Krzysztof Czyżewski "Spirituality of Vilnius" to Vaidotas Daunys

Wilno of the 1990s, my Wilno, Wilno at the end of the second millennium, Vilnius. The Museum of Atheism has been transformed back into a Christian temple. The thick layer of Soviet accretions, laboriously and persistently rubbed off, gets thinner and thinner every year. Czesław Miłosz, with whom I go through the old city, guesses correctly the name of each street. “I still remember every little corner of Wilno; I could go through this city without looking, thinking about something of my own, and yet I would find everything there "- these words written in America do not belong to Miłosz, although they undoubtedly could. Why would their author, Tomas Venclova, brought up in the post-war Vilnius, insist in his dialogue with Miłosz that Warsaw and Vilnius “were two radically different cities”, and he thought  even that Warsaw, “although completely ruined”, changed less?

Meanwhile, something completely different is starting to bother me: it's lunch time, the master is hungry, and here it turns out that all the restaurants have a lunch break. After some nervous searches, we sit on the high stools of the milk bar and have some Russian dumplings. Happy as a Soviet hero on a Soviet poster.

Lenin is gone from Łukiszki. From Szura's house, from Krażio alley, where I often lived, where my old father taught himself Hebrew and remembered Yiddish, but spoke Russian with his daughter. She would talk to her children only in Lithuanian. Her great command of Polish made me feel embarrassed. Today, she studies Yiddish, her daughter Polish, and her son married a Belarusian woman of Polish descent. Today in Vilnius, you can hear the Radio Znad Willi, it broadcasts in Lithuanian, Polish and Russian, that is – to quote Josif Brodski - in all the three native languages of Tomas Venclova.

Not far from  Szura’s house, for several years after the memorable January 1991, stood concrete entanglements meant to defend the Lithuanian Parliament. I have been once shown one of the leaflets that used to be scattered around in these dramatic days of direct struggle for independence: The Pilgrim’s Prayer from Mickiewicz's messianic Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage, in which the word “Poland” was replaced with the word “Lithuania”. Walking through the government corridors to Vytautas Landsbergis' office, I encountered sacks of sand, which Lithuania once barricaded itself against - no one doubted that any more - the foreign occupier.

Sovietness could by no means equal the Vilnius’ Russian element, itself a precious metal of old. I have always been curious about this place next to the Gate of Dawn, which we, Poles and Lithuanians - somehow could not adapt - the Orthodox monastery and the church of Holy Spirit in whose cellars you could smell the breath of the ancient Byzantium. Between the Uniate church of Holy Trinity and the Basilian monastery, the Orthodox church and the church of St. Theresa with the Carmelite monastery and the Gate of Dawn Chapel, stands one of the most important chakras of Vilnius, whose power is born in the amalgam of the East and West. This power was once weakened with the arrival of Novosiltsov, and when by orders of the Tsar or the first secretary of the All-Soviets deportation after deportation went to Siberia. A magnetic counterfield  repelling the East from us under the name of Russia was thus born. Nevertheless, one of the joys of every trip to Vilnius was purchase of Russian books, long unavailable in Poland following liquidation of Soviet bookshops.

We follow Vaidotas Daunys along Giedyminka down towards the Cathedral. It makes me realize the import of the name of the city whose patron is Saint Christopher. He will forever travel from shore to shore, always with Him on his shoulder. “After all, a word becomes a name when one shore calls the other. When man calls man. When nation calls nation”. Other chakras Vilnius are also alloys. We stand at the confluence of three rivers, between Gediminas Mount  and the Cathedral. The ceremony of consecration of the flag of the President of the Republic of Lithuania in 1993 was first held on Mount Gediminas, where members of Romuva celebrated rituals in accordance with a pagan ritual, and then everyone went to the Vilnius Arch-cathedral for a holy mass and the Catholic ceremony of consecration of the flag. Two years later, the Lithuanian Seym, by a few votes majority only, rejected the law granting paganism the status of a traditional religion.

Inquiring about the spirituality of Vilnius from the 1990's perspective does not look easy. What can be important in the tumult of historical changes and the IT revolution? A silent dispute with the Belarusians about the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania still continues. While Algis Kaleda consistently builds from scratch the chair of Polish philology at the Vilnius University, there is a louder a dispute over a Polish university. Karaites make careers in diplomacy. Lithuanian theatre becomes one of the best in the world. Exhibitions and world congresses revive the spirits of Jurgis Maciunas, the creator of Fluxus, and of Vilna Gaon, the sage of Jerusalem of the North. The memory of the Shoah still hurts. Further unknown pages of recent history are rediscovered: heroic guerrillas and calculating collaborators. Pranas Morkus is still unable to build monuments to the Lithuanian victims of the Home Army in Dubinki and to the Polish victims of the Lithuanian police in Glinciszki - lack of consent of the residents. Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova steadfastly continue the dialogue of reconciliation. The Open House of Lithuania is a venue of disputes about Central Europe...

            "It is said that modern civilization produces uniformist boredom and destroys individuality. If so, I had no reason to complain about that flaw," writes Miłosz recalling Vilnius in Native Realm. In such case,  the past once again allows us to read the city of today. Looking for an answer to the question of the spirituality of Vilnius, one could follow the trail of the past, immerse oneself in the maze of unique architecture, quote written testimonies, including masterpieces of literature, try to awaken the ghosts of its great figures sleeping at the university. However, spirituality if meant to be alive, must be grasped at the interface with contemporary reality, with the authentic environment of the people who inherit and create it, and with the whole context in which it is directly immersed. Otherwise, it becomes a museum souvenir, a box with gems from the past, a trap for people enjoying nostalgia.

That is why, although I walked around Vilnius with Czesław Miłosz, and although I had my introduction to the city by the Romantics and later writings of Kulbak, Grade, Miłosz, Konwicki, Rymkiewicz and Venclova, it was not them that finally revealed to me the spirituality of Vilnius. I achieved that equally through my peers, who came from the Lithuanian provinces to learn the Gediminas’ city anew, to read and spell its name. One of them was Vaidotas Daunys, who died  tragically in 1995. To tell about him is to penetrate the realm of myth, of a bold thought that, although lonely and utopian, ultimately determines the spirituality of his time, impressing on it its lasting mark. After all, as Grigori Kanowicz’s - whose name should always be mentioned among the inhabitants of Vilnius - grandmother used to say, "sugar is sweeter in your mind than in your mouth, in your mouth it melts, never in your mind".

"After all, you don't return to this city just like that, but to make your palate feel the vibration of the syllable again.” Vaidotas Daunys returned with a suspenseful attention and conscious purpose. He was one of those nearly seventy percent of the inhabitants of today's Vilnius who were not born in the capital of Lithuania. Most of them came here from the countryside. A symbolic beginning to this exodus to the city dates back to the early 19th century when the Lithuanian historian Szymonas Daukantas walked himself to Vilnius per pedes apostolorum. Today, Leonidas Donskis refers to them as "not-yet-bourgeoisie-not-peasants anymore". They created a characteristic climate of a city coloured with the countryside. "Five minutes’ walk from the Gate of Dawn, people live like in a village: keeping gardens, chickens, fruit trees... A few hundred yards from the Parliament building, on the other side of the Neris, among the Brezhnev era blocks of flats, wooden houses are hidden wooden cottages[...] surrounded by sheds, pigsties, woodsheds...” – writes Katarzyna Korzeniewska. This state of suspension between city and country has had dramatic consequences. The philosopher Arvydas Šlogeris remembers that: "We all left the country for the city, generations of Lithuanian intellectuals and non-intellectuals... And we all know how difficult it was to leave. Many people of great spirit experienced it as a great (maybe the greatest) internal and even national tragedy. Many have paid the highest price: bitter sleepless nights, boundless regrets, longing, scepticism, irony, hopelessness, escape into the intoxicating Kirke drink, psychiatric hospitals, broken families and what else. “

The exodus of people rooted in rural culture to the city, which has become part of the fate of many generations of Lithuanians, is not, however, the matrix of the path chosen by Vaidotas Daunys. His was a return to Vilnius. He was returning to the "city without a name" to discover that name and pronounce it anew. He was returning to the city that was not to be, in which the apocalypse came true. How many times was Vilnius, this true spiritual Vilnius, to be erased from the face of the earth? Take for example the eighteenth century, the times of the Second Swedish war, then the Muscovite invasion and terrible fires. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski wrote then: "We are looking in vain through the eyes of forms that would take us to the past, the improper hand of the improvers have glued on top of the building accessories and decorations that killed its character. They built later many beautiful edifices, but the former Vilnius, the Jagiellonian Vilnius, whose remains were visible before the last fires, has disappeared forever. “

Although the city rose each time like a Phoenix from the ashes, it seemed that the apocalypse of the Second World War once foretold by the Vilnius catastrophists would have put an end to its spirit. Miłosz himself evidenced that by saying:

            I crumbled its brickdust in my fingers.  That is what remains

            of the great love of native cities...

            To reject. To reject everything...

            ...I will neither resurrect the past nor return...

            Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,

            its pupil flashing on the altars.

 [from Farewell]

In his dialogue with Miłosz, Tomas Venclova wrote about the post-war Vilnius as a completely different city. “We know a different Wilno; you can even say they are two distinctly different cities. [...] ... everything here is new. They  sky, of course remained the same. Also Vilia (now called Neris), even sandy patches at the place where Vilnia or Vilnele joins the Vilia; some trees remain - many trees; but what else? There remained, of course, the architecture.”

Vaidotas Daunys would return to the city "from stone with a heart". Together with his friends he used to establish here the Regnum, i.e. the Kingdom. After the ambitious quarterly Krantai (Shores), this was the title of another magazine founded and edited by Daunys, as well as of the foundation of which he was one of the initiators. Arvydas Juozaitis would write in Regnum: "Today, when we have grown in here with our roots, we defend Vilnius, as one should defend his honour, inside of the walls.” They also remembered well Algirdas Greimas's opinion about Vilnius, the city whose walls and streets changed people rather than people would adjust streets and walls to themselves. They quickly learned the city, grew up here, every now and then appeared new magazines, associations, publishing houses .... As if they were afraid that they would not be able to pronounce the name of their city strongly enough. “Not all Lithuania has been permeated by the spirit of our capital,” wrote Juozaitis, “It sometimes seems that the influence of Vilnius is diminishing, that the Lithuania of Vilnius will never become great”.

For Miłosz and Venclova, just like for Mickiewicz, Vilnius was a stage in their journey from province into the great world. That's why you wanted to get out of here. I am happy," wrote Venclova, "to hear the bells of Venice and to know that in five minutes I can see San Giorgio Maggiore, perhaps the most beautiful façade in the world. I wouldn't want to return to present Vilnius, I couldn't actually stand it there.” In this dialogue about Vilnius, Miłosz described this feeling even more bluntly: “The parochialism of Vilnius. It bothered me a lot, and I longed to get out into the world. [...]” I accepted the forced departure to Warsaw with relief. Because Vilnius was a backwater...”

For Daunys and his friends, Vilnius was “a liberation from the introverted patriotism and provincialism”. It was their fate and a window to the world. It is no longer a stage on a linear path of life, it is a circular way of destiny closing on their return to the Kingdom. However, this Kingdom is here and now, under rebirth in the concrete reality of the post-Soviet Vilnius. The Kingdom is a matter of life's praxis. And this is what makes it fundamentally different from Mickiewicz’s or Miłosz’s return, the ideal return through literature to the land of childhood.

To pronounce the name of his city, the memory must get unsealed. “I speak, therefore I remember. [...]” We remember, so we are”, wrote Daunys in his Vilnius. Name and Word. It was Daunys the poet and Daunys the citizen of the Kingdom. How deeply did their memory run? To what tradition did they refer to?

For Miłosz, the memory of Vilnius dated back to the period of Romanticism, the university’s glory times. “At our university you can feel continuity more than at other Polish university, with the exception of the Jagiellonian University. On its closure, in the wake of the Uprising of 1831, it in some way shortened, it was dying and lived on the aura of the Philomaths. Growing up in Vilnius meant belonging the 20th century only to a certain degree, mainly, perhaps, through cinema. Sometimes I confuse today the Academic Vagrants Club, especially the Senior Vagrants Club, with the Society of the Gobblers founded by the professors of young Mickiewicz.”

Since during his stay in Vilnius the interwar period was a taboo, Venclova’s closest tradition became the city of Mickiewicz and Daukantas. While a student he even set up with his colleagues a club modelled on the Szubrawcy [Miscreants Society] “quite risky considering the omniscient KGB...”.

The Vilnius of the present-day citizens of the Kingdom is no longer the Vilnius of Mickiewicz, Miłosz or even Venclova. Owing much to the writers’ books, the citizens themselves have descended much deeper into the deposits of time. Daunys’ return goes much further than the road separating the country and the city, or the distance between the capital of the Republic of Lithuania and the city of Philomaths or Zhagarists. It is a return of a Lithuanian along the route dating back to the times when the Valley of the Vilnia River was still called the Šventaragis Valley. His journey to Vilnius is a kind of incubation - a journey to the holy centre. The bard’s dreams come true due to the ritual of falling asleep on the grave of his forefathers. Gintaras Beresniavicius, another inhabitant of the Kingdom and an excellent ethnologist, reminds us that this was the original purpose of Gediminas' journey to the confluence of three rivers: the dream on the graves of forefathers and the vision of the Iron Wolf which was read by the High Priest Lizdeika as a sign for the establishment of the capital city on this place. It is important that at the very beginnings of Vilnius lay already a bipolar alloy. "Two cities in this city are merged like communicating tubes, wrote Daunys in Vilnius. Name and Word, Naruta stood on a hill, where the light of the world was touching the kingly crown. And though the city on a hill cannot stay hidden - the city got lost, disappeared. Vilnius born from a valley, from shadows... [...] And although a city sown in the shadows cannot mature, the city has risen up and survived”.

Arvydas Šlogeris carries this duality further onto the opposition of two Lithuanian cities - Vilnius and Kaunas. Kaunas is the “temporary” (that is, the earthly, temporal) capital, the city of  wheeler-dealers, the earthly axis, our true Athens, with the cult of our pagan ideal, Vytautas the Great, and the university of his name. Vilnius is our "eternal" capital city, the city of depraved priests - intellectuals, the heavenly axis, our Eternal Jerusalem, with Our Lady of the Dawn Gate (being also Barbora Radvilaitė) and the Jesuit university founded by Poles.

The same is true of Vilnius for young Lithuanians returning to the Kingdom. Reading its name, they evoke the tradition of syncretism and universalism, as Juozaitis' reflections affirm: “The original variety that opens Vilnius to the world, Jews, Karaites and Tatars, as well as Germans - not to mention Lithuanians and Slavs - were the true source of Vilnius' existence, its development dynamics and wealth.... Ethnic diversity has become not only a coveted but also a legally protected way of life that has created a tradition of cultural and religious tolerance. [...] it is a life that transcends the boundaries of ethnic, cultural and religious communities. The universal man grows up not in a culturally uniform environment, but in the syncretic alloy of cultures.”

Trying to pronounce this city, Vaidotas Daunys "hears the murmur of all words. But at the same time, adapts the only one. There is here a Lithuanian, a Greek, a Jew, a Pole, a Prussian, a Karaite, and a Tatar. But at the same time gone from here are a Greek, a Jew… Only one single word that when pronounced becomes a name.”

Pronounced is the name of the city, established the Kingdom, the museum of atheism transformed into a temple, the city - although it experiences the apocalypse - remains unchanged, Jagiellonian one as Kraszewski wished, the principle of the alloy of different elements remains, St. Christopher remains forever watching the passage from shore to shore, the poet with his eyes closed finds streets and alleys, although it is a completely different city from the one he knew, the Lithuanian returns to the confluence of three rivers, the vision of the city haunts the man sleeping on the grave of his forefathers, spirituality lives in the power of action and memory.