Discovering distant neighbours: scandinavian images in Lithuanian poetry

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Skandinaviški įvaizdžiai; Lietuvių poezija; Scandinavian images; Lithuanian poetry.

ENThe image of Scandinavian culture was considerably influenced by literary texts: independent, emotionally misbalanced, boisterous individualities from the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hamsun and their cult of natural vitality call to open the mind to the primordial elements that fascinated Lithuanian neo-Romantic intellectuals of the early twentieth century. The enlightened elite tried to install the principles of a civic society and modify the reviving Lithuanian nationalism with ideas of Baltoscandian confederation. This ambitious geopolitical vision was not supported by axiological arguments: the social, confessional, and economic differences between the distinct shores of the Baltics restricted plans for integration. During the interwar period of cultural Eurocentrism (1918-40), litterateurs often visited Nordic countries and overestimated the heroism of the Vikings who conquered the North. Antithetical myths of Prometheus’s sacrifice and narcissist egocentrism were intermingled in the poetical subconsciousness and were related to the stereotypical Nordic characters of extremely popular novels and dramas. During the first decade of post-war Soviet occupation (1944-54), all means of communication with the northern neighbours were discontinued, and anachronistic historical stereotypes replaced immediate experiences. Scandinavia was regarded as a uniformly alien and hostile territory. The historical name for Swedes, "žuvėdai" (literally, "fish-eaters") appeared in modemist poetry as a historical and cultural allusion, proving that collective memory with the whole complex of national stereotypes was still alive in the era of censorship (in Martinaitis and Vaičiūnaitė). The mythically based and allegorical character Kukutis was represented as a survivor of the global catastrophe appealing to the archaic agrarian images (in Martinaitis)."The chill of empire" and "stagnation of the North" were typical metaphors of Soviet life. The topographical landscape of the Scandinavian capital city recalled the topics of estrangement (in Venclova). While travelling to Norway, attention was focused on the simple objects of "normal life" and the private experience (in Vaičiūnaitė), as opposed to the official propaganda of collectivism. The resentfulness of the intellectual, who clearly realized their hermetic isolation, could be expressed only in a private diary (of Kubilius). During the Cold War era, all the encounters with the mysterious but desirable Other evoked the inferiority complexes of the tourists, and contact with the locals was sporadic. The vision of the emigre poet was related to complex emotions in the metaphorical shelter for nomadic "brothers" and the nostalgic image of the long-lost homeland included in the semantics of the North, and the lyrical subject could feel themselves being entangled in kitschy "Polaroid-style" sentimentalism. The North was qualified as the lost paradise of childhood and the ideal sphere (in Nagys). Nowadays, the barriers of cultural distance have been lost and, ironically, stylized touristy poetry flourishes, but its imagery is still based on the traditional stereotypes of Scandinavia as the "distant neighbour": familiar enough, attractive and seductive, but at the same time hermetic, and not tied by a close mental and spiritual relationship. [Extract, p. 228-229]