Venclova`s Vilnius

This article is from the book “VILNIUS a Personal History” written by Tomas Venclova.
From reading Mr. Venclova’s Bio you can understand why we are excited and honoured to have him as one of the contributing writers for VilNews. In the future we will continue to post excerpts from his book for your reading enjoyment. We thank the publisher, The Sheep Meadow Press for their gracious consent in allowing us to share Mr. Venclova’s book with you and we would like to direct you to The University Press of New England who is the book’s distributor.

Published at:
Sheep Meadow Press
http://sheepmeadowpress.com/
Distributed by:
University Press of New England
http://www.upne.com/index_new.html

Text: Tomas Venclova

Vilnius was founded by Lithuanians, and in the Middle Ages they presumably established the tone of the city. Later, this changed radically. In Bakhtin’s* day, only about two percent of the citizens of Vilnius spoke Lithuanian. After the Second World War, everything changed fundamentally. As the tanks of several occupying armies rolled through the city, half of its inhabitants were murdered, the other half driven out or deported. Lithuanians from villages and small towns, intellectuals (my parents among them) who had earlier been drawn to Kaunas, the second largest Lithuanian city, streamed into the de-populated Vilnius. In short, thousands of people were getting to know their nation’s legendary capital for the first time and had difficulty gaining a foothold in their new surroundings which, quite apart from everything else, were being subjected to the hand of Communist power. Only now, several generations later, do Lithuanians constitute a majority in Vilnius and feel at home there. Today, the Lithuanian language predominates in the streets and has supplanted other languages on signs and public notices. (Despite the protests of philologists, these signs are often printed in English.)

In the surrounding villages, Lithuanian is certainly not spoken everywhere. You have to drive at least thirty miles north or south to hear the old language again. Its dialects differ greatly from one another: for example, the Aukstaiciai, who live in the northern coastal region, have long been known for their sensitivity and imagination; the Dzukai, from the southern pine forests, have always struggled with their sandy soil and sell their berries and mushrooms in Vilnius. The villages of these two groups extend all the way to Belarus―and Belarusian settlements extend into present-day Lithuania. From an ethnic standpoint, the border east of Vilnius follows a completely arbitrary course―even though it separates the European Union from a country still under dictatorial rule. Lithuanians and Slavs have always lived together in the areas surrounding the city. One can probably say that Vilnius has always been on the European border―a sort of transit lounge.

The second historic people of Vilnius called themselves Ruthenians. In the Middle Ages, their language was probably heard as often on the wooden sidewalks of the city as Lithuanian. The Ruthenians were already building their Orthodox churches when the Lithuanians were still heathens. In governmental affairs, the Slavic language predominated because writing was connected with Orthodoxy. It is hard to say just when the East Slavic tribe of the Ruthenians became a separate people. At first, the only thing that differentiated them from the Muscovite Russians was their dialect, but later, when they developed a greater affinity with the West, their political orientation followed suit. Ruthenian churches did not belong to the Patriarchy of Moscow but rather to the Patriarchy of Constantinople, which did not always agree with Moscow.

With the passage of centuries marked by turmoil and religious wars, the Belarusian people gradually formed out of the Ruthenians in the Vilnius area and further east. Even today, having settled among Russians and Poles―Orthodox Christians and Catholics, respectively―Belarusians lack a distinctive identity. Moreover, their contact with the Lithuanians also had consequences. There are many Lithuanian words in the Belarusian language, and many Belarusian or Ruthenian words in Lithuanian, especially ecclesiastical words. The grammar of the Belarusian language was only codified by twentieth-century nationalists; the nationalist movement they triggered was the latest to occur in all of Europe. The Belarusians―like their neighbors the Dzukai―held on to their archaic mythology, folklore, and customs; they were long known not only for their generosity but also for their poverty and their inability to subsist on the barren soil of a region where there were practically no roads. Up until the First World War, four-fifths of the population were illiterate. Politics determined how they were classified in passports and statistics. Whatever nation happened to be in power at the time would count the Belarusians among its own people, even if it looked down on them. Today, some Belarusians describe their nationality with the word tutejszy—“local.” Another Ruthenian dialect goes back to the origins of the Ukrainian people, but that is another story. The Ukraine is far to the south of my country.

The third historic people, the Poles, had the greatest impact on Vilnius and its surroundings for several centuries. Catholicism came to Lithuania from Poland and brought with it a different way of life. Relatively few Poles actually came to Vilnius―most of them priests. The local Lithuanian and Ruthenian upper class viewed the Polish aristocracy with great mistrust and tried to keep them from settling in their territory in every imaginable way. But at the very same time this local upper class, captivated by Polish Renaissance customs and freedoms, quickly decided to adopt the Polish language. This is a paradox rarely encountered elsewhere in Europe: the upper strata of society were in all respects Polish, but they stubbornly called themselves Lithuanians―as opposed to the “genuine” Poles from Krakow and Warsaw.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, city people primarily spoke Polish. Lithuanian and Belarusian were relegated to the rural regions and became a sign of peasant origin and backwardness. Actually, Belarusian is not very different from Polish and was considered one of its dialects. The Lithuanians faced a situation similar to that of the Irish: their language had about as much in common with Polish as Gaelic had with English, and therefore many people considered it just a historical curiosity―quaint, but doomed to oblivion. The Lithuanian intelligentsia managed to change this viewpoint (they were more successful than the Irish), but it was difficult and took a long time. In other words, there were two types of Lithuanians: the first type knew only Polish and couldn’t imagine a life without Poland, even though they were local patriots, whose forefathers spoke Lithuanian (or Ruthenian); the second type, who were less conspicuous, still spoke the old Lithuanian language and dreamed of an independent Lithuanian state. This social division resulted in considerable animosity. Later, it turned into armed conflict, which would determine the fate of the city.

Józef Piłsudski, who founded the independent Polish state after the First World War, saw himself as having Lithuanian origins, as did Adam Mickiewicz in the nineteenth century and Tadeusz Kósciuszko in the eighteenth. Piłsudski liked to say, “Poland is like a pretzel―everything that’s good about it is in the outer crusts, and inside there’s nothing.” Among these “outer crusts,” Piłsudski ranked Vilnius above all others. He had been educated in Vilnius, and it was there that he had first become interested in revolutionary ideas and was first arrested for taking part in a conspiracy. Another conspirator in that same plot, Lenin’s older brother Alexander, was hanged. But Piłsudski survived and eventually, weapon in hand, liberated his own country, brought Lenin’s Bolsheviks to a standstill at the Vistula, and marched into the city he had grown up in. For the next twenty years, Vilnius would remain a part of his country, Poland. Although Piłsudski’s heart is buried in a Vilnius cemetery, the Poles are today a minority in the city; they no longer form the upper class, nor even the educated class. For the most part, they are laborers, craftsmen, former peasants. The Polish language is still dominant in the surrounding villages, although it is difficult to establish precisely where it spills into Belarusian.

There are also genuine Russians in Vilnius. The first Russian probably came to Lithuania from Moscow as early as the sixteenth century: Prince Kurbsky, the patron of all Russian dissidents and political émigrés. After a dreadful falling-out with Tsar Ivan “the Terrible,” Kurbsky wrote letters to his former ruler from nearby Lithuania. The Tsar replied with angry, but impeccably literary outbursts. This was the start of a polemic between tyrants and their opponents that has continued in Russia ever since. About a century later, émigrés appeared who disagreed with the reform of the Orthodox Church and had decided to preserve the old liturgy and morality. These so-called “Old Believers” put down roots in Vilnius but continued to speak their own language, which is quite distinct from Belarusian and Polish―and not at all like Lithuanian. The Old Believers gained a reputation as quiet, hardworking people. Their churches are modest and do not resemble Orthodox churches at all. One of them, behind the train station in an out-of-the-way section of Vilnius, is surrounded by high walls that formerly protected it from attacks by followers of the New Orthodox Church who threw stones at the Old Believers.

When the city was under Tsarist occupation in the nineteenth century, these New Orthodox Russians came to Vilnius in great numbers. They built churches, usually in the most conspicuous locations: even today their threatening, onion-shaped cupolas loom high above the city―in sharp contrast to the graceful Baroque of the Catholic churches. During the Soviet era, Russians made up at least one third of the population. The majority had moved to Vilnius only after the end of the Second World War. At the time, all public notices and signs had to be printed in Cyrillic lettering as well as in the Roman alphabet. Lithuanian and Polish schools devoted considerable time to learning Russian. I wasn’t too upset about that because I was just beginning to love Alexander Pushkin, as well as the later Silver Age poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, who were not listed in the syllabus or mentioned in school at all. But I was an exception; my classmates equated the Russians with the unbearable Soviet government. When it collapsed, the majority of Russian civil servants and military personnel left Lithuania, accompanied by their daughters, who had piqued my youthful interest. But quite a few intellectuals―who were, as a rule, closer to Kurbsky’s tradition than to that of Ivan the Terrible―remained, and this too is still noticeable in the city.

Two tiny ethnic groups are also among the historic peoples of Vilnius: the Tatars and the Karaites. Though the city is far from the Balkans, some Moslems live there. Tatars, followers of the Prophet, settled here as early as the Middle Ages. They even had a wooden mosque and a cemetery in their own city district near the bend of the Neris River. For many years it was known as “Tartaria.” I can still remember seeing in the cemetery the abandoned stone grave markers, decorated with a crescent moon. During my time in Vilnius, the mosque was torn down and the graves were transferred to a distant suburb, but they still exist. Even now you can still find Tatars―fewer perhaps in Vilnius itself than in its vicinity, where there are still mosques that face Mecca. The Tatars have forgotten their Turkic language and now speak Belorussian, but they still read the Koran. (There are even Belorussian manuscripts using the Arabic alphabet.) Incidentally, the most famous participant of the struggle against the Soviets in 1991, Loreta Asanavičūtė, was descended from Lithuanian Tatars. She was the young girl who was run over by a tank and killed when Gorbachev’s troops sought in vain to suppress the independence movement. It is easy to identify the Moslem name “Hassan” in her surname.

The Karaites, one of the smallest ethnic groups in the world, are even more unique. There are scarcely three hundred of them, but in this case quality compensates for quantity: the Karaites stubbornly cling to their language and religion, and one cannot confuse them with anyone else. Their Turkic language is quite similar to that of the Tatars, but their religion is unique. The Karaites call themselves the “People of the One Book,” for they recognize only the Torah. Although they consider both Christ and Mohammed prophets, they hold neither the New Testament nor the Koran sacred. Theirs is, in effect, the oldest pre-Talmudic Judaism―in a significantly altered form, of course. The Karaites, it is said, were a remnant of the mysterious Khazars―a nomadic people (about whom we know almost nothing) who adopted this faith in the early Middle Ages. Whether or not this is true, the Karaites have remained in the Lithuanian forests as an enclave of the Asiatic Steppe. Once warlike, today they are primarily farmers. Most of them live in the little town of Trakai, although they also have a synagogue in Vilnius. A relatively large number of them are intellectuals. Present-day Lithuania has three Karaite diplomats―one is the ambassador to Turkey. (Her native language allows her to understand Turkish.) It would be difficult to imagine another ethnic group of which one percent are employed by the diplomatic service.

I have not yet mentioned the seventh historic people; today, hardly any of them are left in Vilnius. For several centuries, they formed one half of the city’s population—and sometimes more than half—namely, the Jews. They called Vilnius Jerusholayim de Lite, Lithuanian Jerusalem, and the city actually resembled Jerusalem in size and had a self-contained Old Town, whose walls enclosed a veritable oriental maze of streets and alleys. The Jewish quarter was a considerable part of this jumble, with arches that extended over the walls and with numerous houses of prayer, among them the Great Synagogue. Eighteen Torah scrolls were stored there, and among the Great Synagogue’s columns five thousand of the faithful could find room to pray. Small stores were clustered around the synagogue, along with tradesmen’s workshops and libraries. The largest of the libraries, founded by the Enlightenment philosopher Mattityahu Strashun, housed Hebrew incunabula and manuscripts.

Lithuanian heads of state and bishops issued detailed regulations restricting the rights of Jews. For example, a synagogue could not be higher than a Catholic church; that is why one had to enter a Jewish house of prayer as if one were going downstairs into a cellar. Still, on the whole, Jews were able to lead a more peaceful life in Vilnius than anywhere else in Europe, and when they lost their homelands in Cordoba and in the Rhineland, Vilnius became the most important Jewish center in the world. In many ways the city could indeed call itself the Lithuanian Jerusalem when describing its spiritual life. But today, all this is only a memory.

My parents were still able to witness the old Jewish quarter of Vilnius, unchanged since the sixteenth or seventeenth century. But my experience was something different. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation, when I was five years old, my mother and I met a man walking not on the sidewalk but in the gutter, a yellow six-pointed star sewn on his sleeve. My mother greeted the man, and after we had passed him I asked her what the yellow star meant. “He is Jewish,” my mother answered, “All the Jews are ordered to wear it.” Not until after the war did she tell me that she herself had been arrested because the new rulers suspected her of being Jewish. She could have been shot. My mother managed to save herself by having one of her former teachers testify that she was Lithuanian and Catholic―which was true.

In the post-war period, I was already attending school. On the way there, I had to walk through an overgrown area of ruins, in the center of which rose the remnants of a massive white building with vestiges of columns and arches. By the time I understood that it had once been the Great Synagogue, it had already been razed. The Soviet State supported the Jewish faith as little as it supported any other religion. Jews lay in mass graves in the pine forests of the suburb of Paneriai; very few still lived in Vilnius. Some went abroad; many emigrated to the real Jerusalem. The ruins became a barren land, and no one spoke of its past. A very dilapidated Strashun Street has survived—under a different name, of course. Today if you were to scratch the paint off the walls, here and there, below the windows you would find Hebrew letters.

* Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian philosopher 1895-1975