Henriko Nagio kultūriniai herojai egzilinėje kelionėje

Abstract

Lithuanian exile poet Henrikas Nagys (1920–1996) created some cultural heroes who belong to the semantic field of the “žemininkai” generation, but express the genuine experience of the mid-20th century. They may be characterized as mobile, nostalgic, travelling in space and time and breaking all boundaries. In his early writings there are many lyrical figures who refer to the biblic paraphrases of the Prodigal Son, to the romantic wanderers of H. A lain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, or to Ch. Baudelaire’s symbolic image of flaneur who got himself lost in the urban public spaces. The influence of (neo)romanticism and some cliches of quotidian poetic vocabulary are evident: Nagys’s pitiful wanderers present themselves as emotionally depressed vagabonds who suffer from the postwar traumas and observe the twilight of Western civilization. Robinson plays the role of the cultural demiurge and his vision of the future is optimistic, though sometimes polemic. Charon relates to the Antique mythology and to the symbolism of death, but also to the paradigm of transition in space. The subject of Nagys’s poetry tries to balance the positions of theological and atheistic existentialism.