, 237 Csáth, Géza [József Brenner] (1887–1919) 172, 231 Csejka, Gerhardt (b. 1945) 278 Csengery, Antal (1822–1880) 168 Cseres, Tibor (1915–1993) 231 Csontváry Kostka, Tivadar (1853–1919) 173 Curie-Skłodowska, Maria (1867–1934) 434 Cvijić, Jovan (1865–1927) 334 Czartoryski, Prince Adam Jerzy (1770–1861) 345, 434 Czeczot, Jan (1796–1847) 21 D Daghani, Arnold (1909–1985) 69, 73–74 Daicoviciu, Constantin (1898– 1973) 246, 250 Damian, Horia (b. 1922) 431 Daniel of Voskopoja (Master Daniel, Dhanil Haxhiu) (1754–1825) 289 Dan, Pavel (1907–1937) 268 Dans’kyi, O. [Danylo Chaikovs’kyi] (1909–1972) 416 Dantiscus, Johannes [Johann von Hoefen, Jan Dantyszek] (1485–1548) 78 Däubler, Theodor (1876–1934) 156 Daukantas, Simonas [Szymon Dowkont] (1793–1864) 20, 23 Daukša, Mikalojus [Mikołaj Dauksza] (c. 1527–1613) 18 Davidović, Dimitrije (1789–1838) 165, 166 Deglavs, Avgusts (1862–1922) 42–44, 56 Delchev, Gotse (1872–1903) 361 Demaçi, Adem (b. 1936) 299 De Martino, Leonardo (1830– 1923) 294 Demczenko, Vitalij (b. 1937) 75 Demolli, Arif (b. 1949) 300

Index of East-Central European Names Densuşianu, Nicolae [Nicolae Pop] (1846–1911) 249 De Rada, Girolamo (1814–1903) 284–285 Deretić, Jovan (b. 1934) 230 Der Nister [Pinkhas Kahanovich] (1884–1950) 184, 190 Déryné, Róza Széppataki (1793– 1872) 165 Derzhavyn, Volodymyr (1899– 1964) 420, 423 Despot Vodă, Prince of Moldavia (r. 1561–1563) 236 Deutscher, Isaac (1907–1967) 184 Dianu, Romulus (1905–1975) 275 Dik, Ayzik Meyir (1814–1893) 185 Dinezon, Jacob (1856–1919) 203 Dingelstedt, Franz (1814–1881) 156 Döbrentei, Gábor (1786–1851) 258 Dobrushin, Yekheskel (1883– 1953) 191 Doinaş, Ştefan Augustin (1922– 2002) 268, 277, 280 Domokos, Géza (b. 1928) 278, 279, 282 Dones, Elvira (b. 1960) 298 Dontsov, Dmytro (1883–1973) 414, 415, 422, 424 Dor, Milo [Milutin Doroslovac] (b. 1932) 158 Dózsa, György [Gheorghe Doja] (?–1514) 250, 253 Drach, Josef (1883–1940?) 57–58 Drăgan, Iosif Constantin (b. 1911) 250 Drăgescu, Ioachim C. (1844–1915) 253 Drėma, Vladas (1910–1995) 25 Drumev, Vasil (1840–1901) 139 Drozdowski, Georg (1899–1987) 57, 58, 72 Dsida, Jenő (1907–1938) 266, 271, 272 Dubnov, Shimon (1860–1941) 198, 326–327

Dukagjini, Jahja bej (Dukaginzâde Yahyâ bey, or Taşlicali Yahyâ) (?–1575) 286 Dumitrescu, Natalia (b. 1915) 431 E Ebner–Eschenbach, Marie von (1830–1916) 344, 345–349, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356 Eenpalu, Karl (1888–1942) 31 Eftimiu, Victor (1889–1972) 275 Ehrenburg, Ilya [Il’ia Grigor’evich Erenburg] (1891–1967) 178, 199, 327 Ehrenkranz, Jehuda (?–?) 66 Ehrlich, Eugen (1862–1922) 71 Eikenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich (1886–1959) 198 Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986) 99, 223, 250, 430, 431, 432, 449 Eminescu, Mihai [Eminovici] (1850–1889) 58, 71, 72, 76, 112, 113, 223, 249, 263, 429 Eötvös, József (1813–1871) 170 Ērmanis, Pēteris (1893–1969) 48 Esterházy, Péter (b. 1950) 175, 214, 222, 227, 228, 237 Ettinger, Solomon (1803–1856) 330 Eysymont, Jan (1577–1610) 18 Ezera, Regīna (b. 1930) 53 F Faehlman, Friedrich Robert (1798–1850) 29 Falk, Robert Rafailovich (1886– 1958) 198 Farkas, Árpád (b. 1944) 279 Fed’kovych, Osip Yurii (1834– 1888) 65, 70, 71 Fefer, Itsik (1900–1952) 192, 193 Feigmane, Tatyana Dimitrievna (b. 1952) 54 Ferenczi, Sándor (1873–1933) 172 Feuerberg, Mordecai Ze‘ev (1874–1899) 329 Figlia, Nicola (1693–1769) 284 Finkel, Leonid (b. 1938) 75

Index of East-Central European Names Fischbejn, Mojsej (b. 1946) 75 Fishta, Gjergj (1871–1940) 296 Flămând, Dinu (b. 1947) 279 Flinker, Robert (1906–1945) 73 Fogel, Dvoreh (1902–1942) 208 Fomenko, Valerij (1947–1993) 75 Fontane, Theodor (1819–1898) 156 Forgács, Péter (b. 1950) 227 Frakulla, Nezim (Nezim Berati, or Ibrahim Nezimi) (c. 1680– 1760) 287 Franko, Ivan (1856–1916) 354, 419 Franz Joseph [Josef], Emperor (1830–1916) 63, 261, 317, 352, 386, 387, 389 Franzos, Karl Emil (1848–1904) 58, 62, 65, 71, 110, 354–355 Franyó, Zoltán (1887–1963) 113 Frashëri, Abdyl (1839–1892) 291 Frashëri, Naim (1846–1900) 291–292 Frashëri, Sami [Şemseddin Sâmî Bey Frashëri] (1850–1904) 291, 292–293 Fredro, Aleksander (1793–1876) 434 Frejka, Jiří (1904–1952) 179, 180 Frishman, David (1859–1922) 203 Frug, Semen (1860–1916) 197 Fučík, Julius (1872–1943) 181 Fundoianu/Fondane [Wexler], Benjamin/Barbu (1898–1944) 375, 431, 443–451 Furnadzhiev, Nikola (1903–1968) 142 G Gaál, Gábor (1891–1954) 266, 269, 276, 277, 279 Gadjanski, Ivan (b. 1937) 241 Gaj, Ljudevit (1809–1872) 164, 167 Galaction, Gala (1879–1961) 237, 239, 241 Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons (1905–1953) 25

Galich [Goncharenko], Yurii (1877–1940) 50 Galkovsky, Konstantin (1875– 1963) 23 Gallasz, Nándor (1893–1949) 113 Gambini, Pier Antonio Quarantotti (1910–1965) 154 Ganelin, Vyacheslav (b. 1944) 27 Gárdonyi, Géza (1863–1922) 171 Gediminas [Gedym Gedimynas], Grand Duke (abt. 1260–1341) 11, 14, 15, 18, 19 Gelley, Alexander (b. 1940) 10, 94, 115, 139 Genovich, Nicola (1864–73) 400, 405, 407 Germanus, Gyula (1884–1979) 275 Gerov, Konstantin (?–?) 129 Gerov, Naiden (1823–1900) 129, 140, 142 Gessen, I[osif] V[ladimirovich] (1866–1943) 198 Gheorghiu, Virgil (1903–1977) 431 Ghica, Ion (1816–1897) 429 Ghica, Prince Gheorghe (1600– 1664) 252 Ghica, Prince Grigore III (r. 1768–1769) 62 Giedroyć, Jerzy (1906–2000) 435, 436 Ginkas, Kama (b. 1941) 27 Ginzburg, Evgeniia Semenovna (1906–1977) 52 Ginzburg, Saul M. (1866–1940) 195–196, 198 Giotti, Virgilio (1885–1957) 149 Giurgiuca, Emil (1908–1992) 264 Gjerqeku, Enver (b. 1928) 300 Glik, Hirsh (1922–1944) 188 Gnessin, Uri Nissan (1870–1913) 205, 329 Gociu, Simeon (b. 1949) 75 Goga, Octavian (1881–1938) 113, 163, 170, 263, 264, 272, 275, 277 Gogol, Nikolay Vasilyevich (1809–1852) 321, 426

499 Gojdu, Emanuil [Gozsdu Manó] (1802–1870) 163 Goldfaden, Abraham [Avrom] (1840–1908) 65, 211, 330, 331 Goldschläger, Regine (1888–1965) 72 Goldziher, Ignác (1850–1921) 169 Gołuchowski, Agenor (1812– 1875) 350, 355–356 Goma, Paul (b. 1935) 432 Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–1969) 375, 435, 436, 437, 440–443 Gong, Alfred (1920–1981) 59–60, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75 Gordon, Judah Leib (1831–1892) 186 Gorenshtein, F[ridrikh] (b. 1932) 200 Gött, Johann (?–?) 258 Gottlober, Abraham Baer (1811– 1899) 330 Gozsdu, Elek (1849–1919) 170 Grade, Chaim (1910–1982) 187, 188 Grass, Günter (b. 1927) 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85–88, 89, 91, 92 Grazie, Marie Eugenie delle (1864–1931) 227 Gregor, Joseph (1888–1960) 58, 67 Gregory of Voskopoja [Gregory of Durrës] (?–1772) 283–284 Greenberg, Uri Zvi (1896–1981) 206, 207–208 Grillparzer, Franz Seraphicus (1791–1872) 72, 155, 156 Grosbard, Hertz (?–?) 66 Grosz, Georg (1893–1959) 338 Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich (1905–1964) 199 Grozescu, Iulian (1838–1872) 261 Gruber, Jona (1908–1980) 72, 75 Gruev, Ioakim (1828–1912) 129 Grün, Anastasius (1806–1876) 156 Gurakuqi, Luigj (1879–1925) 295 Gusti, Dimitrie (1880–1955) 273 Guzzetta, Giorgio (1682–1756)

500 Gyulai, Pál (1826–1909) 169, 260–261 H Ha’am. See Ahad Ha’am Hadžić, Jovan [Miloš Svetić] (1799–1869) 165 Hadzikonstantinov-Jinot, Jordan (1818–1882) 141 Halkin, Shmuel (1897–1960) 192, 204 Haller, Gábor (1685–1723) 258 Haller, László (1717–1751) 258 Halpern, Moyshe-Leyb (1886– 1932) 330 Haltrich, Josef (1822–1886) 260 Hamid I, Sultan Abdul [Turk: äbdül ‘hämēd’] (1725–1789) 62 Hamuljak, Martin (1789–1859) 167 Hanka, Václav (1791–1861) 359 Harapi, Anton (1888–1946) 296 Harkavy, Albert (1835–1919) 198 Harsányi, Kálmán (1876–1929) 171 Harteneck, Johann Zabanius Sachs von (1664–1703) 254, 265 Hašek, Jaroslav (1883–1923) 177, 181, 220, 380, 381, 385, 386–388 Hauser, Arnold (1892–1978) 113, 120 Havel, Václav (b. 1936) 7, 182, 382 Haxhifilipi, Todhri [Dhaskal Todhri] (c. 1730–1805) 289 Hegedušić, Krsto (1901–1975) 338 Heifetz, Jasha (1901–1987) 24 Heliade Rădulescu, Ion (1802– 1871) 429 Heltai, Gáspár (c. 1520–1575) 258 Hennoste, Tiit (b. 1953) 31 Herbert, Zbigniew (1924–1998) 88, 92 Herczeg, Ferenc (1863–1954) 120, 170, 172, 227 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw (1919–2000) 435

Index of East-Central European Names Hertz, Zofia (1911–2003) 436 Hervay, Gizella (1934–1982) 282 Herzl, Theodore [Binyamin Ze’ev] (1860–1904) 157, 327 Hevelius, Johannes (1611–1687) 78, 87 Hilsenrath, Edgar (b. 1926) 58, 60, 69, 73 Hint, Mati (b. 1937) 36 Hirshbeyn, Peretz (1880–1948) 204 Hlavka, Joseph (b. 1927) 63 Hochmeister, Martin (?–1789) 256 Hodjak, Franz (b. 1944) 278, 282 Hoffmann, Leopold Alois (1748–1806) 162 Hofman, Vlastislav (1884–1964) 177, 178–179 Hofshteyn, Dovid (1889–1952) 184, 190, 191 Hohenberger, Paul (1840–?) 156 Holban, Anton (1902–1937) 97 Hollý, Ján (1785–1849) 164 Honterus, Johannes (1498–1548) 254, 258, 265 Honzl, Jindřich (1894–1953) 177, 178, 179, 180, 181 Horea [Vasile Ursu Nicola] (1730–1985) 250, 253, 260, 265, 268, 269 Hordynsky, Sviatoslav (1907– 1993) 415, 417 Horia, Vintilă (1915–1992) 376 Horonchik, Shimon (1889–1939) 205 Horowitz, Abraham Ben Shabbetai Sheftel (c. 1550–1615) 316 Horthy, Miklós (1868–1957) 215, 269, 281 Horváth, István (1784–1846) 165 Horváth, János (1878–1961) 173 Hoxha, Enver (1908–1985) 296 Hrabal, Bohumil (1914–1997) 81 Hrynevycheva, Katria (1875– 1947) 417 Huelle, Paweł (b. 1957) 77, 78, 79, 80–85, 87, 88, 91, 92

Humenna, Dokiya (1904–1996) 417, 425 Hupel, A[ugust] W[ilhelm] (1737–1819) 41 Hurmuzachi, Alexandru (1823– 1871) 64 Hurmuzachi, George (1817–1882) 64 Hussovianus, Nicolaus (c. 1475–after 1533) 17–18 I Iancu, Avram (1824–1872) 250, 259, 260 Iancu [Janco, Ianco], Marcel (1895–1984) 431 Ierunca, Virgil (b. 1920) 432 Igel, Eliezer Elijah (?–?) 65 Ignjatović, Jakov (1822–1889) 163, 229, 230 Ikonomov, Teodosii (1836–1871) 141 Ilf [Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzil’berg] (1897–1937) 198 Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera (1892–1983) 276 Illyés, Gyula (1902–1983) 274 Ilyin, Ivan (1883–1954) 50 Indrieş, Alexandra (1936–1993) 115 Ionescu, Eugen [Eugène Ionesco] (1909–1994) 93, 240–241, 243, 431, 432, 449 Ionescu, Nae (1890–1940) 105 Iorga, Nicolae (1871–1940) 60, 93, 104, 105, 240, 250, 253, 273 Iorgovici, Paul (1764–1808) 107, 111 Isac, Emil (1886–1954) 264, 273 Isserles, Moses ben Israel (1525–1572) 316 Istrati, Panait (1884–1935) 223, 224, 237, 238, 239 Iushkevich, Semyon [Semen] (1868–1927) 198 Iványi, Ödön (1859–1893) 171 Ivasiuc, Alexandru (1937–1977) 280

Index of East-Central European Names Ivassjuk, Mykhajlo (1917–1995) 75 Ivassjuk, Volodymyr (1949–1979) 77 Izvorski, Stefan (1815–1875) 140 J Jaffe, Lev [Leyb] (1876–1948) 198 Jakobson, C[arl] R[obert] (1841– 1882) 29–30 Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982) 177, 178, 181, 198 Jankowski, Czesław (1857–1929) 22 Jannsen, J[ohann] W[oldemar] (1819–1890) 29 Jászi, Oszkár (1875–1957) 171, 172, 174, 217, 269 Jefremov, Serhii (1876–1939) 419 Jeleński, Konstanty A. [Jelenski, Constantin] (1922–1987) 435 Jesenská, Milena (1896–1944) 384 Jókai, Mór (1825–1904) 169, 224, 225, 229, 237, 251, 260, 263 Joseph II, Emperor (1741–1790) 60, 110, 154, 157, 162, 163, 229 Jósika, Miklós (1794–1865) 251, 252, 254, 259, 260 József, Attila (1905–1937) 237, 239, 241, 247, 281 Jurinčič, Edelman (b. 1952) 365, 367, 370 K Kacyzne, Alter (1885–1941) 206 Kadare, Ismail (b. 1936) 237, 297–298 Kaffka, Margit (1880–1918) 112, Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 73, 85, 115, 147, 154, 179, 184, 281, 325, 327, 376, 380, 381, 382, 384–385, 422, 443 Kaindl, Raimund Freidrich (1866–1930) 60, 77 Kairiūkštis, Jurgis (1890–1961) 25 Kalandra, Záviš (1902–1950) 181, 182 Kallas, Oskar (1868–1946) 29

Kalmer, Josef (1898–1959) 72 Kamberi, Hasan Zyko (second half of 18th c. – beg. of 19th) 287 Kaminska, Ida (1899–1980) 211, 212 Kangro, Bernard (1910–1994) 32, 34, 35 Kanovich, Grigory [Iakov] (b. 1929) 27, 200 Kányádi, Sándor (b. 1929) 279 Kapor, Momo (b. 1937) 223 Kappeler, Andreas (b. 1943) 74 Karađorđe Petrović (1768–1817) 165 Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović (1787– 1864) 165, 166, 334 Karavelov, Lyuben (1834–1879) 126, 135, 136–137, 139, 238, 391, 392, 393, 396, 397, 398– 399, 400, 401, 402, 403–404, 406, 409–410, 412–413 Karinthy, Frigyes (1887–1938) 169 Károly Róbert [Charles Robert of Anjou] (1315–1323) 108 Karpowicz, Michał Franciszek (1744–1803) 18 Kassák, Lajos (1887–1967) 120, 171, 172, 173, 174 Katsenelson, Yitskhok (1886– 1944) 206, 208 Katz, Leo (1892–1954) 76 Kaush, Vasilii (?–?) 44 Kavalioti, Theodhor [Theodôros Anastasios Ka-balliôtês] (c. 1718–1789) 289 Kavolis, Vytautas (1930–1996) 17 Kazimierz III the Great, King of Poland (1310–1370) 87 Kazinczy, Ferenc (1759–1831) 165, 173 Kelmendi, Ramiz (b.1930) 300 Kemal, Namik (1840–1888) 292 Kemény, János (1903–1971) 271, 277 Kemény, Zsigmond (1814–1875) 168, 251–252, 258, 260, 261, 262

501 Keren, Else (b. 1924) 69, 72 Kertész, André (1894–1985) 228 Kertész, Imre (b. 1929) 175 Kerzhentsev, Platon Mikhailovich (1881–1940) 179 Kette, Dragotin (1876–1899) 159 Khashtshvatski, Moshe (1897– 1943) 192 Khodasevich, Vladimir (1886– 1939) 50 Khvyl’ovyi, Mykola [Mykola Fitilev] (1893–1933) 416, 417, 424–425, 426 Kikoine, Michel (1892–1968) 187 Kipnis, Itzik (1896–1974) 193 Kipper, Heinrich (1875–1959) 72 Kirkov, Dimitar (b. 1942) 138 Kiš, Danilo (1935–1989) 124, 231, 232, 237, 241–243, 334, 335, 340–343 Kisfaludy, Károly (1788–1830) 164, 165, 263 Kisfaludy, Sándor (1772–1844) 164 Kiss, József (1843–1921) 170 Kittner, Alfred (1906–1991) 68, 69, 73, 74, 75 Kivastik, Mart (b. 1963) 33 Klausner, Josef, Dr. (1874–1958) 203 Klein-Haparasch, Jakob (1897– 1970) 73 Klen, Iurii [Oswald Burghardt] (1891–1947) 376, 416, 417, 421, 425, 426 Kletskin, Boris Arkadyevitsh (1875–1937) 186 Klima, Ivan (b. 1931) 124 Klochkov, Mikhail Vasil’evich (1887–?) 50 Klug, Alfred (1883–1944) 72 Kóbor, Tamás (1867–1942) 171 Kobylyans’ka, Ol’ha (1863–1942) 58, 66, 70–71, 72, 74 Kocjančič, Alojz (1913–1991) 365, 366, 367, 370, 372 Kodály, Zoltán (1882–1967) 242

502 Koestler, Arthur (1905–1983) 87, 342, 343 Kogălniceanu, Mihail (1817–1891) 248–249, 429 Kolas, Jakub (1882–1956) 22 Kölcsey, Ferenc (1790–1838) 173 Kollár, Ján (1793–1852) 164, 167–168 Kolnik, Arthur (1890–1972) 66 Kolodij, Vitalij (b. 1939) 75 Komarianos, D. (?–?) 143 Kommer, Rudolf K. (1888–1943) 67 Konrád, György [George] (b. 1933) 175, 222, 242, 343, 379–380, 385 Konstantinov, Aleko (1863–1897) 362 Konwicki, Tadeusz (b. 1926) 26 Kopitar, Jernej (1780–1844) 248, 333, 334 Kõpp, Johan (1874–1970) 35 Koppel, Heinrich (1863–1944) 29 Korais, Adamantios (1748–1833) 130, 131 Kormchii, L[eonard] (1875–?) 50 Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktinonovich (1853–1921) 197 Kőrösi Csoma, Sándor (1784– 1842) 256 Kós, Károly (1883–1977) 251, 267, 269, 271, 272, 273 Kosach, Iurii (1909–?) 420, 422, 424, 426, 427 Kościuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817) 18, 351 Kosovel, Srečko (1904–1926) 159 Kossuth, Lajos (1802–1894) 168, 217, 225, 242, 259 Kostets’kyi, Ihor [Ivan Merzliakov] (1913–1983) 420, 422, 426, 427 Kostyuk, H[ryhorii] (1902–?) 424 Kosztolányi, Dezső (1885–1936) 170, 172, 173–174, 231, 232 Kótsi Patkó, János (1763–1842) 256

Index of East-Central European Names Kotzebue, Wilhelm von (1813– 1887) 163, 165, 256 Kovač, Mirko (b. 1938) 333 Koval, Vasyl [Vasyl Kuk] (1913–?) 416 Kozeljanko, Vassyl (b. 1960) 75 Kraft, Arthur (1897–1942) 69 Král, Petr (b. 1945) 436 Krasiński, Zygmunt Sigismund (1812–1859) 352, 434 Krastevich, Gavril (1817–1898) 393 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy (1812–1887) 20 Kravtsiv, Bohdan (1904–1978) 417 Kremegne, Pinchas (1890–1981) 187 Kremer, Arkady [Aaron, “Alexander”] (1865–1935) 186 Kreutzwald, F[riedrich] R[einhold] (1803–1882) 29 Kreytman, Ester (1891–1954) 210 Kriza, János (1811–1875) 260–261 Krleža, Miroslav (1893–1981) 213, 214, 217, 219, 220, 221–222, 237, 239, 241–242, 334, 335–340, 341, 342, 343 Kross, Jaan (b. 1920) 31, 32 Krúdy, Gyula (1878–1933) 166, 172, 173 Kruus, Oskar (b. 1929) 32 Krym, Anatolij (b. 1946) 75 Kugy, Julius (1858–1944) 156 Kukk, Jüri (1940–1981) 36 Kulbak, Moshe (1896–1940) 187 Kulish, Mykola (1892–1937?) 417 Kullurioti, Anastas (1822–1887) 290–291 Kuncz, Aladár (1885–1931) 267, 270, 271 Kundera, Milan (b. 1929) 2, 180, 182, 222, 227, 243, 343, 377, 380–384, 385 Kupala, Janka (1882–1942) 22, 23 Kurti, Donat (1903–1969) 296 Kurz, Anton (1799–1849) 258

Kushnirov, Aaron (1890–1949) 192 Kuśniewicz, Andrzej (1904–1993) Kvitko, Leyb (1890–1952) 191, 193 Kyçyku, Muhamet (1784–1844) Kyselak, Josef (1795–1831) 217, 220 L Laar, Mart (b. 1960) 36 Lam, Jan (1838–1886) 344, 349–355, 356 Lăncrănjan, Ion (1928–1991) 277, 281 Laske, Oskar (1874–1951) 66 Lászlóffy, Aladár (b. 1937) 279 Lastouski, Václav (1883–1938) 22 Latzina, Anemone (1942–1993) 278, 279, 282 Lauer, Kamillo (1887–1966) 73 Laufer, Siegfried (1908–1933) 73 Lavrinenko, Iurii (?–?) 424 Lazăr, Gheorghe (1779–1823) 260 Lazaruk, Myroslav (b. 1958) 75 Lebenson, Abraham Dov (1794– 1878) 186 Lebenson, Micah Joseph (1828– 1852) 186 Lebenstein, Jan (1930–1999) 435 Lelewel, Joachim (1786–1861) 349 Leményi, Ioan (served as bishop 1832–1850) 256 Lenau, Nikolaus (1802–1850) 120, 156, 241 Lenin [Ulyanov], Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924) 52, 55, 337, 339 Lenski, Khayim (1905–1942) 329 Lerer, Jechiel (1910–1943) 211 Leszczyński, Stanisław (1677– 1766) 81 Levanda, Lev (1835–1888) 186, 197 Levin, Leibu (1914–1983) 66 Levitan, Isaak (1860–1900) 198 Leviţchi, Vasile (1921–1997) 75

Index of East-Central European Names Levkin, Andrei Viktorovich (b. 1954) 54 Liaturyn’ska, Oksana (1902–?) 417 Liberman, Aron Samuel (1845– 1880) 186 Liebhard, Franz [Robert Reiter] (1899–1989) 120, 121, 241 Lieven, Prince Anatoly Pavlovich (1875–1963) 50 Likhachev, Dmitrii Sergeevich (1906–1999) 38 Lilienblum, Moshe Leib (1843– 1910) 194 Lillin, Andrei A. (1915–1985) 107, 113 Lipchitz, Jacques (1891–1973) 22 Lippet, Johann (b. 1951) 113, 219, 277 Lissitzky, El (1890–1941) 190, 198, 206 Liszt, Franz (1811–1886) 65, 112, 275 Litvakov, Moshe (1875–1937) 190 Livezeanu, Irina (b. 1952) 106–107 Liutyk, Mircea (b. 1939) 75 Loga, Constantin Diaconovici (1770–1850) 107, 111, 255 Londo, Bardhyl (b. 1948) 298 Loos, Adolf (1870–1933) 66 Lotman, Mikhail (b. 1952) 39 Lotman, Yuri M. (1922–1993) 11, 31, 37–39 Lovinescu, Eugen (1881–1943) 240, 277 Lovinescu, Monica (b. 1923) 432 Löwendal, Ariadne (1899–1954) 72 Löwenthal, Jakob (1807–1882) 155–156 Lucaciu, Vasile (1852–1922) 263 Luca, Gherasim [Salman Locker] (1913–1994) 430, 431 Luiga, Juhan (1873–1927) 29 Lukács, György (1885–1971) 113, 169, 172, 174, 242

Lupu, Prince Vasile (r. 1634–1652) 62 Lupul, Janko [Iancu] (1836–1922) 65, 71 Luria, Isaac Ben Solomon (1534–1572) 316 Lüüs, Aadu (1878–1967) 29, 35 M Macedonski, Alexandru (1854– 1920) 429 Madách, Imre (1823–1864) 173, 272 Magris, Claudio (b. 1939) 106, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223–224, 226, 227, 239, 269, 389–390 Maior, Petru (1760–1821) 162, 163, 164, 248, 255, 256 Maiorescu, Titu (1840–1917) 240, 255 Makkai, Sándor (1890–1951) 271, 272 Maksim, Lev (1874–1941?) 49 Malaniuk, Ievhen (1887–1968) 417 Mandelshtam, Leon (1819–1889) 196 Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich (1891–1938) 198–199, 327 Manger, Itzik (1901–1969) 58, 72, 210–211, 323, 326 Maniu, Iuliu (1873–1951) 263, 270 Manteuffel, Gustav (1832–1916) 46 Mapu, Abraham (1808–1867) 329 Márai, Sándor (1900–1989) 170, 174, 175, 274, 376 Marcu, Duiliu (1885–1966) 112 Margul-Sperber, Alfred (1898– 1967) 68, 72, 73, 75, 276 Marholm, Leonhard (1854–1928) 44 Marian, Simion Florea (1847– 1907) 260

503 Marienescu, Atanasie Marian (1830–1915) 260 Marin, Biagio (1891–1985) 149 Mark, Rabbi Abraham Jacob (?–1941) 59, 68 Markish, Peretz (1895–1952) 191, 192, 193, 207, 208 Markó, Béla (b. 1951) 282 Markovits, Rodion (1888–1948) 113 Marshak, Samuil Yakovlevich (1887–1964) 199 Martov, Yulius (1873–1923) 186 Martynets’, Volodymyr (1899– 1960) 416 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850–1937) 178, 242 Masing, Uku (1909–1985) 34 Matios, Maria (b. 1959) 75 Mauriņa, Zenta (1897–1978) 53 Maurüber, Albert (1896–1951) 67 Mayzels, Nakhum (1887–1970) 190 Mednyánszky, László (1852–1919) 173 Meerbaum-Eisinger, Selma (1924–1942) 69 Meksi, Mira (b. 1960) 298 Mekuli, Esad (1916–1993) 299 Mehmeti, Kim (b. 1955) 300 Meisels, Dov Beer (1798–1870) 349 Méliusz, József (1909–1995) 113, 114–115, 273, 276, 277 Meltzl, Hugó (1846–1908) 262 Mendele Moykher Sforim [Scholem Ya’aqov Abramovitch] (1835–1917) 194, 195, 330, 331 Mercy, Claudius Florimund, count of (1666–1734) 219 Merilaas, Kersti (1913–1986) 34 Meschendörfer, Adolf (1877– 1963) 254, 265, 266, 273 Meškauskas, Eugenijus (1907– 1997) 27 Messiah of Prishtina (Priştineli Mesihi) (c. 1470–1512) 286

504 Meyrink, Gustav [Gustav Meyer] (1868–1932) 176 Mischel-Grünspan, Salomea (1901–?) 69, 72 Michelstaedter, Carlo (1887–1910) 150, 151 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855) 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 76, 351, 434, 437 Micu, Dumitru (b. 1928) 259 Micu-Klein, Ioan Inochentie (1692–1768) 254, 255, 256 Micu-Klein, Samuil (1754–1806) 162, 163, 164, 249, 255, 256 Migjeni [Millosh Gjergj Nikolla] (1911–1938) 296 Mihai Viteazul [Michael the Brave] (r. 1593–1601) 252–253, 268 Mihăieş, Micea (b. 1954) 118 Mikes, Kelemen (1690–1761) 254 Mikhailov, Ivan [Vanche] (1896–1990) 359 Mikhailovski, Stoyan (1856–1927) 361 Mikhoels, Shimon Mikhailovich (1890–1948) 199 Mikó, (1805–1876) 260–261 Mikszáth, Kálmán (1847–1910) 170 Miladinov, Dimitar (1810–1862) 359, 360 Miladinov, Konstantin (1830– 1862) 359–360 Milarov, Svetoslav (1850–1892) 395, 412 Miłosz, Czesław (1911–2004) 3, 11, 25, 26, 187, 236, 243, 343, 389, 433, 435, 436 Milovanov, Luka (1784–1828) 166 Milutinović, Sima Sarajlija (1791–1847) 164 Mints, Zara (1927–1990) 38 Mintslov, Sergei Rudolfovich (1870–1933) 50 Mircea, Ion (b. 1947) 279 Miškinis, Antanas (1905–1983) 25

Index of East-Central European Names Mjeda, Ndre (1866–1937) 295–296 Moldovanu, Corneliu (1883–1952) 274 Molnár, Ferenc (1878–1952) 171, 172, 173 Molnár, Gusztáv (b. 1948) 279 Molodovski, Kadya (1894–1975) 191, 210 Moltke, Leopold Max (1819– 1894) 258, 259 Monoran, Ion (1953–1993) 115, 118, 119, 120 Morandini, Giuliana (b. 1938) 146, 154, 158 Móricz, Zsigmond (1879–1942) 172, 173, 251, 252, 254 Moritz, Yunna (b. 1937) 200 Mosendz, Leonid (1897–1948) 417 Mosser, Franz (1840–?) 156 Moşoiu, Tiberiu (?–?) 274 Motzan, Peter (b. 1946) 278 Mózes, Attila (b. 1952) 281 Mrkalj, Sava (1783–1833) 166 Mukařovský, Jan (1891–1975) 177 Müller, Friedrich (1834–1898) 260 Müller, Herta (b. 1953) 115, 219 Müller-Guttenbrunn, Adam (1852–1923) 107, 111, 120, 123, 227 Munkácsi, Bernát (1860–1937) 170 Munkácsy, Mihály (1844–1900) 173 Murgu, Eftimie (1805–1870) 164 Muşat, I[oan] D[imoftache [Ioan Dimoftache] (1898–1983) 253 Mušicki, Lukijan (1777–1837) 162, 164 Musil, Robert Edler von (1880– 1942) 66, 147, 154, 381, 386 Muskatirović, Jovan (1743?–1809) 163 Mustafaj, Besnik (b. 1958) 298

N Naborowski, Daniel (1573–1640) 18 Nachov, Nikola (1859–1940) 394, 403 Nachovich, Grigor (1845–1920) 412 Nahman, Rabbi of Bratslav (1772–1819) 330 Naibi, Sulejman (?–1772) 287 Naidenov, Ivan (1834–1910) 401, 406, 407, 408 Nagy, István (1904–1977) 276 Naumov, N. [Naum Kogan] (1863–1893) 198 Nedelciu, Micea (1950–1999) 118 Nedelcovici, Bujor (b. 1936) 432 Negoiţescu, I[on] (1921–1993) 268, 277 Negriuk, Ivan (1954–1998) 75 Neiburga, Andra (b. 1957) 53 Nekrošius, Eimuntas (b. 1952) 27 Németh, László (1901–1975) 217, 242, 273–274, 275 Nemoianu, Virgil (b. 1940) 108–109, 123–124, 214–215 Neubauer, Rudolf (1822–1890) 65, 70, 71 Neumann, Victor (b. 1953) 107, 108, 123, 215, 236, 237 Nevakhovich, Judah (1776–1831) 196 Neweklovsky, Ernst (1884–1964) 218 Nezval, Vítězslav (1900–1958) 177, 179–180, 181, 182 Neiburga, Andra (b. 1957) 53 Nicoară, Moise (1784–1862) 111 Nicolaescu, Sergiu (b. 1930) 253 Niemchevski [Schwartz], Felix (?–?) 70 Nikaj, Ndoc (1864–1951) 295 Nikolov, Minko (?–?) 141 Nikolaidis, A. (?–?) 143 Noailles, Countess Anne de [Ana-Elisabeta Brâncoveanu] (1876–1933) 429, 430 Noica, Constatin (1909–1987) 106

Index of East-Central European Names Nolde, Baron Boris Emmanuilovich (1876–1948) 50, 89 Nomberg, Hirsch David (1876– 1927) 203, 205 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (1821– 1883) 434 Nottara, Constantin (1859–1935) 66 Novak, Slobodan (b. 1930) 313 Novomeský, Ladislav (1904– 1976) 237, 241 Nußbaum, Stephanie (1898–1975) 72, 75 Nyirő, József (1889–1953) 269, 271 O Obradović, Dositej (1739–1811) 107, 112, 164 Obrenović, Miloš (1780–1860) 166 Odeanu, Anişoara [Doina Peteanu] (1912–1972) 113 Odzhakov, Petar (1834–1906) 407, 408 Oláh, Miklós [Olahus, Nicolaus] (1493–1568) 246–247 Olăreanu, Costache (1929–2000) 106 Ol’zhych, Oleh [Oleh Kandyba] (1908–1944) 416 Onciul, Aurel (1864–?) 59 Orest, Mykhailo (1901–1963) 416 Os’machka, Todos’ [Teodosii] (1895–1962) 417 Osmanchik, Edmund (b. 1913) 51 Ostrovska, Julia (?–?) 52 Ovadia, Moni (b. 1946) 157 P Padegs, Kārlis (1911–1940) 48–49 Pagis, Dan (1930–1986) 72 Pahor, Boris (b. 1912) 160 Palach, Jan (1948–1969) 383 Palacký, František (1798–1876) 169

Paleologu, Alexandru (b. 1919) 96, 103–104 Palgi, Daniel (1899–1988) 31 Pancrazi, Pietro (1893–1952) 151–152 Pann, Anton (1797–1854) 238 Pannonius, Iannus [Ivan Čezmički; János Pannonius]] (1434–1472) 333, 336 Pantenius, Theodore Hermann (1843–1915) 44 Paoli, Betty (1814–1894) 156 Papadat-Bengescu, Hortensia (1876–1955) 97, 98 Papahagi, Marian (1948–1999) 279 Papillian, Al[exandru] (b. 1947) 432 Parek, Elsbet (1902–1985) 31 Părlichev, Grigor (1830–1893) 360 Pashku, Anton (1937–1995) 299 Páskándi, Géza (1933–1995) 277, 282 Pastior, Oskar (b. 1927) 279, 282 Päts, Konstantin (1874–1956) 30 Pavić, Milorad (b. 1929) 237 Pelin, Elin (1877–1949) 237, 239 Penn, Yehuda [Yuri] (1854–1937) 198 Peretz, Isaac Leyb (1852–1915) 202, 203–204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 326 Perle, Yehoshua (1888–1943) 211 Perl, Yosef (1773–1839) 328 Petelei, István (1852–1910) 170 Petőfi, Sándor (1823–1849) 168, 170, 173, 259, 264, 277, 279 Petrescu, Camil (1894–1957) 97, 98, 112, 274, 275 Petrescu, Cezar (1892–1961) 97, 98, 266, 274, 275 Petrescu, Radu (1927–1982) 106 Petrov [Evgenii Petrovich Kataev] (1903–1942) 198 Petrov, Gyorche (1864/1865– 1921) 361 Petrovici, Duşan (b. 1938) 115, 118, 120

505 Philip II of Macedonia (r. 359–336 BC) 131 Pilinszky, János (1921–1981) 175 Piłsudski, Joseph (1867–1935) 24 Pinsker, Leo (1821–1891) 194 Pinski, David (1872–1959) 203, 204 Pipitz, Franz (1815–1899) 156 Plinius, Basilius (c. 1540–1605) 41 Podrimja, Ali (b. 1942) 300 Poltava, Leonid (1921–1990) 417 Pomeranzev, Igor (b. 1948) 75 Poniatowski, King Stanisław August (1764–1795) 344 Popa, Vasko (1922–1991) 237, 241 Popescu, Adrian (b. 1847) 279 Popescu, Dumitru Radu (b. 1935) 277 Popescu, Ion Apostol (1920–1984) 278 Popescu, N[icolae] D. (1842/1843–1921) 252–253 Popescu, Petru Demetru (b. 1946) 376 Pop-Florentin, Ioan (1843–1936) 260 Pop, Ion (b. 1940) 279 Popović, Jovan Sterija (1806– 1856) 164 Popovich [Waldburg], Aleksander (?–?) 70 Popovici, Aurel (1863–1917) 217, 261 Popovici, Titus (1930–1994) 253, 277 Popovici, Traian (1892–1946) 69 Popper, Leo (1886–1911) 169 Poruks, Jānis (1871–1911) 42 Potocki, Walenti [Abraham ben Agraham] (?–1749) 19 Prešeren, France (1800–1849) 159 Preyer, Johann Nepomuk (1805– 1888) 105, 108, 110, 111 Prezzolini, Giuseppe (1882–1982) 153 Prokopenko, Zinovij (?–?) 75 Protogerov, Alexander (?–1928) 359

506 Prus, Bolesław [Aleksander Głowacki] (1847–1912) 202, 225–226 Pszoniak, Wojciech (b. 1942) 436 Pumnul, Aron (1818–1866) 71, 249, 260 Pumpianski, Aaron (1835–1893) 45 Pusztai, János (b. 1934) 281 Pyatigorsky, Aleksandr Moiseevich (b. 1929) 38 Q Qosja, Rexhep (b. 1936) 300 R Rabbi Loew of Prague (1512– 1609) 176 Rabinowitz, Yaakov (1875–1948) 195 Ráby, Mátyás (1752–after 1797) 229 Raczuk, Mykola (b. 1940) 75 Radics, Peter von (1836–1912) 156 Radnóti, Miklós (1909–1944) 327 Radoja, Ëngjell (1820–1880) 294 Rădulescu–Motru, C[onstantin] (1868–1957) 273 Radziwill, Prince Antoni (1775– 1833) 355 Raimund, Ferdinand Jacob (1790–1836) 155 Rakovac, Milan (b. 1939) 365, 366, 368 Rakovski, Georgi S[toikov] (1821–1867) 395, 398 Rákóczy, György (1621–1660) 251 Rákóczi II, Ferenc (1676–1735) 254 Raţiu, Ioan (1828–1902) 263 Rău, Aurel (born 1930) 250 Ravdin, B[oris] (?–?) 40 Ravitsh, Melekh (1893–1976) 206, 207 Ravnitsky, Yehoshua Chana (1859–1944) 195

Index of East-Central European Names Rebreanu, Liviu (1885–1944) 113, 229, 253, 265, 268–269, 272, 280 Rebula, Alojz (b. 1924) 160 Reder, Bernard (1897–1963) 66 Reiman, Villem (1861–1917) 29 Reményik, Sándor (1890–1941) 269, 271, 272, 276 Resuli, Kapllan (b. 1935) 299 Révai, Miklós (1750–1807) 162, 164 Revzin, Isaak Iosifovich (1923– 1974) 38 Rexhepi, Ramadan (b. 1940) 299 Reymont, Władysław Stanisław (1867–1925) 434 Reysen, Avrom (1876–1953) 330 Rezzori, Gregor von (1914–1998) 58, 60, 70, 72, 326 Ribak, Issakar (1897–1935) 190 Ringelblum, Emmanuel (1897– 1944) 211 Rippl-Rónai, József (1861–1927) 172 Ristikivi, Karl (1912–1977) 32, 376 Roemer, Michał (1880–1945) 23 Rogowski, Ludomir Michał (1881–1954) 22, 23 Ronetti-Roman, M[oise] (1847– 1908) 327 Romer-Ochenkowska, Helena (1876–1947) 22 Rosenkranz, Moses (1904–2003) 68, 73, 75 Rosetti, C[onstantin] A. (1816– 1885) 428, 429 Rossetti, Domenico (1774–1842) 152 Roth, Daniel (1801–1859) 254 Roth, Joseph (1894–1939) 344 Roth, Stephan Ludwig (1796– 1849) 256, 259 Roziner, Felix (b. 1936) 200 Rrota, Justin (1889–1964) 296 Rubene, Eva (b. 1972) 53 Rubinstein, Susanna (1847–1914) 66

Ruika, Zofija (?–?) 51 Russo Alecu (1918–1859) 249 Russow, Balthasar (c. 1536–1600) 32 Russu, I[on] I. (1911–1985) 250 Ruszczyc, Ferdynand (1870–1936) 22, 23 Rybakov, Anatoly Naumovich [A. N. Aronov] (1911–1998) 199 Rybałko, Alicja (b. 1960) 27 Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek (b. 1935) 26 Rymsza, Andrzej (c. 1550–c. 1595) 18 S Saba, Umberto [Umberto Poli] (1883–1957) 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 158 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von (1836–1895) 354–355 Sadoveanu, Ion Marin [Iancu Leonte Marinescu] (1893– 1964) 98–99 Sadoveanu, Mihail (1880–1961) 223, 237, 238, 239, 274, 275 Šafařik, Pavel [Pavol] Josef [Jozef] (1795–1861) 164, 230 Szálasi, Ferenc (1897–1946) 215, 276 Samarineanu, G.M. (?–?) 274, 275 Samchuk, Ulas (1905–1987) 418, 420, 421, 425 Sandanski, Yane Ivanov (1872– 1915) 358 Sang, August (1914–1969) 34 Santori, Francesco Antonio (1819–1894) 285 Saphir, Moritz Gottlieb (1795– 1859) 65 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz [Mathias Casimirus Sarbievius] (1595–1640) 18 Sârbu, I[on] D[ezideriu] (1919– 1989) 268, 277 Schaffer, Heinrich (1895–1943) 69 Schedius, Lajos (1768–1847) 162, 163, 167

Index of East-Central European Names Scherer, Olga (b. 1920) 435 Scherg, Georg (1917–2003) 277 Schildkraut, Rudolf (1862–1930) 66 Schlesak, Dieter (b. 1934) 278, 281, 282 Schloezer, Boris de (1881–1969) 446 Schlögel, Karl (b. 1948) 77 Schmidt, Joseph (1904–1942) 77 Schneider, Klaus F. (b. 1958) 282 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) 78, 80–81, 83, 430 Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942) 82, 212, 341 Schuster, Paul (b. 1930) 278 Schwartz, Gheorghe (b. 1945) 115 Schwarzwald, Eugenie (1872– 1940) 66 Scridon, Gavril (b. 1922) 278 Sebastian, Mihail [Iosif Hechter] (1907–1945) 97–98, 241, 327 Segall, Lazar (1885–1957) 187 Seidl, Johann Gabriel (1804–1875) 156 Seifert, Jaroslav (1901–1986) 177, 178, 179 Selejan, Radu (1935–2000) 253 Senkovsky, Osip (1800–1858) 22 Severnjuk, Tamara (b. 1941) 75 Seweryn, Andrzej (b. 1946) 436 Sforim (Mendele Moykher Sforim). See Mendele Shekhtman, Eli (1908–?) 193 Sherekh, Iurii [George Y. Shevelov] (1908–2002) 418, 419, 422, 423–424, 425, 426 Shestov, Lev (1866–1938) 443, 446, 447, 448, 450 Shevchenko, Taras (1814–1861) 75, 359 Shkreli, Azem (1938–1997) 299 Shllaku, Gjon (1907–1946) 296 Shofman, Gershon (1880–1972) 329 Sholem Aleykhem [Sholem Rabinovitch] (1859–1916) 46, 183, 188–189, 198, 205,

320–321, 322, 323, 324–325, 330, 331 Shomer [Nahum Meyer Shaykevitsh] (1849–1905) 203 Shopov, Atanas (1853–1922) 141, 142, 404, 409 Shvarts, Marek (1892–1962) 206, 208 Shwarts, Elena (b. 1948) 200 Siegel, Carl (1896–1981) 66 Šíma, Josef (1891–1971) 180, 181 Simiginowicz-Staufe, Ludwig Adolf (1832–1897) 65, 71 Simionescu, Mircea Horia (b. 1928) 106 Simonyi, Zsigmond (1853–1919) 170 Şincai, Gheorghe (1754–1816) 164, 248, 255, 256 Singer, Bernard (1893–1966) 201 Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904– 1991) 200, 202, 204, 209–210 Singer, Israel Joshua (1893–1944) 209 Sinijärv, Karl-Martin (b. 1971) 33, 34 Sinkó, Ervin [Spitzer; Šinko], (1898–1967) 230, 231 Sirdani, Marin (1885–1962) 296 Širvydas, Konstantinas [Konstanty Szyrwid] (c. 1579–1631) 18 Skanderbeg [George Castriota or Kastriotes] (c.1404–1468) 284 Skarga, Piotr (1536–1612) 18 Skoryna, Franciszek (before 1490–before 1541) 18 Škvorecký, Josef (b. 1924) 382, 389 Slamnig, Ivan (1930–2001) 301–302, 312, 313 Slaveikov, Pencho (1866–1912) 395 Slaveikov, Petko R[achev] (1827–1895) 132, 135, 139, 141, 362, 391, 392–395, 396, 400, 408, 412 Slavici, Ioan (1848–1925) 107, 111, 215, 263, 264, 265

507 Slataper, Scipio (1888–1915) 151, 152–153, 156, 159, 161 Słonimski, Piotr (b. 1922) 436 Slonyskii, Edmind (?–?) 51 Słowacki, Juliusz (1809–1849) 19, 351, 434 Smirian, Amalia (?–?) 131–132 Soffici, Ardengo (1879–1964) 153 Šoljan, Antun (1932–1993) 304–313 Söllner, Werner (b. 1951) 278, 279 Şora, Mariana (b. Klein, 1917) 113 Soutine, Chaim (1894–1943) 22, 187 Spahiu, Xhevahir (b. 1945) 298 Spariosu [Spăriosu], Mihai (b. 1943) 123 Spiel, Hilde (1911–1990) 161 Spector, Mordkhe (1858–1925) 203 Spleny, General Gabriel Freiherr von (?–?) 62 Sruoga, Balys (1896–1947) 25 Staff, Leopold (1878–1957) 434 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich [Ioseb Jughashvili] (1878–1953) 51, 52, 55, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 81, 101, 103, 115, 116, 174, 182, 193, 199, 230, 277, 278, 281, 296, 298, 299, 318, 377, 378, 381, 416, 417, 423, 424, 425 Stambolov, Stefan Nikolov (1854–1895) 412 Stamboliski, Alexander (1879– 1923) 358 Stambolski, Khristo (1843–1932) 397, 403, 411 Stamatu, Horia (1912–1989) 431 Stanca, Radu (1920–1962) 277 Stancu, Zaharia (1902–1974) 237 Starčević, Ante (1823–1896) 338 Stawczan, Anton Freiherr Kochanowski von (?–?) 63 Steinbarg, Elieser (1880–1932) 58, 72, 76, 77 Steinberg, Yaakov (1887–1947) 203, 205 Steinhardt, Nicu (1912–1989) 327

508 Stepovyi, Oleksa [Oleksa Voropai] (1913–1989) 416 Stern, Israel (1894–1942) 206, 208 Stern, Manfred [General Emilio Kléber] (1896–1937) 67 Stieglitz, Heinrich (1801–1849) 156 Stöger, Johann August (1791– 1861) 155 Stoica, Petre (b. 1931) 115 Stoia-Udrea, Ion (1901–1967) 113 Stoianov, Zakhari (1850–1889) 412 Străinu, Mircea (1910–1945) 72 Strashimirov, Anton (1872–1937) 361 Strashun, Mattityahu (1819–1885) 24 Stratimirović, Stefan (Metropolitan, 1790–1837) 164, 165 Straucher, Benno (1856–1940) 59, 66 Streinul, Mircea (1910–1945) 67 Stryjkowski, Maciej (c. 1547–c. 1593) 18 Stuparich, Carlo (1894–1916) 151, 154 Stuparich, Giani (1891–1961) 151, 154 Štýrský, Jindřich (1899–1942) 177, 181, 182 Sudrabkalns, Jānis (1894–1975) 48 Suits, Gustav (1883–1956) 30, 31 Şuluţiu, Octavian (1909–1949) 274, 275 Sütő, András (b. 1927) 276, 281 Suttner, Bertha von (1843–1914) 57 Sutzkever, Abraham (b. 1913) 25, 188 Svevo, Italo [Aron Hector Schmitz] (1861–1928) 148, 149–150, 151–152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159 Sytnyk, Mykhailo Vasyl’ovych (1920–1959) 417

Index of East-Central European Names Szabédi, László (1907–1959) 276, 282 Szabó, Dezső (1879–1945) 265, 269, 271, 272 Szalay, László (1813–1864) 168 Széchényi, Ferenc (1754–1820) 165, 168 Szemere, Pál (1785–1861) 165 Szemlér, Ferenc (1906–1978) 272, 275, 276 Szerb, Antal (1901–1945) 229, 248, 269, 327 Szilágyi, Domokos (1937–1976) 279, 282 Szilágyi, István (b. 1938) 279, 282 Szinyei Merse, Pál (1845–1920) 173 Szőcs, Géza (b. 1953) 279, 282 Szymborska, Wisława (b. 1923) 79 T Tabak, Friedrich (1907–1976) 75 Tablic, Bohuslav (1769–1832) 162, 164 Tacciu, Elena (b. 1932) 250 Tahsini, Hasan (1811–1881) 292 Tairov, Aleksandr Iakovlevich (1885–1950) 179 Tal, Sidi (1912–1983) 77 Talev, Dimităr (1898–1966) 360, 361 Talvik, Heiti (1904–1947) 34 Tamási, Áron (1897–1966) 267, 271, 272, 274, 281 Tammsaare, A[nton] H[ansen] (1878–1940) 35 Tănase, Stelian (b. 1952) 96, 103–104 Táncsics, Mihály (1799–1884) 164 Tarassjuk, Halyna (b. 1948) 75 Teige, Karel (1900–1951) 177, 179, 181, 182 Tekelija-Popović [Tököli], Sava (1761–1842) 164, 165 Teleki Sámuel (1739–1822) 259 Teliha, Olena (1907–1942) 416 Ţepeneag, Dumitru (b. 1937) 432

Ţepes, Vlad [Dracula] (1431– 1476) 235, 251 Terizanu, Vasile (b. 1945) 75 Terlecki, Tymon (1905–2000) 435 Teutsch, Traugott (1829–1913) 254 Tevfik, Ebüzziya (1849–1913) 292 Thenen [Waldberg], Julie (1834–1919) 71 Theodoru, Radu (b. 1924) 253 Theresa [Teresia], Empress Maria (1717–1780) 148, 154 Tishler, Alexander (1898–1980) 191 Tišma, Aleksandar (1924–2003) 214, 222, 231, 232 Titel, Sorin (1935–1984) 115–116, 118, 222, 237 Tito, Josip Broz (1892–1980) 223, 230, 299 Tkacz, Mychajlo (b. 1932) 75 Todorova, Maria (b. 1949) 3, 4, 124, 243 Todorovich, Pericli (?–?) 140 Tomaszczuk, Constantin (?–?) 62, 77 Tomizza, Fulvio (1935–1999) 147, 160–161, 365, 366, 368, 370 Tomšič, Marjan (b. 1939) 365, 366, 367, 368–372 Tõnisson, Jaan (1868–1942) 29–30, 33, 35 Toporov, Vladimir (1928–1990) 11, 38 Tormay, Cécile (1876–1937) 171, 174 Torop, Peeter (b. 1950) 31, 39 Tótfalusy Kis, Miklós (1650?– 1702) 258 Totok, William (b. 1951) 115, 122 Towiański, Andrzej (1799–1878) 434 Toyen [Marie Cerminova] (1902–1980) 181, 182 Traian, Traian Pop (b. 1952) 115, 118 Trubar, Primož (1508–1586) 159 Trutnev, Ivan (1827–1912) 22

Index of East-Central European Names Tschabuschnigg, Adolf Ritter von (1809–1877) 156 Tschernichowski, Saul (1875– 1943) 195, 329 Tsoukalas, Georgios (?–?) 131 Tseytlin [Zeitlin], Aaron (1898– 1973) 208, 209, 329 Tseytlin [Zeitlin], Elhanan (1900–1943) 208 Tseytlin [Zeitlin], Hillel (1872– 1942) 206, 208, 210, 329 Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna (1892–1941) 50, 178 Tzara, Tristan [Sami Rosenstock] (1896–1963) 106, 430, 444 Tuglas, Friedebert (1886–1971) 30 Tuminas, Rimas (b. 1952) 27 Turczynski, Emanuel (1919–2002) 59 Tuwim, Julian (1894–1953) 327 U Ujejski, Kornel (1823–1897) 354 Ulinover, Miryam (1890–1944) 210 Ulmanis, Kārlis (1877–1942) 51 Under, Marie (1883–1980) 34, 376 Ungureanu, Cornel (b. 1943) 9, 124 Urzidil, Johannes (1896–1970) 106, 149, 217, 389 Uspenski, Boris A. (b. 1927) 38 V Vācietis, Ojārs (1933–1983) 52 Vaičiūnaitė, Judita (1937–2001) 26 Wałęsa, Lech (b. 1943) 79 Vályi, András K. (1764–1801) 162 Vámbéry, Ármin (1832–1913) 169 Vaptsarov, Nikola (1909–1942) 360 Variboba, Giulio (1724–1788) 284 Varshavsky, Ezer (1898–1944) 205 Vasa, Pashko [Wassa Effendi, or Vaso Pasha Shkodrani] (1825–1892) 294–295 Vasilev, Stefan (?–1878) 141, 196 Vassiliko, Nikolai (?–?) 59

Vaykhert, Mikhl (1890–1962) 206 Vaysenberg, I[saac] M[eir] (1881–1938) 205 Vazov, Ivan (1850–1921) 136–137, 138, 141, 142, 223, 361, 363 Venclova, Tomas (b. 1937) 436 Vegliani, Franco (1915–1982) 147 Veltruský, Jiří (1919–1994) 177, 180 Verseghy, Ferenc (1757–1822) 164 Vesper, Iulian (1908–1986) 67, 72 Vidaković, Milovan (1780–1841) 164 Vidrić, Vladimir (1875–1909) 334 Vighi, Daniel (b. 1956) 115, 237 Viiding, Paul (1904–1962) 34 Viktiuk, Roman (b. 1936) 27 Vilna Elijah, Gaon of (1720–1797) 19 Vilpishevskii, Jaroslav (?–?) 51 Vincent, Marianne (1900–1988) 72 Vinea, Ion [Eugen I. Iovanaki] (1895–1964) 444 Virág, Benedek (1754–1830) 162, 164 Visnapuu, Henrik (1890–1951) 376 Vitkovics, Mihály [Mihailo Vitković] (1778–1829) 162, 163, 165, 228, 229, 241 Vlahuţă, Al[exandru] (1858–1919) 264 Vogel, David (1891–1944?) 329 Voghera, Giorgio (1908–1999) 158 Vogl, Johann Nepomuk (1802– 1866) 156 Vogler, Elkhanon (1907–1969) 188 Voiculescu, Vasile (1884–1963) 239 Voinikov, Dobri (1833–1878) 141 Voitin, Al. [Alexandru Voitinovici] (1915–1986) 260 Volkonski, Peeter (b. 1954) 33 Volynskii, Akim [Akim Flekser] (1863–1926) 197 Vorobkevich, Isidor (1836–1903) 70

509 Voronca, Ilarie [Marcus Eduard] (1903–1946) 430–431, 447 Vörösmarty, Mihály (1800–1855) 167–168, 173 Voskovec, Jiří (1905–1981) 180–181, 182 Vreto, Jani (1820–1900) 290 Vuk, Stanko (1912–1944) 160 Vulcan, Iosif (1841–1907) 261, 262, 263 W Wagner, Richard (b. 1952) 115, 121, 122, 172, 204, 219 Wahle, Richard (1857–1935) 66 Wajda, Andrzej (b. 1926) 436 Walter, Bruno (1876–1962) 112 Weinreich, Max (1894–1969) 187 Weiss, Edoardo (1889–1971) 158–159, 161 Weiss, Michale (1569–1612) 251, 252, 254 Weißglas, Immanuel (1920–1979) 68, 69, 72, 73, 75 Werich, Jan (1905–1980) 180–181 Werthes, Friedrich August Clemens (1748–1817) 162 Wesselényi, Miklós, the elder (1750–1809) 217, 256 Wickenhauser, Franz Adolf (1809–1991) 70 Wielopolski, Aleksander (1803– 1877) 355 Wilde, Iryna (1907–1982) 75 Winkler, Manfred (b. 1922) 72 Wittner, Victor (1896–1949) 68–69 Wittstock, Erwin (1899–1962) 276 Wittstock, Joachim (b. 1939) 278 Wiwulski, Antoni (1877–1919) 22, 23 Władysław IV, King (1595–1648) 17 Wojtyła, Karol [Pope John Paul II] (1920–2005) 435 Wolf, Leyzer (1910–1943) 188 Wujek, Jakub (1541–1597) 18 Wuolijoki, Hella [Hella Murrik] (1886–1954) 28, 34–36

510 Y Yavorov, Peyo [Kracholov] (1878– 1914) 142, 361–362, 363 Yudovin, Solomon (1892–1954) 198 Z Zagajewski, Adam (b. 1945) 85, 343, 436 Zahul, Dmytro (1890–1944) 77 Zalai, Béla (1882–1915) 169 Zāle, Kārlis (1888–1942) 48 Zalman, Elijah Ben Solomon [Vilna Gaon] (1720–1797) 317 Zamenhof, Ludwik Lazar (1859–1917) 328 Zapp, Walter (1905–2003) 41 Zariņš, Marğeris (1910–1993) 52

Index of East-Central European Names Zarishi, Pjetër (1806–1866) 294 Zbara, Natan (1908–1975) 193 Zemach, Shlomo (1886–1974) 195 Żeromski, Stefan (1864–1925) 209 Zerov, Mykola (1890–1937) 423 Zhdanovych, Oleh Shtul (1917– 1977) 422 Zhechev, Toncho (1929–1999) 394, 395 Zhinzifov, Raiko [Xenophanes] (1839–1877) 140, 141, 359, 360 Zhiti, Visar (b. 1952) 298 Zhitlovski, Khayim (1865–1943) 326 Zich, Otakar (1879–1934) 177 Zichy, János (1868–1944) 170 Zidelkovskyi, Semen (b. 1952) 75

Zilahy, Lajos (1891–1974) 274, 275 Zillich, Heinrich (1898–1988) 227, 246, 250, 265, 266, 269, 272, 273 Zinberg, Israel (1873–1938) 198, 199 Žižek, Slavoj (b. 1949) 142 Zogaj, Preç (b. 1957) 298 Zois, Žiga (1747–1819) 159 Żulawski, Andrzej (b. 1940) 435

List of Contributors to Volume 2

Veronika Ambros, Professor of Slavic Languages & Literature, University of Toronto, Canada Florin Berindeanu, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, Case Western Reserve University, Celeveland, OH, USA Vladimir Biti, Chair and Professor of Literary Theory, Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literatures, University of Zagreb, Croatia Anna Campanile, lecturer, Romanisches Seminar, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany Amy Colin, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Literatures and Languages, University of Pittsburgh, USA Marcel Cornis-Pope, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Robert Elsie, freelance scholar and translator, Olzheim, Germany George Grabowicz, Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Agnieszka Gutthy, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, USA Nicolae Harsanyi, Coordinator, Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA Brian Horowitz, Director of the Jewish Studies Program, Tulane University, New Orleans LA, USA Katarzyna Jerzak, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Georgia, Athens GA, USA Sándor Kibédi-Varga, Professor Emeritus of French, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Alexander Kiossev, Professor of History of Culture, Department for Cultural Studies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Tiina A. Kirss, Professor, Estonian Studies, University of Toronto, Canada Sabina Mihelj, Lecturer in Media, Communication and Culture, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK Agnieszka Nance, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA John Neubauer, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Irina Novikova, Professor and Director of the Center for Women’s Studies, The University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia Inna Peleva, Associate Professor, Department of Theory and History of Literature, The Paisij Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria Boyko Penchev, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria

512

List of Contributors to Volume 2

Nikola Petković, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature/Cultural Studies, University of Rijeka, Croatia. Peter Rychlo, Professor and Chair of World Literature, University of Czernowitz/Cernivci, the Ukraine Guido Snel, Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Monica Spiridon, Professor and Director of the Center for Communication Studies, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Professor of Central Eurasian Studies and Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA; Chair of Comparative Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Jüri Talvet, Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Tomas Venclova, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, New Haven, USA Roxana M. Verona, Associate Professor of French, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA Seth L. Wolitz, Professor of Comparative Literature and L. D. Marie and Edwin Gale Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA

In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication:

Weisstein, Ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. Expected Out of print Balakian, Anna (ed.): The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémia Kiado) 1984. 732 pp. III Vajda, György M. † (réd.): Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme. (Akadémia Kiado) 1982. 684 pp. IV Weisgerber, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 622 pp. V Weisgerber, Jean (réd.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: Théorie. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 704 pp. VI Gérard, Albert (ed.): European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Akadémia Kiado) 1986. 1288 pp. 2 volumes. VII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner et André Stegmann (réd.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Volume 1: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480). (Akadémia Kiado) 594 pp. Expected Out of print VIII Garber, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémia Kiado) 1988. 395 pp. IX Gillespie, Gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp. X Arnold, A. James, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash (eds.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. 1994. xviii, 579 pp. XI Bertens, Hans and Douwe W. Fokkema (eds.): International Postmodernism. Theory and literary practice. 1997. xvi, 581 pp. XII Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997. xviii, 398 pp. XIII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner and Paul Chavy (eds.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Tome IV: Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). 2000. xiv, 817 pp. XIV Glaser, Horst Albert and György M. Vajda † (eds.): Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820. Epoche im Überblick. 2001. x, 760 pp. XV Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking regions. 2001. x, 672 pp. XVI Knabe, Peter-Eckhard, Roland Mortier and François Moureau (eds.): L'Aube de la Modernité 1680-1760. 2002. viii, 554 pp. XVII Esterhammer, Angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp. XVIII Sondrup, Steven P. and Virgil Nemoianu (eds.): Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp. XIX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I. 2004. xx, 648 pp. XX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume II. 2006. xxiv, 510 pp. I II

The series incorporates a subseries on Literary Cultures I.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I (Vol. XIX in the main series) Volume II (Vol. XX in the main series) Volume III n.y.p. Volume IV n.y.p. (Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)

II.

Comparative Histories of Nordic Literary Cultures n.y.p.

III. Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula n.y.p.