Forms of Hope

Tomas Venclova, the great Lithuanian poet, has for a quarter of a century 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 riter's response to the totalitarian challenge,' These studies of contemporary history and writers are themselves part of the struggle.