Česlovo Milošo skaitymai / Czesslaw Milosz's readings

The article presents the analysis of one of the main characters in the novel “The Gambler”, which is the first attempt by Dostoevsky to portray “a definitely beautiful person” later made by him once again in his novel “The Idiot”. Though Malcolm V. Jones pointed out that “it is unlikely that Dostoevsky based Mr. A stley on any real-life encounter with an Englishman”, nevertheless, some sources (e.g., Apollinaria Suslova’s diaries) tell us about some of her (and possibly Dostoevsky’s) real-life encounters with Englishmen or stories about this kind of encounters. Looking at these sources we can trace some hypothetic prototypes of Mister Astley. The comparison of the character of Mister Astley with some real-life Englishmen portrayed in Suslova’s diaries provides a better understanding of the ways of stylistic representation of the foreign character in the novel written in Russian. The carried out research shows that the created image of Mr. Astley in “The Gambler” have echoes in Dostoevsky’s future work, in particular, in his novel “The Idiot”: not only in the image of Prince Myshkin, but also in the way Elisaveta Prokof ’evna Epanchina is represented.

This article discusses the desubjectivation in Jonas Mekas’ collection of poems “Žodžiai ir raidės” (“Words and Letters”) and film “Requiem for a Typewriter” approaching it from media theory, deconstruction and philotopical points of view. Desubjectivation is understood as freedom from History, ideology, symbol, and relations between author and reader/viewer. The works discussed are Mekas’ attempt to be free by denying subjectivity, renouncing a gap between experience, language and image. Speaking person in his poetry, as also the filming and reading one in his film, does not accept a logical causal development of story and its dictated thought, which is usually expressed by symbolic writing and narrative cinema in the Western world. Using graphic, rather than symbolic writing in his poetry Mekas produces such media, which does not admit in-mediation – media as an “extension of man” has only a life force for him. The film also erases the distance both between sound and image, and the viewing and the filming person. The distance between the author and the audience is impossible to define. The poems do not have the effect of death, exclusion, and isolation – which is traditionally attributed to media. “Requiem for a Typewriter” does not talk about death and end; the focus is on the present moment. The speaking person in “Words and Letters” and the filmed and filming one in “Requiem for a Typewriter” refuse not only the traditional categories of time, but also the spatial ones: there is no division into the lost, existing and discovered space. The place, in which speaking and filming takes place, is home not because it is a place where one has grown up and matured, but because it is universal and sufficient, there is no need to go beyond it and to desire a different location and different being.[...]

The article covers the correlation between the usage of mother tongue and Russian language by migrants from different countries, which makes it possible to describe it as a part of the sociolinguistic situation in Russia. The study provides a comparative characteristic of the linguistic behavior of Lithuanian migrants against that of migrants from other former USSR countries. An important part of saving one’s identity and mother tongue, as well as successful social and cultural adaptation in the country of residence, is the activity of different national institutions (cultural communities consisting of migrants from different countries, embassies, educational projects) along with one’s personal conscious determination to conserve the mother tongue by means of reading, listening and communication using modern technology.

Recently the issue of the image of Lithuania and Lithuanians in foreign literature has become more frequent in the works by comparative literature scholars: Algis Kalėda, Nijolė Kašelionienė, Irena Buckley, and Sigutė Radzevičienė discuss it in Polish, French, and Swedish literature. Though the issue has been a constant concern for the Lithuanians, it has become a topic of special interest in 2012 with the second publication of the novel “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair (including the commentaries by Lithuanian literary scholars and Valdas Adamkus, the Former President of the Republic). Written at the beginning of the 20th century Sinclair’s novel depicts the harsh destiny of the Lithuanians of the first wave of emigration to the USA. Some books about Lithuanians and their lives inspire the discussions on the image of Lithuanians abroad, the understanding of small country, its realities, and their artistic interpretation. The reasons for the writers to take upon the Lithuanian theme are historical and socio-cultural: during different specific periods the increased Lithuanian emigrants’ flows or “waves” to other countries made it possible for the people of these countries to get acquainted and communicate directly with the Lithuanians, as well as to learn more about Lithuania.[...]

Sovietų okupacija nutraukė natūralią lietuvių, kaip ir kitų tautų – latvių, estų – kultūros raidą. Kūrybinės pajėgos buvo išblaškytos, prieš rašytojus vykdytos represijos. Prasideda mechaniškas, administracinis kultūros pakeitimas – politinis meno reikalų vertinimas, literatūra patiria ideologinį terorą (nutrūkusio alsavimo kelias (Brodskij, 2001)). Laisvos Vakarų pasaulio literatūros pažinimas lieka už įstatymo ribų; daugelio užsienio autorių, neatitinkančių sovietinės ideologijos reikalavimų, kūriniai eliminuojami iš literatūros studijų, mokslinių tyrinėjimų, iš bibliotekų. Nepaisant to, ir lietuvių, ir latvių visuomenėje tebeišlieka gyvas dėmesys Vakarams, ypač – prancūzų kultūrai ir literatūrai. Šis interesas ženklina laisvos dvasinės erdvės ir kultūrinės autonomijos savisaugą, demonstruojamą priklausymą ne Rytų, o Vakarų civilizaciniam kontekstui. Ilgainiui prancūzų kultūros ir literatūros propagavimas, itin sustiprėjęs Kaune, virsta viena iš inteligentijos pogrindinės kultūrinės veiklos ašių. Todėl šio straipsnio tikslas – apžvelgti tokios vakarietiškos sąmonės pasireiškimą sovietmečio Kaune.[...]

It can be argued that essayism, as merging of philosophical, aesthetic and scientific thought, is a specific property of contemporary culture. One of the most prominent essayists of the last century is Czesław Miłosz, whose aesthetics is based on the interaction between personality and self-identifying word, where self-identification should be treated as a movement towards the discovery of meaning. The article relates the method and character of Miłosz’s essayism to the concepts of deconstruction and to the issues of sign, language and text. Deconstruction as a strategy of textual analysis is used in the light of Jacques Derrida’s ideas. As an initial intention, the literary orientation may be employed: essay may be treated as a spiritual, transcendental and empirical experience of the writer. The reality with its details, reflected in Miłosz’s essay, confirms the temporariness of the being-consciousness; the subjectivity of the artist acquires independent creative meaning. Miłosz also strives to optimize the meaning of his text. He makes presuppositions on the state of his reader’s knowledge and his level of preparation to trust oneself to an external creative work. Though multiple layers of meaning constitute the conditions for the essayist’s creative work, the becoming of relations between the author and the world is most significant in Miłosz’s essays.

The article analyses the semiotics of the boundary between Europe and Asia. This boundary is special because it is imposed not so much by geography (it is the only borderline between continents that is not marked by any water barrier) as by culture. In the course of historical exploration of the territory the boundary has changed both its location and meaning. The article traces the mental – political, historical, and cultural – grounds for semantization of the boundary Europe/Asia. The focus is on the literary representation of the boundary in contemporary texts created mainly on the territory that lies in its close proximity – the Urals. In literature new meanings are associated with the general semantics of the terminal, the idea of frontier, the “melting pot” of the nation, and the actualization of the memory of local pagan tribes. All this demonstrates new possibilities both in aesthetic and ideological approaches: for writers it is employment of the poetics of the myth; and for a researcher it confirms the acuteness of the ideas of “inner colonization” and formation of a new regional identity.

The article discusses the horizons of perception of Swedish literature through translations in Lithuania in last decade. Quite numerous translations of Swedish literature witness an active cultural exchange between Lithuania and Sweden. The titles of published translations during the last decade show the following tendencies: 1) though classical authors have not been forgotten, but more and more attention has lately been paid to contemporary literary works, especially novels; 2) the interest in women’s writing is obviously growing: many new and unknown works have been translated; 3) a great variety of the translations of Swedish children’s literature – both classical and modern works – has been published so far. It is also noteworthy that the translations are of exceptional quality and a number of translators are capable of doing a professional translation from Swedish. With regard to the translations, the article focuses on the cultural communication and dialogic relationship as discussed in Yuri Lotman’s works; the research is also based on the insights by Lithuanian semiotician A. J . Greimas and phenomenologist Algis Mickūnas. The idea that cultural communication promotes the understanding of the “other” is particularly well revealed by Irvis Scheynius’ prose and poetry, reflecting his double – Lithuanian and Swedish – identity. In his works the double identity is perceived not as provoking hostility but rather as showing alternatives and creating the consciousness capable to compare and combine. Witnessing the possibility of understanding each other (as it is the relationship of the self and the “other” that helps to overcome isolation and create new structures of meanings) the writer continues his father’s – Ignas Šeinius, – mission started in Sweden in 1917.[...]

The article discusses the issue of the represented space in the narratives by two Lithuanian authors – Kazimieras Barėnas (1907-2006), who emigrated to England in 1947 and lived there till the end of his life, and Aleksandra Fomina (b. 1981), who lived in England for some time. Postcolonial approach to text allows shedding light on the images, which appear in both authors’ novels, as possible signs of Lithuanian culture and problematic (e)migrant identity. The woman protagonists of the novels – Veronika and Ūla – could be called postcolonial (postsoviet) subjects: both of them are from a small (post)occupied country, but locating themselves figuratively in the spaces, which symbolize power – in the imaginary royal castle (in Barėnas’ “Twenty-One Veronica”) and the tower (in Fomina’s “Yesterday We Were on the Island”), they invert the positions of power and subordination. The images of castle and tower create an opposition to the metonymic image of (ruined or unfinished to be build) Lithuanian farmhouse. Although the periods and forms of the Lithuanian (e)migration represented in the novels are different, both novels reflect the (e)migrant’s homelessness (through the depiction of Veronika living in DP camp and Ūla – in Squatter Houses) and her intense need to have a home, as well as emigrant’s loneliness, lack of relation with community, and the experiences of working person in foreign country. In both novels the reoccurring images of buses, trains, stations, path, threshold, window, and fences mark the (e)migrant’s transitive state and liminality.

The article discusses the capacity of poetry to evoke emotions in two different ways – by using metaphors and with the help of laconic language. The hypothesis that the effect on the reader generated by both a thick poetic text and poetic speech purified to the maximum could be very similar is tested by employing the concepts of cognitive poetics in reading the chosen poetic texts and focussing on the cognitive processes presupposed by different sorts of metaphors. The main task is to discuss the phenomenon of iconicity and to explain particular effects caused by the poems written by two popular Lithuanian authors – Justinas Marcinkevičius and Vladas Šlaitas. The comparison of the chosen texts by the two poets suggests that iconicity is manifested not only in a thickly coded poetic text, but also in a laconic poem. The results of the analysis have shown that iconicity can be created not only by using original conceptual metaphors, but also by specific visual images, which can help the poet not only to say something, but also to show. It may be that iconicity is more pronounced in laconic poetry, because the atmosphere envelops the reader instantly categorizing, rather than diving among the so-called mental spaces and interpreting the meanings of metaphors. The visual impression is stronger, but in the field of a poetic text it is rather difficult to define what this visuality is. Apparently, it is worth to investigate how fast one or another impression occurs to the reader, and which of the two – a metaphor or a simple image selected accordingly – is faster in generating a specific mental image. It would seem that the priority should be given to simplicity, but without a study it can not be stated categorically. Most important thing is that a writer succeeds in provoking a specific emotional state. Marcinkevičius and Šlaitas knew how to do it, even though their creative principles differed significantly.