Tomas Venclova, Forms of hope : essays : recenzija

Abstract

Tomas Venclova may well be regarded as the most influential social and cultural critic in twentieth-century Lithuania. A national poet of Lithuania, a liberal critic of conservative nationalism, and a brilliant essayist, Venclova holds a legitimate place alongside such most prominent critics of society and culture in Central and Eastern Europe as Czesław Miłosz, Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Joseph Brodsky. As a critic of Communism, and as a human rights activist, he was a major figure in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union and beyond. Yet Venclova’s critiques and humane concerns far transcended the limits of the then conventional political dissent and entered the discursive universe of the critical questioning of his own society and culture. Prejudice, superstition, irrational fear of modernity, antisemitism, xenophobia, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness are keywords to define the object of his criticism targeted at Lithuanian society and culture.[...]