THE CAPTIVE MIND
1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz grew up in Vilnius when it was a part of Poland. Though he has since lived in other towns in Europe and America, Vilnius was always the city of his heart.
What follows is an extraordinarily vivid recollection of life in Vilnius just before World War II. Excerpted from his book, The Captive Mind, 1951 - 52.
There are certain places in Europe which are particularly troublesome to history and geography teachers: Trieste, the Saar Basin, Schleswig-Holstein. Just such a sore-spot is the city of Vilna. In the last half-century it belonged to various countries and saw various armies in its streets. With each change, painters were put to work repainting street and office signs into the new official language. With each change, the inhabitants were issued new passports and were obliged to conform to new laws and injunctions. The city was ruled in turn by the Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, again the Lithuanians, again the Germans, and again the Russians. Today it is the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, a fancy title designed to conceal the blunt fact that Russia is effectively carrying out the precepts of the Tsars in regard to territorial expansion.From The Captive Mind by Czeslaw MiloszDuring my school and university years the city belonged to Poland. It lies in a land of forests, lakes, and streams concealed in a woody dale. Travelers see it emerge unexpectedly from behind the trees. The steeples of its scores of Catholic churches, built by Italian architects in the baroque style, contrast in their gold and white with the blackness of the surrounding pines. Legend tells us that a certain Lithuanian ruler, hunting in the wilds, fell asleep by a fire and had a prophetic dream. Under the spell of his dream he constructed a city on the spot where he had slept. Throughout the many centuries of its existence, Vilna never ceased to be a city of forests. All about it lay an abandoned province of Europe whose people spoke Polish, Lithuanian, and Byelorussian, or a mixture of the three, and retained many customs and habits long since forgotten elsewhere. I speak in the past tense because today this city of my childhood is as lava-inundated as was Pompeii. Most of its former inhabitants were either murdered by the Nazis, deported to Siberia, or resettled by the Russians in the western territories from which the Germans were expelled. Other people, born thousands of miles away, now walk its streets; and for them, its churches, founded by Lithuanian princes and Polish kings, are useless.
Then, however, no one dreamt of mass murder and mass deportations. And the life of the town unfolded in a rhythm that was slower and less subject to change than are forms of government or borders or kingdoms. The University, the Bishop's Palace, and the Cathedral were the most esteemed edifices in the city. On Sundays, crowds filled the narrow street leading to the old city gate upon which, in a chapel, was housed the picture of the Virgin known for its miraculous powers. Vilna was a blend of Italian architecture and the Near East. In the little streets of the Jewish quarter on a Friday evening, through the windows one could see families seated in the gleam of candlelight. The words of the Hebrew prophets resounded in the ancient synagogues, for this was one of the most important centers of Jewish literature and learning in Europe. Great fairs on Catholic holidays attracted peasants from neighouring villages to the city, where they would display their wooden wares and medicinal herbs on the ground. No fair was complete without obwarzanki (hard, round, little cakes threaded on a string); and no matter where they where baked, they always bore the name of the little town whose only claim to fame were its bakeries and its one-time "bear academy", an institution where bears were trained. In the winter, the steep streets were filled with boys and girls on skis, their red and green jerkins flashing against a snow that became rosy in the frosty sun.
Translated by J. Zielonko
Copyright 1951, 1953 by Czeslaw Milosz
Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf., Inc.
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Issue No 18, Sept - Oct 1995.
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