What is unusual about the Borderland
An article by Mayhill Fowler.
Fundacja Pogranicze, located in the small Polish town of Sejny, is an example of how to carry out a dialogue of cultural identity with your neighbours.
Czesław Miłosz is perhaps best known in the West not for his poetry, but for his incisive 1953 analysis of the seduction of communism for writers entitled !e Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł). If Miłosz is right, then the question naturally arises: How does one liberate the mind? How does the artistic imagination become un-captive? On a more practical level, the question of how artistic institutions should emerge from the arts-state-public matrix which was particular to the former socialist Soviet Bloc can be asked? One answer and success story is Fundacja Pogranicze – the Borderland Foundation, in Sejny, Poland. 'e story of Fundacja Pogranicze carries profound implications both for culture throughout the post-Soviet space, as well as more generally in Europe (the Borderland Foundation and the Centre “Borderland Arts, Cultures, Nations” are two separate institutions. 'ey are linked through personnel and goals, and are discussed together in this article – author’s note).
Art as Utopia
I will begin with a utopian image. Late in summer 2010, I visited Pogranicze in the little town of Sejny, way up in the far corner of north-eastern Poland, on the border with Lithuania and near the border with Belarus. Sejny may be a small town, but it is also a microcosm of 20th-century Eastern Europe in the borderlands: the region belonged successively to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Russian Empire, to Poland (contested by Lithuania), and to the People’s Republic of Poland under the Soviet sphere of influence. Poles and Lithuanians fought over Sejny, and of course, Sejny’s Jewish community was destroyed during the Second World War. Multiple layers of war, occupation, ethnic violence, shifting demographics, imperial and political borders have seemingly left little trace in this charming town located near lakes, excellent hiking and outdoor summer concerts. Sitting in the apple-strewn garden of the summerhouse where I was staying, I could hear Jewish klezmer music wafting across town. I knew that the young local students, part of Pogranicze’s Sejny !eatre Klezmer Orchestra (Orkiestra Klezmerska Teatru Sejnenskiego), were practising for the evening concert, which would be performed at sunset outside the former synagogue. In the sunny late-summer afternoon the music floated across the town from one end to the other. Immediately,
I had a sense of the aural environment of the pre-war world and a frisson of the long-gone multicultural past of Poland. That moment is pure Pogranicze: young students creating a magical sense of a lost world through art, transforming the local environment and restoring its place. Of course how Sejny residents themselves would have heard that music, back in the prewar shtetl days, is another matter. 'e multiple cultural strands making up the local aural landscape – so intriguing to the 21st century historian – would have been so commonplace that it is quite likely locals would not have even registered that Jewish musicians were practising. Moreover, music can only evoke the past – it cannot recreate it. What Pogranicze has achieved, however, is important in the present.
Dawn of a new Europe
Pogranicze is a renaissance institution: an educational and cultural organisation, a documentation centre and a publishing house. It operates a jazz festival, a klezmer orchestra, a theatre workshop, and an exhibition space. 'ey organise music exchanges, tours for the theatre and orchestra groups, as well as conferences on dialogue and inter-ethnic cooperation for scholars and cultural practitioners worldwide.
In 1990, at the dawn of a new Poland and a new Europe, four young artist-idealists, Krzysztof Czyzewski, Małgorzata Sporek-Czyzewska, Bozena Szroeder, and Wojciech Szroeder, moved to Sejny and began working with students and the local community. Over two decades later, they are still there, all grown up, but still idealists. Now a part of the local community, the founding members of Pogranicze have raised children here, shaped the local culture and brought visitors to Sejny. Czyzewski writes and travels around the world speaking about Pogranicze and inter-ethnic communication. 'e theatre and orchestra also tour, and I, for one, first discovered them at LaMaMa 'eatre in New York City in spring 2008.
One of the central programmes of Pogranicze is the theatre workshop. Children of different ethnic backgrounds (Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Old Believer) come together and make art. 'e piece is called !e Sejny Chronicles (Kroniki Sejnenskie) and is based on images, songs, and stories of pre-war Sejny. Songs and stories alternate throughout the piece and at the centre of the stage stands a model of their town built by the students at the workshop. The process is what lies at the core of the performance, because all the students have to learn each other’s stories.
Lithuanians learn the Polish stories, Poles learn the Old Believer songs, and vice versa. All children learn about the Roma and Jewish members of the Sejny community through talking to relatives, and learning stories and songs from Sejny’s past. The result is a powerful evening, even for someone in far-off New York City. The power of stories simply told is electric. 'e production demonstrates the ability of applied arts to build bridges between communities and seems not only to have given the audiences, but also the actor-students themselves lessons and models for thinking about local communities, the transformative power of the arts, and inter-ethnic communication.
Pogranicze has also benefited from the interest, generosity, and spiritual patronage of Czesław Miłosz. Based primarily in buildings that formerly belonged to the Jewish community in Sejny, Pogranicze now also works out of Krasnogruda, Czesław Miłosz’s mother’s former estate. The work of Czyzewski, et al., resonates perhaps most clearly with Miłosz’s Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm), because this memoir of Miłosz is so much about this particular place on the borderlands at the corner of empires, and its experience in the brutal 20th century. But Pogranicze is also profoundly resonant with !e Captive Mind. Pogranicze promotes a radical vision of culture and of Europe, and their key success, in my mind, has been in emerging from the captivity of Soviet socialism.
The socialist layer
What was socialist Sejny like? Interestingly, the Sejny Chronicles never connects with the immediate socialist past of the People’s Republic of Poland. There are no stories, songs or images of Solidarity, martial law, 1968, or any of the key moments from the last 60 years. Rather, they have chosen to take the multi-cultural pre-Soviet and pre-war past as their foundation. It is a mythical Chagall-inspired place they conjure, one out-of-time with no mention of Polish-Lithuanian violence, and an oblique mention of the Holocaust. 'e stories in the show could have taken place in the early years of the 20th century, or the mid-1920s. Time is unimportant.
What is important, however, is place. In this sense, they are following in the tradition of the cultural turn towards the kresy, the swampy borderlands between Europe and Russia; lands with multi-ethnic villages and few cities, lands contested by various empires and states, and ravaged by war. Innovative interwar Polish theatre director Juliusz Osterwa looked to the kresy for cultural inspiration, as did the avant-garde Gardzienice theatre company, with whom Czyzewski and his colleagues worked in the late communist period.
The turn to the kresy and the omission of the Soviet socialist past actually somewhat hides Pogranicze’s particular success. First of all, the town of Sejny offers a perfect paradox of the socialist Soviet Bloc: in promoting minorities, socialism actually built walls between ethnic groups. Soviet socialism was not about building bridges. In the “Friendship of Nations” ethnic groups did not speak to each other, even though they lived together in a onestreet town. Soviet culture promoted sameness – “socialist in content, national in form”.
But Pogranicze promotes difference. In fact, Pogranicze stakes its success in the very creativity produced by difference. Business manuals, cultural economists, and postcolonial theorists all write of the productivity of diversity, but the arts have tended to fall into national or ethnic categories, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Secondly, Soviet culture focused on centre and centralization: Warsaw or Moscow. Pogranicze, however, directs its energy away from the centre, towards the peripheral borderlands. In fact, Pogranicze puts the centre of European culture precisely in the periphery. Czyzewski defines a goal for today’s European culture as powrót do prowincji, or the return to the provinces. Rejecting centralization marks a distinct move away from the centripetal force of Soviet socialism.
Finally, partially because of the centripetal force of Soviet socialism, Soviet culture was rarely focused on local community concerns, that is, a local audience. Pogranicze has entirely placed itself in the hands of the audience. Of course, Pogranicze is unfortunately dependent on grant organizations such as the European Union, the Polish Ministry of Culture, and the Ford Foundation, in order to continue their work. But full state funding under communism implicitly placed the state as a middleman between the audience and the artist. Pogranicze is re-creating the relationship of the arts with its audience through excellence, through community involvement, and through listening to the audience. Far from any épater le bourgeois rhetoric of avant-garde theatre, or enveloping the artist in a concept comprehensible only to himself, Pogranicze’s creativity has an impact on the local community. 'e result is that cultural production becomes not about the performers, but about the people in the audience. This is profoundly new.
With the return to the local, the borderlands, and the audience, Pogranicze has been able to move out of the paradigm of the captive mind.
The Pogranicze model
Is there a Pogranicze model? What makes Pogranicze possible? Could you have a Pogranicze in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus? If so, what factors would contribute to the model’s success or failure? One answer, which Czyzewski himself has explained, is the excellence of their cultural offering. Also, of course, Sejny and Pogranicze are shaped by the Soviet socialist legacy differently than, say, Ukraine or Georgia.
For places that were in the USSR itself, not just in its sphere of influence, and places that experienced the early years of forging communism, the reality of emerging from the “captive mind” phenomenon requires, perhaps, other institutions, practices, and skills.
Twenty more years of being in the Friendship of Nations makes the ethnicisiation harder to overcome. More importantly, Poland belongs to the European Union, and Pogranicze dovetails well with the EU’s project of exploring what constitutes European culture, and what it means to be European. Diversity, plurality, and dialogue are (if fraught!) topics of conversation in the EU. Compare Pogranicze to Russkiy Mir (www.russkiymir.ru), a Kremlin-sponsored cultural organization aimed at exporting Russian-language culture abroad. Russianlanguage culture, no doubt, is rich and well deserves to be shared with the rest of the world. But the Russkiy Mir model implies the dominance of Russian culture world-wide, as opposed to embracing the various diversities and tensions within Russian culture itself. Pogranicze is about dialogue while Russkiy Mir is about the excellence of the monologue. If we look at other countries of Eastern Europe, we also don’t see a model similar to Pogranicze. Ukraine, for example, has not embraced the idea of the “other” as central to its cultural identity. At the heart of the Pogranicze model is the belief that art lies in the “other”, not the “self”. Culture only exists as refracted and reflected through multiple others. 'is model would require Ukrainian culture to embrace not only the wild Cossack steppe, but the Ashkenazi Jews (along with their historical leaders and communities), the Poles themselves, the Russians, the Armenians, the Germans, and the Bulgarians, etc. It would require embracing Paul Celan, Bruno Shultz, and Vasily Grossman. It would mean taking a Pogranicze approach to culture, inclusive and dependent on the “other”. Could students not only learn and present “our own” stories of underground fighters, nationalist rebellions and death in famine, but also stories of the “other”, of the Jewish population, of the Red Army, of the expelled Poles, of the many different peoples who lived, worked, suffered, rejoiced in the region that is today Ukraine and whose legacies still exist today?
Europe as East?
It is in this embrace of the “other” (and promoting the identity of the “self-asother”) that Pogranicze is most radical. 'is radicalism lies not only in its rejection of the Soviet legacy, but also in its stance in Europe today. Last autumn I had the pleasure of participating in Pogranicze’s Nowa Agora conference, a multi-day event in Brussels attended by applied artists, cultural practitioners, writers, and scholars all engaged in the question, whether scholarly or practically, of how to resolve agora with diversity, that is, how to promote multiculturalism without ignoring and eroding difference. According to Zygmunt Bauman, to be European is to be different, because in Europe difference has always been close. The “other” lived next door. (Bauman writes of these ideas frequently, most recently in his book,
Culture in a Liquid Modern World Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
Most of the New Agora conference took place at East Poland House, an institution determined to represent the interests of Poland’s east, that is, the kresy, in the European Union. The very existence of the institution shows the urgency of this representation. In other words, were it not for specifically advocating the borderlands, Europe’s and Poland’s east, these interests might fall by the proverbial wayside. In other words, East pushes the definition of Europe. Europe today, however, is defined by its borders, its edges, its minorities, and its borderlands. Pogranicze, in fact, takes a cultural and intellectual genealogy not of the Western Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Rousseau or Goethe, but Herman Hesse, Ivo Andric, Czesław Miłosz; they take Europe not from France, but from Poland: a Europe with others, and a Europe with an East. Pogranicze’s success is not only related to its music and theatre. It embraces the East as Europe’s future, placing the centre in the periphery and emerging from the paradigm of captive minds. The Pogranicze model may not work everywhere, but it proves the benefit of diversity for creativity, and art itself for the teaching of diversity.
Mayhill Fowler holds a PhD in History from Princeton University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
