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Forms of Hope: EssaysTomas Venclova![]()
Categories: 20th Century
Imprint: Sheep Meadow Press Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Hardback (288 pages) (Pub. Jul 2011) 9781878818706 Out of Stock
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
'Venclova's Forms of Hope is poignant and eloquent work, merging literary criticism with moral insight. One believes that Mandelstam and Babel might have rejoiced in it.'
Harold Bloom
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