Tomas Venclova, the great Lithuanian poet, has for a quarter of acentury been one of the lonely representatives of the conscience of Lithuania. He belongs to a distinguished line of late-twentieth-century poets, one that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky. They are the cosmopolitan exiles, 'the transplanted spirits whose fate has been to burrow back into the mother tongue to claim the home that history denied them'. This drama also plays out in Venclova's Forms of Hope: essays and public statements on political and literary subjects. As an essayist, Venclova writes that he has been occupied by two basic themes: Vilnius, his native city, 'through whose example one could easily trace all of the complexity and tragedy of ethnic and national relations in Eastern Europe,' and 'the eastern European writer's response to the totalitarian challenge'. These studies of contemporary history and writers are themselves part of the struggle.

Contents


Introduction i
Preface
Politics
Letter to the Communist Party
A dialogue about a City
Jews and Lithuanians
Russians and Lithuanians
South African Diary
On the Choise between Democracy and Nationalism
Balkans and Baltics
Poems Melted into Ice

I. Literature
1. Literary Essays
An Exercise in Futility - The Case of Andrei Kurbsky
Czeslaw Milosz: Despair and Grace
Poetry as Atonement
Three Russian Poets
'Lithuanian Divertissement,' by Joseph Brodsky
A journey from Petersburg to Istanbul
Prison as communicative phenomenon: The literature of the gulag
The Game of the Soviet Censor
Odi et Amo

II. Review Essays
A poet in Stalin's Winter
Art and Danger
In the Lion's Mouth
On the Art of Writing in the USSR
war and Pieces
Out of Chaos
Making It
The Nonexistent Arrow
The Obscene House